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The Unfreedom Monitor: Turkey Country Report

Amsterdam: Global Voices Advox (2022), 27 pp.

"Since its ascent to power twenty years ago, the ruling AKP has tightened the screws on all forms of freedom of expression, both online and offline. It has introduced draconian laws, imposed internet restrictions, blocked content, and has arrested and intimidated critics on an unprecedented level. I ... more

The Unfreedom Monitor: Sudan Country Report

Khattab Hamad

Amsterdam: Global Voices Advox (2022), 25 pp.

"There is a clear digital divide in Sudan as the number of internet users is a very low part of the population. Despite the high contribution of the telecommunication field to the GDP, the Sudanese authorities are not using this contribution to enhance and develop the ICT field to fill the gap of di ... more

Understanding the Laws Relating to "Fake News" in Russia

Anton Vaganov

Thomson Reuters Foundation;Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) (2022), 16 pp.

"This guide is intended to provide user-friendly, practical guidance for journalists and newsrooms seeking to understand the Russian “fake news” laws, and how they’ve been applied to local and international press." (Page 1)

The Unfreedom Monitor: Zimbabwe Country Report

Kudzai Chimhangwa

Amsterdam: Global Voices Advox (2022), 28 pp.

"The government of Zimbabwe and the ruling ZANU PF party are bent on ensuring that the status quo is preserved at all costs. As evidenced by findings in the Civic Media Observatory, the digital sphere has been identified as a threat to the country’s national security, insofar as deposing the curre ... more

Chinese Discourse Power: Aspirations, Reality, and Ambitions in the Digital Domain

Kenton Thibaut

Washington, DC: Atlantic Council (2022), 32 pp.

"This report provides a framework for understanding China's discourse-power ambitions [...], the strategy China has developed to achieve them, and an initial assessment of the successes and limitations of these efforts to date. The report begins by tracing the evolution of China's conception of disc ... more

Putin's Disinformation & Misinformation Campaign

Jakub Ferencík

EUROPEUM (2022), 12 pp.

"Disinformation and misinformation have been amplified in the digital age. In order to combat their increasing presence in our everyday lives, we have to first educate ourselves on what disinformation is. In this post, Jakub Ferencik looks at this question in some detail, primarily by analyzing Vlad ... more

The Cultural Politics of Affect and Emotion: A Case Study of Chinese Reality TV

Wei Dong

Bielefeld: transcript (2022), 232 pp.

"Against the background of the media commercialization reform since the 1990s in China and drawing on the case of »X-Change« (2006-2019), Wei Dong investigates the entanglements between emotion and subjectivity, ideology, identity and hegemonic power in the multimodal text of the program. The focu ... more

Belarus Media Landscape Guide

CDAC Network (2022), 21 pp.

"This Media Landscape Guide was produced in January 2022. It provides a snapshot of the media at this time in Belarus. It provides an analysis of the recent shocks to the media landscape and an overview of the different types of media and information sources available for Belarusians: digital media ... more

Shadow Forces: Hidden Malign Domestic and Foreign "Grey Zone" Media Influence in Central-Eastern Europe

Lóránt Gyõri

Political Capital Institute (2022), 39 pp.

"This paper is the summary of the results of a research project lasting over six months, covering domestic and foreign hidden malign influence activities pursued through the so-called "grey zone" media in three countries - the Czech Republic, Serbia and Hungary -, during a period of heightened inter ... more

Independent Media Under Pressure: Evidence from Russia

Tom Paskhalis, Bryn Rosenfeld, Katerina Tertytchnaya

Post-Soviet Affairs, volume 38, issue 3 (2022), pp. 155-174

"Existing literature recognizes growing threats to press freedom around the world and documents changes in the tools used to stifle the independent press. However, few studies investigate how independent media respond to state pressure in an autocracy, documenting the impact of tactics that stop sho ... more

Controlling China’s Digital Ecosystem: Observations on Chinese Social Media

Jennifer Pan

China Leadership Monitor, issue 72 (2022), 10 pp.

"Nowhere is the effort to control the flow of digital information more extensive and sustained than it is in China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses a wide range of tools and strategies to achieve two related, but distinct, goals of digital information control: to shape public knowledge and to ... more

The Informational Dictator's Dilemma: Citizen Responses to Media Censorship and Control in Russia and Belarus

Samuel A. Greene

PONARS Eurasia (2022), 9 pp.

"The findings described in this memo strongly suggest that "softer" strategies of media cooptation are more effective than harsher, more coercive approaches to media control. In Russia, where the Kremlin has-until very recently-used a combination of commercial pressure and political influence to pus ... more

Is Telegram a “harbinger of Freedom”? The Performance, Practices, and Perception of Platforms as Political Actors in Authoritarian States

Mariëlle Wijermars, Tetyana Lokot

Post-Soviet Affairs, volume 38, issue 1-2 (2022), pp. 125-145

"This paper examines the practices, performance, and perceptions of the messaging platform Telegram as an actor in the 2020 Belarus protests, using publicly available data from Telegram’s public statements, protest-related Telegram groups, and media coverage. Developing a novel conceptualization o ... more

Russia's Vigilante YouTube Stars: Digital Entrepreneurship and Heroic Masculinity in the Service of Flexible Authoritarianism

Anna Schwenck

Europe-Asia Studies, volume 74, issue 7 (2022), pp. 1166-1189

"Combating illegal parking and drinking in public is the raison d’être of Russia’s best-known law-and-order youth initiatives, StopKham and Lev Protiv. These initiatives enforce and promote neotraditional morals amongst young people by challenging alleged offenders on camera and uploading the e ... more

Narrative russischer staatlicher Medien über Corona-Impfstoffe im Westen

Daria Zakharova

Russland-Analysen, issue 418 (2022), pp. 2-5

"Die überwiegende Mehrheit der Beiträge in russischen staatlichen Medien über Impfkampagnen im Westen haben eine negative Konnotation. Die Übertreibung der negativen Folgen einer Impfung mit Präparaten von BionTech/Pfizer und Moderna sowie die Überzeichnung der angeblich massenhaften Unzufried ... more

The Revolution Will be Televised in Arabic: Iran’s Media Infrastructure Abroad

Hamdi Malik

Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy (2022), 19 pp.

"The media space is increasingly becoming yet another battlefield for the Islamic Republic to consolidate its hegemony throughout the Middle East. Iran’s media outreach, particularly in Arabic, is only likely to increase, especially online. Supreme Leader Khamenei is keen to see more activities do ... more

You Are What You Read: Media, Identity, and Community in the 2020 Belarusian Uprising

Samuel A. Greene

Post-Soviet Affairs, volume 38, issue 1-2 (2022), pp. 88-106

"The movement that mobilized to oppose Alyaksandr Lukashenka in August 2020 was notable for its ability to bridge divisions of social class, geography, age, and identity. Almost uniquely among post-Soviet revolutionary movements, the Belarusians who rose up were not divided from those who did not al ... more

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Media Assistance in Burma’s Reform Decade

Jane Madlyn McElhone

Washington, DC: Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) (2022), 35 pp.

"Using the coup as a vantage point, interviewees for this report were asked to reflect on three main questions: What have we learned about past media reform efforts? With hindsight, what are the legacies, best practices, and lessons learned? With a view to the future, what does the media’s respons ... more

Counter-Hegemonic Collaborations or Alliances of the Underdogs? The Case of TeleSUR with Al-Mayadeen, RT and CGTN

Pablo Sebastian Morales

Global Media and Communication, volume 18, issue 3 (2022), pp. 365-382

"This study explores how news channels from the Global South challenge western narratives by co-producing TV programmes. It focuses on Telesur (Venezuela) and its collaborations with RT (Russia), Al-Mayadeen (Lebanon) and CCTV/CGTN (China). By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this pap ... more

Media Usage and Political Trust Among Young Adults in China: The Role of Media Credibility, Trust in Sources and Political Membership

Qiong Gong, Marc Verboord, Yijing Wang

Global Media and Communication, volume 18, issue 3 (2022), pp. 301-321

"On the basis of an online survey conducted among young Chinese adults, this study examines how the association between media usage and political trust can be explained by three factors: the mediating roles of the perceived credibility of traditional and social media; the moderating roles of trust i ... more