Italian Populism and Fake News on the Internet: A New Political Weapon in the Public Discourse

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-197
Author(s):  
Matteo Monti
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Fake News ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Weapon

On Waxen Wings: Challenges to the Public Sphere in the Network Age

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Francoeur
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Public ◽  
Digital Space ◽  
Multiple Viewpoints ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Communicative Space

There is a tendency, particularly among Western pundits and technologists, to examine the Internet in almost universally positive terms; this is most evident in any discussion of the medium’s capacity for democratization. While the Internet has produced many great things for society in terms of cultural and economic production, some consideration must be given to the implications that such a revolutionary medium holds for the public sphere. By creating a communicative space that essentially grants everyone his or her own microphone, the Internet is fragmenting public discourse due to the proliferation of opinions and messages and the removal of traditional gatekeepers of information. More significantly, because of the structural qualities of the Internet, users no longer have to expose themselves to opinions and viewpoints that fall outside their own preconceived notions. This limits the robustness of the public sphere by limiting the healthy debate that can only occur when exposed to multiple viewpoints. Ultimately, the Internet is not going anywhere, so it is important to equip the public with the tools and knowledge to be able to navigate the digital space. 

scholarly journals Unravelling A Regulation Machine

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-98
Author(s):  
Dionysia Mylonaki ◽  
Panagiotis Tigas
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Technical Aspect ◽  
Current Approach ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
The Public ◽  
Machine Leraning

Computational censorship in the form of fake news and toxic comments regulation is a subject that comes up quite often in the public discourse, as a result of the volatile political circumstances on a global scale and due to the unquestionable impact of journalism on these circumstances. Public attention has been directed to the role of mainstream and other media in the formation of public opinion, either in the form of articles or in the form of usergenerated comments. The purpose is to analyse and allow a deeper understanding of a project that is under development, namely, computational-censorship and to show that algorithmic regulation is not a solution, but rather another layer to a more fundamental problem. This article examines the implicationsof developing Machine Leraning/Artificial Iintelligence (ML/AI) which aims to regulate the internet and we attempt to allow a glimpse into the technical aspect of the problem as a way to back arguments that could be re-jected by the ML/AI research community as “non-pragmatic”. Finally, it aims to highlight the absurdity of the current approach to research in this area, which is the exact opposite of the rationalism that the field claims to be embracing.

scholarly journals Hidden participation in the public sphere: Understanding Malaysian university students’ public discourse practices in cyberspace

First Monday ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mei-Yuit Chan ◽  
Shameem Rafik-Galea ◽  
Ngee-Thai Yap
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Public University ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Discourse Practices ◽  
The Public Sphere

A recent development in Malaysia was the unprecedented rise in young Malaysians’ participation in the country’s social and political affairs, facilitated almost entirely by the Internet. This phenomenon caught many by surprise considering that university students in the country had been barred through legislation from active involvement in political activities for more than 30 years. Through a survey of 514 university students in a Malaysian public university, supplemented by interview data and samples of students’ writing, this study investigated in which ways Malaysian tertiary students are participating in the public sphere through the Internet. Following Hauser’s (1999) conception of public discourse as personal, interactive, informal, and distributed voices among the citizenry, we argue for a perspective that explains how online interactions in the friendship frame among young people represent their participation in the public sphere in the context of contemporary society.

A Taxonomy Approach to Fake News

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Valchanov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Communication Channels ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Online Environment ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
Fact Checking ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Media Corporations

The development of the Internet and social media and networks as a media environment and communication channels combined with the specificity of the journalistic profession in the online environment are a factor which contributes to the emergence and proliferation of fake news. The lack of reliable fact checking by the media and the fast news consumption by the public lead to mass disinformation about certain issues or subjects. The current paper examines fake news from several points of view and describes the models of their use – as harmless jokes, as lack of journalistic competence or professionalism and as means of manipulation and intentional misleading of public opinion. The attempts of big media corporations to fight fake news are also described.

scholarly journals A Reliable Weighting Scheme for the Aggregation of Crowd Intelligence to Detect Fake News

Information ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franklin Tchakounté ◽  
Ahmadou Faissal ◽  
Marcellin Atemkeng ◽  
Achille Ntyam
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Majority Vote ◽  
Internet User ◽  
Majority Voting ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Weighted Averaging ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Vote Model ◽  
The Public

Social networks play an important role in today’s society and in our relationships with others. They give the Internet user the opportunity to play an active role, e.g., one can relay certain information via a blog, a comment, or even a vote. The Internet user has the possibility to share any content at any time. However, some malicious Internet users take advantage of this freedom to share fake news to manipulate or mislead an audience, to invade the privacy of others, and also to harm certain institutions. Fake news seeks to resemble traditional media to establish its credibility with the public. Its seriousness pushes the public to share them. As a result, fake news can spread quickly. This fake news can cause enormous difficulties for users and institutions. Several authors have proposed systems to detect fake news in social networks using crowd signals through the process of crowdsourcing. Unfortunately, these authors do not use the expertise of the crowd and the expertise of a third party in an associative way to make decisions. Crowds are useful in indicating whether or not a story should be fact-checked. This work proposes a new method of binary aggregation of opinions of the crowd and the knowledge of a third-party expert. The aggregator is based on majority voting on the crowd side and weighted averaging on the third-party side. An experimentation has been conducted on 25 posts and 50 voters. A quantitative comparison with the majority vote model reveals that our aggregation model provides slightly better results due to weights assigned to accredited users. A qualitative investigation against existing aggregation models shows that the proposed approach meets the requirements or properties expected of a crowdsourcing system and a voting system.

scholarly journals Historycy piszą o współczesności. Rok niebezpiecznego zwrotu (2010) w ujęciu Georges’a Minka i Timothy’ego Snydera

2019 ◽  
pp. 351-363
Author(s):  
Jerzy Fiećko
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Political History ◽  
Fake News ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Road ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Air Disaster ◽  
Way Of Thinking

The author analyses the ways of depicting contemporary times in two monographs written by renown scholars: La Pologne au coeur de l’Europe. De 1914 à aujourd’hui, histoire politique et conflits de mémoire (Poland at the heart of Europe. From 1914 to the present day. Political history and conflicts of memory) and The Road to Unfreedom. Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder. A particularly important date here is 2010, the year of the Smolensk air disaster, which in Poland gave rise to many false myths and manipulations of facts (described by both authors). Snyder chooses this year as a symbolic turning point within the global process of shifting from the mindset of “inevitability” towards the mindset of “eternity”. The second main characteristic of this way of thinking and acting is that truth and facts are replaced in the public discourse with fake news, fabrications, creating social divisions and stirring hostile emotions.

scholarly journals Towards Combating Pandemic-Related Misinformation in Social Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 140-158
Author(s):  
Isa Inuwa-Dutse
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
The Public ◽  
Toxic Impact ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Conventional preventive measures during pandemics include social distancing and lockdown. Such measures in the time of social media brought about a new set of challenges – vulnerability to the toxic impact of online misinformation is high. A case in point is COVID-19. As the virus propagates, so does the associated misinformation and fake news about it leading to an infodemic. Since the outbreak, there has been a surge of studies investigating various aspects of the pandemic. Of interest to this chapter are studies centering on datasets from online social media platforms where the bulk of the public discourse happens. The main goal is to support the fight against negative infodemic by (1) contributing a diverse set of curated relevant datasets; (2) offering relevant areas to study using the datasets; and (3) demonstrating how relevant datasets, strategies, and state-of-the-art IT tools can be leveraged in managing the pandemic.

scholarly journals INTERDISCURSIVITY, INTERTEXTUALITY AND PRECEDENT TEXTS IN THE WEBSITE FORUM MEDIALECT

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-78
Author(s):  
Oksana CHERVENKO ◽  
Snezhan VELIKOVA
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
Communicative Behavior ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
The Public ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Linguistic Behavior

is article analyzes the phenomena of interdiscursivity, intertextuality, precedent texts and their functions in the websites forum medialect, which could be described as an online space, where specific language usage related to internet communication is manifested. The main purpose is, firstly, to comment on these functions and, secondly, to analyze their relationship to participants’ linguistic behavior established around a specific news media in the public discourse. By presenting specific solutions, the article discusses the categories of intertextuality, interdiscursivity, precedent texts, and medialect. The illustrations for the analysis are taken from predominantly news-oriented online journalistic websites, and the article analyzes the speech behavior of the participants in the comment section medialect. Based on specific examples, the article draws conclusions about the role of the internet media in the use of the three phenomena and of the manifestations of the cooperative and masking functions performed by intertextuality, interdiscursivity and precedent texts included in the linguistic range of the commentators. The roles of the three categories in the formation of thecommunicative act and its outcome are commented in terms of topics that are sensitive for both journalists and the commentators of their articles. These are mainly topics that attract multiple comments due to their significance for a group of users or for the whole society, such as ethnic minorities, migration, corruption, political practices, political actors, etc. Furthermore, they manage to provoke the activity, dexterity, originality of the ones taking part in the communicative acts and thus to create favorable conditions to observe web specific linguistic practices; to track specific language usage and the communicative behavior of the addressers in the public space, observable in the internet media.

scholarly journals Fake News Detection with Machine Learning

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-127
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Online News ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Daily Routine ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Criminal Records ◽  
The Public ◽  
Processing Techniques

As the internet is becoming part of our daily routine there is sudden growth and popularity of online news reading. This news can become a major issue to the public and government bodies (especially politically) if its fake hence authentication is necessary. It is essential to flag the fake news before it goes viral and misleads the society. In this paper, various Natural Language Processing techniques along with the number of classifiers are used to identify news content for its credibility.Further this technique can be used for various applications like plagiarismcheck , checking for criminal records.

HATE SPEECH IN THE INTERNET PUBLIC DISCOURSE

Yazykoznaniye ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 92-118
Author(s):  
Liliya Komalova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Behavioral Characteristics ◽  
The Public

The paper provides an overview of foreign studies on the implementation of hate speech in the public discourse of institutional and non-institutional media and social media based on the material of Indo-European, Fino-Ugric and Sino-Tibetan language families. The content of the concept «hate speech» is analyzed in the broad sense of this word. The findings reveal thematic, discursive, and cognitive features of hate speech realization, the behavioral characteristics of haters, as well as the groups of people towards whom hate speech is most often targeted.

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