The Salience of Fakeness: Experimental Evidence on Readers’ Distinction between Mainstream Media Content and Altered News Stories

This experiment was designed to explore people’s critical, differentiating capacity between actual news and content that looks like news. Four groups of post-millennials read four versions of a news story. While the first condition included a real news story derived from a mainstream medium, the other three conditions tested three attributes of fakeness, namely an exaggerated, satirical, and popularised frame of disinformation. Although readers differentiated between satire and the actual news story, no significant differences were observed between exaggerated and simplified versions of news and the actual news story. Additional intervening variables were scrutinized, showing a connection between the salience of a story and its perceptions of fakeness

The salience of 'Fakeness': Experimental Evidence on Readers' Distinction between Mainstream Media Content and Altered News Stories

This experiment was designed to explore people’s critical, differentiating capacity between actual news and content that looks like news. Four groups of post-millennials read four versions of a news story. While the first condition included a real news story derived from a mainstream medium, the other three conditions tested three attributes of fakeness, namely an exaggerated, satirical, and popularised frame of disinformation. Although readers differentiated between satire and the actual news story, no significant differences were observed between exaggerated and simplified versions of news and the actual news story. Additional intervening variables were scrutinized, showing a connection between the salience of a story and its perceptions of fakeness

To activists: please post and share your story: renewing understandings on civic participation and the role of facebook in the Indignados movement

The global upsurge in protest, which has accompanied the current international financial crisis, has highlighted the extensive use of online social media in activism, leaving aside the extent to which citizenship is enacted, empowered and potentially transformed by social media use within these movements. Drawing on citizenship and communication theories, this study employs a crosscountry analysis of the relationship between citizenship, civic practices and social media within the Indignados movement in Greece and France. By the use of semi-structured interviews, we attempt to discern the degree of involvement of actors with the political community in question and explore the complex layers of their motivations and goals around participation. Content analysis employed in the movement’s Facebook groups allows us to critically evaluate the potential of social media in (re)defining the meaning and practice of civic participation. Findings indicate that the failure of traditional forms of civic participation to attain and resolve everyday political issues becomes its potential to transfer the political activity in other sites of struggle. The role of Facebook is double: it can reinforce civic talk and debate through activists’ digital story telling (around shared feelings and personal stories) significant for meaningful activist participation online and offline. Second, it can support new forms of alternative politics inspired by more participatory modes of engagement

Social Media, Citizenship and New Social Movements: The Role of Facebook Use in the Construction of Collective and Civic Identities by the Indignados Movement in Greece and France

At the dawn of the 21st century we witness an upsurge in mobilization and collective action by a wide range of activists and groups engaging in social and political protest, all over the world. What these movements have in common is not only their association with the global financial crisis but also their extensive use of online social media like Facebook and Twitter for mobilization, participation and coordination. Thus, the Indignados movement which sprung in Southern Europe in 2008, constitute a new phenomenon that deserves to be studied in its own right, not only as a form of social movements per se, but also with regard to the role of digital technologies in collective action. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines have tended to focus on questions about the role of the internet in protest, without attending to the changing meaning of what it means to be a citizen within such movements and through their practices and discourses (see Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Two questions in need of empirical study and which remain unanswered in the literature are: 1. How is civic and collective identity constructed within current constellations of social movements such as the Indignados? 2. How is this construction process mediated by the use of Facebook? This dissertation responds to this need through an empirical study of the discourses and online content of Indignados activists in France and Greece. Drawing an analytical framework from the components of civic and collective identity, it brings together elements that are necessary for a two-level analysis: a) the tangible aspects such as the practices of movements and their participants and b) the ideational aspects such as the feelings of activists within the movement and in relation to the nation. More specifically, this thesis aimed, first, at mapping different forms and processes attached with the construction of civic and collective identity through the discourses of actors. By the use of semi-structured interviews and online content, we attempted to discern and analyse the actors’ belonging, practices, identification and values and principles within the political community in question (the nation-state) and the collectivity (the Indignados), exploring the multiple and complex layers of their feelings. The second objective was to explore the role of Facebook in this process, which allowed us to critically evaluate the potential of social media in the negotiation of civic and collective identity in both meaning and practice. This dissertation provides some insights regarding the figure, shape and nature of citizens in the Indignados movements, arguing for a redefinition of civic identity as a dynamic and unfixed entity based on the everyday struggles and practices of individuals. Along with this, collective ! vii! identity among the Indignados could be qualified as hybrid, multi-layered and open-ended, by pointing out the different elements which coexist within the movement such as politically diverse individuals, different political flows and discourses and new forms of belonging. The role of Facebook seems to be more complex. Several elements found online (e.g. civic talk, creation of collective frames of reference around actions) certainly contribute to the reproduction of civic and collective identities and seem to create a fertile ground for empowerment and the construction of active citizenship in the Indignados movement. However, further research is needed in order to demonstrate the long-term efficacy of such communicative practices in movement outcomes and trajectories.Co-Supervisor: Fabien Granjon, Professor, University Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis, France, President of the committee: Peter Dahlgren, Professor Emeritus, Lund University, Sweden, Member of the committee: Josiane Jouët, Professor, University of Pantheon-Assas Paris 2, France, Member of the committee: Pantelis Vatikiotis, Associate Professor, Izmir University of Economics. TurkeyComplete

‘Facebook and Google care deeply about journalism’? Mapping audience-based monetization projects and the impact on journalistic practices and values

Facebook and Google launches in 2017 and 2020, ‘Google News Initiative’ and ‘Facebook Journalism Project’ respectively to provide cutting-edge tools to help journalists understand and connect with their users, improve their products and power their technological infrastructure. This goes in line with the strategy of ‘infrastructuralization’ applied by Google and Facebook to centralize international flows and reinvent relationships between diverse publics (Plantin et.al., 2018). Along with this, news organizations have been forced to reinvent the ways by adapting their editorial decisions, shaping their forms in search of alternatives by which they can monetize their news stories through a ‘platform native strategy’. Thus, technological platforms are seen as ‘digital intermediaries’ with specific business models where data-power processes tackle the production, monetization and visibility of journalistic content. While this is evident, publishers and news organizations might reinvigorate their institutional practices and values to priorities and values of the platforms in a process of “institutional isomorphism” (Caplan and Boyd, 2018). Whereas significant empirical and theoretical work has been focused on the promises of technology on journalism per se, little is known about innovation projects that take place within technological corporations and are vastly applied in news organisations. Thus, little is known about human aspects of technological approaches in influencing journalistic identities

‘The poor have been raped’: An analysis of politicised collective identity in facebook groups against the financial crisis in Cyprus

This paper investigates the content of collective identities as constructed in Facebook groups created in protest against the haircut in 2013 in Cyprus. Given its supplementary role to offline social action, we use Facebook as a research domain and data gathering tool. Drawing on the concept of politicised collective identity we undertake a qualitative content analysis of the posts in three Facebook groups. The analysis reveals two main forms of collective identification. The first presents a rather common form of collective identity that is informed ideologically by nationalism. The second is built upon a strong anti-president rhetoric, echoing the arguments of the opposition parties. The ‘banal’ nature of such identities probably go a long way in accounting for the limited potential for collective action-unlike some of the other European crisis countries

Do Facebook and Google Care about Journalism? Mapping the Relationship between Affordances of GNI and FJP Tools and Journalistic Norms

This study engages in a sociotechnical analysis of Facebook and Google to understand the material means by which these corporations strive to engage journalists vis-à-vis their business models. Through affordance theory, we argue that interfaces of technological artifacts are manifestations of their implicit politics and ideology, given that affordances entail normative claims about what users should do. Our study draws from Google News Initiative and Facebook Journalism Project to explore: how the affordances of FJP and GNI tools allow particular behaviors and encourage certain journalistic norms to emerge? We analyzed nine journalist-oriented tools from FJP and GNI, by performing a discursive interface analysis. Findings indicate that FJP and GNI tools affordances can encourage four distinct journalistic norms: (1) successful journalism should circulate widely on platforms, (2) successful journalism should be aware of the ways competition is measured in FJP and GNI, (3) successful journalism should attract loyal readership as defined by platforms and (4) successful journalism should make money through platforms. We argue that FJP and GNI tools affordances can facilitate a form of platform schooling which, in addition to journalism schools and work environments, can might dictate what is and what is not “successful journalism.”