M Bastos
Biographic Data
| ID | 30429 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Bastos |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Bastos |
| SIGNATURE | BASTOS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0480-1078 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 201 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Selling War at Home and Abroad: The Dual Objective of State Media Propaganda in the Russo-Ukrainian War
This study examines how authoritarian regimes set conflicting domestic and foreign propaganda agenda during wartime to ensure domestic unity and engage international audiences. We posit that authoritarian regimes relying on public support for legitimacy attempt to keep domestic opinion onside by emphasizing the high stakes and low costs of war, thereby ensuring that dissent against the conflict does not threaten the regime. Foreign audiences, on …
Meta’s 3pfc Speech Governance: An Inquiry Into the Fact-Checking Content Moderation Infrastructure
Social media play a pivotal role in managing the environments where political debate and public deliberation occur, and therefore must contend with the targets set by official bodies and policymakers to ward off harmful speech and mis/disinformation in their platforms. However, little is known about the criteria applied by social platforms’ content moderation infrastructure to address problematic information. This paper examines the speech govern…
The Emergence of the Shallow State and the Capturing of Twitter
Introduction: A Shift Toward the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ In 2007, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and Noah Glass launched Twitter as a platform for open and public conversations. In 2022, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and founder of The Boring Company, acquired Twitter for forty-four billion dollars. Musk transformed Twitter into X, which we argue has evolved into a component of a greater surveillance assemblage and an ideological tool for…
Between disclosure and conspiracy: The transparency effect on r/UFO and r/UAP subreddits
While there exists genuine scientific inquiry seeking to understand Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), the lore of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) is deeply intertwined with narratives deliberately crafted to mislead, obfuscate, and manipulate public perception with a community historically targeted by sustained disinformation campaigns. In this study, we explore the public reception regarding UAP disclosures against the historical conte…
The News Feed is Not a Black Box: A Longitudinal Study of Facebook’s Algorithmic Treatment of News
This study examines the effects of a series of significant algorithm changes within Facebook’s News Feed on user engagement with news content on the platform between 2011-2020. By tracking public announcements, industry research, and leaks to the press, we constructed a timeline of algorithm changes and collected data on 1 million news articles from The Guardian over the 10-year period, alongside their associated Facebook engagement metrics (like…
Controversies, Problematic Information, and Polarisation: Case Studies Across Six Countries
Political trends around the world have drawn further scholarly attention to the study of polarisation, especially also as it is expressed and potentially deepened by public communication on digital and social media platforms. The very concept of polarisation itself, however, remains ill-defined especially in communication research, where it is often used as a mere buzzword without sufficient definition – even in spite of a wide range of conceptua…
Behind the Enemy News: Issue salience in the Russo-Ukrainian War
Agenda-setting theory and warfare studies hold that setting the national agenda is strategically advantageous to foreign policy goals. We probe this theory on the RussoUkrainian War by analyzing the conflicting agenda set by RIA Novosti, RT Russian, RT International, BBC News Russian, and BBC News from February 2022 to July 2023. In contrast to previous work that identified press coverage misalignment to be largely concentrated in the framing of …
The chat-chamber effect: Trusting the AI hallucination
This study investigates the potential for ChatGPT to trigger a media effect that sits at the intersection of echo-chamber communication and filter bubbles. We devised a two-phase, two-stage experimental design with ChatGPT 3.5 (treatment group) and Google search engine (control group) by asking participants to find out how many LGBTQIA+ individuals served as elected representatives in India (first phase) and Ireland (second phase). The similar tr…
Visual Identities in Troll Farms: The Twitter Moderation Research Consortium
The Twitter Moderation Research Consortium is a database of network propaganda and influence operations that includes 115,474 unique Twitter accounts, millions of tweets, and over one terabyte of media removed from the platform between 2017 and 2022. We probe this database using Google's Vision API and Keras with TensorFlow to test whether foreign influence operations can be identified based on the visual presentation of fake user profiles emphas…
Indifferent About Online Traffic: The Posting Strategies of Five News Outlets During Musk’s Acquisition of Twitter
This study examines the publication strategies of legacy news outlets on Twitter following the company’s acquisition by Elon Musk. We used SCImago Media Rankings to identify the news organizations with the highest online audiences, namely The Guardian, The New York Times, USA Today, The Independent, and The Washington Post. Data was acquired through the Twitter Academic API v2 and the SEMrush platform at the beginning of 2023 and covers all of 20…
Forty Thousand Fake Twitter Profiles: A Computational Framework for the Visual Analysis of Social Media Propaganda
Successful disinformation campaigns depend on the availability of fake social media profiles used for coordinated inauthentic behavior with networks of false accounts including bots, trolls, and sockpuppets. This study presents a scalable and unsupervised framework to identify visual elements in user profiles strategically exploited in nearly 60 influence operations, including camera angle, photo composition, gender, and race, but also more conte…
The Weird Governance of Fact-Checking: From Watchdogs to Content Moderators
In this work, we chart the multiple conflicts between stakeholders in the pursuit of a common standard for fact-checking outside Western Industrialized Educated Rich and Educated (WEIRD) countries, a problem that sits at the center of the institutional mission of fact-checkers as watchdogs of politicians and enforcers of content moderation. We apply reflexive thematic analysis to a set of interviews with 37 fact-checking experts from 35 organizat…
The Toxic Turn? Conceptual and Methodological Advances on Problematic Contents on Social Media
The ‘toxic turn’ in social media platforms continues unabated. Hate speech, mis- and disinformation, misogynistic and racist speech, images, memes and videos are all far too common on social media platforms and more broadly on the internet. While the diminishing popularity of populist politicians led to hopes for less social toxicity, the Covid-19 pandemic introduced new and more complex dimensions. Tensions have emerged around what constitutes p…
The Insurrectionist Playbook: Jair Bolsonaro and the National Congress of Brazil
In this paper we unpack the 2022 Brazilian Presidential campaign marked by multiple claims of electoral fraud and support for a coup d’état by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. We identify the narrative frames underpinning the insurrectionist playbook by analyzing Bolsonaro’s statements during the presidential campaign. We subsequently test the penetration of this playbook on members of the Brazilian National Congress during the camp…
When Fact-Checking Is Not Weird: Challenges in Fact-Checking Beyond the Western World
Fact-checking has rapidly achieved a pivotal role in regulating the public debate globally. Reports show that the fact-checking industry is becoming more diverse, operating across more cultures and languages of recent. However, literature on fact-checking beyond the West is still forthcoming, as empirical research is disproportionally focused on the US. In this paper, we seek to catalog the many different forms of organizing and implementing fact…
Auditing Facebook Algorithms: The Elapsed Effects of Facebook News Feed to Engagement With Guardian Articles
In this paper, a proof-of-concept study is performed to validate the algorithmic auditing of Facebook News Feed. We tracked and documented public or otherwise known changes to the algorithms through Facebook public announcements, industry research, and information leaked to the press to parametrize a model that accounts for the variation in user engagement with Guardian news articles. To this end, we queried the Guardian API to collate a database…
Local News as Propaganda: Precarization and Media Control in Qinghai News
In this paper we report on the challenges that Chinese local news outlets face in the absence of independent newspapers and radio stations, the underfunding and under-training of journalists, and the effective use of digital-only local news outlets for state propaganda. To this end, we carried out in-depth interviews with 20 staff members, including department heads, editors, and journalists from Qinghai News, the local news outlet in the Chinese…
When Fact-Checking Is Not Weird: Negotiating Consensus Outside Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic Countries
This study unpacks the emerging framework of detection, verification, and correction of falsehoods developed by fact-checkers outside Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries. We explore a series of semistructured interviews carried out in several languages with thirty-seven fact-checking experts from thirty-five organizations in twenty-seven countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Our findings e…
The Weird governance of fact-checking and the politics of content moderation
In this article, we chart the conflicting standards of fact-checking outside Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries that shifted their focus from holding politicians to account to acting as content moderators. We apply reflexive thematic analysis to a set of interviews with 37 fact-checking experts from 35 organizations in 27 countries to catalog the pressures they face and their struggle with tasks that are inc…
Meaningful disinformation: Narrative rituals and affective folktales
In this article, we review the epistemological boundaries of disinformation studies and argue that they are informed by network and transmission models where the unit of analysis (i.e., disinformation) is assumed to follow contagion growth patterns typical of population models. This framework reduces disinformation to a behavioral problem that downplays the participatory and ritualistic dimension of disinformation, which we argue cannot be reduce…
The Insurrectionist Playbook: Jair Bolsonaro and the National Congress of Brazil
This study unpacks the 2022 Brazilian Presidential campaign marked by multiple claims of electoral fraud and calls for a coup d'état by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. We identify the narrative frames underpinning this insurrectionist playbook by analyzing Bolsonaro's statements during the presidential campaign. We subsequently test the penetration of this playbook on members of the Brazilian National Congress during the campaign t…
Fact-Checking Misinformation: Eight Notes on Consensus Reality
In this study we review the literature on fact-checking and the empirical evidence contending that it can correct prior knowledge and successfully debunk misinformation. We caution against the oversized expectation of policymakers that fact-checks can ward off misinformation and outline eight fundamental problems revolving around epistemology, implementation, bias, efficacy, ambiguity, objectivity, ephemerality, and criticism. We discuss these sh…
Guy Next Door and Implausibly Attractive Young Women: The Visual Frames of Social Media Propaganda
This study introduces a mixed-methods approach to classifying the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five key propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), including Russian and American partisan groups. We manually coded profile images and subsequently applied qualitative and quantitative processing to the images. The visual motifs identified in IRA Twitt…
The Limits of Fact Checking: Eight Notes on Consensus Reality
In this study, we review the literature on fact-checking and the empirical evidence contending that it can correct prior knowledge and false information. We posit that the growing fact-checking industry is detached from the mis – disinformation landscape and outline eight fundamental problems with fact-checking revolving around epistemology, implementation, bias, efficacy, ambiguity, objectivity, ephemerality, and criticism. We discuss these shor…
From Global Village to Identity Tribes: Context Collapse and the Darkest Timeline
In this article we trace the development of two narratives describing social media that informed much of internet scholarship. One draws from McLuhan’s axiom positing that communication networks would bring forth a ‘global village,’ a deliberate contradiction in terms to foreground the seamless integration of villages into a global community. Social media would shrink the world and reshape it into a village by moving information instantaneously f…
The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News
In this article, we uncover a network of Twitterbots comprising 13,493 accounts that tweeted the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ballot. We compare active users to this set of political bots with respect to temporal tweeting behavior, the size and speed of retweet cascades, and the composition of their retweet cascades (user-to-bot vs. bot-to-bot) to evidence strategies for bot…
Gatekeeping Twitter: Message Diffusion in Political Hashtags
This article explores the structure of gatekeeping in Twitter by means of a statistical analysis of the political hashtags #FreeIran, #FreeVenezuela and #Jan25, each of which reached the top position in Twitter Trending Topics. We performed a statistical correlation analysis on nine variables of the dataset to evaluate if message replication in Twitter political hashtags was correlated with network topology. Our results suggest an alternative sce…
Shares, Pins, and Tweets: News readership from daily papers to social media
This paper compares the volume of news articles per section in newspapers and social media platforms. To this end, two weeks of news articles were retrieved by querying the public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of The New York Times and The Guardian and the diffusion of each article on social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon, was tracked. The results show significant differences in the t…
Serial activists: Political Twitter beyond influentials and the twittertariat
This article introduces a group of politically charged Twitter users that deviates from elite and ordinary users. After mining 20 M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest from 2009 to 2013, we identified a network of individuals tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags and revisited the term “serial activists.” We contacted 191 individuals and conducted 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews thematically coded…
Donald Trump Is My President: The Internet Research Agency Propaganda Machine
This article presents a typological study of the Twitter accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a company specialized in online influence operations based in St. Petersburg, Russia. Drawing on concepts from 20th-century propaganda theory, we modeled the IRA operations along propaganda classes and campaign targets. The study relies on two historical databases and data from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to retrieve 826 us…
Fact-Checking Misinformation: Eight Notes on Consensus Reality
In this study we review the literature on fact-checking and the empirical evidence contending that it can correct prior knowledge and successfully debunk misinformation. We caution against the oversized expectation of policymakers that fact-checks can ward off misinformation and outline eight fundamental problems revolving around epistemology, implementation, bias, efficacy, ambiguity, objectivity, ephemerality, and criticism. We discuss these sh…
Camera Trap Observations of Nonhabituated Critically Endangered Wild Blonde Capuchins, Sapajus flavius (Formerly Cebus flavius)
The Weird governance of fact-checking and the politics of content moderation
In this article, we chart the conflicting standards of fact-checking outside Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries that shifted their focus from holding politicians to account to acting as content moderators. We apply reflexive thematic analysis to a set of interviews with 37 fact-checking experts from 35 organizations in 27 countries to catalog the pressures they face and their struggle with tasks that are inc…
Hashtags Functions in the Protests Across Brazil
In this article, we discuss the communicative functions of hashtags during a period of major social protests in Brazil. Drawing from a theoretical background of the use of Twitter and hashtags in protests and the functions of language, we extracted a sample of 46,090 hashtags from 2,321,249 tweets related to Brazilian protests in June 2013. We analyzed the hashtags through content analysis, focusing on functions, and co-occurrences. We also quali…
Guy next door and implausibly attractive young women: The visual frames of social media propaganda
This study combines data analysis with multilevel processing of visual communication to classify the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency, including Russian and American partisan groups, and explored how their operations deviated from canonical state propaganda marked by symbols of national identity and heroic masc…
Being a Serial Transnational Activist: Serial Transnational Activism
Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world's powerbrokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border-spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a dataset of 2.5 million unique Twitter users, we identified a subset of exceptionally prolific communicators and interviewed 21 of t…
When Fact-Checking Is Not Weird: Negotiating Consensus Outside Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic Countries
This study unpacks the emerging framework of detection, verification, and correction of falsehoods developed by fact-checkers outside Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries. We explore a series of semistructured interviews carried out in several languages with thirty-seven fact-checking experts from thirty-five organizations in twenty-seven countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Our findings e…
Robustness and the Paradox of Bridging Organizations: The Exit Problem in Regional Water Governance Networks in Central America
Bridging organizations facilitate a range of governance processes, including cooperation and social learning, and are theorized to be a key component of robust governance systems. In this article, we use node removal simulations to test structural hypotheses of robustness in a regional water governance network in Central America. We investigate the response of network measures supporting core governance processes to the targeted removal of bridgi…
Persistent Activist Communication in Occupy Gezi
We revisit the notion of activist persistence against the backdrop of protest communication on Twitter. We take an event-based approach and examine Occupy Gezi, a series of protests that occurred in Turkey in the early summer of 2013. By cross-referencing survey data with longitudinal Twitter data and in-depth interviews, we investigate the relationship between biographical availability, relational and organisational ties, and social and personal…
The Insurrectionist Playbook: Jair Bolsonaro and the National Congress of Brazil
This study unpacks the 2022 Brazilian Presidential campaign marked by multiple claims of electoral fraud and calls for a coup d'état by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. We identify the narrative frames underpinning this insurrectionist playbook by analyzing Bolsonaro's statements during the presidential campaign. We subsequently test the penetration of this playbook on members of the Brazilian National Congress during the campaign t…
The chat-chamber effect: Trusting the AI hallucination
This study investigates the potential for ChatGPT to trigger a media effect that sits at the intersection of echo-chamber communication and filter bubbles. We devised a two-phase, two-stage experimental design with ChatGPT 3.5 (treatment group) and Google search engine (control group) by asking participants to find out how many LGBTQIA+ individuals served as elected representatives in India (first phase) and Ireland (second phase). The similar tr…
Forty Thousand Fake Twitter Profiles: A Computational Framework for the Visual Analysis of Social Media Propaganda
Successful disinformation campaigns depend on the availability of fake social media profiles used for coordinated inauthentic behavior with networks of false accounts including bots, trolls, and sockpuppets. This study presents a scalable and unsupervised framework to identify visual elements in user profiles strategically exploited in nearly 60 influence operations, including camera angle, photo composition, gender, and race, but also more conte…
Meaningful disinformation: Narrative rituals and affective folktales
In this article, we review the epistemological boundaries of disinformation studies and argue that they are informed by network and transmission models where the unit of analysis (i.e., disinformation) is assumed to follow contagion growth patterns typical of population models. This framework reduces disinformation to a behavioral problem that downplays the participatory and ritualistic dimension of disinformation, which we argue cannot be reduce…
This Account Doesn't Exist: Tweet Decay and the Politics of Deletion in the Brexit Debate
Literature on influence operations has identified metrics that are indicative of social media manipulation, but few studies have explored the lifecycle of low-quality information. We contribute to this literature by reconstructing nearly 3 million messages posted by 1 million users in the last days of the Brexit referendum campaign. While previous studies have found that on average only 4% of tweets disappear, we found that 33% of the tweets lead…
The Imped Model: Detecting Low-Quality Information in Social Media
This article introduces a model for detecting low-quality information we refer to as the Index of Measured-diversity, Partisan-certainty, Ephemerality, and Domain (IMPED). The model purports that low-quality information is characterized by ephemerality, as opposed to quality content that is designed for permanence. The IMPED model leverages linguistic and temporal patterns in the content of social media messages and linked webpages to estimate a …
Public Opinion Revisited: The propagation of opinions in digital networks
The aim of this article is to discuss the propagation of opinions expressed on the Internet (digital media matrix) in view of a historical development of public opinion. In order to address that, the article examines the debate concerning public opinion based on the works of Walter Lippmann (1961), Niklas Luhmann (1997; 2000; 2005), Jürgen Habermas (1991; 1997) and Dirk Baecker (2004), whereas the concept of a digital media matrix is discussed to…
Internet Dynamics and the Theory of Social Systems
This article presents a Luhmannian perspective of the internet. The first section summarizes the contributions of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and outlines the theoretical boundaries between the theory of social systems and that of media studies. The second section addresses the Internet and offers some preliminary concepts, derived from a social system’s perspective, to understand this medium as an autopoietic system. This section will desc…
Entreaberto-Entrefechado: Herança maldita do conceito de comunicação
This paper discusses a debate that is common in the social sciences and in philosophy, but has not yet received an adequate treatment in the field of communication. This is the debate about the opening and the closure of consciousness and of systems, which is an epistemological attitude that underlies the concept of communication, notwithstanding the lack of a theoretical foundation. The paper deals with that debate by means of Niklas Luhmann’s t…
Transmission, commnion, communicaation
O livro Communication as culture: essays on media and society é um clássico da escola de comunicação americana, reeditado em 2009 pela Routledge na ocasião da morte do autor. A nova edição conta com um prefácio de G. Stuart Adam e explica o papel essencial que James Carey teve na consolidação do campo da comunicação nos Estados Unidos, especialmente no combate à redução da pesquisa em comunicação a funções de controle social e político. O livro s…
The diver and the surfer
Os Superficiais: O Que a Internet Está Fazendo com os Nossos Cérebros analisa o impacto cultural e intelectual da Internet nos usuários. Nicholas Carr baseia-se em pesquisas neurológicas que contrastam os circuitos neuronais dos leitores de livros com aqueles forjados pelo uso da Internet para embasar a tese de que as tecnologias que utilizamos para controlar, localizar e armazenar informação literalmente alteram nossos circuitos neuronais, e que…
P1-87 Surveillance of death for women of childbearing age: Experience report
Introduction Since the establishment of policies of humanisation of delivery and to obtain more accurate data on causes of maternal deaths, maternal mortality in Brazil declined. Pregnant women have been given priority in health services. As a result, we started to notice a large number of deaths of women of childbearing age, not pregnant, who now have more difficulty getting care in health services. Objectives To identify the causes of death in …
Public Opinion Revisited: The propagation of opinions in digital networks
The aim of this article is to discuss the propagation of opinions expressed on the Internet (digital media matrix) in view of a historical development of public opinion. In order to address that, the article examines the debate concerning public opinion based on the works of Walter Lippmann (1961), Niklas Luhmann (1997; 2000; 2005), Jürgen Habermas (1991; 1997) and Dirk Baecker (2004), whereas the concept of a digital media matrix is discussed to…
A cultural form for the technological society
O presente artigo reconstrói um debate teórico que permeia as obras de Niklas Luhmann, Dirk Baecker e Vilém Flusser acerca da forma cultural que deverá surgir na sociedade tecnológica. Não obstante a diferença de perspectiva e de orientação epistemológica dos três autores assinalados, suas obras têm em comum o entendimento de que a introdução dos computadores e da internet altera não apenas a cultura, mas também a estrutura material da sociedade.…
Gatekeeping Twitter: Message Diffusion in Political Hashtags
This article explores the structure of gatekeeping in Twitter by means of a statistical analysis of the political hashtags #FreeIran, #FreeVenezuela and #Jan25, each of which reached the top position in Twitter Trending Topics. We performed a statistical correlation analysis on nine variables of the dataset to evaluate if message replication in Twitter political hashtags was correlated with network topology. Our results suggest an alternative sce…
Narrative and violence: The Brazilian Autumn coverage on Twitter
O artigo analisa a cobertura dos protestos que aconteceram no Brasil em Junho de 2013. Para tanto, monitoramos 2282 tweets de dez veículos jornalísticos brasileiros que cobriram os protestos e, através de uma análise de conteúdo, comparamos e identificamos mensagens com enfoque na violência gerada pelos protestos. Também comparamos esse discurso aos dados oficiais divulgados pelos veículos jornalísticos a respeito de mortos, feridos e presos em 2…
Camera Trap Observations of Nonhabituated Critically Endangered Wild Blonde Capuchins, Sapajus flavius (Formerly Cebus flavius)
Shares, Pins, and Tweets: News readership from daily papers to social media
This paper compares the volume of news articles per section in newspapers and social media platforms. To this end, two weeks of news articles were retrieved by querying the public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of The New York Times and The Guardian and the diffusion of each article on social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon, was tracked. The results show significant differences in the t…
Tents, Tweets, and Events: The Interplay Between Ongoing Protests and Social Media
Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this article, we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying Gaussianization to the data, we found contentious communication on Twitter and Facebook forecasted …
Serial activists: Political Twitter beyond influentials and the twittertariat
This article introduces a group of politically charged Twitter users that deviates from elite and ordinary users. After mining 20 M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest from 2009 to 2013, we identified a network of individuals tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags and revisited the term “serial activists.” We contacted 191 individuals and conducted 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews thematically coded…
Hashtags Functions in the Protests Across Brazil
In this article, we discuss the communicative functions of hashtags during a period of major social protests in Brazil. Drawing from a theoretical background of the use of Twitter and hashtags in protests and the functions of language, we extracted a sample of 46,090 hashtags from 2,321,249 tweets related to Brazilian protests in June 2013. We analyzed the hashtags through content analysis, focusing on functions, and co-occurrences. We also quali…
Digital Journalism And Tabloid Journalism
Early incursions into the tabloid genre date from the nineteenth century with experimental publications designed to appeal to popular taste, but it was only during the ensuing century that the term gained specific application to print media. The tabloid press became increasingly specialized in the techniques of connecting reports on consumer products to economics and celebrity gossip to popular culture. The transition from the printed press to on…
Being a Serial Transnational Activist: Serial Transnational Activism
Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world's powerbrokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border-spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a dataset of 2.5 million unique Twitter users, we identified a subset of exceptionally prolific communicators and interviewed 21 of t…
A endogamia da Comunicação: Redes de colaboração na CSAI
O presente artigo analisa e discute as redes de colaboração na área de Ciências Sociais Aplicadas I. Os registros de coautoria e colaborações foram identificados e extraídos da base de dados Lattes do CNPq e análise de redes sociais foi empregada para oferecer um panorama da área, e mais especificamente, dos grupos de colaboração da subárea Comunicação. Os resultados da análise apontam para comunidades formadas pela combinação de diferentes crité…
The Geographic Embedding of Online Echo Chambers: Evidence from the Brexit Campaign
Core-periphery or decentralized? Topological shifts of specialized information on Twitter
The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News
In this article, we uncover a network of Twitterbots comprising 13,493 accounts that tweeted the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ballot. We compare active users to this set of political bots with respect to temporal tweeting behavior, the size and speed of retweet cascades, and the composition of their retweet cascades (user-to-bot vs. bot-to-bot) to evidence strategies for bot…
Parametrizing Brexit: Mapping Twitter political space to parliamentary constituencies
In this paper, a proof of concept study is performed to validate the use of social media signal to model the ideological coordinates underpinning the Brexit debate. We rely on geographically enriched Twitter data and a purpose-built, deep learning algorithm to map the political value space of users tweeting the referendum onto Parliamentary Constituencies. We find a significant incidence of nationalist sentiments and economic views expressed on T…
Robustness and the Paradox of Bridging Organizations: The Exit Problem in Regional Water Governance Networks in Central America
Bridging organizations facilitate a range of governance processes, including cooperation and social learning, and are theorized to be a key component of robust governance systems. In this article, we use node removal simulations to test structural hypotheses of robustness in a regional water governance network in Central America. We investigate the response of network measures supporting core governance processes to the targeted removal of bridgi…
Persistent Activist Communication in Occupy Gezi
We revisit the notion of activist persistence against the backdrop of protest communication on Twitter. We take an event-based approach and examine Occupy Gezi, a series of protests that occurred in Turkey in the early summer of 2013. By cross-referencing survey data with longitudinal Twitter data and in-depth interviews, we investigate the relationship between biographical availability, relational and organisational ties, and social and personal…
The disinformation landscape and the lockdown of social platforms
This introduction to the special issue considers how independent research on mis/disinformation campaigns can be conducted in a corporate environment hostile to academic research. We provide an overview of the disinformation landscape in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and social platforms’ decision to enforce access lockdowns and the throttling of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for data collection. We argue t…
Donald Trump Is My President: The Internet Research Agency Propaganda Machine
This article presents a typological study of the Twitter accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a company specialized in online influence operations based in St. Petersburg, Russia. Drawing on concepts from 20th-century propaganda theory, we modeled the IRA operations along propaganda classes and campaign targets. The study relies on two historical databases and data from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to retrieve 826 us…
Political science (39 works) · Computer Science (34 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Social Media and Politics (27 works) · Law (26 works) · Social media (22 works) · World Wide Web (19 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (17 works) · Politics (17 works) · Media Studies and Communication (16 works)