Free culture communities support self-learning, peer production, and the distribution of knowledge generated without any restrictions. However, free culture communities are not isolated from the social inequalities of the outside world. Understanding (in)visibility as the (in)ability to address internal under-representation within these communities, this research aims to analyse their member profiles and their perception of this issue. To this end, an online questionnaire was administered to 290 communities and interviews were conducted with members of 37 of these previously surveyed communities. The respondents and interviewees acknowledged that technopolitics requires a broad knowledge of the technical implications of their values, which makes access to and participation in a community more difficult. They also criticised the gender bias of their communities and, last but not least, pointed to other inequalities relating to the sexual orientation, socioeconomic level, or ethnic origin of the members of their communities.
La investigación sobre la conversación política online ha estado muy influenciada por la teoría deliberativa, como resultado del optimismo depositado originalmente en Internet para revolucionar la política. Sin embargo, dos décadas de investigación empírica señalan que estas interacciones comunicativas informales difícilmente se parecen a los ideales deliberativos. En este estudio exploramos si internautas de Facebook que comparten posturas ideológicas presentan una mayor probabilidad de a) justificar sus puntos de vista y b) interactuar entre ellos. Aplicamos el análisis de contenido a una muestra de 2.800 comentarios publicados en los muros de los cuatro principales partidos españoles durante las Elecciones Generales de 2015. Los resultados muestran que la homofilia se relaciona negativamente con la argumentación y la interacción comunicativa. Es el electorado de otras organizaciones quien con más probabilidad razona sus opiniones, mientras que aquellos con puntos de vista neutros son más proclives a la interacción.
COVID-19 has generated a social crisis that has required the production of vast amounts of information of various types, including medical. In this scenario, hoaxes and fake news about health issues have also increased, encouraging disobedience of lockdown restrictions and opposition to vaccination against the disease. At the same time, because of their structure and functioning, social media networks have facilitated the production and distribution of such false information. YouTube has also been identified as a source of medical information including COVID-19 hoaxes. This research focusses on an analysis of a video viewing network on YouTube to trace the connection between various videos recommended on the platform and determine the content of the videos that compose that network. To achieve this, we carry out a content analysis supported by specialised software to extract and analyse the videos. The results reveal a limited network of videos about COVID-19, strongly related to each other. Its amateur aesthetic stands out, as well as the frequent appearance of certain personalities who, as opinion leaders in a scenario of the delegitimization of traditional institutions, become catalysts for hoaxes and fake news that call for civil disobedience and, sometimes, show links with the extreme right.
As fake news elicits an emotional response from users, whose attention is then monetised, political advertising has a significant influence on its production and dissemination. Facebook ads, therefore, have an essential role in contemporary political communication, not only because of their extensive use in international political campaigns, but also because they address intriguing questions about the regulation of disinformation on social networking sites. This research employs a corpus of 14,684 Facebook ads published by the major national political parties during their campaigns leading up to the two Spanish general elections held in 2019. A manual content analysis was performed on all the visually identical ads so as to identify those containing disinformation and those denouncing it. The topics addressed in these ads were then examined. The results show that the political parties’ Facebook ad strategies were akin to those of conventional advertising. Disinformation messages were infrequent and mainly posted by Ciudadanos and VOX. Nonetheless, it is striking that the main topic addressed in the ads was the unity of Spain—precisely the issue of Catalonia’s independence. In light of this, it can be deduced that ‘traditional’ parties are taking longer to renounce classical forms of campaigning than their ‘new’ counterparts, thus demonstrating that the actors implementing disinformation strategies are not only restricted to the extreme right of the ideological spectrum.
Disinformation is a communicative phenomenon that frequently feeds on political or electoral topics, as well as other aspects of our reality. This research takes as a case study the coverage given by the Spanish digital media to a hoax broadcast during the Filomena storm in 2021 that insisted that the snow was plastic. The purpose of this work is to analyze the instrumentalization of fake information as an expression of the information media crisis in the current context of disinformation. We set out four specific objectives: (SO1) to study the spread of the hoax through the media, (SO2) to analyze the construction of headlines in the news pieces, (SO3) to investigate the treatment of the hoax in the content of the pieces, and (SO4) to analyze the sources used in the pieces. To reflect on this phenomenon, we propose a three-dimensional model (structural, economic, and pragmatic) aimed at clarifying the relationship between the logic of the spread of hoaxes on the Internet and the role played by traditional media in their diffusion. The methodology used combines workflow techniques of digital methods with quantitative and content analyses. The results reveal the appropriation of certain communication strategies by digital newspapers aimed at obtaining visits. We conclude that the Spanish media, by adapting to the dynamics of disinformation irresponsibly encouraged by the attention economy, subscribe to and reinforce the crisis of credibility faced by the media ecosystem.
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