‘Stop Fake Hate Profiles on Facebook’: Challenges for crowdsourced activism in social media

This research examines how activists mobilise against fake hate profiles on Facebook. Based on six months of participant observation, this paper demonstrates how Danish Facebook users organised to combat fictitious Muslim profiles that spurred hatred against ethnic minorities. Crowdsourced action by Facebook users is insufficient as a form of sustainable resistance against fake hate profiles. A viable solution would require social media companies, such as Facebook, to take responsibility in the struggle against fake content used for political manipulation

IRA Propaganda on Twitter: Stoking Antagonism and Tweeting Local News

This paper presents preliminary findings of a content analysis of tweets posted by false accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St Petersburg . We relied on a historical database of tweets to retrieve 4539 tweets posted by IRA-linked accounts in 2012-2017 and coded 2501 tweets manually . The messages cover US newsworthy events , the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in 2015, and the Brexit referendum in 2016. Tweets were annotated using 19 control variables to investigate whether IRA operations on social media are consistent with classic propaganda models. The results show that the IRA operates a composite of user account s tailored to perform specific tasks , with the lion’s share of their work focusing on US daily news activity and the diffusion of polarized news across different national contexts

From irony to solidarity: affective practice and social media activism

This article discusses affective practice in context of social media activism. Drawing on work by Margaret Wetherell the article explores particular sensibility of political discourse and action, enhanced by the social media environment. The empirical cases involve the social media activism of anti-immigrant movement as well as solidarity activists in the context of the so called refugee crisis in Europe. It is argued that practices and sensibilities of activism enhanced and shaped by the technologies and economics of social media. While the anti-immigrant movement makes use of politics of irony on various levels from discourse to acts of trolling, solidarity movements tend to focus on compassionate, yet increasingly practical and shielded forms of practices as well as commercialized. Finally it introduces solidarity of dissonance as an opportunity for reflexive collective action and as a space to imagine alternatives

From Irony to Solidarity: Affective Practice and Social Media Activism

This article discusses affective practice in context of social media activism. Drawing on work by Margaret Wetherell the article explores particular sensibility of political discourse and action, enhanced by the social media environment. The empirical cases involve the social media activism of anti-immigrant movement as well as solidarity activists in the context of the so called refugee crisis in Europe. It is argued that practices and sensibilities of activism enhanced and shaped by the technologies and economics of social media. While the anti-immigrant movement makes use of politics of irony on various levels from discourse to acts of trolling, solidarity movements tend to focus on compassionate, yet increasingly practical and shielded forms of practices as well as commercialized. Finally it introduces solidarity of dissonance as an opportunity for reflexive collective action and as a space to imagine alternatives

Disguised Propaganda from Digital to Social Media

Disguised propaganda and political deception in digital media have been studied since the early days of the World Wide Web. At the intersection of internet research and propaganda studies, this chapter explores disguised propaganda on websites and social media platforms. Based on a discussion of key concepts and terminology, this chapter outlines how new modes of deception and source obfuscation emerge in digital and social media environments, and how this development complicates existing conceptual and epistemological frameworks in propaganda studies. The chapter concludes by arguing that contemporary challenges of detecting and countering disguised propaganda can only be resolved, if social media companies are held accountable and provide the necessary support for user contestation

Content policies in Social Media Critical Discourse Studies: The invisible hand of social media providers?

This paper complements theoretical and methodological considerations regarding social media in critical discourse studies as it addresses social media content policies as a key contextual element. Specifically, this paper argues that - and why - the exploration of content policies and their enforcement is indispensable when approaching social media platforms and social media data in particular from a critical perspective. A number of researchers have already begun to identify contextual elements that require particular attention when viewing social media and social media data through a CDS lens. However, social media sites' content policies, as pervasive contextual element, have not received adequate research attention yet. Drawing on Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) and recent developments in Social Media CDS (SM-CDS), this paper first demonstrates the existing gap in research. Then, it contends that social media sites' content policies deserve more detailed attention in SM-CDS, argues why this is the case and elaborates on the different aspects of content policies and policy enforcement that require examination. After detailed theoretical discussion of this, empirical evidence to support this argument is presented in the form of a case study of Wikipedia and Wikipedia data

From Irony to Solidarity: Affective Practice and Social Media Activism

This article discusses affective practice in context of social media activism. Drawing on work by Margaret Wetherell the article explores particular sensibility of political discourse and action, enhanced by the social media environment. The empirical cases involve the social media activism of anti-immigrant movement as well as solidarity activists in the context of the so called refugee crisis in Europe. It is argued that practices and sensibilities of activism enhanced and shaped by the technologies and economics of social media. While the anti-immigrant movement makes use of politics of irony on various levels from discourse to acts of trolling, solidarity movements tend to focus on compassionate, yet increasingly practical and shielded forms of practices. Finally, it introduces solidarity of dissonance as an opportunity for reflexive collective action and as a space to imagine alternatives

‘Stop Fake Hate Profiles on Facebook’: Challenges for crowdsourced activism on social media

This research examines how activists mobilise against fake hate profiles on Facebook. Based on six months of participant observation, this paper demonstrates how Danish Facebook users organised to combat fictitious Muslim profiles that spurred hatred against ethnic minorities. Crowdsourced action by Facebook users is insufficient as a form of sustainable resistance against fake hate profiles. A viable solution would require social media companies, such as Facebook, to take responsibility in the struggle against fake content used for political manipulation

Effective Persuative Techniques and Factors Used by Propaganda and Disinformation Resources

The topic of persuasion becomes current these days, with a permanent stream of information, from whose is hard to pick the true ones. Every one of us gets to know the world according to certain figures of selective perception, that permit us to see the world according to our beliefs. My work aims to find the answer on several questions about the use of persuasion in propagandistic and disinformation media a make a basic overview of this topic. The answer to these questions is important to know, so we can get about this world, where "lie" is called "alternative truth". To write my thesis, I used academic journals, articles, and studies. In the theoretical part, I introduce the topic and its importance and define the keywords of my work. Next, I describe the topic of attitude change, its models and factors that intervene in the persuasion process on the side of the source, message, and the receiver. The last is propaganda and dezinformation and its techniques used in the environment of the new media. The draft of my research project has a qualitative design. I propose there the Czech version of replication of the correlation study made by Pennycook and Rand (2019), that aims to look at the psychological profile of the recipient of fake news. I investigate the correlation between analytical thinking,...V dnešní době se téma přesvědčování stává aktuálním v souvislosti s neustálým tokem informací, ze kterých je těžké vybrat ty pravdivé. Každý z nás poznává svět prostřednictvím jistých vzorců selektivního vnímání, které nám umožňují vidět svět na základě našich přesvědčení. Cílem mé práce je proto najít odpověď na některé otázky ohledně využívání persvaze v propagandistických a dezinformačních médiích a poskytnout přehled pro základní orientaci v této problematice. Například jaké jsou dnes způsoby, kterými se nám mocní snaží dostat do hlavy a co v jejich působení hraje klíčovou roli. Odpovědi na ně je třeba znát, abychom se dokázali pohybovat ve světě, kde se začíná "lež" označovat pojmem "alternativní pravda". Při psaní práce jsem čerpala z odborných publikací, článků a výzkumných studií. V literárně přehledové části se zaměřuji na úvod do problematiky, význam mé práce a definuji klíčové pojmy mé práce. Dále se zabývám procesem změny postoje, jeho modely a faktory intervenujícími v procesu přesvědčování na straně zdroje, zprávy i příjemce. Posledním tématem je propaganda a dezinformace a techniky, které užívá, a to i v prostředí internetu a nových médií. Návrh výzkumného projektu bude mít kvantitativní design. Navrhuji v něm českou verzi replikace korelačního výzkumu provedené Pennycookem a Randem...Katedra psychologieDepartment of PsychologyFaculty of ArtsFilozofická fakult