"Ammann hat den Aufstieg der sozialen Medien von Anfang an begleitet und zieht Bilanz: Sie bieten auf der einen Seite große Chancen für die Demokratie. Die effektive Nachbarschaftshilfe während der Pandemie oder der immense Erfolg von #fridaysforfuture und #blacklivesmatter basieren auf der Reich
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weite von Social Media. Auf der anderen Seite unterminieren sie aber zugleich die demokratischen Grundlagen: durch die Verbreitung von Fake News und Verschwörungstheorien, vor allem aber auch, weil die global agierenden Betreiber sich nur an ihre eigenen Regeln halten. Was dem Einzelnen Freiheit verspricht, begünstigt eine manipulative Gegenöffentlichkeit, die Falschmeldungen und Hass verbreitet. Ammann hat zahllose Beispiele und Fakten zusammengetragen, die deutlich machen: Der Kampf um unser politisches System hat bereits begonnen – aber die Machtprobe ist noch lange nicht entschieden." (Buchrücken)
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"Die Digitalisierung hat nicht nur zu tiefgreifenden Veränderungen der Lebens-, Arbeits- und Wirtschaftswelt geführt, sie hat auch massive Auswirkungen auf die internationale Politik. Diese Auswirkungen, so Yvonne Hofstetter, stellen die Sicherheitspolitik der Staaten vor massive Herausforderungen
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. So haben etwa im letzten US-Wahlkampf die sogenannte Russland-Affäre oder der Skandal um die Datenauswertungen von Cambridge Analytica gezeigt, welch schädlichen Einfluss digitale Techniken auf demokratische Systeme haben können. Diese liefen, so die Autorin, Gefahr, durch autoritäre Akteure mit ihren eigenen Waffen geschlagen zu werden, da der freie Verkehr von Informationen auch zur Manipulation demokratischer Prozesse missbraucht werden kann und überdies sicherheitspolitische Konzepte ins Wanken bringt. So wandelt sich auch die Natur zwischenstaatliche Konflikte in Zeiten von künstlicher Intelligenz, Hackerangriffen und neuen Propagandastrategien. Die demokratischen Staaten, so Yvonne Hofstetter, müssten sich in der digitalen Sphäre wappnen, um Sicherheit, Stabilität und Liberalität für ihre Bürgerinnen und Bürger auf Dauer gewährleisten zu können." (Klappentext)
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"The unique dangers of the new communication revolution fall into several categories: Velocity – The lightning speed of online communication is in tension with democracy because well-timed lies immediately preceding an election can gain a national audience before they can be rebutted; Virality –
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The legacy intermediaries that served to cabin what kinds of speech received a national audience have declined in importance in the internet age. With their decline, virality has become the new coin of the political communication realm. The kinds of speech, strategies, and candidacies most likely to succeed in a regime that places primacy on virality are those that appeal to emotion, especially to outrage. Democratic discourse requires some baseline of reasoned deliberation that is not well-served by a communication system based on virality; Anonymity – Anonymity can be an indispensable protection for dissenters in authoritarian and democratic regimes, alike, but it also gives rise to a range of unaccountable anti-democratic speech. Although hate groups are increasingly willing to march in the light of day, they fester and foster in the anonymity the internet provides. Moreover, the privileging of anonymity is what generates the “bot” problem – in which computer code generates much of online communication that is increasingly indistinguishable from human speech. So too, the problem of foreign interference in election campaigns is facilitated by internet anonymity, because the origin of campaign speech is unknown to the audience and regulator alike; [...]" (Executive summary)
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"This handbook and additional dossiers, freely available at the Digital Resistance project homepage (www.digi-res.eu), provide all the information teachers need to conduct a short module on the topic of “fake news” in the classroom or other settings with a group of students aged between 14 and 2
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0 years. The methodology suggested in this handbook can easily be adapted by other actors in the educational sector working in different learning contexts. It begins by providing background knowledge about the topic of fake news and digital competences, followed by guiding steps on how to work on this topic with students in a short module. The learning methodology used is based on enquiry-based learning, so students can be supported to conduct a small-scale research project on a self-chosen topic connected to fake news. Information on this can be found in Chapter 3 of this handbook. In Chapter 5, the concept of peer-to-peer learning is used to set up learning processes between students attending the short module." (Executive summary, page 5)
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"Concerns surrounding the threats that digital platforms pose to the functioning of Western liberal democracies have grown since the 2016 U.S. election. Yet despite a preponderance of academic work in this area, the precise nature of these threats, empirical solutions for their redress, and their re
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lationship to the wider digital political economy remain undertheorized. This article addresses these gaps with a semisystematic literature review that identifies and defines four prominent threats—fake news, filter bubbles/echo chambers, online hate speech, and surveillance—and constructs a typology of “workable solutions” for combating these threats that highlights the tendency to silo technical, regulatory, or culturally embedded approaches." (Abstract)
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"This volume brings together the lectures and presentations of the main speakers at the eleventh edition of the Professional Seminar for Church Communications Offices: Dialogue, Respect and Freedom of Expression in the Public Sphere, organized by the School of Church Communications of the Pontifical
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Univwersity of the Holy Cross, in Rome in April 17 to 19, 2018." (Back cover)
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"Our research revealed that the deepfake phenomenon is growing rapidly online, with the number of deepfake videos almost doubling over the last seven months to 14,678. This increase is supported by the growing commodification of tools and services that lower the barrier for non-experts to create dee
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pfakes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we observed a significant contribution to the creation and use of synthetic media tools from web users in China and South Korea, despite the totality of our sources coming from the English-speaking Internet. Another key trend we identified is the prominence of non-consensual deepfake pornography, which accounted for 96% of the total deepfake videos online. We also found that the top four websites dedicated to deepfake pornography received more than 134 million views on videos targeting hundreds of female celebrities worldwide. This significant viewership demonstrates a market for websites creating and hosting deepfake pornography, a trend that will continue to grow unless decisive action is taken. Deepfakes are also making a significant impact on the political sphere. Two landmark cases from Gabon and Malaysia that received minimal Western media coverage saw deepfakes linked to an alleged government cover-up and a political smear campaign. One of these cases was related to an attempted military coup, while the other continues to threaten a highprofile politician with imprisonment. Seen together, these examples are possibly the most powerful indications of how deepfakes are already destabilizing political processes. Without defensive countermeasures, the integrity of democracies around the world are at risk."
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"Computational propaganda is an emergent form of political manipulation that occurs over the Internet. The term describes the assemblage of social media platforms, autonomous agents, algorithms, and big data tasked with the manipulation of public opinion. Our research shows that this new mode of int
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errupting and influencing communication is on the rise around the globe. Advances in computing technology, especially around social automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence mean that computational propaganda is becoming more sophisticated and harder to track at an alarming rate. This introduction explores the foundations of computational propaganda. It describes the key role that automated manipulation of algorithms plays in recent efforts to control political communication worldwide. We discuss the social data science of political communication and build upon the argument that algorithms and other computational tools now play an important political role in areas like news consumption, issue awareness, and cultural understanding. We unpack the key findings of the nine country case studies that follow—exploring the role of computational propaganda during events from local and national elections in Brazil to the ongoing security crisis between Ukraine and Russia. Our methodology in this work has been purposefully mixed, we make use of quantitative analysis of data from several social media platforms and qualitative work that includes interviews with the people who design and deploy political bots and disinformation campaigns. Finally, we highlight original evidence about how this manipulation and amplification of disinformation is produced, managed, and circulated by political operatives and governments and describe paths for both democratic intervention and future research in this space." (Abstract)
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"The cases discussed in this chapter have demonstrated how disinformation and rhetoric that is spread through social media in the developing world often meets the Benesch criteria for dangerous speech. It comes from influential sources, which can include family and friends who share it. It plays on
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audience fears by persuading them that members of their group are being attacked by a rival group. It sometimes dehumanizes other groups and issues direct calls for violence against them. It happens where there are longstanding ethnic tensions and grievances. And where the media landscape is weak or suppressed, social media becomes a primary source of information, making it an especially influential means of transmission. There are several characteristics shared by developing countries, particularly those with a recent history of conflict and/or government repression, that make them more vulnerable to dangerous speech spread by social media. This includes low media or digital literacy, a lack of available alternative media and the prevalence of untraceable messaging platforms such as WhatsApp." (Conclusion)
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"A luta contra a desinformação não é nova, mas atingiu proporções inimagináveis há algumas décadas. O volume de conteúdos, a velocidade e o alcance conferiram mudanças qualitativas ao problema, exigindo um esforço para a descoberta de novas formas de enfrentá-lo. Longe de esgotarmos o a
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ssunto nesta publicação, procuramos destacar alguns dos aspectos que nos parece ser mais relevantes para a compreensão do fenômeno e para buscar soluções para confrontá-lo. São poucas as soluções globais, mas já existem princípios e dispositivos suficientes para nos orientar no bom caminho da manutenção dos direitos fundamentais, do fortalecimento dos dispositivos democráticos e da imprescindibilidade da transparência. Fortalecer as soluções coletivas, a busca de regulação dos agentes privados a partir dos dispositivos democráticos e o amplo debate crítico com a sociedade ainda nos parecem ser a melhor abordagem para avançarmos no combate a este problema em consonância com a garantia do direito à comunicação, compreendido em sua interdependência com os demais direitos fundamentais." (Conclusão, página 46)
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"The dynamism of Russia’s information warfare is best illustrated by the fact that over the last decade it underwent at least two strategic shifts—after the Russian-Georgian war in 2008 and in 2014 when Russia went from being risk-averse and stealthy to increasingly aggressive and risk-taking. E
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ffective countermeasures, especially those applied in Central and Eastern Europe, must reflect this reality by being highly adaptable and agile—a factor that local anti-information-warfare capacities often lack." (Executive summary)
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"Efforts to fight the spread of disinformation have had mixed results. Self-regulation by online platforms such as Twitter or Facebook puts a great deal of power in their hands, with potentially negative effects on independent news outlets that depend on social media for their outreach. State regula
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tion, meanwhile, raises concerns of censorship. There is a danger that methods intended to reduce disinformation, implemented clumsily or without sufficient regard for their effects, will actually exacerbate the anti-establishment feeling that drives disinformation in the first place. Just as the disinformation problem can, to a great extent, be traced back to wider structural faults in the political system, the solution, too, must be partly structural. There must be a shift in commercial practices to disrupt the commercial motivations driving disinformation, make online platforms more fair, transparent and open, and reduce the pressure on media outlets to compete for attention." (Executive summary)
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"Facebook is the Internet in Myanmar, and it presents both opportunities for and challenges to the government, the opposition, and the people in a country that is in transition. Facebook has gained notoriety as a platform for hate speech and fake news in Myanmar over the past seven years. Facebook h
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as removed hundreds of accounts and pages allied with or supportive of the Myanmar military, or engaged in coordinated deceptive behaviour. The National League for Democracy government has sought to control and regulate social media by establishing a social media monitoring body and preparing a cyber law, but without much impact to date. Both Facebook’s close monitoring of accounts and defamation suits have made Facebook users in Myanmar more cautious, but supporters of the National League for Democracy, the military and opposition parties still rely heavily on Facebook for partisan political communication." (Executive summary)
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"Our analysis of millions of Russian tweets over 2014-2018 reveals that bots make up a large proportion of the Russian political Twittersphere. However, an important lesson from our region is that one cannot assume that simply because there are bots present in the Russian political Twittersphere tha
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t they are pro-Kremlin. Instead, as it turns out, pro-opposition, pro-Kiev, and neutral bots proliferate as well. We therefore also developed machine learning models that allow us to distinguish between three major groups of political bots in Russia at scale, including pro-Kremlin, pro-opposition, and pro-Kyiv bots. It is worth noting, though, that the fourth residual category of bots that we call neutral actually make up a plurality of these bot-orientation types. Our preliminary analysis of bot activity shows that across the entire data set, bots mainly seem to be being used to amplify political messages. In the case of neutral bots, amplification is conducted via tweeting repetitive texts, whereas non-neutral bots achieve this via retweeting. It appears that the sources of retweets from Russian political bots are either mass media with strong political orientation or prominent political figures. Exciting topics for future research would include more deeply diving into the topics of the messages shared by bots, better understanding whether the target audience for these shared messages are humans or other computer algorithms (e.g., to influence search rankings), and testing hypotheses related to over-time variation in the use of political bots, both in Russia and beyond." (Conclusion)
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"The central focus of this study is the dynamic and complex relationship between elections and (digital) media. This choice of focus is explained by the need to safeguard the integrity and credibility of electoral processes, as well as the role of the news media during election periods, in the face
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of new issues related to the digital environment. These issues include (i) online disinformation; (ii) the digital dimension of the safety of journalists and other media actors, and (iii) disruptive practices in election campaigning and communications." (Introduction)
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"Convergence of services usually affects the quality and price of services offered by providers. However, this has not been the case in Romania yet. People benefit from a very competitive market and enjoy fairly cheap services, but the implications of convergence on the content made available to con
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sumers are less beneficial for citizens. If three major companies start controlling both the infrastructure and the media content, the production of good quality journalism is likely to be affected and tastes and ideas could be shaped in unexpected ways. If these companies establish ties with the political elites as well and start endorsing certain ideologies, they can start having an unwarranted impact on society. Although these concerns are now hypothetical, they are grounded in practices that could be observed already for years in Romania. Social media is becoming increasingly influential as a source of information, with more than two-thirds of Romanians getting their news from Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms. Recent debates surrounding fake news have prompted calls for regulation of the online media in a similar way broadcast activities have been regulated for decades. Civil society organizations have been critical of such initiatives, fearing that they could pave the way to the reintroduction of censorship disguised as user protection." (Page 4)
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"Esta guía instruccional está diseñada para el uso de periodistas, facilitadores, académicos y estudiantes con el fin de contextualizar la crisis de las ‘noticias falsas’ del siglo 21. Por medio de algunos casos relevantes y un cronograma, los usuarios podrán informarse de manera más efect
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iva sobre las causas y consecuencias del ‘desorden informacional’—desde ataques periodísticos de ‘trolls,’ hasta la manipulación de elecciones y crisis diplomáticas. Aunque históricamente los medios también se han visto involucrados en la desinformación, esto no se considera un legítimo paradigma contemporáneo en los diferentes medios de comunicación. Es por esto que las manifestaciones contemporáneas de la desinformación son más fácilmente vistas en las redes sociales—un fenómeno que pone en riesgo el periodismo auténtico y a las sociedades de manera general." (Página 2)
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