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Government

Snurb — Monday 8 July 2019 22:52

‘Fake News’ in the 2019 Nigerian Presidential Election

Politics | Elections | Government | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | IAMCR 2019 |

The next speaker in this entertaining IAMCR 2019 session is Adeyanju Apejoye, whose focus is on ‘fake news’ in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. ‘Fake news’ has become a critical issue in Nigerian politics, given the highly contested nature of the campaign, the shortcomings of Nigerian mainstream media, and the increasing role of online and social media in the country.


The project examined such issues through surveys and qualitative content analysis of news stories and comments, focussing on some eleven news stories with a particular focus on a province seeking to secede from the country. Some such stories used highly …

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Snurb — Monday 8 July 2019 22:20

‘Fake News’ to Undermine the Mexican Electoral Authority

Politics | Elections | Government | ‘Fake News’ | IAMCR 2019 |

The next IAMCR 2019 session is on ‘fake news’, and we start with Julio Juarez Gamiz who focusses on ‘fake news’ directed at the national electoral authority in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections.

There is substantial mistrust of electoral authorities given that, until recently, Mexico had the same party in power for some 70 years; in 1988, the system that provides vote count updates broke down altogether as it showed the opposition in the lead, and by the time it came back online the government was back in the lead. This is still seen as a marker of the worst …

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Snurb — Monday 8 July 2019 20:03

A Historical Perspective on Dignity

Politics | Government | IAMCR 2019 |

The first keynote at the IAMCR 2019 conference is by Javier Gomá, whose theme is human dignity. He suggests that dignity is the most revolutionary concept of the 20th century. It has become a widespread concept that animates many modern causes, from unionism through feminism to emerging new political ideologies, and is crucial to many current debates about the role and impact of new technologies, yet remains ignored by many recent philosophical works.

There has been a certain revival of interest in the concept of human dignity in recent years, however. (Argh, the wifi and thus the live translation audio …

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Snurb — Saturday 3 November 2018 20:44

European Governments’ Communication about Brexit in Online and Social Media

Politics | Government | Social Media | ECREA 2018 |

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Holger Sievert, whose interest is in the European public sphere. There are now some decades of criticism that suggests that the development of that public sphere is lagging behind other forms of European integration, and such criticism has now also increasingly focussed on online and digital media.

This missing European public sphere has also been blamed as one driver of the U.K.’s recent Brexit vote: without a European public sphere there are few fora available to counteract the negative discussion about the European Union that may be taking place in national …

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Snurb — Friday 2 November 2018 00:37

The Role of Research in Developing New Visions for Democracy

Politics | Government | ECREA 2018 |

Finally for this ECREA 2018 session, Natalie Fenton asks how we as academics might therefore need to reconsider our own work in political communication. If we are considering different ways of doing democracy, this is inevitably also a question of power, of course, and it has immediate and critical implications for societies in which the gaps between the powerful and the powerless are rapidly widening.

As the institutions – especially at local levels – in which publics have traditionally sought to engage are being hollowed out and shut down (for instance as a result of austerity policies such as those …

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Snurb — Sunday 28 October 2018 19:18

Understanding the Datafied Society by Decentring Data

Government | e-Government | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Social Media | iCS 2018 |

The second day at the iCS Symposium at IT University Copenhagen starts with a keynote by Lina Dencik. She explores the difficulties in researching the datafied society, building on several of the projects currently underway at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University. This work must involve researchers, but also civil society actors, practitioners, journalists, and others.

The datafied society represents an immensely fast-moving space; there are constant updates on development projects, company initiatives, government actions, data scandals, etc. As researchers, it is important to introduce a sense of slowness into this environment from time to time, in order to …

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Snurb — Saturday 27 October 2018 23:53

Legal and Regulatory Approaches to ‘Fake News’

Politics | Government | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | iCS 2018 |

The next session at this iCS Symposium starts with Irini Katsirea, who continues with our ‘fake news’ theme. There are a great many definitions for this problematic term, and it is usually better to distinguish between several more specific types of mis- or disinformation, and indeed a U.K. House of Commons committee recently recommended abandoning the term altogether.

One submission to the committee defined ‘fake news’ as knowing and consistent publication of predominantly false information in the guise of news, yet what is missing here is an acknowledgment that this is done with the specific intent to mislead; otherwise, openly …

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Snurb — Saturday 21 October 2017 21:32

Computational Propaganda around the World

Politics | Government | Social Media | AoIR 2017 |

I arrived late to the final AoIR 2017 session on computational propaganda, and I think it's Samantha Bradshaw speaking at the moment. She's presenting the overall Computational Propaganda project at the University of Oxford, which from secondary source research identified some 23 countries that were known to be using some kind of informational warfare online at this stage.

The recent report from the project identifies social media uses in computational propaganda since 2010, which mainly focus inwardly and target domestic audiences; authoritarian regimes are especially active. Democratic countries are more likely to target external audiences, but sometimes also target specific …

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Snurb — Friday 20 October 2017 23:59

Towards e-Privacy by Design in European Union Legislation

Politics | Government | e-Government | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | AoIR 2017 |

The second keynote at AoIR 2017 is by Marju Lauristin, who is both a professor at the University of Tartu and the rapporteur on e-privacy at the European Parliament, where she also represents Estonia as an MEP; indeed she has been named one of the most influential Estonian women in the world. This week the Parliament voted on new EU privacy regulations which Marju has been instrumental in developing.

Her focus here is on the impact of algorithms on deliberative democracy, and the short summary of the situation is that algorithms will severely affect democracy if the companies that utilise …

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Snurb — Friday 20 October 2017 21:39

YouTube's Disruptive Effect on the Saudi Mediasphere

Politics | Government | Produsers and Produsage | Streaming Media | AoIR 2017 |

The second speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Omar Daoudi, whose interest is in the Saudi government's reactions to YouTube content. This work covers the period of time between 2010 and 2016, after which there were also considerable changes in government policy.

Saudi Arabia's media system is closed to unauthorised companies; the state controls the media, and indeed by proxy also has substantial influence over pan-Arab media companies. This is also in line with the overall structure of the Saudi government itself, where the king continues to exercise nearly absolute power. However, at the same time senior princes in …

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