scholarly journals Social Media and Fake News in the Post-Truth Era: The Manipulation of Politics in the Election Process

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-196
Author(s):  
Turgay Yerlikaya ◽  
Seca Toker

This article focuses on how virtual social networks affect socio-political life. The main theme of the article is how social networks such as Facebook and Twitter can direct voters’ electoral preferences, especially during election time, through the dissemination of manipulative content and fake news. The use of social media, which was initially thought to have a positive effect on democratization, has been extensively discussed in recent years as threat to democracy. Examples from the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, France, Brexit, Germany, the UK and Turkey will be used to illustrate the risks that social networks pose to democracy, especially during election periods.

Author(s):  
Leticia Bode ◽  
Emily K. Vraga ◽  
Kjerstin Thorson

Chapter 7 tackles the challenges posed by misinformation campaigns and fake news, an issue of growing concern in America and around the world. Following the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, academics and pundits alike struggled to make sense of what happened, and many pointed to the role of fake news and misinformation more broadly in leading voters astray in their assessments of the two major candidates for president. This chapter draws on survey data to investigate how media use in general, and use of social media and partisan media more specifically, affected belief in six fake news stories directly following the 2016 election. The analysis assesses whether use of different types of media affected belief in misinformation—including messages congruent and incongruent with their own candidate preferences—providing insight into what was to blame for belief in fake news in the 2016 elections.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-59
Author(s):  
Neelam Kumari ◽  
Joginder Singh Malik ◽  
Dangi Pooja Arun

Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google hold the potential to alter civic engagement, thus essentially hijacking democracy, by influencing individuals towards a particular way of thinking. Today, social media plays a crucial role in facilitating and transmitting content related to all the matters that have larger effect on public opinions and democracy. Due to higher use of social media among new generations, they are exposed to politics more frequently, and in a way that is integrated into their social lives. New media hailed as vehicles for providing a voice to the voiceless. But the restrictions imposed by the government on social media sites and internet services, while allowing only that content that are government friendly amounts to compelled speech. This paper explores how social media have become a platform for fake news and propaganda to influence certain audiences towards a particular way of thinking. When it comes to healthy democratic networks, it is important that the news remains true so it doesn’t affect people levels of trust. A certain amount of trust is very crucial for healthy and well-functioning democratic systems.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Kellyton dos Santos Brito ◽  
Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira ◽  
Paulo Jorge Leitão Adeodato

The use of social media (SM) in modern political activities has reshaped how politicians run electoral campaigns. This study aims to improve the understanding of online campaigns and their correlation with electoral results. We focus on the 2018 Brazilian presidential campaign, which is well known for its strong online presence, and analyze how candidates used their SM profiles, as well as how citizens interacted with them. We propose a new set of metrics for modeling SM performance and identify statistical correlations between SM performance and votes received. For this, we analyzed more than 40,000 posts made by the 13 candidates on Brazil’s three major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) from January to October 2018. Results indicate that candidates used SM heavily throughout the year but focused on engaging words and avoided contentious topics. The most voted-for candidate received more than half (55%) of the interactions received by all the candidates. Posts’ interactions were highest on Instagram, where users were increasing the attention given to political content. Lastly, we found strong correlations between the proposed metrics and votes received. Thus, proposed metrics may support new models for predicting electoral results using combined data from many social networks.


Author(s):  
V.T Priyanga ◽  
J.P Sanjanasri ◽  
Vijay Krishna Menon ◽  
E.A Gopalakrishnan ◽  
K.P Soman

The widespread use of social media like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc. has changed the way News is created and published; accessing news has become easy and inexpensive. However, the scale of usage and inability to moderate the content has made social media, a breeding ground for the circulation of fake news. Fake news is deliberately created either to increase the readership or disrupt the order in the society for political and commercial benefits. It is of paramount importance to identify and filter out fake news especially in democratic societies. Most existing methods for detecting fake news involve traditional supervised machine learning which has been quite ineffective. In this paper, we are analyzing word embedding features that can tell apart fake news from true news. We use the LIAR and ISOT data set. We churn out highly correlated news data from the entire data set by using cosine similarity and other such metrices, in order to distinguish their domains based on central topics. We then employ auto-encoders to detect and differentiate between true and fake news while also exploring their separability through network analysis.


Author(s):  
Martin Fredriksson Almqvist

Since the 1990s, the understanding of how and where politics is made has changed radically. Scholars such as Ulrich Beck and Maria Bakardjieva have discussed how political agency is enacted outside of conventional party organizations, and political struggles increasingly focus on single issues. Over the past two decades, this transformation of politics has become common knowledge, not only in academic research but also in the general political discourse. Recently, the proliferation of digital activism and the political use of social media is often understood to enforce these tendencies. This article analyzes the Pirate Party in relation to these theories, relying on almost 30 interviews with active Pirate Party members in Sweden, the UK, Germany, the USA, and Australia. The Pirate Party was initially formed in 2006, focusing on copyright, piracy, and digital privacy. Over the years, it has developed into a more general democracy movement, with an interest in a wider range of issues. This article analyses how the party’s initial focus on information politics and social media connects to a wider range of political issues and to other social movements, such as Arab Spring protests and Occupy Wall Street. Finally, it discusses how this challenges the understanding of information politics as a single issue agenda.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justyna Masłyk

Abstract The main purpose of this article is to present the results of research concerning the use of social media by companies from the SME sector in Podkarpackie Province. The article includes data obtained in the first stage of the study, which is a part of a research project on the use of social media in the area of creating the image of an organization / company as an employer.The survey covered the entire population of companies from the SME sector, which are registered in Podkarpackie Province (REGON database). The research phase, the results of which are presented in this article, mainly involved the analysis of data on companies from the SME sector in Podkarpackie Province in terms of their presence on the Internet (having an individual website, having company profiles on selected social networks). The results of the first stage of the study confirm that the companies see the potential of the online presence / functioning in social media (more and more companies have their own website, Facebook profiles). The dynamics of changes in this area is definitely not adequate to the pace of new media development. On the basis of preliminary results of further stages of the research, it can also be concluded that in the vast majority of cases, however, these are non-strategic and non-systematic activities.


Author(s):  
Kirsten Forkert ◽  
Ana Lopes

This article examines unwaged posts at UK universities, using recent examples of advertised job posts. While unpaid work is common in the UK higher education system, unwaged posts are not. The posts under scrutiny in this article differ from traditional honorary titles as they target early career academics, who are unlikely to have a paid position elsewhere, rather than established scholars. The article contextualizes the appearance of these posts in a climate of increasing marketization of higher education, entrenching managerialism in higher education institutions, and the casualization of academic work. We also discuss resistance to the posts, arguing that the controversy surrounding unpaid internships in the creative industries created a receptive environment for resisting unwaged posts in academia. We analyze the campaigns that were fought against the advertisement of the posts, mostly through social media and the University and College Union. We explore the tactics used and discuss the advantages and limitations of the use of social media, as well as the role of trade unions in the campaigns against these posts, and we reflect on what future campaigns can learn from these experiences.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-136
Author(s):  
Celintara Anindya Ayu Wardhani ◽  
Sarah Kristina ◽  
Priyo Hari Adi

This study aims to analyze the effect of applying e-filing to taxpayer reporting compliance with the use of social media as a moderating variable. The data used are primary data in the form of questionnaires taken directly through filling out questionnaires distributed via online media using Google Form. The sampling method in this study uses a purposive sampling method with taxpayer criteria using social media. The results showed that the application of e-filing had a significant positive effect on compliance with taxpayer reporting while the use of social media was not able to moderate the effect of e-filing on taxpayer reporting compliance.


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