Citations

... The widespread growth of the internet enables media content to be available in online formats, offering numerous options to users (Treem, J. W., Leonardi, P. M., & Van den Hooff, B., 2020;Hacker, J., Vom Brocke, J., Handali, J., Otto, M., & Schneider, J., 2020). The availability of content across platforms provides users with more freedom and flexibility in shaping their consumption patterns by allowing content to be available on demand (Martens, B., Aguiar, L., Gomez-Herrera, E., & Mueller-Langer, F., 2018). This benefits users who can access media content according to their desires and needs without being bound by schedules and content determined by media entities. ...
Article
The popularity of social media in Indonesia is currently on the rise, and recent trends indicate that social media usage is associated with the dissemination of various factors contributing to the development of news and information within society. Most social media users utilize their social networks to meet their news needs, even though these sources are not always accurately verifiable. Unfortunately, there is a significant amount of misinformation and hate speech found on social media, compounded by the low media literacy rates in Indonesia, leading to rapid and widespread dissemination of information. This study aims to analyze the relationship between individual behavior in consuming media (media consumption) and their responses to hoax and hate speech on social media. The theory employed is selective exposure. The research method used is a quantitative approach utilizing correlational research methods. Sampling was conducted using a questionnaire, selecting two districts as the research sample through simple random sampling. The total number of respondents included in this study was 110, determined based on Taro Yamane's formula with a precision/tolerance error of 10%. The research findings indicate that the majority of respondents emphasize the importance of selecting information free from negative content such as insults, hate speech, and fake news on social media platforms. Significant differences in respondent perspectives reflect variations in the assessment of accessed information, while differing opinions regarding the validity and freedom of information from certain negative elements are also evident in this study. Some respondents exhibit uncertainty regarding the objectivity and consistency between titles and content of information obtained through social media. The analysis reveals a connection between the intensity of social media usage and respondents' reactions to hoax and hate speech information. Although the relationship is relatively weak, it indicates an association between the frequency of social media usage and the way respondents respond to information containing hoaxes or hate speech.
... Additionally, social media algorithms often prioritize content that aligns with a user's existing beliefs and preferences, creating an echo chamber (Cinelli et al., 2021) where people are exposed primarily to information that reinforces their perceptions. This can contribute to polarization and hinder constructive dialog between groups of individuals with varied opinions (Ireton and Posetti, 2018;Martens et al., 2018;Meel and Vishwakarma, 2020;Majerczak and Strzelecki, 2022). Despite these foreseeable challenges, Millennials and Gen Z increasingly rely on social media for news consumption. ...
Article
Full-text available
The ascendancy of social media as a predominant source of information has underscored the imperative to grasp its impact on individuals' perceptions and behaviors across diverse industries. In the realm of organic farming, which often sparks conflicting perspectives among stakeholders, the inundation of user-generated content presents a formidable challenge in discerning reliable sources from dubious ones. This phenomenon risks perpetuating misinformation, particularly among younger consumers, with uncertain implications for Agricultural Education and Communication. To address this void in understanding how social media influences perceptions of organic farming, a study was undertaken at the University of Georgia, utilizing Q methodology to delve into the perspectives of undergraduate and graduate students regarding organic food and farming practices. Complementing this approach, an offline survey questionnaire assessed their purchasing habits and media consumption patterns. Through the sorting of 41 statements encompassing themes such as health, socioeconomics, environment, ideological beliefs, and ethics, the study identified four distinct consumer typologies: "Dilettante Consumers," "Decisive Consumers," "Need-based Consumers," and "Wandering Consumers." Social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube were identified as the primary information sources for young consumers seeking information about the organic farming industry. Source attractiveness and perceived trustworthiness were identified as major attributes contributing to the credibility of social media as an information source among these consumers. However, their reliance on source expertise remained debatable. Notably, the research also unveiled that students' experiential learning facilitated a more nuanced understanding of various facets of the organic food industry. These findings emphasize the necessity for stakeholders to adapt to the digital age and remodel their communication strategies to better comprehend consumer perspectives and address prevailing knowledge gaps, particularly among the younger demographic. CITATION Nayak S, Campbell J and Duffey KC (2024) Utilizing Q methodology to explore university students' perceptions of the organic food industry: the integral role of social media.
... The widespread use of the internet, social media, and mobile phones has fundamentally disrupted established business models in the news sector. New business models often grapple with budget constraints, infrastructure challenges, and a scarcity of resources, leading to a reduction in "on-the-ground, " reallife news coverage (32). The pressure to continuously create content to feed the homepage and social media accounts, along with the speed of publication demands, has reduced the quality control processes such as verification, diversity of data, and content enhancement. ...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction The accuracy and reliability of health information disseminated through news is crucial, as it directly impacts both individual and societal health outcomes. This study aims to analyze the publication process of health content in Türkiye and its implications for public health. By examining the perspectives of various health communication stakeholders, the study seeks to identify existing issues and propose potential solutions. Methods The research uses a mixed-methods approach, including baseline content analysis of 846 news by 133 criteria, quantitative research with 78 participants encompassing bureaucrats, academics, journalists, and health association members, and 15 in-depth interviews for comprehensive insights. Results The content analysis indicated that 23.2% of the analyzed news articles lacked credible sources, while 63% did not mention the author’s name. A striking 96.2% of respondents stated that inaccurate health news poses a risk to public health, emphasizing the urgent need for standardized reporting practices. The majority (90.9%) pinpointed the media as the primary catalysts for infodemic spread, with 93.5% citing gatekeepers as barriers to accurate information. Eroding trust in media, fueled by unethical practices, harms both media credibility and effective public health interventions. Discussion The study underscores the necessity for a collaborative approach among public institutions, academia, and media, focusing on responsibility, regulation, and sanctions against the infodemic. The research advocates for a balanced approach that prioritizes health rights and press freedom within a stakeholder-driven framework, highlighting that legislation alone cannot fully enhance the digital information ecosystem.
... The specific sector we aim to focus on is journalism. It has, in recent years, experienced a trans-formative period (Martens et al., 2018), moving from printed to digital news and grappling with the increased importance of social media and a subsequent rise of disinformation (Guess and Lyons, 2020). Recent reports (Newman et al., 2023) suggest that generative AI will bring the next significant shift, with 28% of publishers reportedly using AI in their processes in 2023, and OpenAI expressing interest in this field. ...
Preprint
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being utilised across a range of tasks and domains, with a burgeoning interest in their application within the field of journalism. This trend raises concerns due to our limited understanding of LLM behaviour in this domain, especially with respect to political bias. Existing studies predominantly focus on LLMs undertaking political questionnaires, which offers only limited insights into their biases and operational nuances. To address this gap, our study establishes a new curated dataset that contains 2,100 human-written articles and utilises their descriptions to generate 56,700 synthetic articles using nine LLMs. This enables us to analyse shifts in properties between human-authored and machine-generated articles, with this study focusing on political bias, detecting it using both supervised models and LLMs. Our findings reveal significant disparities between base and instruction-tuned LLMs, with instruction-tuned models exhibiting consistent political bias. Furthermore, we are able to study how LLMs behave as classifiers, observing their display of political bias even in this role. Overall, for the first time within the journalistic domain, this study outlines a framework and provides a structured dataset for quantifiable experiments, serving as a foundation for further research into LLM political bias and its implications.
... Furthermore, they disseminate faster and further on social media sites causing serious impact on politics and economics (Tandoc, 2019). Accordingly, the report on digital transformation of media and the rise of disinformation/fake news of the European Union (EU) (Martens et al., 2018) reinforces the need to strengthen trust in digital media. ...
Article
Full-text available
Social media platforms enable the rapid dissemination and consumption of information. However, users instantly consume such content regardless of the reliability of the shared data. Consequently, the latter crowdsourcing model is exposed to manipulation. This work contributes with an explainable and online classification method to recognize fake news in real-time. The proposed method combines both unsupervised and supervised Machine Learning approaches with online created lexica. The profiling is built using creator-, content- and context-based features using Natural Language Processing techniques. The explainable classification mechanism displays in a dashboard the features selected for classification and the prediction confidence. The performance of the proposed solution has been validated with real data sets from Twitter and the results attain 80% accuracy and macro F-measure. This proposal is the first to jointly provide data stream processing, profiling, classification and explainability. Ultimately, the proposed early detection, isolation and explanation of fake news contribute to increase the quality and trustworthiness of social media contents.
... Por último, seria preciso reavaliar a restrição de que a propagação intensa de fluxos dispersos de opiniões nas redes sociais on-line seria exclusiva à desinformação: trata-se de um ponto de vista questionável, visto que essa propagação é uma característica fundamental do processo comunicativo. Martens et al. (2018) (Maingueneau, 2008, p. 21, inserções próprias). Em outras palavras, trata-se de um processo em que a incompreensão entre discursos de formações discursivas dadas é um traço constitutivo da relação entre esses discursos. ...
... Numa concepção ampla, essas "notícias" seriam concebidas no âmbito de um problema de desordem e de distorção, com destaque para fabricação de versões de informações que promoveriam, segundo Martens et al. (2018), "ideologias" perturbadoras do debate público de qualidade. Ainda que esses autores trabalhem com uma abordagem "mista" na discussão do fenômeno -considerando, assim, concepções restrita e ampla na elaboração do relatório -, opto por enfocar a concepção ampla a fim de tratar da desinformação no contexto da pandemia de covid-19 em toda sua complexidade, para além do "explícito" e verificável, ou, como veremos a seguir, de uma centralidade no aspecto dos produtores da desinformação. ...
Thesis
Full-text available
Esta Tese de Doutorado investiga notícias publicadas por agências de fact-checking de três países diferentes: Argentina, Brasil e Estados Unidos. De uma perspectiva etnográfico-discursiva, que conjuga pressupostos teórico-metodológicos dos estudos de letramentos e da análise do discurso de orientação francesa, o objetivo geral da pesquisa é investigar concepções de texto que emergem do trabalho de checagem das agências dos países mencionados: respectivamente, Chequeado, Lupa e Politifact. Esse objetivo geral desdobra-se em três objetivos específicos: (1) investigar quais aspectos desse processo de textualização são priorizados na análise do objeto de checagem, quando as agências definem o que é verdadeiro ou falso no texto publicado; (2) investigar a relação entre o que as agências explicitam, metodologicamente, na análise do objeto de checagem, e o que efetivamente apresentam no texto publicado e (3) investigar, do ponto de vista do processo de checagem da informação, como a “fonte” pelas agências eleita contribui para o estabelecimento de critérios para chegar ao verdadeiro ou falso no texto publicado. Considerando-se que, no combate às fake news em mídias sociais, as agências buscam analisar se uma informação é falsa a partir de um texto outro – objeto de checagem –, a hipótese norteadora do trabalho é a de que, embora tais agências explicitem e publiquem em seus sites certos critérios metodológicos adotados e reconhecidos internacionalmente, há critérios outros – “não explícitos” – que podem ser assumidos e que orientam essas práticas de investigação. Orientam, portanto, um modo de definir (o conceito de) verdadeiro ou falso na notícia publicada. O corpus da pesquisa totaliza 710 produções textuais escritas de base multissemiótica que circularam em mídias sociais (290 notícias publicadas e 420 objetos de checagem) no período de 27/02/2020 a 30/4/2020. A escolha foi realizada com base no cruzamento do início de checagem sobre covid-19 nessas agências. As categorias de análise foram construídas segundo observação de três procedimentos discursivos para cada um dos objetivos propostos: (1) oscilações; (2) flutuações e (3) mobilizações. Os resultados alcançados permitem comprovar a hipótese de partida a partir dos três eixos de reflexão propostos: (1) a observação de oscilações de modos semióticos priorizados na análise do objeto checado em direção ao estabelecimento da verdade do texto pôde ser vinculada à construção de um discurso virtuoso das agências; (2) a apreensão de flutuações metodológicas na seleção de “conteúdo” e de “fonte” original pôde ser vinculada à construção de uma imagem de agente virtuoso feita pelas agências e (3) o estudo de modalidades enunciativas, na mobilização das fontes, nas notícias, entendidas como formas de discurso relatado, pôde ser vinculado à construção de uma virtude discursiva. Portanto, a pesquisa contribui com estudos voltados ao fenômeno da desinformação sobre covid-19 em agências de fact-checking a fim de fornecer subsídios teórico-metodológicos para desenvolvimento de competências letradas digitais de cidadãos de diferentes países.
... The decline of a paid readership and the shrinking share of revenue that "legacy" media outlets have forced many of them to cut down on staff (Bakir and McStay 2018). Literature on fake news and disinformation has sought to establish the link between falling revenue margins and the comparatively low barriers to entry into digital media (Martens, et al. 2018). Livingston and Bennett (2020) note the disruption of public sphere institutions through intensified flows of dark money and illicit campaign finances that has led us to the current juncture. ...
Article
In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of work and labour was being deeply pondered upon. The demarcations that emerged out of this juncture led to a bifurcation of labour into ‘essential workers’, who are pushed into precarity from the threat of disease and contractual uncertainty in employment, and those who ‘work from home’. While geo-spatial segregation of these distinctions is contingent upon the specific relation of the nature of work with datafication, we are impelled to ponder upon the role that the accumulation of surplus value plays in this process. More specifically we must ask, what role does digital labour play in the datafication and datafied reorganization of work and workplaces? The inadequateness of data colonialism as a theoretical tool that accounts for the historical-materialist and dialectical roots of extraction and accumulation of user data requires a retheorization of the process. In this paper, I shall examine the ontological inadequacies of the metaphors of colonialism, and its extractivist logic, being transposed and mapped onto the studies of datafication. Following this I shall explore ‘digital dispossession’ as a convergence of Digital Capitalism and the neoliberal reorganization of digitized social labour, alongside its necropolitical implications. Drawing upon David Harvey’s theorization of ‘Accumulation by Dispossession’, I argue for a classical Marxist interpretation of datafication as a new reorganization of capitalist accumulation that acts and appropriates surplus generated by prosumers through the unpaid and discursive digital labour performed on digital platforms.
... Disinformation represents the deliberate creation and spreading of false and/or manipulated information to mislead and deceive others (House of Commons et al., 2019;Martens et al., 2018;Tandoc et al., 2018). It often aims to connect with any prevailing public discontent or widely held negative attitudes. ...
... Heuristic information processing is a common way humans cope with uncertainty and information overload (Martens et al., 2018;Metzger et al., 2010;Metzger & Flanagin, 2013;Samoilenko, 2018;Sundar, 2008;Zhang et al., 2018). People often lack the motivation to monitor their decision-making processes. ...
Article
Website contents can be designed to influence individual and group decision-making for social, political or financial gain. A novel working theoretical framework was developed to provide insights into where website contents have been designed to exploit common cognitive vulnerabilities (CVs) amongst audiences; a form of social cognitive hacking. A literature synthesis on CVs, website content design and credibility identified features on a context credibility (CC) dimension that were mapped against features on an information validity (IV) dimension. Alignment of CC and IV feature pairings with CVs enables evaluation and interpretation of nuanced website content for identification of attempted influence undetectable by machine algorithms. Subjective responses to prompts about features on each dimension generate pairs of numerical values. The value pairs indicate within a quad-graph the possible presence and extent of CV exploitation. Each value pair can be traced to the underlying CC-IV features and CVs being targeted. External prima facie assessment suggests the framework can form the basis for standardised human analysis of website contents. Application of the framework provides insights into what and how feature combinations may be manipulated for CV exploitation. It has potential for application in fields such as intelligence analysis, education, and marketing.
... Plataformas #paraservir introducción: las redes sociales como instrumento Para oPtimizar la comunicación de las instituciones con sus Públicos en situaciones de emergencia Las redes sociales, presentes en la vida de casi 90% de la ciudadanía (IAB Spain, 2022), ofrecen la posibilidad de estar informados en tiempo real y de interactuar con usuarios, instituciones y empresas (Neuberger et al., 2019;Rissoan, 2016). Con dicha interacción, estas buscan generar un clima de confianza que ayude a fomentar la credibilidad de los mensajes que emite (Agnihotri, 2020;Martens et al., 2018) y se convierten en fuentes primarias de información para sus públicos, eliminando del proceso comunicativo a intermediarios que pueden distorsionar el mensaje. Esto puede ser decisivo para reducir las posibilidades de que se caiga en la desinformación, tal como citan Alcalá-Santaella y sus colegas (2021): ...
Article
Full-text available
La Unidad Militar de Emergencias (UME) actúa en situaciones de catástrofe y emergencia principalmente en España. La profesionalización de su comunicación ha incrementado el alcance y la comprensión de sus intervenciones. Partiendo de un análisis de contenido de carácter cualitativo en las plataformas Facebook, Twitter e Instagram (meses de junio y diciembre de 2022), profundizamos en cómo la unidad expone sus contenidos en las redes sociales. De los resultados se desprenden tres conclusiones principales: a) la comunicación en Facebook, Twitter e Instagram está planificada con solvencia, se apoya en elementos visuales y textuales coherentes, y humaniza a los profesionales que trabajan en la unidad; b) la dinámica de contenidos varía sustancialmente cuando hay una intervención de emergencia, generando un relato permanente que ayuda a la sociedad a estar informada desde el propio campo de actuación, y c) la reacción de los usuarios es positiva y apenas existen críticas negativas hacia la UME.
... Wasserman and Madrid-Morales (2019) maintain that in the field of African journalism studies, the use of social media platforms (such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, among others) as vehicles for disseminating political misinformation is rising. However, research into false news also indicates that it may also come from mainstream media (Benkler, Faris & Roberts, 2018;Carlson, 2018;Wahutu, 2019). Agbese (2017) argues that fake news is the worst weapon in the hands of people who care less about the well-being of society and more about their own political and social goals. ...