"The war in Ukraine is just the latest instance where attention-grabbing events have fuelled the rapid spread of false or misleading news about refugees and migrants. This Issue Paper examines the challenges posed by disinformation about refugees from Ukraine, as well as the responses taken so far t
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o address it. It inspects which disinformation actors spread false claims about Ukrainian refugees, and how. It sheds light on why migration-related disinformation is so pervasive and how disinformation narratives change over time and space. It also examines which audiences are more susceptible to online disinformation. The paper also identifies positive developments and shortcomings in the EU's responses." (Executive Summary, page 5)
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"In this story of persistent struggle in the name of truth, a young journalist joins forces with her older colleague in uncovering a complicated corruption case that leads to many dead ends. When the welfare of vulnerable people is at stake, it takes two mdern-day heroes to save the day, but every h
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ero has an achilles' heel." (Introduction)
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"Existing research on factors informing public perceptions of expert trustworthiness was largely conducted during stable periods and in longestablished Western liberal democracies. This article asks whether the same factors apply during a major health crisis and in relatively new democracies. Drawin
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g on 120 interviews and diaries conducted during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Serbia, we identify two additional factors not acknowledged in existing research, namely personal contact with experts and experts’ independence from political elites. We also examine how different factors interact and show how distrust of experts can lead to exposure to online misinformation." (Abstract)
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"Wie denken gewöhnliche Russ:innen wirklich über die Entscheidung von Präsident Putin, in die Ukraine einzumarschieren? Obwohl einiges dafürspricht, dass frühere Umfragen, die Zustimmungswerte um 60 % für den Krieg zeigen, als genuine Signale der russischen öffentlichen Meinung gewertet werde
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n können, untersucht dieser Beitrag eine Reihe von Gründen, warum diese Umfrageergebnisse mit großer Vorsicht behandelt oder gar ignoriert werden sollten. Gründe dafür sind u. a. die staatliche Zensur, die Selbstzensur der Bevölkerung und eine verzerrte Beantwortung der Fragen, das Vorhandensein von Protesten sogar in einem autoritären Umfeld in Russland, als auch die Tatsache, dass einige der früheren Umfragen nach einem hypothetischen Einmarsch fragten, über den viele Russ:innen wohl nicht ausreichend nachgedacht haben könnten. Allerdings führt der Beitrag an, dass die plausibelste Erklärung für den offensichtlichen anfänglichen Rückhalt für den Krieg in der Manipulation der öffentlichen Meinung durch staatliche Kontrolle der Kommunikationskanäle und der weitverbreitete Einsatz von Zensur, Propaganda und Desinformation im eigenen Land als auch im Ausland liegt." (Seite 6)
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"Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, policymakers worldwide have taken measures to curb the reach of Russia’s foreign communication outlets, RT and Sputnik. Mapping the audiences of these outlets in 21 countries, we show that in the quarter before the invasion, at least via their official we
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bsites and mobile apps, neither outlet reached more than 5% of the digital populations of any of these countries each month. Averaged across all countries, both outlets’ website and mobile app reach remained approximately constant between 2019 and 2021, was higher for men, and increased with audiences’ age." (Abstract)
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"This book presents a new perspective on how Russia projects itself to the world. Distancing itself from familiar, agency-driven International Relations accounts that focus on what 'the Kremlin' is up to and why, it argues for the need to pay attention to deeper, trans-state processes over which the
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Kremlin exerts much less control. Especially important in this context is mediatization, defined as the process by which contemporary social and political practices adopt a media form and follow media-driven logics. In particular, the book emphasizes the logic of the feedback loop or 'recursion', showing how it drives multiple Russian performances of national belonging and nation projection in the digital era. It applies this theory to recent issues, events and scandals that have played out in international arenas ranging from television, through theatre, film, and performance art, to warfare." (Publisher description)
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"The research – based on programmatic text-mining supported analyses of several millions of war-related comments scraped by Sentione and further examined with CrowdTangle - found traces of inauthentic, repetitive pro-Kremlin activity on Facebook in all countries under review, which can be consider
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ed attempts to influence public opinion in the affected states and, in some cases, beyond them. Our main conclusions are: Crises help the Kremlin. Even if public opinion in the EU is currently unfavorable to the Kremlin, the onset of high, permanent inflation, soaring energy prices and the looming danger of an EU-wide recession could create a more favorable environment for the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts. Most (covertly) Kremlin-friendly forces will adopt a rhetoric blasting sanctions for harming Europe more than Russia. Importing disinformation narratives. Three out of the four narratives found in Hungary were imported into the country from abroad. One doubting Ukraine’s existence as a country started from an organization connected to Ukrainian pro-Putin oligarch Viktor Medvechuk, taken over by the so-called “news agency” of separatists. Another narrative detailing a new, dictatorial world order based on, among others, COVID-19 restrictions, and led by NATO was aimed at developing countries where Russia can hope to hold more sway. The third essentially took over a trend in the Russian media space: users tried to discredit anti-war voices by asking them “where they were in the past eight years” when Ukraine committed atrocities against minorities. Strategies in Germany: Divide and Rule. The six relevant narratives we found in Germany employed three different strategies. The first was anti-Westernism, where the US and NATO are to blame for Russia’s attack. The second aimed clearly at generating debates by spreading a Kremlin-critical narrative. Some profiles involved in this were caught disseminating both pro-Kremlin and anti-Kremlin narratives, which indicates it is not intended to counter the Kremlin’s information operation but to be a part of it. The third strategy was about exploiting contemporary events - such as heightened discussions on sanctions and rising inflation." (Executive summary)
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"Danny Schmidt analysiert, wie führende deutsche Medien über Russland schreiben. Artikel der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, des Neuen Deutschlands, des Spiegels, der Süddeutschen Zeitung und der Welt zeichnen ein deutliches Bild. Der Blickwinkel ist verengt, die Perspektivenvielfalt reduziert,
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ein neutraler Blick nicht immer gegeben. Historische Diskurse reaktivieren Stereotype und befeuern Ressentiments. Die Folge ist die Konstruktion eines vitalen Feindbildes, das im Krieg in der Ukraine traurige Realität geworden ist." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"Polnische Juden stellten nicht nur die größte Gruppe unter den Opfern des Holocaust, in den 1930er Jahren hatte auch kein Land Europas mehr jüdische Einwohner und einen vielfältigeren jüdischen Printmarkt als Polen. Die Studie trägt zu einem Paradigmenwechsel bei, der diese Tatsachen stärker
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berücksichtigt, indem er den Blick von Ost nach West richtet und die polnischen Juden nicht länger als monolithischen Block passiver Opfer begreift, sondern als handelnde Subjekte, die den Antisemitismus, der sie bedrohte, aktiv bekämpften. Aufbauend auf einer Analyse der Berichterstattung der jiddischen Warschauer Tagespresse über Nationalsozialismus und Judenverfolgung legt sie die Netzwerke der jüdischen Zeitungsmacher frei und zeigt, wie diese sich trotz Zensur und Repression subversives Wissen aneigneten, es ihrem Publikum vermittelten und so die Vorstellungswelten polnischer Juden über Deutschland prägten sowie Protest- und Solidaritätsaktionen zugunsten der Verfolgten initiierten." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"Maidan, Krim und Russland bilden 2014 einen Fokus der Berichterstattung, als Proteste v. a. in Kiew in eine Staatskrise münden und die Halbinsel Krim von Russland annektiert wird. Diese einschneidenden Ereignisse werden von Medien eingeordnet und in Sinnzusammenhänge eingebettet. Die vorliegende
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Medien-Frame-Analyse untersucht das Bild, das seinerzeit in den kommentierenden Texten der reichweitenstärksten deutschen Printmedien geprägt wurde. Sie begreift Meinung als über den Begriff des Frames in den Texten nachweisbar, den sie theoretisch daraus herleitet, wie Menschen mit (Eigen-)Kategorien die Welt verstehen und sortieren. Mit einer operationalisierbaren Definition des Begriffes Frame können so die Meinungsspektren nachgezeichnet werden." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"Through this research we gained insight into tactics employed by state-backed social media disinformation. With that goal, we explored user interactions with inauthentic Twitter accounts. We used multiple procedures to measure the ways in which users talked with and about the accounts employed by t
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he Russian-affiliated Internet Research Agency in the month before the 2016 U.S. Election. We found that users were overwhelming supportive of the IRA accounts, a fact that calls into question the standard representation of these accounts as “trolls.” Users were particularly supportive of the accounts that pretended to be part of a particular ideological group (on both the left and right), supporting arguments that a strategy of building connections with like-minded people was central to the IRA campaign. This strategy seems to work—on days that the Russian accounts received more support they also received more engagement." (Lay summary)
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"This midterm performance evaluation of the United States Agency for International Development’s Assistance to Citizens in Fight Against Corruption Activity (ACFC) and Investigative Journalism Program (IJP) examines the outcomes the activities achieved during the first two and a half years of impl
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ementation. Both activities started in September 2019 and will end in September 2024. The evaluation concluded that the two activities increased citizens’ awareness about and confidence in anticorruption activities of civil society in directly targeted municipalities, and awareness about media anticorruption reporting at a national level. More success stories and a centralized effort to promote results and messaging should follow, and all supported media requires an improved approach to audience engagements. Despite stagnation at the national level, citizens’ engagement in anticorruption increased significantly in affected municipalities, especially through locally based informal groups and CSO initiatives, as well as through well-tailored initiatives for monitoring abuse of public resources in pre-election campaigns and public procurement during the pandemic. The lack of coordination between direct beneficiaries, and with external stakeholders, partially caused by the pandemic, made anticorruption efforts fragmented and less sustainable. The pandemic and political stalemates negatively affected the high-level advocacy initiatives with modest results only in the areas of conflict of interest and public procurement, while the ACFC grantees had some results in their advocacy initiatives. The two activities were effective in getting institutions to process corruption reports and in stopping illegal activities in some of the institutions. Investigative journalism reports resulted in several high-profile corruption cases. Even though judicial effectiveness is improving, citizens’ distrust in judicial and other institutions still hampers gains in reporting corruption." (Abstract)
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"In this contribution, using a case-study approach, we focus on the assassination of Ján Kuciak and his fiancée and explore the impact and consequences that it had on the community of investigative journalists in Slovakia. By conducting a series of semi-structured interviews with top investigative
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journalists (N = 12), we seek to answer two questions: How have they coped with the murder of their colleague? And, how has this incident changed their everyday journalistic practices and routines when it comes to achieving and maintaining safety? We identified 12 coping actions which, based on their function, were organised into five higher order families of coping: emotional purging; sharing and support seeking; avoidance and displacement; defiance and defence; and spreading the legacy and giving meaning to the tragedy. Regarding safety and security practices, the journalists claim that their approach has fundamentally changed. A variety of measures to stay safe, both online and offline, were adopted both on the organisational and on the individual level. However, many of these measures are not used consistently, mostly because they are not deemed necessary when covering non-sensitive topics, but also because of their impracticality in everyday journalistic work, and sceptical and fatalistic approach of the journalists to safety." (Abstract)
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"Trust in the news has fallen in almost half the countries in our survey, and risen in just seven, partly reversing the gains made at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic. On average, around four in ten of our total sample (42%) say they trust most news most of the time. Finland remains the countr
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y with the highest levels of overall trust (69%), while news trust in the USA has fallen by a further three percentage points and remains the lowest (26%) in our survey.
• Consumption of traditional media, such as TV and print, declined further in the last year in almost all markets (pre-Ukraine invasion), with online and social consumption not making up the gap. While the majority remain very engaged, others are turning away from the news media and in some cases disconnecting from news altogether. Interest in news has fallen sharply across markets, from 63% in 2017 to 51% in 2022.
• Meanwhile, the proportion of news consumers who say they avoid news, often or sometimes, has increased sharply across countries. This type of selective avoidance has doubled in both Brazil (54%) and the UK (46%) over the last five years, with many respondents saying news has a negative effect on their mood. A significant proportion of younger and less educated people say they avoid news because it can be hard to follow or understand – suggesting that the news media could do much more to simplify language and better explain or contextualise complex stories.
• In the five countries we surveyed after the war in Ukraine had begun, we find that television news is relied on most heavily – with countries closest to the fighting, such as Germany and Poland, seeing the biggest increases in consumption. Selective news avoidance has, if anything, increased further – likely due to the difficult and depressing nature of the coverage.
• Global concerns about false and misleading information remain stable this year, ranging from 72% in Kenya and Nigeria to just 32% in Germany and 31% in Austria. People say they have seen more false information about Coronavirus than about politics in most countries, but the situation is reversed in Turkey, Kenya, and the Philippines, amongst others." (Summary, page 10)
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"We sought to better understand Russia's disinformation on social media and generate recommendations to better meet and counter this evolving threat. We relied on an analysis of Russian military literature, investigative efforts, official reports, academic and policy literature, media reporting, and
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expert interviews. We also conducted a case study in Ukraine, interviewing a variety of key experts in the Ukrainian government and in the nongovernmental sector who are involved in confronting Russian information warfare." (Summary)
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"This thematic issue asks about the role of religions and religious actors and conspiracy theories/theorists in democratic and authoritarian regimes in general. Special attention is given to the current Covid]19 pandemic, since the relevant state of emergency obviously endorses the persuasiveness
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of conspiracy theories and makes the comparison with religions necessary. In this respect, the challenges religious prejudices and conspiracy myths imply could even shed light on the problem of whether democracy or authoritarianism is the best regime to fight the Coronavirus successfully. The articles at hand answer these issues from interdisciplinary areas, particularly from political science, sociology, social psychology, and history." (Editorial, page 132)
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"This book reveals the value and significance of pirate radio, with a special focus on local radio stations that broadcast illegally in Poland in the early 90s. It shows that many of them, like in other countries from the region, began as non-commercial, community-oriented initiatives. Several sourc
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es of information were used to maximize the potential of the study, especially documents gathered from public institutions, press articles, interviews with radio representatives, and decision-makers who influenced the shape of the broadcasting system. The analysis of these sources supports the conclusion that, although the pirates left a lasting legacy, they lost out in the licensed regime driven by market logic." (Publisher description)
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