View article

In recent years, social curation technology has been successfully promoted as a means of addressing the problem of involving citizens with news content. Sites like Facebook., Reddit and Storify., just to name a few, allow their users to discuss, comment., share, identify and review news content from various sources. A key goal of this paper is to analyze the process of social validation in the context of Acropolis, a social computing platform that allows citizens to build and share their own narratives about complex or long-term news stories. The sense of social validation determines an increase in self-esteem, self-confidence, and instant happiness, when conveniently engendered in virtual environments.