scholarly journals The politics of social media manipulation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rogers ◽  
Sabine Niederer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Media ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
Free Press ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Manipulation ◽  
Publishing Practices

This chapter gives an overview of the contemporary scholarship surrounding ‘fake news’. It discusses how the term has been deployed politically as a barb against the free press when publishing inconvenient truths since the mid-nineteenth century. It also addresses how such notions have been used in reaction to novel publishing practices, including to the current social media platforms. More generally, the scholarship could be divided into waves, whereby the first related to the definitional issues and the production side, whilst the second has been concerned with its consumption, including the question of persuasion. There is additionally interest in solutions, including the critique of the idea that automation effectively addresses the problems. It concludes with research strategies for the study of the pervasiveness of problematic information across the internet.

scholarly journals Propaganda through ‘reflexive control’ and the mediated construction of reality

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144482090244
Author(s):  
Christopher Till
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
The Social ◽  
Deceptive Advertising ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Political Intervention ◽  
Psychological Operations

The nature of reality has been a central concern of philosophy and the social sciences, but since the proliferation of social media, psychological operations have taken on greater visibility and significance in political action. ‘Fake news’ and micro-targeted and deceptive advertising in elections and votes has brought the tenuous character of political reality to the fore. The affordances of the Internet, World Wide Web and social media have enabled users to be mobilised to varying degrees of awareness for propaganda and disinformation campaigns both as producers and spreaders of content and as generators of data for profiling and targeting. This article will argue that social media platforms and the broader political economy of the Internet create the possibilities for online interactions and targeting which enable form of political intervention focused on the destabilisation of perceptions of reality and recruit users in the construction of new politically useful realities.

scholarly journals Mitigating the Infodemic Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic: Roles of Nigerian Librarians

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-75
Author(s):  
Afebuameh James Aiyebelehin ◽  
Faith O. Mesagan
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Service Delivery ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Survey Design ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Emergency Situations ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Descriptive Survey ◽  
Official Information

This study investigates how Nigerian librarians are mitigating the infodemic caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. The entire population of Nigerian librarians in major social media platforms of the Nigerian Library Association and its sections were used for the study. An online survey administered through Google forms was used. A total of 186 librarians responded to the survey. The data was analysed with percentages and presented in charts. The findings show that: the majority (80%) agreed that there is infodemic in Nigeria. The major roles played by the librarians in mitigating the infodemic are: correction of misconceptions online (54.8%), posting of official information online(47.8%), and provision of authentic sources to COVID-19 guidelines (39.8%); the majority (91.1%) of the librarians played these roles as personal initiatives; majority (79%) of them believe their roles have been effective; and the major challenges facing their efforts are the issue of low bandwidth (59.1%), distrust for official information (31%) and regard for myths (29%). The implication of these findings is that most of the efforts made by Nigerian librarians to curb the spread of fake news associated with the corona virus were mainly personal initiatives. This further implies that a majority of Nigerian libraries do not have plans and policies in place to ensure service delivery in emergency situations. It was recommended, among others, that Nigerian librarians should go beyond online efforts to use traditional methods in order to reach a larger part of the populace without access to the internet.

Chinese Social Media Platforms and Microblogging in the Context of Public Diplomacy

Communicology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-179
Author(s):  
E.S. Nadezhkina
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Interactive Communication ◽  
Network Interaction ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Right ◽  
Chinese Social Media

The term “digital public diplomacy” that appeared in the 21st century owes much to the emergence and development of the concept of Web 2.0 (interactive communication on the Internet). The principle of network interaction, in which the system becomes better with an increase in the number of users and the creation of user-generated content, made it possible to create social media platforms where news and entertainment content is created and moderated by the user. Such platforms have become an expression of the opinions of various groups of people in many countries of the world, including China. The Chinese segment of the Internet is “closed”, and many popular Western services are blocked in it. Studying the structure of Chinese social media platforms and microblogging, as well as analyzing targeted content is necessary to understand China’s public opinion, choose the right message channels and receive feedback for promoting the country’s public diplomacy. This paper reveals the main Chinese social media platforms and microblogging and provides the assessment of their popularity, as well as possibility of analyzing China’s public opinion based on “listening” to social media platforms and microblogging.

scholarly journals Perceived truth of statements and simulated social media postings: an experimental investigation of source credibility, repeated exposure, and presentation format

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Nadarevic ◽  
Rolf Reber ◽  
Anne Josephine Helmecke ◽  
Dilara Köse
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Source Credibility ◽  
Repeated Exposure ◽  
Presentation Format ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Additive Effects ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Source Information ◽  
Internet Age

Abstract To better understand the spread of fake news in the Internet age, it is important to uncover the variables that influence the perceived truth of information. Although previous research identified several reliable predictors of truth judgments—such as source credibility, repeated information exposure, and presentation format—little is known about their simultaneous effects. In a series of four experiments, we investigated how the abovementioned factors jointly affect the perceived truth of statements (Experiments 1 and 2) and simulated social media postings (Experiments 3 and 4). Experiment 1 explored the role of source credibility (high vs. low vs. no source information) and presentation format (with vs. without a picture). In Experiments 2 and 3, we additionally manipulated repeated exposure (yes vs. no). Finally, Experiment 4 examined the role of source credibility (high vs. low) and type of repetition (congruent vs. incongruent vs. no repetition) in further detail. In sum, we found no effect of presentation format on truth judgments, but strong, additive effects of source credibility and repetition. Truth judgments were higher for information presented by credible sources than non-credible sources and information without sources. Moreover, congruent (i.e., verbatim) repetition increased perceived truth whereas semantically incongruent repetition decreased perceived truth, irrespectively of the source. Our findings show that people do not rely on a single judgment cue when evaluating a statement’s truth but take source credibility and their meta-cognitive feelings into account.

scholarly journals Intelligent Detection of False Information in Arabic Tweets Utilizing Hybrid Harris Hawks Based Feature Selection and Machine Learning Models

Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 556
Author(s):  
Thaer Thaher ◽  
Mahmoud Saheb ◽  
Hamza Turabieh ◽  
Hamouda Chantar
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Feature Selection ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
User Profile ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Classification Model ◽  
Fake News ◽  
False Information ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Fake or false information on social media platforms is a significant challenge that leads to deliberately misleading users due to the inclusion of rumors, propaganda, or deceptive information about a person, organization, or service. Twitter is one of the most widely used social media platforms, especially in the Arab region, where the number of users is steadily increasing, accompanied by an increase in the rate of fake news. This drew the attention of researchers to provide a safe online environment free of misleading information. This paper aims to propose a smart classification model for the early detection of fake news in Arabic tweets utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, Machine Learning (ML) models, and Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO) as a wrapper-based feature selection approach. Arabic Twitter corpus composed of 1862 previously annotated tweets was utilized by this research to assess the efficiency of the proposed model. The Bag of Words (BoW) model is utilized using different term-weighting schemes for feature extraction. Eight well-known learning algorithms are investigated with varying combinations of features, including user-profile, content-based, and words-features. Reported results showed that the Logistic Regression (LR) with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) model scores the best rank. Moreover, feature selection based on the binary HHO algorithm plays a vital role in reducing dimensionality, thereby enhancing the learning model’s performance for fake news detection. Interestingly, the proposed BHHO-LR model can yield a better enhancement of 5% compared with previous works on the same dataset.

Governing Fake News: The Regulation of Social Media and the Right to Freedom of Expression in the Era of Emergency

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Donato VESE
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
Media Censorship

Governments around the world are strictly regulating information on social media in the interests of addressing fake news. There is, however, a risk that the uncontrolled spread of information could increase the adverse effects of the COVID-19 health emergency through the influence of false and misleading news. Yet governments may well use health emergency regulation as a pretext for implementing draconian restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, as well as increasing social media censorship (ie chilling effects). This article seeks to challenge the stringent legislative and administrative measures governments have recently put in place in order to analyse their negative implications for the right to freedom of expression and to suggest different regulatory approaches in the context of public law. These controversial government policies are discussed in order to clarify why freedom of expression cannot be allowed to be jeopardised in the process of trying to manage fake news. Firstly, an analysis of the legal definition of fake news in academia is presented in order to establish the essential characteristics of the phenomenon (Section II). Secondly, the legislative and administrative measures implemented by governments at both international (Section III) and European Union (EU) levels (Section IV) are assessed, showing how they may undermine a core human right by curtailing freedom of expression. Then, starting from the premise of social media as a “watchdog” of democracy and moving on to the contention that fake news is a phenomenon of “mature” democracy, the article argues that public law already protects freedom of expression and ensures its effectiveness at the international and EU levels through some fundamental rules (Section V). There follows a discussion of the key regulatory approaches, and, as alternatives to government intervention, self-regulation and especially empowering users are proposed as strategies to effectively manage fake news by mitigating the risks of undue interference by regulators in the right to freedom of expression (Section VI). The article concludes by offering some remarks on the proposed solution and in particular by recommending the implementation of reliability ratings on social media platforms (Section VII).

scholarly journals THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FRAMING ON AUDIENCE PERCEPTION OF ENDSARS AGENDA PROTEST

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiemezie Chukwuka Ugochukwu ◽  
Obiajulu Joel Nwolu
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Survey Research ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Category Theory ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Media Framing ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Proper Action ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Nigerian Government

In 2017, the #ENDSARS hashtag began trending across social media platforms, calling for a scrap of a police unit Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Nigerians complained about the activities of SARS that include extortion, extra-judicial killing, and harassment, among others. The Nigerian government and Police authorities promised to overhaul the SARS activities despite calls to scrap the police unit. On October 3rd 2020, a video went viral across social media platforms how police officers suspected SARS officers shot a young man and took his Lexus car away. Social media influencers organized the protest and like wildfire, it spread across the country. Based on this, the research is structured to ascertain respondents’ level of exposure to social media framing on EndSARS protest, to determine if social media framing on EndSARS protest motivated the youths, to find out if social media framing contributed to protests across the country. No doubt, the internet and social media have changed the narrative of organizing protests across the globe and Nigeria in particular. Anchored on three theories namely, framing theory, social category theory, and technology determinism theory. Survey research method was adopted for the study and copies of the questionnaire were distributed online with help of Google forms. Findings revealed that respondents were exposed to social media framing on EndSARS agenda and social media framing contributed to country’s protest across the country. The study recommends, among others, that government should always investigate reports about its agencies and take proper action to forestall any protest in the future.

scholarly journals Pengaruh Ephemeral Content dan E-WOM terhadap Purchase Intention Millenial Customers pada UMKM Industri Kuliner di Surabaya

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Santho Vlennery Mettan ◽  
Aldo Hardi Sancoko
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Purchase Intention ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Purchasing Decisions ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Indonesian’s Millennials are estimated to reach 70% of the productive population in 2020-2030 (BPS 2018), who cannot be separated from the internet and social media (Harahap 2017). Due to this fact, (Hsu 2018) and (Benini 2018) claim that millennials are afraid of being left behind by ephemeral content which will disappear within 24 hours so that many social media platforms are equipped with these temporary content features and companies are using temporary content strategies to reach more consumers. SMEs on the other hand have low knowledge of ephemeral content, even though 84% of millennials buy products due to the influence of social media, where ephemeral content lies within (Boen 2016). In the other hand, word-of-mouth has a significant impact on customer purchasing decisions until now. Along with the change to the digital era, word-of-mouth is being accelerated with the help of the internet, it called e-WOM, where many businesses use social media or other online platforms to promote business. The results showed that the two variables of ephemeral content and word-of-mouth with the help of the internet had a significant effect on customer purchase intentions, especially the millennial customer for SMEs in Surabaya City. In the future, by implementing ephemeral content in SMEs media social will increases their customer’s e-WOM.

scholarly journals Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Instagram and Influencer Marketing

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Evelina Francisco ◽  
Nadira Fardos ◽  
Aakash Bhatt ◽  
Gulhan Bizel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Marketing Strategy ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Video Conferencing ◽  
Marketing Mix ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Exploratory Research ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Made In

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting stay-at-home orders have disrupted all aspects of life globally, most notably our relationship with the internet and social media platforms. People are online more than ever before, working and attending school from home and socializing with friends and family via video conferencing. Marketers and brands have been forced to adapt to a new normal and, as a result, have shifted their brand communication and marketing mix to digital approaches. Hence, this study aims to examine the shift of influencer marketing on Instagram during this period and the possible future implications. By employing an online survey for exploratory research, individuals answered questions addressing their perceptions about the impact of the pandemic, brands and influencers’ relationship, and the overall changes made in marketing strategy.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document