Resisting covert persuasion in digital news: comparing inoculation and reactance in the processing of native advertising disclosures and in article engagement intentions

An online experiment ( N = 931) assessing recognition of and responses to native advertising sought to explore how disclosures affect behavioral intent in digital news contexts. Findings suggest that resistance to persuasive attempts conferred by native advertising disclosures is explained by both inoculation and reactance processes and demonstrates how a simple, or generic, disclosure can inoculate people against a type of message (covert advertising mimicking authentic journalism) rather than the content of the message. Furthermore, the attenuating effect of a simple disclosure on behavioral intent is fully and serially mediated through advertising recognition, increased perception of threat to freedom, and increased reactance.Accepted manuscrip

Mapping State-Sponsored Information Operations with Multi-View Modularity Clustering

This paper presents a new computational framework for mapping state-sponsored information operations into distinct strategic units. Utilizing a novel method called multi-view modularity clustering (MVMC), we identify groups of accounts engaged in distinct narrative and network information maneuvers. We then present an analytical pipeline to holistically determine their coordinated and complementary roles within the broader digital campaign. Applying our proposed methodology to disclosed Chinese state-sponsored accounts on Twitter, we discover an overarching operation to protect and manage Chinese international reputation by attacking individual adversaries (Guo Wengui) and collective threats (Hong Kong protestors), while also projecting national strength during global crisis (the COVID-19 pandemic). Psycholinguistic tools quantify variation in narrative maneuvers employing hateful and negative language against critics in contrast to communitarian and positive language to bolster national solidarity. Network analytics further distinguish how groups of accounts used network maneuvers to act as balanced operators, organized masqueraders, and egalitarian echo-chambers. Collectively, this work breaks methodological ground on the interdisciplinary application of unsupervised and multi-view methods for characterizing not just digital campaigns in particular, but also coordinated activity more generally. Moreover, our findings contribute substantive empirical insights around how state-sponsored information operations combine narrative and network maneuvers to achieve interlocking strategic objectives. This bears both theoretical and policy implications for platform regulation and understanding the evolving geopolitical significance of cyberspace

Fake News: Finding Truth in Strategic Communication

Fake news is an old phenomenon that has become a new obsession and a menace to society due to technological advancement and the proliferation of social media, which has changed traditional journalism norms. As the spread of false information has increased these past few years, it has become increasingly difficult for information consumers to distinguish between facts and fakes. A comprehensive systematic literature review to extract themes revealed the major factors responsible for spreading fake news. This qualitative interpretative meta-synthesis (QIMS) aims to better understand and offer solutions to combat fake news. This Ph.D. dissertation will serve as a guide for ethical communication practice and a reference for future research studies

Free to Bleed or Free to Buy? The Postfeminist Transformation of Menstruation

From innovative new products to cheeky advertisements to period politics, menstruation appears to be having its moment. This thesis serves to offer some skepticism towards the changing cultural attitudes towards periods, categorizing many of these recent developments as a consequence of a postfeminist cooptation. To support this process, this thesis first identifies menstruation as a political issue with implications for both gender politics and anti-capitalist efforts, identifying the stakes at play with this paradigm shift. Then, it deconstructs the consequences of the changing corporate narratives and advertisements and of the most recent mainstream political engagement with menstruation, the menstrual equity movement. Ultimately, I argue that the growing political consciousness surrounding menstruation and its various social issues has, through these cultural sites, been redirected towards more palatable and accommodating neoliberal channels, diminishing the radical and intersectional potential of the bodily process as a site of political struggle

Processing spam: Conducting processed listening and rhythmedia to (re)produce people and territories

This thesis provides a transdisciplinary investigation of ‘deviant’ media categories, specifically spam and noise, and the way they are constructed and used to (re)produce territories and people. Spam, I argue, is a media phenomenon that has always existed, and received different names in different times. The changing definitions of spam, the reasons and actors behind these changes are thus the focus of this research. It brings to the forefront a longer history of the politics of knowledge production with and in media, and its consequences. This thesis makes a contribution to the media and communication field by looking at neglected media phenomena through fields such as sound studies, software studies, law and history to have richer understanding that disciplinary boundaries fail to achieve. The thesis looks at three different case studies: the conceptualisation of noise in the early 20th century through Bell Telephone Company, web metric standardisation in the European Union 2000s legislation, and unwanted behaviours on Facebook. What these cases show is that media practitioners have been constructing ‘deviant’ categories in different media and periods by using seven sonic epistemological strategies: training of the (digital) body, restructuring of territories, new experts, standardising measurements (tools and units), filtering, de-politicising and licensing. Informed by my empirical work, I developed two concepts - processed listening and rhythmedia - offering a new theoretical framework to analyse how media practitioners construct power relations by knowing people in mediated territories and then spatially and temporally (re)ordering them. Shifting the attention from theories of vision allows media researchers to have a better understanding of practitioners who work in multi-layered digital/datafied spaces, tuning in and out to continuously measure and record people’s behaviours. Such knowledge is being fed back in a recursive feedback-loop conducted by a particular rhythmedia constantly processing, ordering, shaping and regulating people, objects and spaces. Such actions (re)configure the boundaries of what it means to be human, worker and medium

Viewing the COVID-19 Resilient Skincare Market through a Sociohistorical Lens: The Patterning of Conspicuous Consumption Mediated by Marketing

The Chinese skincare market distinguishes itself with an inelastic consumer demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project employs the endogenous preferences economic framework and a sociohistorical lens to analyze the social forces that sustain the resilient beauty market. Through setting up a socially embedded framework for economic analysis, this project highlights the active role of marketers, which are omitted in mainstream economics, in fostering a bond between consumers and skincare products. With a comparative analysis of both the colonial and the COVID-19 pandemic contexts, this project demonstrates how marketers connect consumers to skincare products through reference to the system of social values and priorities that are inscribed in that historical context ­– the color hierarchy in the colonial period and the reviving emphasis on health and hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic. In other words, this project unfolds innovative ways that marketers leverage to cultivate and perpetuate a consistent consumption pattern for goods that resonate with certain desirable habitus ­related to race, gender, and class ideologies

Politics and Society in Federation Era Russia: Power Elites, Music and the Shaping and Manipulation of Culture and Identity

This thesis examines the relationship between government and society in shaping and manipulating perceptions – or even illusions – of culture and identity in contemporary Russia. Russia’s relationship with the larger world is arguably playing out in a revisionist post-Soviet era framework, particularly since Vladimir Putin first assumed the role of Acting President of the Russian Federation, following the resignation of Boris Yeltsin, in December 1999. Since, the Russian government has sought to create a perception of a healthy public space within representative democratic structure of government. This is a perception the government of Vladimir Putin is committed to maintaining. This study examines the use of music to persuade, create support for, or marginalize or eliminate meaningful dissent and opposition to the agendas of power elites within the governing structure of the Russian Federation. The concepts of the “real” and the “assumed” in the relationship between contemporary Russian music and politics is examined to highlight the role of existing scholarship in exploring this issue as well as identify the perspective and approach taken in the study. Other aspects of this topic examined include the history and context of the use of music by power elites in both the Soviet Era and the current Federation era to identify and examine the consistent role of music in shaping Russian culture and identity to support the vested interests of Russian power elites, regardless of era, and the roles of individual illusory cultural actors in the relationship between Russian music and politics. This thesis concludes that there is a consistent thread that connects the Soviet era and the current Federation era in Russia, in terms of the power structure’s use of music to shape and manipulate perceptions and interpretations of the public space to support the vested political interests of power elites. Additionally, this shaping and manipulation has entered a new phase in which the facilitation of particular cultural actors, groups and expression is emphasized over suppression

Spectacles and spectres: political trials, performativity and scenes of sovereignty

Political trials are generally understood as extraordinary events in the life of liberal democracies, dramatically staging claims to and contests over political authority and legitimacy. Notably, political trials often attract commentary on their theatrics whereby the spectacle becomes a matter of uneasy scrutiny, despite the tacit crosscultural acknowledgment that the trial is an inherently theatrical form. This thesis is an attempt to conceptualise the political operations and effects of the relation between performance and performativity in trials, treating these as separate but related terms. It proposes a new framework for studying political trials by drawing on theories of performativity (J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Shoshana Felman, Stanley Cavell) which assist not only in rethinking the role and effects of performance in trials, but also in introducing a multivalence to the meaning of ‘political’ in political trials. In other words, performative theory allows the formulation of the politics of trials beyond its standard conception in terms of the utilisation of legal procedure for political ends or expediency, instead attuning us to the unconscious processes, inadvertent gestures, ghostly operations, structural infelicities and other similar dynamics that recast the political effects of legal proceedings. This thesis is therefore an attempt to conceptualise the spectacles and spectres of justice at the intersection of law and politics. In addition to incorporating brief discussions of various 20th and 21st century political trials to develop this theoretical framework, it offers close studies of three cases: the 1921 Berlin trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, and two contemporary ‘deep state’ trials from Turkey – the Ergenekon trial, and the Hrant Dink murder trial. A sustained concern is with legacies of political violence, how they are addressed or contained by law, and how they are perpetuated by law