Hwa Kim

Social media platforms play a central role in the structure of political discourse today. It is imperative to theorise about why and how we should regulate these institutions to manage some of the problems they raise for political discourse, namely misinformation and disinformation, hate speech, and polarising content. In this paper, I scrutinise their business models to form a basis of justification and strategy to regulate social media platforms. I argue that, in virtue of their business models, platforms are morally complicit with malicious actors in quickly and widely spreading their disinformation, hate speech, and provocative claims. I do this by rejecting the claim that platforms are merely intermediaries that reflect their users popular preferences and therefore cannot be complicitous with malicious actors as they have no intentional participation. With this basis of justifying regulation, I propose a progressive tax on platforms advertising revenue based on the number of users they have and show how this is preferable to banning the business model. This can remove the main incentive social media platforms have to be complicit with malicious actors without further consolidating the ‘winner take all’ nature of the social media market.

This article contributes to normative debates about residential segregation and its relationship to inequality. It defends a position often disregarded in literature: that there is merit to advancing residential integration through some scenarios where advantaged individuals move to disadvantaged areas. It develops this case in dialogue with three other views. In relation to advocates of addressing the inequalities of residential segregation through redistribution, it defends integration as a means of tackling social and political factors that sustain injustice. It challenges those who defend relocating disadvantaged individuals to advantaged areas by highlighting the burdens and demand for cultural assimilation this imposes on the disadvantaged. It considers the worry that advantaged individuals relocating to disadvantaged areas harbours the problematic features of gentrification. It responds that these concerns, while important in some cases, do not arise in all scenarios of this kind.

This study investigated the usefulness of the six-item Stress and Anxiety to Viral Epidemics scale and the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale as tools to assess anxiety related to coronavirus disease in cancer patients. A total of 221 patients with cancer responded to an anonymous online questionnaire between 15 July and 15 August 2020. The functional impairment of the patients was assessed using the Work and Social Adjustment Scale, and the SAVE-6 and CAS were also applied. Among these 221 cancer patients, 110 had SAVE-6 scores ≥ 15 and 21 had CAS scores ≥ 5. Within the study population, 104 and 29 patients had WSAS scores ≥ 11 and ≥ 21, respectively. The correlations between the SAVE-6 and WSAS and CAS scores were statistically significant. The cut-off for the SAVE-6 was 15 points, while that for the WSAS was 11. Our results suggested that the SAVE-6 and CAS could be used to evaluate moderate and severe degrees of functional impairment related to mental health, respectively, in cancer patients during viral epidemics.