scholarly journals Testing and unpacking the effects of digital fake news: on presidential candidate evaluations and voter support

AI & Society ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 969-980
Author(s):  
Rodolfo Leyva ◽  
Charlie Beckett
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Presidential Candidate ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Democratic Candidate ◽  
Electoral Impact ◽  
Candidate Evaluations ◽  
Democratic Elections

Abstract There is growing worldwide concern that the rampant spread of digital fake news (DFN) via new media technologies is detrimentally impacting Democratic elections. However, the actual influence of this recent Internet phenomenon on electoral decisions has not been directly examined. Accordingly, this study tested the effects of attention to DFN on readers’ Presidential candidate preferences via an experimental web-survey administered to a cross-sectional American sample (N = 552). Results showed no main effect of exposure to DFN on participants’ candidate evaluations or vote choice. However, the perceived believability of DFN about the Democratic candidate negatively mediated evaluations of that candidate—especially amongst far-right ideologues. These results suggest that DFN may at worst reinforce the partisan dispositions of mostly politically conservative Internet users, but does not cause or induce conversions in these dispositions. Overall, this study contributes novel experimental evidence, indicating that the potential electoral impact of DFN, although concerning, is strongly conditional on a reciprocal interaction between message receptibility and a pre-existing right-wing ideological orientation. The said impact is, therefore, likely narrow in scope.

USING OF NEW MEDIA IN INFORMATION WARFARE AS A PART OF MODERN POLITICAL CULTURE

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tetiana Korianova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Information Warfare ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Positive Information ◽  
Information Campaigns ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Informational Influence ◽  
Concept Of Information

The article analyzes the significant role, place, and influence of the new media during information war, which is used as a modern political practice and tool for achieving political goals. The concept of “information war” within the Ukrainian legislation is defined and the peculiarities of its course are established. Since there are many definitions of information warfare, this article formulates this term clearly based on Ukrainian context. Information warfare is actions aimed at achieving information superiority support of national military strategy acting both, local information sources and information systems of the enemy while ensuring security and protection of the information owner. Information warfare is the most promising way to “continue politics by other means” now. We have considered five basic rules used in information campaigns: surveillance, exaggeration, and distortion, orchestration or silence, transfusion, and infection. It was found that the concept of the informational influence of mass media on the person and, society follows from the analysis of these influences. Analysis of information warfare, its principles and methods allows us to understand the essence of these influences. It is very important in the context of Russian aggression in Ukraine in modern conditions. The article also presents and analyzes the most commonly used models of media influence on public opinion. Information influence can be both, positive and negative. Moreover, positive information has an educational function. The purpose of negative information is to inflame social conflicts, exacerbate differences in society. The problems of information warfare should be solved by counteracting the manipulative media technologies and improving methods of counteraction, fight with fake news and misinformation in general. It is proved that the effectiveness of the applied technologies determines the further location of forces in the political arena.

scholarly journals The Politics of Social Media Manipulation

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Data Journalism ◽  
Digital Methods ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Media Manipulation

Disinformation and so-called fake news are contemporary phenomena with rich histories. Disinformation, or the willful introduction of false information for the purposes of causing harm, recalls infamous foreign interference operations in national media systems. Outcries over fake news, or dubious stories with the trappings of news, have coincided with the introduction of new media technologies that disrupt the publication, distribution and consumption of news -- from the so-called rumour-mongering broadsheets centuries ago to the blogosphere recently. Designating a news organization as fake, or der Lügenpresse, has a darker history, associated with authoritarian regimes or populist bombast diminishing the reputation of 'elite media' and the value of inconvenient truths. In a series of empirical studies, using digital methods and data journalism, the authors inquire into the extent to which social media have enabled the penetration of foreign disinformation operations, the widespread publication and spread of dubious content as well as extreme commentators with considerable followings attacking mainstream media as fake.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

Counseling and new media technologies: A comparison of problem presentations in e-mail and in chat

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyke Stommel ◽  
Fleur Van der Houwen
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Online Counseling ◽  
Counseling Program ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Email Counseling ◽  
Counseling Clients ◽  
E Mail ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
New Media Technologies

In this article, we examine problem presentations in e-mail and chat counseling. Previous studies of online counseling have found that the medium (e.g., chat, email) impacts the unfolding interaction. However, the implications for counseling are unclear. We focus on problem presentations and use conversation analysis to compare 15 chat and 22 e-mail interactions from the same counseling program. We find that in e-mail counseling, counselors open up the interactional space to discuss various issues, whereas in chat, counselors restrict problem presentations and give the client less space to elaborate. We also find that in e-mail counseling, clients use narratives to present their problem and orient to its seriousness and legitimacy, while in chat counseling, they construct problem presentations using a symptom or a diagnosis. Furthermore, in email counseling, clients close their problem presentations stating completeness, while in chat counseling, counselors treat clients’ problem presentations as incomplete. Our findings shed light on how the medium has implications for counseling.

Disruptive Fixation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christo Sims
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
New Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Middle Schoolers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
Conventional Type

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. This book documents the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. It is the account of how this “school for digital kids,” heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged. The book shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes. It traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. It offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle. The book offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.

Stories from Ultrasonographic Abyss

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matylda Szewczyk
Keyword(s):  
Prenatal Care ◽  
New Media ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Prenatal Ultrasound ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Medical Imagery ◽  
The Future ◽  
Different Cultures

The article presents a reflection on the experience of prenatal ultrasound and on the nature of cultural beings, it creates. It exploits chosen ethnographic and cultural descriptions of prenatal ultrasounds in different cultures, as well as documentary and artistic reflections on medical imagery and new media technologies. It discusses different ways of defining the role of ultrasound in prenatal care and the cultural contexts build around it. Although the prenatal ultrasounds often function in the space of enormous tensions (although they are also supposed to give pleasure), it seems they will accompany us further in the future. It is worthwhile to find some new ways of describing them and to invent new cultural practices to deal with them.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

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