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Disinformation as Political Communication
Abstract
This introduction to the special issue “Beyond Fake News: The Politics of Disinformation” contains four main sections. In the first, we discuss the major sociopolitical factors that have allowed disinformation to flourish in recent years. Second, we review the very short history of disinformation research, devoting particular attention to two of its more extensively studied conceptual relatives: propaganda and misinformation. Third, we preview the seven articles in this issue, which we divide into two types: studies of disinformation content and of disinformation reception. We conclude by advancing a few suggestions for future disinformation research.
... The growing attention and concern about fake news and related topics have prompted heated discussions over the meanings and definitions of these concepts (Altay et al., 2023;Freelon & Wells, 2020;Simon & Camargo, 2023). Political actors have concurrently appropriated the label of fake news as a means of discrediting media institutions and political opponents (Lischka, 2019;Rossini et al., 2021). ...
... Across social scientific disciplines, fake news and related phenomena have received significant academic attention in recent years (Freelon & Wells, 2020;Righetti, 2021). Scholars from a wide array of fields have sought to study, conceptualise, and delineate both new and existing phenomena (Farkas, 2023c). ...
... Scholars from a wide array of fields have sought to study, conceptualise, and delineate both new and existing phenomena (Farkas, 2023c). This has given rise to a range of competing, and at times conflicting, typologies, revolving around terms such as fake news (Tandoc, 2019), junk news (Howard et al., 2017), information disorder (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017), computational propaganda (Woolley, 2020), cyber influence operations (Sander, 2019), coordinated inauthentic behaviour (Weber & Neumann, 2021), disinformation (Freelon & Wells, 2020), malinformation (Yesmin, 2023), and misinformation (McBrayer, 2020). ...
In this article, we examine how journalists try to uphold ideals of objectivity, clarity, and epistemic authority when using four overlapping terms: fake news, junk news, misinformation, and disinformation. Drawing on 16 qualitative interviews with journalists in Denmark, our study finds that journalists struggle to convert the ideals of clarity and objectivity into a coherent conceptual practice. Across interviews, journalists disagree on which concepts to use and how to define them, accusing academics of producing too technical definitions, politicians of diluting meaning, and journalistic peers of being insufficiently objective. Drawing on insights from journalism scholarship and rhetorical argumentation theory, we highlight how such disagreements reveal a fundamental tension in journalistic claims to epistemic authority, causing a continuous search for unambiguous terms, which in turn produces the very ambiguity that journalists seek to avoid.
... (36,39) Por otro lado, la propaganda política emplea tácticas más agresivas y manipuladoras para influir en la opinión pública. (3,40) El marketing político busca posicionarse por encima de la competencia en términos de oferta, calidad, conocimiento y elección. (37) Una estrategia exitosa debe ser auténtica, clara y relevante para el público objetivo, implementándose de manera consistente en todos los canales de comunicación. ...
... (2,35,45) Sin embargo, el marketing político se basa en la persuasión y la oferta de soluciones políticas y la propaganda política se ha identificado más con la manipulación y la supresión de información. (3,15,31,40) Por tanto, el marketing político y la propaganda política pueden plantear desafíos éticos y sociales para el funcionamiento de los sistemas políticos y para la ciudadanía activa. (52) En ambos casos, se corre el riesgo de manipular la información, de desinformar a los ciudadanos y de socavar la confianza en las instituciones democráticas. ...
Introducción: La comunicación política juega un papel crucial en el acceso al poder y su ejercicio. Los políticos utilizan estrategias comunicativas para informar, persuadir y movilizar a las personas, así como para construir la imagen de su partido político o de sí mismos. El marketing político y la propaganda política son dos enfoques utilizados en este proceso. Objetivo: Analizar las diferencias entre el marketing político y la propaganda política, así como explorar su utilización en diversos entornos políticos. Métodos: El estudio se basó en una revisión documental que analizó fuentes bibliográficas y estudios previos relacionados con el tema. Se examinaron casos de marketing político y propaganda política a nivel nacional e internacional. Resultados: El marketing político y la propaganda política buscan persuadir, pero difieren en sus enfoques. El marketing político se centra en construir una imagen positiva y generar confianza en una opción política, mientras que la propaganda política utiliza técnicas más agresivas, distorsionando hechos y apelando a las emociones. Ambas estrategias plantean desafíos éticos y sociales, como la manipulación de información y la desinformación. Es esencial que los ciudadanos sean críticos y estén alertas ante la comunicación política para contrarrestar estos riesgos. Conclusiones: Se necesita fomentar una cultura de participación responsable en la vida democrática, donde los ciudadanos estén informados y posean habilidades para evaluar críticamente la información. Esto implica comprender los mecanismos de la comunicación persuasiva, identificar la intencionalidad en la retórica y la narrativa, y participar en el debate público de manera informada y constructiva.
... One reason for the lack of conceptual clarity may be that research has expanded so quickly and is conducted in many different disciplines (Arqoub et al., 2020;Ha et al., 2021;Madrid-Morales & Wasserman, 2022). Another reason may be that scholarly interest in misinformation, disinformation and fake news studies has grown exponentially since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election with its repeated allegations of interference and meddling (Freelon & Wells, 2020;Madrid-Morales & Wasserman, 2022). This suggests that many research projects were planned, designed, and conducted around the same time, without knowledge of other similar projects. ...
... On the other hand, theoretical and conceptual articles are also well represented, accounting for 239 (19%) articles within our sample (e.g. Ball, 2021;Freelon & Wells, 2020;Egelhofer & Lecheler, 2019;McKay & Tenove, 2020;Tandoc et al., 2018;Wasserman, 2020). Review articles were identified more rarely, but still account for 90 (7.1%) of the articles in our sample (e.g. ...
Even though misinformation, disinformation, and fake news are not new phenomena, they have received renewed interest since political events such as Brexit and the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections. The resulting sharp increase in scholarly publications bears the risk of lack of overview, fragmentation across disciplines, and ultimately a lack of research cumulativity. To counteract these risks, we have performed a systematic research review of 1261 journal articles published between 2010 and 2021. Results show the field is mostly data-driven, frequently investigating the prevalence, dissemination, detection or characteristics of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news. There further are clear foci concerning contributing disciplines, methodologies, and data usage. Building on our results, we identify several research gaps and suggest avenues for future research.
... Disinformation-the goal-directed dissemination of deceptive information-has been regarded as a key threat to democracy. Among other things, disinformation can increase polarization, enhance cynicism, or cultivate distrust and uncertainty among citizens (e.g., Bennett & Livingston, 2018;Freelon & Wells, 2020). These concerns are voiced even louder for visual disinformation, and deepfakes in particular (e.g., Dan et al., 2021;Westerlund, 2019). ...
... Disinformation can be understood as the intentional creation or dissemination of deceptive information (Chadwick & Stanyer, 2022;Freelon & Wells, 2020). Disinformation may be motivated by different goals, such as sowing discord in foreign democracies (e.g., Lukito, 2020), increasing cynicism, augmenting societal cleavages in domestic political settings (e.g., Marwick & Lewis, 2017), or making financial profits (e.g., Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). ...
Visual disinformation has been regarded as convincing because it strongly resembles reality. Yet, we lack a clear understanding of the effects of different forms of audiovisual disinformation—cheapfakes versus deepfakes. To advance the disinformation literature, this paper reports on the findings of two experiments in which participants were exposed to political cheapfakes and deepfakes, respectively. Our main findings indicate that audiovisual disinformation is not perceived as more credible or believable than the same disinformation in textual format. Importantly, deepfakes are perceived as less credible than cheapfakes with a similar de-legitimizing anti-immigration narrative. Although more research is needed, our findings suggest that less sophisticated modes of deception can be at least as credible as more sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence-driven audiovisual fabrication.
... Además de la incesante sobreoferta de contenidos informativos y de entretenimiento, el establecimiento de nuevas dinámicas para la generación y circulación de datos (Jungherr, 2023) facilita la circulación de información imprecisa o malintencionada (Arugay & Baquisal, 2022;Freelon & Wells, 2020;Persily & Tucker, 2020;Schiffrin & Cunliffe-Jones, 2021). A ello hay que añadirle la aparición de nuevos actores no políticos en la escena pública que visibilizan posturas políticas. ...
En 2024, México enfrenta un desafiante proceso electoral marcado por la propagación de información no verificada, la desconfianza hacia el periodismo crítico y nuevas formas de comunicación entre actores políticos y votantes. ¿Representan estos desafíos fenómenos novedosos o son formas modernizadas de propaganda política? Este análisis se fundamenta en la investigación sobre el impacto del entorno digital en elecciones previas, tanto en México como a nivel mundial. Cuatro áreas emergen como posibles factores de influencia: 1) el debilitamiento del periodismo, 2) la desconfianza en los medios tradicionales, 3) la transformación en la comunicación política y 4) el incremento de la desinformación. La pregunta crucial es si estos elementos alterarán de manera radical el proceso electoral o si forman parte de una evolución política natural.
... Misinformation [6] can be categorized as information that is factually incorrect or misleading, disseminated without the intention of deceiving. On the other hand, disinformation [6] refers to a deliberate tactic employed to manipulate individuals by fabricating and spreading false information to achieve predetermined political or financial objectives [7]. As per expert analysis, there is a projection that the deliberate dissemination of distorted news through various channels will increasingly serve as the primary means to influence public opinion or conceal information. ...
Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have produced synthetic images with high visual fidelity, making them nearly indistinguishable from human-created images. These synthetic images referred to as deepfakes, have become a major source of misinformation due to social media. Technology is advancing rapidly, so reliable methods for distinguishing real from fake images are needed. The current detection mechanisms require image forensics tools such as error level analysis (ELA), and clone detection to detect manipulated images. These approaches are limited because they require forensics expertise to use, are manual in application nature, and are unscalable, creating a need for a framework for a scalable tool that experts and non-experts can use to combat the spread of manipulated images and preserve digital visual information authenticity. We approach this problem with a multi-model ensemble framework using the transfer learning method to effectively detect fake images. The proposed approach named Multi-Model GAN Guard (MMGANGuard)integrates four models into an ensemble framework to identify GAN-generated image characteristics to improve deepfake detection. The Gram-Net architecture, ResNet50V2, and DenseNet201 models are used with co-occurrence matrices using transfer learning for MMGANGuard. Through comprehensive experiments, the proposed model demonstrates promising results in detecting the deepfake with high accuracy on the StyleGAN dataset. For automated detection of deepfake-generated images, the proposed model exceeded 97% accuracy, 98.5% TPR, 98.4% TPR, and 95.6% TPR in these evaluations, eliminating the need for manual assessment which is promising for future research in this domain.
... The findings help understand the roles of news literacy in mitigating misperceptions and identify subgroups formed along ideology and ideological media consumption patterns that are more or less likely to benefit from news literacy interventions. Freelon and Wells (2020) differentiate between disinformation and misinformation: They define disinformation as false information that is designed and spread intentionally, while misinformation is fake information circulated without the disseminators' knowledge. Moreover, Nyhan and Reifler (2010) offered an important distinction between misinformation, which regards the information itself, and misperceptions -defined as 'cases in which people's belief about factual matters are not supported by clear evidence and expert opinion ' (p. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the urgency of working across lines of political difference to combat misinformation. This paper asks: Does having news literacy matter in reducing misperceptions, and importantly, for whom does having news literacy matter? Using a national survey of US adults (N = 1700) that included the largest set of COVID-19-related misperceptions examined to date (k = 84), we tested how the effects of news literacy on misperceptions vary across ideology and ideological media consumption. Although holding a higher level of news literacy is associated with fewer misperceptions in general, it helps conservatives less than it helps liberals. Moreover, although news literacy is associated with mitigating the misperception-inducing effect of ideological media consumption on both ends of the political spectrum, this potential benefit appears to be weaker for conservative media use than for liberal media use. Finally, the benefit of having news literacy is maximized among cross-cutting consumers of ideological media but dampened among like-minded consumers, particularly conservatives with heavy conservative media consumption. We discuss the implications of our findings for identifying subgroups for future news literacy interventions and understanding the potentials and challenges of using news literacy to combat misinformation in a polarized climate. ARTICLE HISTORY
... These political propaganda campaigns are particularly compelling because they operate within already established, complex social dynamics. Oftentimes, the exploitation of racial identities is the focus of identity propaganda campaigns (Freelon et al., 2022;Freelon & Wells, 2020). Identity propaganda relies on three major narratives: othering, essentializing, and authenticating (Reddi et al., 2021). ...
U.S. anti-abortion activists use social media to advocate for their cause. While influencer scholarship has proliferated within media studies, the advent of political influencers remains understudied, despite their ability to influence public opinion. Through 16 interviews with anti-abortion political influencers combined with digital observation, we examine the emergent tactics of “progressive” anti-abortion influencers. We find that these influencers co-opt marginalized communities’ ideological frameworks and experiences of discrimination in an effort to influence public opinion on abortion. We build upon the concept of identity propaganda from Reddi, Kuo, and Kreiss, but crucially reveal the ways in which these influencers mobilize their own experiences of oppression as members of marginalized communities themselves. Thus, we put forth the theoretical concept of embodied political influencers to articulate these influencers’ aim to change political opinion through identifying as members of marginalized groups, calling on their own historical—and at times contemporary—experiences of subjugation to propagate embodied propaganda.
... 4 V današnjem času se opisani vsakodnevni primeri manipulacij raziskovalnega dela in vanj vključenih ljudi za namene nepoštenega političnega delovanja po vsem svetu prav posebej opazno odražajo tudi skozi dezinformiranje kot obliko političnega komuniciranja, preko zlorab lažnih novic na svetovnem spletu in preko novih orodij (npr. t. i. »troli«), ki jih omogoča t. i. umetna inteligenca (Thompson, 2000;Marcus, 2000;Chilton, 2004;Albright, 2017;Brennen, 2017;Carlson, 2018;Egelhofer in Lecheler, 2019;Freelon in Wells, 2020;Milano idr., 2020). ...
... Another key contribution of this study is to address methodological limitations of previous studies that constrain knowledge about the extent to which exposure to disinformation varies on the individual level (Freelon & Wells, 2020;Guess et al., 2020). ...
Despite the conceptual affinity of right-wing populism and disinformation, we know little about whether populist radical-right (PRR) attitudes impact exposure to disinformation online. Previous research indicates that individual characteristics and media use affect the likelihood of being exposed to (more) disinformation. However, few studies examined the effect of PRR attitudes on exposure to disinformation. Further, previous studies show limitations with regard to the measurement of actual online exposure to disinformation. This study seeks to understand how PRR attitudes, media trust and social media usage affect online exposure to disinformation in the beginning of the corona pandemic. We combined survey and tracking data on individual online information behavior of N = 594 participants from Germany. To identify disinformation in the tracking data, we developed a hybrid machine-human approach combining automated classification of disinformation with hand-coding. Findings show very low average online exposure to disinformation, but high concentration among a small group of individuals and websites. Higher levels of PRR attitudes, trust in non-traditional media, reliance on social media for political information, and lower levels of education predicted a higher online exposure to disinformation.
... Researchers have highlighted that misinformation with broad reach, attracting significant attention from social media users, is particularly concerning because users interact with and propagate it (Marwick and Lewis, 2017;Freelon and Wells, 2020). This type of misinformation transforms its negative consequences from an individual issue to a societal problem. ...
Social media platforms like YouTube can exacerbate the challenge of ensuring public adherence to health advisories during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily due to the spread of misinformation. This study delves into the propagation of antivaccination sentiment on YouTube in Switzerland, examining how different forms of misinformation contribute to this phenomenon. Through content analysis of 450 German- and French-language YouTube videos, we investigated the prevalence and characteristics of completely and partially false information regarding COVID-19 vaccination within the Swiss context. Our findings show that completely false videos were more prevalent, often embedded with conspiracy theories and skepticism toward authorities. Notably, over one-third of the videos featured partially false information that masquerades as scientifically substantiated, associated with higher view counts and greater user engagement. Videos reaching the widest audiences were marked by strategies of commercialization and emotionalization. The study highlights the insidious nature of partially false information in Switzerland and its potential for greater impact due to its seemingly credible presentation. These findings underscore the need for a multifaceted response to misinformation, including enhancing digital literacy among the public, promoting accurate content creation, and fostering collaborations between health authorities and social media platforms to ensure that evidence-based information is prominently featured and accessible. Addressing the subtleties of misinformation is critical for fostering informed public behavior and decision-making during health emergencies.
... (Freelon, D., Wells, C.) examines fake news as a form of political communication. The authors convincingly argue that fake news is an effective means to achieve various political goals, such as influencing public opinion, destabilizing political processes and undermining trust in state institutions (Freelon, D., Wells, C. 2020). ...
This scientific article presents a content analysis of modern research in the field of manipulation as one of the current topics of the humanitarian scientific paradigm. Manipulativeness as a multifaceted phenomenon attracts the attention of researchers from various disciplines, from psychology and sociology to political science, media communication and linguistics. The aim of the article is to bring together different approaches and research into a single transdisciplinary body of knowledge on manipulation. The authors analyze different aspects of manipulability, including psychological, socio-cultural and linguistic aspects, especially using the example of media discourse, where manipulation is a key element in politics and media in the modern information age. The focus is on the influence of media manipulation on public opinion, mood, beliefs and values. The article discusses manipulative strategies, tactics and linguistic means of implementing them in media discourse. This article also emphasizes the importance of educating and developing critical thinking as a means to counter manipulative strategies and the relevance of studying manipulativeness in the humanities. The authors believe that a general transdisciplinary study will contribute to a deeper understanding of manipulative behavior and help to develop strategies to effectively counter this phenomenon in modern society.
... Agency in the Anthropocene requires drawing on diverse ways of knowing 50 to critically evaluate information, misinformation, and disinformation, 51 and to decide which actions can be taken in response to socioecological challenges. Critical evaluation of information sources can mean taking an objective approach by considering whether (and to what extent) source information concurs with the consensus of empirical knowledge, is based on peer review, or both. ...
... However, prior to the influence of the media and their decisions and editorial stance (Carlson, 2017), political misinformation within the parliamentary sphere gains particular relevance (Bennett and Livingston, 2018;Freelon and Wells, 2020). This work focuses precisely on a topic often overlooked in favor of discussions on the viral spread of online hoaxes (Anastasiadou et al., 2021;García-Orosa, 2022) or political leaders and their falsehoods (Boulianne et al., 2020;Froehlich, 2020;Swire-Thompson et al., 2020). ...
Disinformation is one of the main challenges faced by modern democratic societies, becoming a crucial focus of study in political communication. Terms such as lie, falsehood, hoax, disinformation, or post-truth have become part of the daily language of the media, featured in numerous scientific studies, and entered political discourse. With the aim of delving into and determining the characteristic features of Spanish politicians' discourse on disinformation, a methodology of quantitative and qualitative content analysis is applied to a total of 1,115 interventions by members of the Congress of Deputies during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. This period is chosen due to its high levels of disinformation and polarization. The results indicate that the issue of disinformation is a minor topic on the Spanish political agenda. Furthermore, metrics confirm a much higher use of terms such as lie, false, and hoax, to the detriment of other words like disinformation or post-truth. An impact of the pandemic on the main themes related to this phenomenon is also detected, with health and the economy being the primary frames identified. From an interpretative perspective, this is attributed to the tendency of Spanish politicians to use this issue as just one element within a polarizing and confrontational rhetoric, generally eschewing proactive debates on the measures needed to address disinformation.
... Since the US 2016 presidential election, much attention has focused on the bad, under conceptual banners including misinformation, disinformation, problematic context, fake news, information pollution, and many others. Such research has undertaken a number of goals, three of the most prominent being defining the problem (Freelon & Wells, 2020;Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017), mapping its scope (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017;Farhall et al., 2019), and testing the efficacy of proposed solutions (Walter et al., 2020). Personalized information environments have attracted attention across disciplinary lines, with scholars from information science, computer science, communication, political science, public policy, and public health making substantial contributions. ...
Social media have long been studied from platform‐centric perspectives, which entail sampling messages based on criteria such as keywords and specific accounts. In contrast, user‐centric approaches attempt to reconstruct the personalized information environments users create for themselves. Most user‐centric studies analyze what users have accessed directly through browsers (e.g., through clicks) rather than what they may have seen in their social media feeds. This study introduces a data collection system of our own design called PIEGraph that links survey data with posts collected from participants' personalized X (formerly known as Twitter) timelines. Thus, in contrast with previous research, our data include much more than what users decide to click on. We measure the total amount of data in our participants' respective feeds and conduct descriptive and inferential analyses of three other quantities of interest: political content, ideological skew, and fact quality ratings. Our results are relevant to ongoing debates about digital echo chambers, misinformation, and conspiracy theories; and our general methodological approach could be applied to social media beyond X/Twitter contingent on data availability.
... (Freelon, D., Wells, C.) examines fake news as a form of political communication. The authors convincingly argue that fake news is an effective means to achieve various political goals, such as influencing public opinion, destabilizing political processes and undermining trust in state institutions (Freelon, D., Wells, C. 2020). ...
This scientific article presents a content analysis of modern research in the field of manipulation as one of the current topics of the humanitarian scientific paradigm. Manipulativeness as a multifaceted phenomenon attracts the attention of researchers from various disciplines, from psychology and sociology to political science, media communication and linguistics. The aim of the article is to bring together different approaches and research into a single transdisciplinary body of knowledge on manipulation. The authors analyze different aspects of manipulability, including psychological, socio-cultural and linguistic aspects, especially using the example of media discourse, where manipulation is a key element in politics and media in the modern information age. The focus is on the influence of media manipulation on public opinion, mood, beliefs and values. The article discusses manipulative strategies, tactics and linguistic means of implementing them in media discourse. This article also emphasizes the importance of educating and developing critical thinking as a means to counter manipulative strategies and the relevance of studying manipulativeness in the humanities. The authors believe that a general transdisciplinary study will contribute to a deeper understanding of manipulative behavior and help to develop strategies to effectively counter this phenomenon in modern society.
... Mis-and disinformation are generally understood as being regrettably central to processes of contemporary political communication across the globe (e.g., Freelon & Wells, 2020). However, studies of health misinformation and studies of political misinformation have largely remained siloed from one another, only overlapping to the extent that scholars of each share interest in identifying the mechanics of misinformation flow and effects (e.g., Donovan, 2020;Vraga et al., 2019). ...
... A review of research on health-related misinformation reflects concerns about how misinformation and disinformation are affecting health communication efforts and decision-making for health [32]. Misinformation refers to false information, regardless of whether the communicator intends to mislead, whereas disinformation refers to false or misleading information spread deliberately to deceive, often with political intent [33]. ...
Purpose of Review
Obesity and eating disorders share common issues related to media use and effects, especially in the USA. Current research increasingly demonstrates that media literacy can address this problem. This narrative review highlights current media literacy–based research for obesity and eating disorder prevention among youth.
Recent Findings
Current research using media literacy techniques to prevent obesity indicates that these interventions improve nutrition outcomes, improve family communication about food, improve critical thinking about food advertisements, reduce sugar and fat intake, and reduce screen use for parents and youth. In addition, eating disorder research reveals that media literacy techniques lead to higher scores of body satisfaction and self-esteem, with lower scores of perfectionism, thinness, and ideal masculinity.
Summary
There is a need for media literacy–based interventions to focus on family communication to prevent obesity and eating disorders. Furthermore, there should be more focus on identified levels of prevention and specific clinical outcomes.
... This strategic decision is aimed at effectively tackling and curbing the spread of disorderly information throughout its platform, all the while avoiding the complexity of unequivocally labeling it as false content [9]. Academic literature suggests that these coordinated efforts have become fertile ground for the proliferation of political disinformation [28][29][30][31], a phenomenon observed across various social media platforms [32]. ...
The information landscape has undergone dramatic changes with the expansion of the internet and online social networks. Optimistic views thought that online communication would foster a culture of participation. However, recent events suggest that social media platforms limit the diversity of the content by exposing users to pre-existing beliefs, which is known by the metaphor of echo chambers. In addition, users with malicious intent are using these platforms to deceive people and discredit the democratic process. To better understand these two phenomena, this chapter describes a computational method to analyze coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook groups on posts, URLs, and images. Our findings suggest that Facebook groups shared identical items almost simultaneously by different entities. In doing so, we could identify that these groups resemble disinformation echo chambers, where repeatedly sharing activities of disinformation narratives occur. The chapter concludes with theoretical and empirical implications.
... In the scientific and professional literature, one can come across several other definitions of the term disinformation, especially from authors who deal with the issue in their research or works. Based on the content analysis of individual works, it can generally be concluded that individual authors generally characterize disinformation as "false, inaccurate or misleading information that is deliberately disseminated in order to achieve mainly political, economic or other goals" (Freelon -Wells, 2020;Wardle -Derakhsham, 2017). ...
Disinformation, propaganda, and hybrid threats are topics that, especially since Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and even more so since last year's military invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, resonate not only in professional but also in societal debates. Disinformation is one of the primary tools of propaganda and information warfare, and thus also the spread of hybrid threats through the press, television, radio, but especially through the Internet and social networks. For this reason, the author in the article, within the framework of interdisciplinary scientific research, using relevant scientific methods, with the aim of deepening the academic discourse in the subject area, deals with disinformation, propaganda and hybrid threats, pointing out that it is extremely important on the part of transnational organizations, democratic states and their competent institutions, including security forces, on the one hand, to take effective and efficient measures aimed at reducing the possibilities of their spread, and on the other hand, to support prevention and education in the field of media literacy and working with information.
This article brings frameworks from literary and cultural studies and methods from network science to bear on a central topic in political communication research: polarization. Recent studies have called into question the argument that digital “echo chambers” exacerbate polarization by preventing members from encountering a diversity of information and opinions. Using Gab, a far-right social media platform, as a case study, we offer further evidence that even members of highly polarized publics do engage in “cross-cutting.” However, we develop a distinct concept of hate-sharing, or sharing content for the purpose of disagreeing with or denigrating it. We show that hate-sharing is common on Gab. Moreover, it is associated with stronger community structure than other kinds of sharing and appears to confer substantially greater influence on those who engage in it. We interpret these findings as evidence that social networks incentivize the production of networked outrage—where “hating on” linked content merges with hate.
The article explores the methods of manipulation of consciousness in the mass media on the example of content analysis of Kazakhstan Russian-language sources. The authors reveal the concept of manipulation. Media manipulation is carried out at different levels - informational and emotionally expressive according to the two leading functions of the media language: information and impact. In accordance with this, the manipulation is realised at the level of information or expression. Examples of information manipulation through the expansion of information about the described object by including additional, metacommunicative and modified information are given. Another level of manipulation in the media is emotional and expressive influence. Such manipulation is based on labelling, appealing to authority, the interests of ordinary people, appealing to values, traditions, the use of associative binding, false comparisons, false alternatives, exploitation of slogans, conspiracy theories, myths, ridicule and other techniques. According to the authors, the use of media manipulation techniques generates cognitive tension when understanding additional meaning, which leads to a change in the attitude, evaluation and emotional perception of information on the part of the audience.
The advertising industry today is worth USD 850B annually, with digital ads commanding 76% of the economic pie. Today, 30% of global advertising budgets are spent with Google (Faria, 2023) whilst Yahoo has faded into obscurity.
Presently, both G&Y compete to offer a Search Engine Platform (SEP) whilst generating income through a Digital Advertising Platform (DAP).
Back in 1995, Yahoo was originally formed by Jerry Yang & David Filo as an online directory with the purpose of connecting people to their interests & likeminded individuals (Baker, 2007).
At the height of the millennium, it was once considered the most valuable company in the world. Unfortunately, their fortunes tumbled, culminating in its acquisition by Apollo, a private equity firm for a paltry sum of USD 5B in 2021 (Heater & Lunden, 2021).
Google on the other hand was crafted by Larry Page & Sergey Brin in 1998 with the vision of making information easily accessible (Hall & Hosch, 2023).
This paper examines & compares how market engagement plays a role in formulating fresh ideas for innovation and how this can be used to drive a strategic option for consideration & adoption.
This panel presents research on web and information infrastructures used for manipulative purposes. In contrast to platform manipulation (Woolley & Howard, 2018; Benkler et al., 2018), where users such as bad actors seek to gamify and exploit the weaknesses of online social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok, the papers in the present panel describe studies where web or information infrastructures such as those involved in search and information retrieval are manipulated to alter or produce facts (rather than social commentary on facts). For example, studies have shown how infrastructures like Google Search are manipulated by conservative elites (Tripodi, 2022), how anonymous editors use Wikidata to revise the distribution of information related to political protest movements (Ford, 2022), and how administrators harness information schemas to improve the findability of their advertising content (Iliadis, 2022). In these areas and more, web and digital infrastructures are being manipulated to serve the interests of politically motivated actors (Acker, 2018; Acker & Donovan, 2019). Infrastructures typically refer to shared public services like sewers, telephone poles, and electricity. According to Bowker et al. (2010, p. 98), information infrastructure refers to “digital facilities and services usually associated with the internet.” Information infrastructures are thus enabling resources, in network form, whose key role is that of a distributor, but rather than goods or services, information infrastructures distribute “knowledge, culture, and practice” (Bowker et al., 2010, p. 114). Such structures do this through their development of ontologies or classification schemes that enable dividing the world into categories or, through their application to large data sets, by offering an enormous, open store of data that can be used by others for a variety of purposes, such as retrieving facts and sharing information. Recently, several scholars have elaborated on the political nature of such infrastructural processes of digitization and datafication, including in the domains of archiving and preservation (Thylstrup, 2018, 2022), governance and management (Flyverbom & Murray, 2018), metrics and sorting (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2021), and the creation of global ontologies for things like web search (Iliadis et al., 2023) and surveillance services (Iliadis & Acker, 2022). Manipulation of social media content and messaging is likewise a major research area over the last several years owing to the prevalence of online misinformation and disinformation campaigns (Reagle, 2016; Paris, 2021; Culloty & Suiter, 2021), particularly those associated with electoral politics (Tucker & Persily, 2020) and health misinformation (Keselman et al., 2022). Yet, online manipulation is not a new phenomenon and has long been discussed as a feature of the web in the context of the history of trolling, abuse, and hate (Phillips, 2015, 2019). Manipulation is thus a multivalent concept and is found in several domains which share the notion that manipulation is related to the altering, editing, treating, controlling, and influencing of content and messages for the purpose of misleading individuals. Historically, though, less attention has focused on manipulation as it has been mobilized infrastructurally, particularly with respect to the information infrastructures that transmit content and messages. Infrastructures should be understood here in a broad sense as undergirding the communication structures that transmit messages and content. Such infrastructures can be found in computer science, news and journalism, government, policy, and other areas where messaging is organized using some form of schema, whether it be technical, linguistic, financial, or otherwise. The first paper uses interviews to highlight the “importance of abortion-related web search and whether or not that system has been manipulated by actors trying to prevent abortion access.” The paper “examines how people (users) search for information about abortion, how organizations (content providers) utilize search engine optimization to reach potential users, and how advertisers try to attract visitors.” The second paper uses autoethnography and process tracing with respect to “the AP African American Studies debacle in order to elucidate digitally mediated disinformation as a strategy for stoking moral panic and thereby gaining widespread public buy-in to the establishment of educational censorship infrastructure.” The third paper analyzes Palantir as a surveillance platform that shapes and is shaped by infrastructures of manipulation. The paper “provides a method for researching companies like Palantir and its surveillance infrastructures” through digital media archiving of “over 600+ documents which have been stored, cleaned, annotated, and uploaded into an online digital archive that will be publicly available for media researchers to study.” The fourth and final paper is “an ethnographic study of a single Wikipedia article and how it evolved over the course of a decade” in the context of political revolutons. The paper describes “a framework for understanding new methods of controlling facts in the context of automated knowledge products” and “the importance of semantic infrastructure to new methods of control and influence on Wikipedia and the wider knowledge infrastructures that are increasingly dependent on it.”
The recent surge of false information accompanying the Russian invasion of Ukraine has re-emphasized the need for interventions to counteract disinformation. While fact-checking is a widely used intervention, we know little about citizen motivations to read fact-checks. We tested theoretical predictions related to accuracy-motivated goals (i.e., seeking to know the truth) versus directionally-motivated goals (i.e., seeking to confirm existing beliefs) by analyzing original survey data ( n = 19,037) collected in early April to late May 2022 in nineteen countries, namely Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and USA. Survey participants read ten statements about the Russian war in Ukraine and could opt to see fact-checks for each of these statements. Results of mixed models for three-level hierarchical data (level 1: statements, level 2: individuals, and level 3: countries) showed that accuracy motivations were better explanations than directional motivations for the decision to read fact-checks about the Russian war in Ukraine.
Changes in our informational environment have brought new challenges and opportunities to address systemic issues of information inequity. Thus, when addressing systemic issues of information inequity, it is important to address it not only from the perspective of information access, as it is often considered in information science, but also from the perspective of how information objects are constructed and produced. This essay brings concerns within information science into discussion with journalism studies and critical technology studies to consider: (1) how the production of information, through the case of mainstream journalism, can create information inequity within information representations, and (2) how the dissemination and retrieval of this journalistic information through algorithmically‐mediated online information systems, specifically social media and search platforms, can replicate and reinforce information inequity within a larger information ecosystem. Thus, this essay uses an interdisciplinary lens to suggest new approaches to holistically address information inequity, putting forth a conceptual framework with actionable steps to create a more equitable information ecosystem.
Recent years have seen an increase in governmental interference in digital communication. Most research on this topic has focused on the application level, studying how content is manipulated or removed on websites, blogs or social media. However, in order for governments to obtain and maintain control of digital data flows, they need to secure access to the network infrastructure at the level of Internet service providers. In this paper, we study how the network topology of the Internet varies across different political environments, distinguishing between control at the level of individual Internet users (access) and at a higher level in the hierarchy of network carriers (transit). Using a novel method to estimate the structure of the Internet from network measurements, we show that in autocratic countries, state-owned (rather than privately-owned) providers have a markedly higher degree of control over transit networks. We also show that state-owned Internet providers often provide Internet access abroad, with a clear focus on other autocratic countries. Together, these results suggest that in autocracies, the network infrastructure is organized in a way that is more susceptible to the monitoring and manipulation of Internet data flows by state-owned providers both domestically and abroad.
Pilotní, kvalitativní studie vycházející z dat získaných prostřednictvím moderovaných skupinových rozhovorů odpovídá na hlavní výzkumnou otázku:
Jak formují vybrané kognitivní faktory volbu technik dekódování konspiračních narací, a způsob, jak jim respondenti rozumí?
Analýza nabízí srovnání dvou skupin respondentů, s vyšším a nižším konspiračním potenciálem, a současně přibližuje roli kognitivních a situačních faktorů při dekódování konspiračních narativů.
Úroveň konspiračního potenciálu rozdělila výzkumný soubor na dvě nestejně velké skupiny: (a) respondenty s vyšším konspiračním potenciálem (VKP), a kontrolní skupinu s nižším konspiračním potenciálem (NKP).
Přesto, že jsme nepracovali s reprezentativním souborem, naznačují sociodemografické charakteristiky respondentů s vyšším konspiračním potenciálem (VKP), že inklinace ke konspirační mentalitě je v této skupině rozložena mezi respondenty všech tří typů vzdělání (ZV, SŠ, VŚ) a tří typů generací.
Hlavní zjištění naznačuje zásadní roli sledovaných kognitivních předpokladů ve všech čtyřech tematických oblastech, kde byl jejich vliv testován. Respondenti s vyšším konspiračním potenciálem vykazovali jak odlišné kognitivní předpoklady při dekódování vizuálních obsahů (maleb), tak při dekódování tří typů konspiračních narativů. Lišili se také v pohledu na obecnější hodnotové otázky, respektive v recepci aktuální sociopolitické situace.
I. HODNOCENÍ STAVU ČESKÉ SPOLEČNOSTI A JEJICH POLITICKÝCH REPREZENTANTŮ.
Na úvod diskutovali participanti své názory na českou společnost a své místo v ní. Respondenty s vyšším konspiračním potenciálem odlišovala silnější nespokojenost se společenskou situací, a to jak v rovině existenciální, tak existenční.
Mezi respondenty dominovala všeprostupující kritika vlády, kterou sytily v existenčním rámci socio-ekonomické obtíže a v existenciální dimenzi difúzní úzkost z nejisté sociální a bezpečnostní situace. Ale také konkrétní předmětný strach z války.
De facto u všech respondentů převažovala manifestovaná rezignace a nedůvěra k domácí politické elitě, poukazující na vládní nekompetenci a neochotu naslouchat odborníkům.
Kritika se týkala zvláště ekonomických opatření vlády, které jsou pro respondenty „nesrozumitelné“ a spouštějí u nich socio-ekonomickou úzkost. Platí zde obecně potvrzený poznatek, že nepredikovatelnost jednání decizních orgánů vede u sociálních aktérů k rezignaci na sdílení racionální komunikace s mocí, byť by se jednalo jen o komunikaci zprostředkovanou médii hlavního proudu, která ale většina respondentů s VKP vnímá jako nástroje vládní propagandy.
Respondenty s VKP charakterizuje také manifestní pochybnost o celkovém směřování české společnosti. kterou větší část spojovala s vývojem v posledních čtyřech letech, a zvláště s epidemii covid-19, jejíž krizové řízení část respondentů označovala jako institucionalizovanou šikanu občanů, jež zhoršila mezilidské vztahy a spustila nejhorší stránky české povahy.
Zvláště tito respondenty zdůrazňovali potřeba ŘÁDU, kterou manifestovali skrze kritiku marginalizovaných skupin, ukrajinských migrantů a Romů.
Studie naznačuje, že pro konspirační mentalitu je určující, apriorní popírání, dominantního narativu, který je vnímán jako manipulativní a lživý. Zdá se, že pro konspirátory je důležitější situační odmítání oficiálních vysvětlení než navrhování alternativních řešení. Jde o základní rys konspiračního myšlení, které se nesoustřeďuje primárně na konkrétní „řešení“, často si protiřečících konspiračních teorií, ale na apriorní odmítání statu quo.
II. VNÍMÁNÍ ROLE NÁHODY A SVOBODNÉ VŮLE PŘI FORMOVÁNÍ VLASTNÍHO ŽIVOTA
Respondenti diskutovali o tom, do jaké míry jsou jejich životy (životní dráhy) výsledkem jejich cílené snahy, a do jaké jde o důsledek působení nahodilých dějů, na které nemají vliv. Sledovali jsme tak, do jaké míry se liší respondenti v VKP a respondenti NKP v míře fatality, kterou připisují svým životům.
Většina respondentů zdůrazňovala roli náhody, a nepřímo připouštěla, že nemají běh svých životů zcela pod kontrolou, respektive, že existují síly, které jejich životy ovlivňují, například postavení planet.
Ze tří diskutovaných determinant životní dráhy většina respondentů kombinovala vliv nadpřirozených sil s vlastní, individuální ne/vědomou rolí. Třetí, nejabstraktnější vliv nadosobních společenských sil, které působí v pozadí jako sociopolitické a ekonomické síly, zmínily jen dvě respondentky.
Tento pohled korespondoval u některých respondentů s pocitem vlastnictví exkluzivního vědění, které jim umožňuje ignorovat běžné výklady reality i tradiční religiozitu a spiritualitu.
Tito respondenti také nejčastěji užívali v diskusi kognitivní styl, který akcentuje kategorické soudy a nekomplikované odpovědi umožňující rychlé uzavření problému. Proto se také vyhýbali ambivalentním informacím, respektive komplikovanější diskusi.
III. ZÁKLADNÍ KOGNITIVNÍ PŘEDPOKLADY: IDENTIFIKACE NENÁHODNÝCH VZORŮ V NÁHODNÝCH VIZUÁLNÍCH PODNĚTECH A VÍRA V KONSPIRAČNÍ NARATIVY
Jak jsme ukázali v teoretické expozici, souvisí víra v konspirativní narativy s vyšší tendencí vidět významově smysluplné vzory v různých náhodných znakových shlucích.
To znamená, že silnější potřeba a „schopnost“ nacházet v náhodných nebo chaotických stimulech reálné vzory, by měla indikovat vyšší inklinaci k akceptaci konspiračních narativů. Jak ukázali Wal et al. (2018), u respondentů s vyšší tendencí vnímat nepravděpodobná kauzální spojení mezi jednotlivými událostmi, roste pravděpodobnost, že budou otevření přijetí konspirační teorie.
Pro ověření aplikovatelnosti tohoto předpokladu v domácím prostředí jsme využili částečně modifikovaný experiment realizovaný Douglasovou a Suttonem (2018). Naše pilotní testování naznačuje plauzibilitu jejich hypotézy, která předpokládá existenci vztahu mezi vyšší tendencí vnímat iluzívní neexistující vzory jako reálné/smysluplné a otevřeností přijímat konspirační teorie.
Recepční analýza individuálních taktik respondentů použitých při dekódování vybraných maleb naznačuje vyšší atraktivitu Pollockových obrazů s iluzivními vzory pro respondenty s vyšším konspiračním potenciálem.
Dané zjištění umožňuje formulovat plausibilní hypotézu vycházející z předpokladu, že pravděpodobnost akceptace konspiračních narativů roste s vyšší „schopností“ identifikovat, neexistující, iluzívní vzory ve vizuálních obsazích. Odpověď na otázku, zda jde o efekt vrozené dispozice, nebo o výsledek sociálního učení, jak se domnívají autoři dané hypotézy, zůstává tématem dalšího výzkumu.
Analýza současně naznačuje, že respondenti s vyšším konspiračním potenciálem vykazovali vyšší míru projektivní aktivity při dekódování obrazů, které nenesly jasně identifikovatelné, smysluplné vzory. Jinými slovy, nechali se častěji vtáhnout do imaginativního procesu asociativního doplňování významů do recipovaných maleb. Manifestovali tak vyšší míru asociační hravosti při dekódování daných obrazů.
IV. EXISTENCE A VLIV (NAD)PŘIROZENÝCH SIL
Většina z respondentů s VKP otevřeně manifestovala víru v existenci nadpřirozených sil. Ti, kteří se k této perspektivě explicitně nehlásili, často nepřímo potvrzovali, že je součástí jejich mentálního horizontu, kdy užívali opakovaně argumentační logikou, skrze kterou probleskovala inklinace k magickému způsobu myšlení, jež představuje jednu z komponent konspirační mentality.
Časté bylo zvláště užití „něcistické taktiky“, která se objevovala v různých variantách. Vždy ale s cílem vyvažovat deklarovanou „nevíru“ poukazem na to, že: „je tam určitě něco co, třeba je pravda“.
Nejvýrazněji se tento vyvažující kognitivní styl, který odborná literatura de facto nepopisuje, projevoval v diskusi o astrologických zákonech, respektive důvěryhodnosti horoskopů, se kterými měla většina respondentů více než okrajovou zkušenost.
Většina respondentů přímo nebo nepřímo připouštěla, že mezi postavením planet v době narození a Osudem jedince existuje kauzální vztah. Jedna z respondentek jej popsala následovně. (…) „to znamení, ve kterým jsme se každý narodili, určuje určitý charakter té osobnosti, který se samozřejmě dotváří výchovou, ale ten charakter je v nás už od malička a ten se výchovou lehce dotvaruje, ale nezmění se“.
Obecně mezi respondenty převažovala motivace uspokojovat své relační, epistémické a existenciální potřeby (Jost & Banaji, 1994). V tomto smyslu je třeba rozumět jejich víře v iracionálně konstruovaná tvrzení, víře v nadpřirozené síly, v astrologické principy, resp. horoskopy, za kterými probleskovala potřeba Řádu, který slibuje obnovit narušenou existenciální jistotu a ontologické bezpečí.
V tomto smyslu se potvrdilo, že respondenti využívají situační (konspirační) faktory jako významnou součást procesu vyjednávání kolektivních představ o povaze společenských krizí a hrozeb.
V. TAJNÉ ORGANIZACE
Z pohledu analýzy dekódování konspiračních narativů přitakávala většina respondentů s vyšším konspiračním potenciálem tvrzení o významné roli tajných organizací.
Všichni respondenti souhlasili s tvrzením, že vláda ČR není nejvlivnější organizací v zemi, a považovali ji jen za mocenský nástroj EU. Ale ani EU nevnímali všichni respondenti za autonomní subjekt. Okrajově se objevila představa, že i EU řídí „někdo nad nima“.
Většina respondentů přímo nebo nepřímo spojovala působení tajných organizací s konkrétními aktivitami. Užívali přitom kognitivní styl pasivního přijímání tvrzení o negativní roli tajných organizací a různých narativních modifikacích tohoto tvrzení, zvláště ve vztahu k pandemii covid-19.
Covidová rozprava představovala ve všech skupinách všeobjímající metanarativ, se kterým spojovali respondenti široké spektrum souvisejících, ale i nesouvisejících negativních společenských dějů. Pandemie covid-19 byla v představách většina respondentů překódována z celoplanetárního zdravotního problému do synonyma kolosálního spiknutí.
Mezi hlavní (ne)skryté hybatele pandemie řadili respondenti vedle politicko-ekonomických a strategických zájmů velmocí USA a Číny (ale ne Ruska), jako tajných organizací svého druhu, i roli médií a Evropské unie.
V případě některých respondentů a jejich recepční taktiky bylo možné zachytit indikátory mechanismu projektivní identifikace. Platilo to zvláště, když označovali konspirační motivy jednání „vlády“ či vyšších mocenských celků (EU) jako cynické testování inteligence populace.
Analýza výpovědí těchto respondentů naznačuje, jak silnou roli hrají negativní projektivní identifikace při recepci představy o existenci tajných organizací, do kterých promítají respondenti své negativní emoce, stínové figury svého druhu. V dané souvislosti můžeme hovořit o recepční taktice, která vychází z původního negativního předporozumění domácí politice a politikům, které většina členu skupiny vnímala s konspirativním očekáváním jako síly v pozadí.
VI. HISTORICKO-POLITICKÉ POZADÍ VÝZNAMNÝCH UDÁLOSTÍ
Většina respondentů s vyšším konspiračním potenciálem souhlasila s tvrzením, že pád starého režimu v roce 1989 byl primárně dílem velmocenské dohody mezi SSSR a USA. Zpochybňovali tak národně konstitutivní, mytologický výklad listopadového vzepjetí české společnosti. Někteří explicitně vedli analogii mezi dvěma historicky odlišnými situacemi/ politickými režimy, do které projektovali silnou nedůvěru k možnosti autonomní politiky ČR.
Dalo by se říci, že respondenti začasté užívali kognitivní styl kritického subversivního čtení této události. Vyššímu konspiračnímu potenciálu respondentů vyhovoval kontext dané události, který formovaly skryté mezinárodní i lokální socio-politické okolnosti. V neposlední řadě hrál při „dekódování listopadu 1989“ i kritický pohled de facto všech respondentů na roli politických elit, který tvořil jeden z pilířů jejich konspiračního myšlení.
Toto kriticko-skeptické nastavení využívali respondenti i při interpretaci dalších konspiračních tezí, zvláště ve vztahu k roli USA a EU, které část z nich vnímá mechanisticky jako „náhradu SSSR“.
Tato jejich taktika dekódování „narace demytologizující listopad 1989“ vycházela z nedůvěry k průběhu režimové změny, kterou promítali i do pochybností o stávající politické a ekonomické suverenitě ČR a spojovali s kritiku EU. Daný pohled byl v obou skupinách tak silný, že překrýval vliv odlišného konspiračního potenciál respondentů.
Studie jako celek naznačuje, že víra v konspirační narace souvisí se základními kognitivními funkcemi, jejichž mechanismus ale může za určitých okolností, zvláště ve stavech oslabeného ontologického bezpečí, vést k iluzivnímu vnímání sociálních jevů, jako nenáhodně a smysluplně propojených vzorů, které ale ve skutečnosti neexistují.
V tomto smyslu se zdá, že akceptace konspiračních narativů interaguje s motivací obnovit pocit bezpečí a kontroly, a to i za cenu silného významového zkreslení, jak ilustrovali zvláště respondenti s vyšším konspiračním potenciálem.
Zvláště tito respondenti vidí svou aktuální sociální situaci optikou konfliktu mezi svou každodenní aktivitou (agency) a tlakem nedostatečně komunikující mocenské struktury, kterou podrobují kritice za to, že jim neposkytuje zcela jasné, a především důvěryhodné informace. Tento dialektický střet neprobíhá zvláště z pohledu respondentů s vyšším konspiračním potenciálem vyváženě a oslabuje jejich existenciální jistotu, stabilitu jejich žité každodenní habitualizované sociální zkušenosti. Oslabuje tak jejich důvěru ve spolehlivost sociálních vztahů a predikovatelnost každodenních interakcí.
Cíl: Daná pilotní studie přibližuje, jak různé skupiny běžných mediálních konzumentů reflektují problematiku zavádějících zpravodajských obsahů, tedy takových, které se neopírají o empirickou evidenci, či takovou evidenci záměrně i nezáměrně zkreslují.
Analýza se speciálně věnuje recepčním strategiím a taktikám, které užívají konzumenti zpravodajských obsahů při jejich dekódování. Zasazuje danou „čtenářskou praxi“ do širšího rámce reflexe obecnějších názorů respondentů na škodlivost, identifikovatelnost a potřebu monitoringu zavádějících zpravodajských obsahů. A v neposlední řadě přibližuje i názory respondentů na omezování práva na lživé informace.
Analýza vychází z dat získaných prostřednictvím skupinových rozhovorů realizovaných mezi obyvateli čtyř početně a regionálně odlišných měst v ČR. jako hlavní metoda analýzy dat recepční analýza, která se soustřeďuje na popis procesu identifikace, reflexivního zpracování a přijetí/nepřijetí recipovaného materiálu, kterému jeho konzumenti připisují různé významy.
Hlavní zjištění: (1) pro pravidelné konzumenty dezinformačních médií byla rozhodující hodnotová shoda s recipovaným zpravodajstvím. Jeho pravdivostní hodnota, resp. empirická ověřitelnost hrála minimální roli v procesu zpracování informací, které poskytovalo. Rozhodující byla potřeba respondentů dosáhnout kognitivní konzistence s recipovanými obsahy. Považovali tak většinou názorový souběh s dezinformací za indikátor její validity.
(2) mezi respondenty, kteří se izolovali v uzavřeném dezinformačním obvodu, byla výrazně nižší schopnost přesně rozlišovat mezi realitou a pouze viděným/slyšeným obsahem zpravodajského sdělení, které reprodukovalo názory, jež znali z doslechu či dokonce sdíleli. Tento závěr je v souladu s předpokladem, že důvěra ve falešné zpravodajství má kořeny v základních kognitivních procesech.
(3) Respondenti konzumující pravidelně dezinformační periodika volili recepční taktiku, která umocňovala původní (konspirační) význam testovaných zpravodajských obsahů.
Anti-systémové sociopolitické předporozumění a národovecká optika respondentů stimulovala jejich konspirační naladění zakotvené v sebelegitimizačních mýtech „Čechů, kteří jsou tady doma“ a „Čechů, kterým se tu ubližuje“, zvláště podporou uprchlíků.
Vědomě i nevědomě se tak obraceli imanentním konspiračním narativům, které tvoří historicky konstituovaný rezervoár spikleneckých teorií, jež jsou produktem kolektivní imaginace a zasahují populaci na hlubinně nevědomé úrovni. Jejich historická flexibilita a otevřenost svého druhu poskytuje velký projektivní prostor zvláště pro nejisté či úzkostné jedince.
Across the globe, social media have become dominant channels of communication and news for many citizens. They also provide online spaces where misleading information can exacerbate social cleavages and political differences in societies, which can then lead to deleterious democratic outcomes. Therefore, much work has sought to understand the ways in which the effects of misinformation can be attenuated. This virtual theme collection highlights eight studies that examined the conditions in which individuals would actively verify information as well as the effectiveness of certain countermeasures designed to help individuals discern information veracity.
How do people come to believe far-right, extremist, and conspiratorial ideasthey encounter online? This paper examines how participants in primarily US-based far-right online communities describe their adoption of “redpill” beliefsand the role of disinformation in these accounts. Applying the sociotechnicaltheory of media effects, we conduct qualitative content analysis of “redpillingnarratives” gathered from Reddit, Gab, and Discord. While many users frameredpilling as a moment of conversion, others portray redpilling as a process,something achieved incrementally through years of community participationand “doing your own research.” In both cases, disinformation presented asevidence and the capacity to determine the veracity of presented evidence playimportant roles in redpilling oneself and others. By framing their beliefs as therational and logical results of fully considering a plethora of evidence, redpilladherents can justify holding and promoting otherwise indefensible prejudices.The community’s creation, promotion, and repetition of far-rightdisinformation, much of which is historical or “scientific” in nature, play acrucial role in the adoption of far-right beliefs.
The current study has three main purposes: to examine 1) the impact of theory-driven corrective messages using individual vs. collective frames on information-seeking intention 2) the mediating role of risk perceptions and 3) the moderating role of reflection and gender. Our findings from a randomized experimental study and Hayes’ moderated, moderated mediation model show collective frames were associated with high-risk perceptions among women, which in turn led to higher information seeking intention. The second moderator reveals that people who scored higher on reflection were more willing to seek information. Our findings have critical implications for misinformation research by demonstrating the importance of theoretically driven messages in understanding misperceptions as well as people’s information seeking behavior.
[Note: free download at journal website] This article presents three critiques of disinformation scholarship, with an emphasis on “for-hire.” The article argues that disinformation is defined in unpromising and contradictory ways. Concepts have ontological and epistemological repercussions, and thus far, disinformation scholarship has failed to engage them. Partly because scholars are studying disinformation even when they do not use that word to label their work, the article argues that explicit disinformation scholarship tends to neglect neighboring fields and scholars—the second critique. By most definitions of the term disinformation, neighbors are researching the same object domain, which could provide rich resources for scholars newly attracted to “disinformation”: propaganda, public relations, promotional culture, political consulting/marketing, and post-truth studies. It discusses the neighbors’ deep historical and contemporary research on for-hire deceptive communication, including that pertaining to social media. The third critique argues that disinformation scholarship has a cryptonormative tendency, evident in language of disorder, threats, dysfunctions, and pollution; it therefore needs more overt normative justification (or defense of anti-normativity). The cryptonormativity also entails a tendency toward ethnocentrism. The article ends by questioning whether disinformation is conceptually suitable for the theoretical work with which it tasks itself.
W czasach, gdy niepokojąca (anty)jakość w obcowaniu z faktami staje się coraz bardziej powszechna, książka (Dez)informacja w czasach (post)prawdy będzie przewodnikiem dla nauczycieli i lokalnych działaczy społecznych. Stanie się z pewnością lekturą obowiązkową dla studentów i młodzieży szkolnej a także dla wszystkich tych, którzy są zainteresowani poszerzeniem swojej świadomości medialnej i doskonaleniem umiejętności poruszania się w środowisku współczesnej polityki. • Ukazuje bowiem, jak wieloznacznymi zjawiskami są (dez)informacja i (post)prawda • Pozwala rozróżnić metody i techniki komunikowania się polityków ze społeczeństwem • Przedstawia formy i mechanizmy wykorzystywane w języku mediów • Obnaża zagrożenia związane z technologią deepfake’ów i dynamicznym rozwojem sztucznej inteligencji • Odwołuje się do najnowszych badań w tej dziedzinie.
This paper examines whether proactive efforts to educate people about disinformation through advertisements can successfully increase skepticism towards false headlines or if such efforts do more harm than good by inadvertently increasing belief in false information. We analyze a survey experiment that employed three different advertisements that directly addressed “fake news.” We find that all advertisements were effective at increasing skepticism towards “fake news” headlines. We also find no evidence of backfire effects occurring. However, subsequent analysis using Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) finds significant heterogeneity within these treatment effects. While all advertisements were effective, each ad was effective in different ways despite common themes and content. This suggests a more complicated understanding of the counter-disinformation process and highlights BART’s utility in public opinion research.
As Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, social media was rife with pro-Kremlin disinformation. To effectively tackle the issue of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, this study examines the underlying reasons why some individuals are susceptible to false claims and explores ways to reduce their susceptibility. It uses linear regression analysis on data from a national survey of 1,500 adults (18+) to examine the factors that predict belief in pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives regarding the Russia–Ukraine war. Our research finds that belief in Pro-Kremlin disinformation is politically motivated and linked to users who: (1) hold conservative views, (2) trust partisan media, and (3) frequently share political opinions on social media. Our findings also show that exposure to disinformation is positively associated with belief in disinformation. Conversely, trust in mainstream media is negatively associated with belief in disinformation, offering a potential way to mitigate its impact.
This book examines the shape, composition, and practices of the United States political media landscape. It explores the roots of the current epistemic crisis in political communication with a focus on the remarkable 2016 U.S. president election culminating in the victory of Donald Trump and the first year of his presidency. The authors present a detailed map of the American political media landscape based on the analysis of millions of stories and social media posts, revealing a highly polarized and asymmetric media ecosystem. Detailed case studies track the emergence and propagation of disinformation in the American public sphere that took advantage of structural weaknesses in the media institutions across the political spectrum. This book describes how the conservative faction led by Steve Bannon and funded by Robert Mercer was able to inject opposition research into the mainstream media agenda that left an unsubstantiated but indelible stain of corruption on the Clinton campaign. The authors also document how Fox News deflects negative coverage of President Trump and has promoted a series of exaggerated and fabricated counter narratives to defend the president against the damaging news coming out of the Mueller investigation. Based on an analysis of the actors that sought to influence political public discourse, this book argues that the current problems of media and democracy are not the result of Russian interference, behavioral microtargeting and algorithms on social media, political clickbait, hackers, sockpuppets, or trolls, but of asymmetric media structures decades in the making. The crisis is political, not technological.
While the historical impact of rumours and fabricated content has been well documented, efforts to better understand today’s challenge of information pollution on a global scale are only just beginning. Concern about the implications of dis-information campaigns designed specifically to sow mistrust and confusion and to sharpen existing sociocultural divisions using nationalistic, ethnic, racial and religious tensions is growing. The Council of Europe report on “Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making” is an attempt to comprehensively examine information disorder and to outline ways to address it.
The Russian-sponsored Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) use of social media to influence U.S. political discourse is undoubtedly troubling. However, scholarly attention has focused on social media, overlooking the role that news media within the country played in amplifying false, foreign messages. In this article, we examine articles in the U.S. news media system that quoted IRA tweets through the lens of changing journalism practices in the hybrid media system, focusing specifically on news gatekeepers’ use of tweets as vox populi. We find that a majority of the IRA tweets embedded in the news were vox populi. That is, IRA tweets were quoted (1) for their opinion, (2) as coming from everyday Twitter users, and (3) with a collection of other tweets holistically representing public sentiment. These findings raise concerns about how modern gatekeeping practices, transformed due to the hybrid media system, may also unintentionally let in unwanted disinformation from malicious actors.
So-called “fake news” has renewed concerns about the prevalence and effects of misinformation in political campaigns. Given the potential for widespread dissemination of this material, we examine the individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. To do so, we uniquely link an original survey with respondents’ sharing activity as recorded in Facebook profile data. First and foremost, we find that sharing this content was a relatively rare activity. Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates. We also find a strong age effect, which persists after controlling for partisanship and ideology: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.
Delusion-prone individuals may be more likely to accept even delusion-irrelevant implausible ideas because of their tendency to engage in less analytic and less actively open-minded thinking. Consistent with this suggestion, two online studies with over 900 participants demonstrated that although delusion-prone individuals were no more likely to believe true news headlines, they displayed an increased belief in “fake news” headlines, which often feature implausible content. Mediation analyses suggest that analytic cognitive style may partially explain these individuals’ increased willingness to believe fake news. Exploratory analyses showed that dogmatic individuals and religious fundamentalists were also more likely to believe false (but not true) news, and that these relationships may be fully explained by analytic cognitive style. Our findings suggest that existing interventions that increase analytic and actively open-minded thinking might be leveraged to help reduce belief in fake news.
This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content. It pursues this investigation in critical dialogue with current research in business studies, political economy, and software studies. Focusing on the production of news and games, the analysis shows that in economic terms platformization entails the replacement of two-sided market structures with complex multisided platform configurations, dominated by big platform corporations. Cultural content producers have to continuously grapple with seemingly serendipitous changes in platform governance, ranging from content curation to pricing strategies. Simultaneously, these producers are enticed by new platform services and infrastructural changes. In the process, cultural commodities become fundamentally "contingent," that is increasingly modular in design and continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback.
Many democratic nations are experiencing increased levels of false information circulating through social media and political websites that mimic journalism formats. In many cases, this disinformation is associated with the efforts of movements and parties on the radical right to mobilize supporters against centre parties and the mainstream press that carries their messages. The spread of disinformation can be traced to growing legitimacy problems in many democracies. Declining citizen confidence in institutions undermines the credibility of official information in the news and opens publics to alternative information sources. Those sources are often associated with both nationalist (primarily radical right) and foreign (commonly Russian) strategies to undermine institutional legitimacy and destabilize centre parties, governments and elections. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States are among the most prominent examples of disinformation campaigns intended to disrupt normal democratic order, but many other nations display signs of disinformation and democratic disruption. The origins of these problems and their implications for political communication research are explored.
Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effort
This study examines the agenda-setting power of fake news and fact-checkers who fight them through a computational look at the online mediascape from 2014 to 2016. Although our study confirms that content from fake news websites is increasing, these sites do not exert excessive power. Instead, fake news has an intricately entwined relationship with online partisan media, both responding and setting its issue agenda. In 2016, partisan media appeared to be especially susceptible to the agendas of fake news, perhaps due to the election. Emerging news media are also responsive to the agendas of fake news, but to a lesser degree. Fake news coverage itself is diverging and becoming more autonomous topically. While fact-checkers are autonomous in their selection of issues to cover, they were not influential in determining the agenda of news media overall, and their influence appears to be declining, illustrating the difficulties fact-checkers face in disseminating their corrections.
In this study we investigate how social media shape the
networked public sphere and facilitate communication between
communities with different political orientations. We
examine two networks of political communication on Twitter,
comprised of more than 250,000 tweets from the six
weeks leading up to the 2010 U.S. congressional midterm
elections. Using a combination of network clustering algorithms
and manually-annotated data we demonstrate that the
network of political retweets exhibits a highly segregated partisan
structure, with extremely limited connectivity between
left- and right-leaning users. Surprisingly this is not the case
for the user-to-user mention network, which is dominated by
a single politically heterogeneous cluster of users in which
ideologically-opposed individuals interact at a much higher
rate compared to the network of retweets. To explain the distinct
topologies of the retweet and mention networks we conjecture
that politically motivated individuals provoke interaction
by injecting partisan content into information streams
whose primary audience consists of ideologically-opposed
users. We conclude with statistical evidence in support of this
hypothesis.
The citizens of wealthy, established democracies are less satisfied with their governments than they have been at any time since opinion polling began. Most scholars have interpreted this as a sign of dissatisfaction with particular governments rather than with the political system as a whole. Drawing on recent public opinion data, we suggest that this optimistic interpretation is no longer plausible. Across a wide sample of countries in North America and Western Europe, citizens of mature democracies have become markedly less satisfied with their form of government and surprisingly open to nondemocratic alternatives. A serious democratic disconnect has emerged. If it widens even further, it may begin to challenge the stability of seemingly consolidated democracies.
Significance
The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web is a fruitful environment for the massive diffusion of unverified rumors. In this work, using a massive quantitative analysis of Facebook, we show that information related to distinct narratives––conspiracy theories and scientific news––generates homogeneous and polarized communities (i.e., echo chambers) having similar information consumption patterns. Then, we derive a data-driven percolation model of rumor spreading that demonstrates that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size.
The large availability of user provided contents on online social media
facilitates people aggregation around common interests, worldviews and
narratives. However, in spite of the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called
{\em wisdom of crowds}, unsubstantiated rumors -- as alternative explanation to
main stream versions of complex phenomena -- find on the Web a natural medium
for their dissemination. In this work we study, on a sample of 1.2 million of
individuals, how information related to very distinct narratives -- i.e. main
stream scientific and alternative news -- are consumed on Facebook. Through a
thorough quantitative analysis, we show that distinct communities with similar
information consumption patterns emerge around distinctive narratives.
Moreover, consumers of alternative news (mainly conspiracy theories) result to
be more focused on their contents, while scientific news consumers are more
prone to comment on alternative news. We conclude our analysis testing the
response of this social system to 4709 troll information -- i.e. parodistic
imitation of alternative and conspiracy theories. We find that, despite the
false and satirical vein of news, usual consumers of conspiracy news are the
most prone to interact with them.
New communication technologies have allowed not only new ways in which the audience interacts with the news but also new ways in which journalists can monitor online audience behavior. Through new audience information systems, such as web analytics, the influence of the audience on the news construction process is increasing. This occurs as the journalistic field tries to survive a shrinking audience for news. In this study, I argue that how journalists conceive of the audience as a form of capital influences the extent to which journalists integrate audience feedback from web analytics in their news work. I developed this theoretical framework through case studies of three online newsrooms that included a total of 150 hours of observations and 30 respondent interviews. The findings showed the extent of influence of web analytics on traditional gatekeeping processes and on a new gatekeeping practice online, which I call the process of de-selection
Much of the literature on polarization and selective exposure presumes that the internet
exacerbates the fragmentation of the media and the citizenry. Yet this ignores how the
widespread use of social media changes news consumption. Social media provide readers
a choice of stories from different sources that come recommended from politically
heterogeneous individuals, in a context that emphasizes social value over partisan
affiliation. Building on existing models of news selectivity to emphasize information utility,
we hypothesize that social media’s distinctive feature, social endorsements, trigger several
decision heuristics that suggest utility. In two experiments, we demonstrate that stronger
social endorsements increase the probability that people select content and that their
presence reduces partisan selective exposure to levels indistinguishable from chance.
This is a study of US-based print media coverage of the indigenous-led uprising in Ecuador which occurred in January 2000. As a result of having mobilized tens of thousands of Ecuadorans, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador managed to peacefully force the resignation of a President who had presided over one of the worst recessions in Ecuador's modern history. Nevertheless, most US news dailies covered the affair as if it was purely a military coup and a threat to democracy, in spite of the existence of hundreds of citizen-led, participatory governing councils (called the “People's Parliament,” by Ecuadorans). Previous scholarship on media performance in relation to US foreign policy has proven in a variety of cases to serve as a useful analytical tool and predictive device. This article evaluates the extent that the propaganda model by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, as well as the indexing model by W. Lance Bennett, are instructive in the case of the news media performance of US which covered the uprising in Ecuador.
Democracy without Journalism? is about the ongoing journalism crisis and the policies we need to confront it. It exposes the historical roots, market failures, and policy inaction that led to the loss of local journalism and the proliferation of misinformation through both social media and mainstream news. In underscoring these threats to democracy, the book also draws attention to the growing problem of monopoly control over digital infrastructures in general and the rise of platform monopolies in particular, especially the “Facebook problem.” The book proposes that now is an opportune moment to address core weaknesses in US news and information systems and push for alternatives. Above all, the book argues that to understand the underlying pathologies in our news media and the reforms that are needed, we must penetrate to the roots of systemic problems. Toward this aim, Democracy without Journalism? emphasizes the structural nature of journalism’s collapse. The book concludes with an in-depth discussion of new models for journalism, emphasizing the need for a publicly owned and democratically governed media system. Ultimately, the goal is to reinvent journalism.
The news media industry has changed as the internet and social media have matured and become integral to modern life. I describe these changes through a theoretical analysis of the economic structure of the industry and explore the implications for scholars of online media and politics. The crux of my argument is that social media simultaneously serves as a distribution platform and reputation builder, as social recommendations take the place of expensive investments in high-quality journalism. This development rendered crucial portions of previous models of the market for news inaccurate due to the declining importance of firm reputation. This mechanism interacts with the massive heterogeneity in digital literacy and growing animosity toward the news media among conservatives to create “credibility cascades,” which I argue are a necessary condition for Fake News to flourish.
As the scourge of “fake news” continues to plague our information environment, attention has turned toward devising automated solutions for detecting problematic online content. But, in order to build reliable algorithms for flagging “fake news,” we will need to go beyond broad definitions of the concept and identify distinguishing features that are specific enough for machine learning. With this objective in mind, we conducted an explication of “fake news” that, as a concept, has ballooned to include more than simply false information, with partisans weaponizing it to cast aspersions on the veracity of claims made by those who are politically opposed to them. We identify seven different types of online content under the label of “fake news” (false news, polarized content, satire, misreporting, commentary, persuasive information, and citizen journalism) and contrast them with “real news” by introducing a taxonomy of operational indicators in four domains—message, source, structure, and network—that together can help disambiguate the nature of online news content.
Public opinion, as necessary a concept it is to the underpinnings of democracy, is a socially constructed representation of the public that is forged by the methods and data from which it is derived, as well as how it is understood by those tasked with evaluating and utilizing it. I examine how social media manifests as public opinion in the news and how these practices shape journalistic routines. I draw from a content analysis of news stories about the 2016 US election, as well as interviews with journalists, to shed light on evolving practices that inform the use of social media to represent public opinion. I find that despite social media users not reflecting the electorate, the press reported online sentiments and trends as a form of public opinion that services the horserace narrative and complements survey polling and vox populi quotes. These practices are woven into professional routines – journalists looked to social media to reflect public opinion, especially in the wake of media events like debates. Journalists worried about an overreliance on social media to inform coverage, especially Dataminr alerts and journalists’ own highly curated Twitter feeds. Hybrid flows of information between journalists, campaigns, and social media companies inform conceptions of public opinion.
Alarmed by the oversimplifications related to the ‘fake news’ buzzword, researchers have started to unpack the concept, defining diverse types and forms of misleading news. Most of the existing works in the area consider crucial the intent of the content creator in order to differentiate among different types of problematic information. This article argues for a change of perspective that, by leveraging the conceptual framework of sociocybernetics, shifts from exclusive attention to creators of misleading information to a broader approach that focuses on propagators and, as a result, on the dynamics of the propagation processes. The analytical implications of this perspective are discussed at a micro level (criteria to judge the falsehood of news and to decide to spread it), at a meso level (four possible relations between individual judgements and decisions), and at a macro level (global circulation cascades). The authors apply this theoretical gaze to analyse ‘fake news’ stories that challenge existing models.
Finding facts about fake news
There was a proliferation of fake news during the 2016 election cycle. Grinberg et al. analyzed Twitter data by matching Twitter accounts to specific voters to determine who was exposed to fake news, who spread fake news, and how fake news interacted with factual news (see the Perspective by Ruths). Fake news accounted for nearly 6% of all news consumption, but it was heavily concentrated—only 1% of users were exposed to 80% of fake news, and 0.1% of users were responsible for sharing 80% of fake news. Interestingly, fake news was most concentrated among conservative voters.
Science , this issue p. 374 ; see also p. 348
Cambridge Core - Media, Mass Communication - Fox Populism - by Reece Peck
Building on the persuasion knowledge model, this study examines how audience characteristics and native advertising recognition influence the covert persuasion process. Among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults (N = 738), we examined digital news readers’ recognition of a sponsored news article as advertising. Although fewer than 1 in 10 readers recognized the article as advertising, recognition was most likely among younger, more educated consumers who engage with news media for informational purposes. Recognition led to greater counterarguing, and higher levels of informational motivation also led to less favorable evaluations of the content among recognizers. News consumers were most receptive to native advertising in a digital news context when publishers were more transparent about its commercial nature. Beyond theoretical insights into the covert persuasion process, this study offers practical utility to the advertisers, publishers, and policy makers that wish to better understand who is more likely to be confused by this type of advertising so that they can take steps to minimize deception.
Extending research from Wojdynski and Evans, this experimental study replicates the challenges of effectively disclosing native advertising to readers and demonstrates a promising inoculation method that increases likelihood of recognition. Moreover, this quantitative research indicates that both legacy and online news publishers were evaluated less favorably for displaying native advertising. Attitudes toward the publisher and perceptions of its credibility declined for both, although online publishers suffered greater attitudinal damage than did legacy publishers who may benefit from their established reputation.
Following the 2016 US presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories ("fake news"), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: 1) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their "most important" source; 2) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times; 3) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and 4) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks.
News media have sponsored and used political polling to report public views for several decades. As reported, however, news media polls do less to provide public knowledge about issues, events and personalities than superficial acquaintance with public perceptions. The result is gross oversimplification of the political opinion process, leading to public misinformation. Suggestions are made on how to avoid these journalistic pitfalls.
The crisis in Ukraine has accentuated the position of Russian television as the government’s strongest asset in its information warfare. The internet, however, allows other players to challenge the Kremlin’s narrative by providing counter-narratives and debunking distorted information and fake images. Accounting for the new media ecology—through which strategic narratives are created and interpreted, this article scrutinizes the narratives of allegedly fake news on Channel One, perceiving the fabricated stories as extreme projections of Russia’s strategic narratives, and the attempts of the Ukrainian fact-checking website Stopfake.org to counter the Russian narrative by refuting misinformation and exposing misleading images about Ukraine. Secondly, it analyses how Twitter users judged the veracity of these news stories and contributed to the perpetuation of strategic narratives.
An important dimension of the future of fact is the status of political facts in research on public opinion. Analyzing the public's factual knowledge about public policy is central to addressing citizen competence yet more problematic than scholars have acknowledged. To show this, the authors first summarize a study of theirs that uses typical measures of citizens' information. In a survey of Illinois citizens, they measured factual perceptions about welfare policy. They found that citizens are not only uninformed about welfare but often misinformed-confident in erroneous perceptions. Such misinformation apparently has significant effects on attitudes toward welfare. The authors then consider some conceptual difficulties in research on citizens' information about policy. If the purpose is to ascertain how much information citizens possess, then the researcher must stipulate the relevant facts about an area of policy. But political facts are in large part politically determined, and the researcher often cannot identify precisely what the true and relevant facts are. Finally, the authors suggest a research approach in which citizens, in effect, choose the relevant facts themselves.
As recently as the early 1970s, the news media was one of the most respected institutions in the United States. Yet by the 1990s, this trust had all but evaporated. Why has confidence in the press declined so dramatically over the past 40 years? And has this change shaped the public's political behavior? This book examines waning public trust in the institutional news media within the context of the American political system and looks at how this lack of confidence has altered the ways people acquire political information and form electoral preferences. Jonathan Ladd argues that in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s, competition in American party politics and the media industry reached historic lows. When competition later intensified in both of these realms, the public's distrust of the institutional media grew, leading the public to resist the mainstream press's information about policy outcomes and turn toward alternative partisan media outlets. As a result, public beliefs and voting behavior are now increasingly shaped by partisan predispositions. Ladd contends that it is not realistic or desirable to suppress party and media competition to the levels of the mid-twentieth century; rather, in the contemporary media environment, new ways to augment the public's knowledgeability and responsiveness must be explored. Drawing on historical evidence, experiments, and public opinion surveys, this book shows that in a world of endless news sources, citizens' trust in institutional media is more important than ever before.
This analysis examines the errors in respondent's candidates' positions as measured by the American National Election Study seven-point ideological scales. A methodology is developed that partitions the error into two types. One type is strongly correlated with political sophistication and thus consists of error largely attributable to the respondent; the remainder roughly corresponds to measurement error in the instrument. These results extend and contribute to the debate between Converse, Achen, and Erikson on the nature of error in respondent self-placements on the seven-point ideological and issue scales. The technique developed here can be used to measure the effect of contextual and individual respondent characteristics on the accuracy of individual's perceptions of candidates' ideologies.
When defined in terms of social identity and affect toward copartisans and opposing partisans, the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased. We document the scope and consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit, and behavioral indicators. Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters' minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on nonpolitical judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, doing so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.
This study presents a comparative content analysis of the overall framing in the news and editorial content of the Six-Party Talks on nuclear issues from three international news media for the years 2003 and 2007. The findings of the study lend support to the idea that international news can be interpreted through a combined view, in which propaganda influences on the media coverage are interconnected with the relationship of the media system and national interests within the framework of the dominant ideology.
This article provides an empirical test of the theory that individuals gather political knowledge by inferential reasoning -constructing political ”reality” from the messages to which they are exposed by making inferences about what they do not know based on extrapolations from what they see or hear. This ”filling-in” may often result in misinformation, or the belief in incorrect information (as distinguished from a simple lack of information, or ignorance). Widespread misinformation among the electorate changes our conception of democracy as a ”marketplace of ideas,” and may have much more serious consequences than does a broad lack of information or sophistication on the part of the electorate. Data from a 1997 random-digit-dial survey of 810 adults residing in San Diego was used to test the hypothesis that listening to political talk radio leads to higher levels of both information (regarding non-ideologically charged facts) and misinformation (regarding ideologically charged facts). Analysis revealed that active listening (not only listening but also calling and/or taking action because of talk radio) corresponded to higher levels of in- formation, regardless of the ideological nature of the talk radio programs to which the listeners were exposed. However, greater frequency of exposure to conservative talk radio independently corresponded to greater misinformation, while greater exposure to moderate programming was associated with being less misinformed, controlling for partisanship, ide ology, and a number of other predictors.
The article examines the interrelationship among propaganda, effect, and the Cold War during congressional debates over America's first peacetime propaganda program. Although the rise of the communication research paradigm affected the production of statistical evidence to measure the effectiveness of America's Cold War propaganda, this case study argues that the “war of words” metaphor further heightened the need for empirical proof of America's status in that conflict, Just as with any physical battle that relies on body counts and land measurements to determine the success of America's war efforts, the criteria for measuring the status of America's “war of words” were driven by a similar demand for “objective” proof. The longevity of the Cold War helped ensure the institutionalization of the communication research paradigm, which rejected the use of anecdotal evidence as support for the program's impact.
Six response/scoring methods for multiple-choice tests are analyzed with respect to expected item scores under various levels of information and mis information. It is shown that misinformation always and necessarily results in expected item scores lower than those associated with complete igno rance. Moreover, it is shown that some re sponse/scoring methods penalize all conditions of misinformation equally, and others have varying penalties according to the number of wrong choices the misinformed examinee has categorized with the correct choice. One method exacts the greatest pen alty when a specific wrong choice is believed cor rect ; two other methods provide the maximum pen alty when the examinee is confident only that the correct choice is incorrect. Partial information is shown to yield substantially different expected item scores from one method to another. Guessing is an alyzed under the assumption that examinees guess whenever it is advantageous to do so under the scoring method used and that these conditions would be made clear to the examinee. Additional guessing is shown to have no effect on expected item scores in some cases, though in others it is shown to lower the expected item score. These out comes are discussed with respect to validity and reliability of resulting total scores and also with re spect to test content and examinee characteristics.
The analytic construct of the seven propaganda devices--name calling,
glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card
stacking, and bandwagon--long has been familiar in the field of
communication. The following documentary account of the seven-devices
framework, extending and focusing my previous explications of the subject,
clarifies who first developed the format, how it came to be published,
why it both captured immediate interest and longstanding attention,
and how later it encountered social and ideological conditions that
variously facilitated or impeded its diffusion and use.
The term “disinformation” as a persuasive technique that is based on forgeries and staged events was invented by the KGB, the Soviet secret service. Although disinformation has been used by most states, the Soviets have perfected it as an instrument of public policy. Disinformation comprises two parts: a forgery or fabrication, and the publicity that accompanies it to effectuate some psychological advantage for the originator of the disinformation. It is the falsification or staged event accompanying the persuasive message that distinguishes disinformation from run‐of‐the‐mill propaganda. This article suggests that no state would resort to disinformation if the truth and the actual course of events were operating in its favor.