scholarly journals Sincerely Fake: Exploring User-Generated Political Fakes and Networked Publics

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630512096382
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Ferrari

This article investigates user-generated political satire, focusing in particular on one genre: fake political accounts. Such fakes, created as social media profiles, satirize politicians or political organizations by impersonating them. Through interviews with a sample of Italian fake accounts creators, I explore how the fakes navigate their fakeness vis-à-vis the affordances of social network sites and their publics. First, I map how the publics of the fake accounts react to the satire along two axes: one referring to the public’s understanding of the satire and the other to the uses that the public makes of the satire. Second, I show how fakeness is part of everyday interactions in networked publics. Third, I argue for fakeness as a playful, powerful, and sincere critique of the political and its pretense to authenticity. By focusing on fake political accounts, this article provides insights on the place of fakeness in online communication beyond the debate around “fake news.”

Author(s):  
Anne Kaun ◽  
Carina Guyard

This chapter presents a survey study on attitudes towards political campaigning in social media. During the national election in Sweden in 2010, a considerable amount of resources was invested in online communication with the constituency, not least in social media. Whereas several studies have focused on e-democracy at a macro level, there is a lack of studies examining the phenomenon of campaigning 2.0 as it is perceived by the actual voters. This chapter, therefore, asks the question whether the voters noticed the political campaigning in social media at all, and if so, how they perceived it. The main findings are that respondents who were already interested and politically engaged considered campaigning 2.0, in line with the politicians’ rhetoric, as a way to enhance democracy. Respondents who were neither interested nor engaged in politics, on the other hand, showed little interest in this kind of communication. Consequently, the study confirms assumptions about digital divide and continued fragmentation of the citizenry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-143
Author(s):  
Fera Belinda ◽  
Maria Puspitasari

oaks or fake news is a serious concern because it has a negative impact due to information that is not ascertained the truth. Especially during the political year of the 2019 presidential election, the spread of hoaxes is increasingly massively attacking each candidate personally and institutionally. The Ministry of Communication and Information recorded in 2018 there were 733 hoaks content. In 2019, hoax content increased sharply to 3,801. The drastic increase in the amount of hoax content occurred from February to May, along with the 2019 elections. Not stopping in the 2019 presidential election, until the first half of 2020, the number of hoaks content has reached 1855. The number of hoaks content increased again in March, along with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia and continued with the enactment of the Omnibus Law Ciptakerja. The development of social media technology and smartphones is one of the causes of the current hoaks outbreak. The theories used in this study are the concept of hoaxes, social media and the firehose of falsehood, as well as the theory of delegitimization. The focus of the research on youtube social media channel contains a statement from the Indonesian Rescue Action Coalition Movement (KAMI) in the period September – October 2020. Although it is a new group, us members are old figures who have been known to be opposed to the Jokowi government.  The research methodology used is qualitative approach with data collection method through observation of video text posted. While the method of data analysis is done by analyzing the content or content to give an idea of the rush of fake news that has the potential to harm threats that can disrupt security stability, can even potentially damage the joints of national and state life, as well as become a threat to the sustainability of democracy. The results of this study concluded that hoaxes are usually chained and re-forward existing information and that the content has similarities to previous hoax content. This study recommends the government to actively educate the public regarding media literacy to be selective in receiving messages.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malgorzata Szabla ◽  
Jan Blommaert

Abstract‘Context collapse’ (CC) refers to the phenomenon widely debated in social media research, where various audiences convene around single communicative acts in new networked publics, causing confusion and anxiety among social media users. The notion of CC is a key one in the reimagination of social life as a consequence of the mediation technologies we associate with the Web 2.0. CC is undertheorized, and in this paper we intend not to rebuke it but to explore its limits. We do so by shifting the analytical focus from “online communication” in general to specific forms of social action performed, not by predefined “group” members, but by actors engaging in emerging kinds of sharedness based on existing norms of interaction. This approach is a radical choice for action rather than actor, reaching back to symbolic interactionism and beyond to Mead, Strauss and other interactionist sociologists, and inspired by contemporary linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics, notably the work of Rampton and the Goodwins. We apply this approach to an extraordinarily complex Facebook discussion among Polish people residing in The Netherlands – a set of data that could instantly be selected as a likely site for context collapse. We shall analyze fragments in detail, showing how, in spite of the complications intrinsic to such online, profoundly mediated and oddly ‘placed’ interaction events, participants appear capable of ‘normal’ modes of interaction and participant selection. In fact, the ‘networked publics’ rarely seem to occur in practice, and contexts do not collapse but expand continuously without causing major issues for contextualization. The analysis will offer a vocabulary and methodology for addressing the complexities of the largest new social space on earth: the space of online culture.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (15) ◽  
pp. 97-113
Author(s):  
Yovita Sabarina Sitepu ◽  
Hendra Harahap ◽  
Februati Trimurni

Hoax and digitalization have become a threat to global democracy. During this pandemic, WhatsApp in collaboration with the Ministry of Communication and Informatics (Kominfo) has been successfully taken down 1, 759 hoaxes spreading on social media. Thus hoax content is circulating from January 23 to October 18, 2020. This study examines the literacy capability of social media users in Medan City in facing misinformation (Hoax). The purpose of this study is to describe the knowledge of social media users in Medan City regarding hoaxes; describing the process of spreading hoaxes among social media users in Medan City, as well as to identify the types of hoaxes mostly received and spread by social media users. The quantitative descriptive method is used in this study The samples of this study amount to 250 respondents selected in the accidental method. The results obtained from the aforementioned respondents show that respondents agreed that hoax is ‘a deliberate fake news. They stated that they had not been forwarding ‘splashy news’ that they received and do fact-check. On the other hand, when asked about why the ‘splashy news’ was forwarded, the respondents reasoned that they received the news from someone they trusted. In addition, the respondents each stated that they thought the news was useful as they believed the news to be true. The types of hoaxes most frequently received include lucky draws, socio-politics, governance, and health.


Mäetagused ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 79 ◽  
pp. 167-184
Author(s):  
Eda Kalmre ◽  

The article follows the narrative trend initiated by the social media posts and fake news during the first months of the corona quarantine, which claims that the decrease of contamination due to the quarantine has a positive effect on the environment and nature recovery. The author describes the context of the topic and follows the changes in the rhetoric through different genres, discussing the ways in which a picture can tell a truthful story. What is the relation between the context, truth, and rhetoric? This material spread globally, yet it was also readily “translated” into the Estonian context, and – what is very characteristic of the entire pandemic material – when approaching this material, truthful and fabricated texts, photos, and videos were combined. From the folkloristic point of view, these rumours in the form of fake news, first presented in the function of a tall tale and further following the sliding truth scale of legends, constitute a part of coping strategies, so-called crisis humour, yet, on the other hand, also a belief story presenting positive imagery, which surrounds the mainly apocalyptically perceived pandemic period and interprets the human existence on a wider scale. Even if these fake news and memes have no truth value, they communicate an idea – nature recovers – and definitely offer hope and a feeling of well-being.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hatem SEBEI

This paper adopts a systemic functional linguistics as a paradigm to analyse postings on social media. This paradigmatic relationship is based on a combination of form and meaning. It adopts a Bakhtinian dialogic view of language and discourse. His viewpoint is built on the idea that every’s speaker voice is imbued with traces of previous voices and is in anticipation of other voices. This research shows how bloggers engage readers, how they negotiate and position themselves vis-à-vis the other voices. The current study adopts the Engagement framework as an analytical tool to evaluate the language used in Nawaat to cover the political assassinations in Tunisia. The current research focuses on the writer’s comments, description of the political assassinations. It also focuses on the writer’s comments, description and claims of external voices. Building solidarity and entente with readers who share and hold the same vision is also a matter of concern.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Landi ◽  
Antonio Costantini ◽  
Marco Fasan ◽  
Michele Bonazzi

PurposeThe purpose of this exploratory study is to investigate why and how public health agencies employed social media during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak to foster public engagement and dialogic accounting.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analysed the official Facebook pages of the leading public agencies for health crisis in Italy, United Kingdom and New Zealand and they collected data on the number of posts, popularity, commitment and followers before and during the outbreak. The authors also performed a content analysis to identify the topics covered by the posts.FindingsEmpirical results suggest that social media has been extensively used as a public engagement tool in all three countries under analysis but – because of legitimacy threats and resource scarcity – it has also been used as a dialogic accounting tool only in New Zealand. Findings suggest that fake news developed more extensively in contexts where the public body did not foster dialogic accounting.Practical implicationsPublic agencies may be interested in knowing the pros and cons of using social media as a public engagement and dialogic accounting tool. They may also leverage on dialogic accounting to limit fake news.Originality/valueThis study is one of the first to look at the nature and role of social media as an accountability tool during public health crises. In many contexts, COVID-19 forced for the first time public health agencies to heavily engage with the public and to develop new skills, so this study paves the way for numerous future research ideas.


Stan Rzeczy ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 99-121
Author(s):  
Thari Jungen

In February 2016, the Institute for Falsification researched the production of fake news in Veles, North Macedonia. Focusing on a specific hoax distributed from Veles via social media, this article analyses the political and aesthetic effects of fake news. It argues that fakes and hoaxes (mis)use established references to renew pre-existing discourses, media techniques, and symbols. The present definition of fakes is therefore insufficient for these practices.


2020 ◽  
pp. 019685992097715
Author(s):  
James Morris

“Fake News” has been a frequent topic in the last couple of years. The phenomenon has particularly been cited with regards to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. The creation of “post truth” reports that are disseminated via the Web and social media has been treated as something new, a product of the digital age, and a reason to be concerned about the effects of online technology. However, this paper argues that fake news should be considered as part of a continuum with forms of media that went before in the 20th Century, and the general trend of postmodernity detailed by Baudrillard. The simulation of communications media and mass reproduction was already evident and has merely progressed in the digital age rather than the latter providing a wholly new context. The paper concludes by asking whether the political havoc caused by fake news has an antidote, when it appears to be a by-product of media simulacra’s inherent lack of connection to the real. In a communications landscape where the misrepresentations of the so-called “Mainstream Media” are decried using even more questionable “memes” on social media, is there any possibility for truth?


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asha Kaul ◽  
Vidhi Chaudhri

With the advent of social media and increase in networked publics, context collapse has emerged as a critical topic in the discussion of imagined audiences and blurring of the private and the public. The meshing of social contexts portends problematic issues as messages inadvertently reach unimagined audiences causing shame and leading to loss of ‘face’. In this article, we specifically study the impact of context collapse on some celebrities ‘who had it all’ yet, lost ‘it some’ to the world of networked public. The article examines celebrities sharing identity information across multiple contexts and explores situations of lost fame when ‘face’ is threatened, usage falters and breaks some of the well-established norms of interactivity. It concludes that lack of prudence in separating social contexts, loss of ‘face’ and social approval can dampen online celebrity presence. It proposes the use of ‘polysemy’ to simultaneously appeal to audiences from different contexts.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document