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I Know What You Mean: Information Compensation in an Authoritarian Country

Jiangnan Zhu, Chengli Wang

International Journal of Press/Politics, volume 26, issue 3 (2020), pp. 587-608

"How do people address information deficiency caused by rigid control of information in authoritarian regimes? We argue that there exists an internally oriented information compensation approach through which people can glean extra information from official messages domestically. This approach does ... more

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Pillars of Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State (2020), 76 pp.

"Russia has operationalized the concept of perpetual adversarial competition in the information environment by encouraging the development of a disinformation and propaganda ecosystem that allows for varied and overlapping approaches that reinforce each other even when individual messages within the ... system appear contradictory. This ecosystem reflects both the sources of disinformation and propaganda—official government statements, state-funded media outlets, proxy websites, bots, false social media personas, cyber-enabled disinformation operations, etc.—and the different tactics that these channels use. Russia’s willingness to employ this approach provides it with three perceived advantages. First, it allows for the introduction of numerous variations of the same false narratives. This allows for the different pillars of the ecosystem to fine tune their disinformation narratives to suit different target audiences because there is no need for consistency, as there would be with attributed government communications. Second, it provides plausible deniability for Kremlin officials when proxy sites peddle blatant and dangerous disinformation, allowing them to deflect criticism while still introducing pernicious information. Third, it creates a media multiplier effect among the different pillars of the ecosystem that boost their reach and resonance. The media multiplier effect can, at times, create disinformation storms with potentially dangerous effects for those Russia perceives as adversaries at the international, national, and local level. In the past, Russia has leveraged this dynamic to shield itself from criticism for its involvement in malign activity. This approach also allows Russia to be opportunistic, such as with COVID-19, where it has used the global pandemic as a hook to push longstanding disinformation and propaganda narratives [...] This report provides a visual representation of the ecosystem described above, as well as an example of the media multiplier effect it enables. This serves to demonstrate how the different pillars of the ecosystem play distinct roles and feed off of and bolster each other. The report also includes brief profiles of select proxy sites and organizations that occupy an intermediate role between the pillars of the ecosystem with clear links to Russia and those that are meant to be fully deniable." (Pages 5-7) more

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Media Capture

Russian Analytical Digest, issue 258 (2020), 16 pp.

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From repression to oppression: News journalism in Turkey 2013–2018

Stefanie Pukallus, Lisa Bradley, Sarah Clarke, Jackie Harrison

Media, Culture & Society, volume 42, issue 7-8 (2020), pp. 1443-1460

"The political context for practicing free and independent journalism has always been challenging in Turkey and ever more so after the failed coup d’état of 2016. This article examines and analyzes the changes brought about by this failed coup d’état in terms of their civil, legal, and politic ... more

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Das ist keine Propaganda: Wie unsere Wirklichkeit zertrümmert wird

Peter Pomerantsev

Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb), Sonderausg. (2020), 295 pp.

"Auf der ganzen Welt nutzen unterschiedlichste Akteure die Wirkungsmechanismen der digitalen Medien aus, um durch gezielte Desinformationskampagnen die öffentliche Meinung zu beeinflussen. Dies, so lautet die zentrale These von Peter Pomerantsev, bedrohe Demokratien und Demokratisierungsprozesse. W ... more

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Subversion im Cyberraum: Sicherheit, Freiheit und Resilienz gegen Angriffe im Netz

Andreas Heinemann-Grüder, Johannes Wiggen

Stuttgart: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) (2020), 59 pp.

"Die technischen Möglichkeiten der Cyberwelt haben gänzlich neue Potenziale zur Beeinflussung von politischen Präferenzen in anderen Staaten eröffnet. Die Meinungsbildung in offenen Gesellschaften wird zunehmend durch subversive Maßnahmen autoritärer Regime im Internet beeinflusst, wodurch der ... more

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Retweeting Through the Great Firewall: A Persistent and Undeterred Threat Actor

Jacob Wallis, Tom Uren, Elise Thomas, Albert Zhang, Samantha Hoffman, Lin Li, Alex Pascoe, Danielle Cave

Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), International Cyber Policy Centre (2020), 56 pp.

"This report analyses a persistent, large-scale influence campaign linked to Chinese state actors on Twitter and Facebook. This activity largely targeted Chinese-speaking audiences outside of the Chinese mainland (where Twitter is blocked) with the intention of influencing perceptions on key issues, ... more

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Social Media in Egypt: Impacts on Civil Society, Violent Extremism & Government Control

Sabine Shyre

Tokyo: Toda Peace Institute (2019), 7 pp.

"Throughout this policy brief, we vet the use of social media in a major Middle Eastern country - Egypt - where the youth took to the streets to express frustrations that lasted almost a lifetime. While social media helped topple autocratic dictator, Hosni Mubarak, it played the role of Pandora’s ... more

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Venezuela’s 21st Century Authoritarianism in the Digital Sphere

Iria Puyosa

Tokyo: Toda Peace Institute (2019), 14 pp.

"This policy brief summarises extensive information on digital rights violations and politically motivated information disorders affecting Venezuelans, principally social media users. The brief focuses on the conflict dynamic between an authoritarian government and those fighting for re-democratisat ... more

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China's Pursuit of a New World Media Order
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Cédric Alviani

Paris: Reporters Without Borders (2019), 51 pp.

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Citizens and Condemnation: Strategic Uses of International Human Rights Pressure in Authoritarian States

Jamie J. Gruffydd-Jones

Comparative Political Studies, volume 52, issue 4 (2019), pp. 579-612

"Governments with strict control over the information that their citizens hear from foreign sources are regular targets of human rights pressure, but we know little about how this information matters in the domestic realm. I argue that authoritarian regimes strategically pass on certain types of ext ... more

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The Psychology of State-Sponsored Disinformation Campaigns and Implications for Public Diplomacy

Erik C. Nisbet, Olga Kamenchuk

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, volume 14, issue 1/2 (2019), pp. 65-82

"Policy discourse about disinformation focuses heavily on the technological dimensions of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Unfortunately, this myopic focus on technology has led to insufficient attention being paid to the underlying human factors driving the success of state-sponsored disin ... more

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Social Media in China

Wenbo Kuang

Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan (2018), xxii, 293 pp.

"Redefining the concept of new media in China, this cutting edge book discusses the impact of social media on Chinese public life. Examining its characteristics and the different forms of social media, such as internet and mobile phone media, weibo, wechat and micro-blogging, it considers how public ... more

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Cyber China: Upgrading Propaganda, Public Opinion Work and Social Management for the Twenty-First Century

Rogier Creemers

Journal of Contemporary China, volume 26, issue 103 (2017), pp. 85-100

"The first two years of the Xi Jinping administration saw a thorough reconfiguration of Internet governance. This reconfiguration created a centralized and integrated institutional framework for information technologies, in support of an ambitious agenda to place digital technologies at the heart of ... more

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Anticipating the Struggle against Everyday Impunity in Myanmar through Accounts from Bangladesh and Thailand

Nick Cheesman, Bina D'Costa, T. Haberkorn

Asia & The Pacific Policy Studies, volume 3, issue 1 (2016), pp. 48-61

"Work done internationally to address impunity concentrates on removing blanket amnesties and establishing commissions of inquiry into past atrocities. Everyday impunity—the impossibility of bringing state officers to account for routinized violent crimes against other individuals—gets less atte ... more

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Stifling the Public Sphere: Media and Civil Society in Egypt

Sherif Mansour

Washington, DC: National Endowment for Democracy (NED);International Forum for Democratic Studies (2015), 16 pp.

"Egypt’s plummeting press freedom is in part a result of the many ways in which the state can put pressure on independent media under Egyptian law. While the January 2014 constitution contains clear protections for the media (including, under Article 71, bans on censorship and surveillance), many ... more

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Press Censorship in Turkey: Networks of State Power, Commercial Pressures, and Self-Censorship

Bilge Yesil

Communication, Culture & Critique, volume 7, issue 2 (2014), pp. 154-173

"This article explores the suppression of press freedoms in Turkey under the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government in the late 2000s. Drawing upon analyses of laws and legislation, surveys, reports, and interviews with journalists, it demonstrates how press censorship in Turkey has been act ... more

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Out of Control: Palestinian News Satire and Government Power in the Age of Social Media

Matt Sienkiewicz

Popular Communication, volume 10, issue 1-2 (2012), pp. 106-118

"This article analyzes the Palestinian sketch comedy show Watan Ala Watar, placing the groundbreaking program in the context of theories of satire, government control, and popular resistance. Detailing the show’s tumultuous relationship with the Palestinian Authority, the article argues that despi ... more

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Media Policy Paradigm Shift in Turkey: Rethinking Neo-Authoritarian Media Systems in the Age of Neo Liberalism

Serhat Ahmet Kaymas

Acta Universitatis Danubius. Communicatio, volume 5, issue 1 (2011), pp. 40-69

"This article has aimed to open a discussion on the rethinking a neo authoritarian media system in the age of neo liberalism as a case of Turkey’s media experiences. In this context, this study deals with the media policy paradigm shift in the Republic of Turkey since 1980s. According to a recent ... report of the European Journalism Centre (2010:4); although in the wake of a recent democratization wave in the country, there have been some positive elements in the media such as sporadic emergence of some critical perspectives even in some notoriously biased media outlets, which may change this bleak picture, the structural factors which shape the media practices (ownership concentration, working conditions of the journalist, etc) are too rigid and therefore it is too early to become optimistic. In this context, some aspects of these democratization processes are taken from the candidacy of European Union. Despite these positive developments in the doorstep of the European Union, Turkey’s media experience is heavily based on ownership structure and journalistic routines are far away from the democratic media system. Therefore, Turkey’s media experiences are characterised as a sample of neo authoritarian media system with ongoing media policy transformations, for instance privatization of media companies as much as possible, breaking monopolies and the fundamental change of the public broadcasting service is in the context of media policy. This observable change depends on the two overlapping development in Turkey’s democracy. On the one hand, the landscape of national media spaces has been affected by the political and economical conditions; especially after the two financial crashes (in 2000 and 2001) Turkey’s media has followed a re-structure by means of ownership and control. On the other hand, Turkey’s media experiences have been affected by governmental changes. Before the economic crises Turkey’s democracy was governed by a coalition and after the economic crises Turkey’s government changed by the national elections in 2002. Thus this article seeks to answer two interrelated questions: Where does press freedom stand in Turkey decades after the Justice and Development Party’s policies began? And what does Turkey’s media transformation tell us about our understanding of mass political media systems? In this study by using comparative analysis, and incorporating political science literature that offers typologies of non democratic systems of governance, this article demonstrates that contemporary Turkey’s media find much in common with authoritarian regimes across the world and are not sui generis as some have argued." (Abstract) more

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Totalitarian Communication: Hierarchies, Codes and Messages

Kirill Postoutenko (ed.)

Bielefeld: transcript (2010), 316 pp.

China's Pursuit of a New World Media Order Top Insights

China's Pursuit of a New World Media Order
Top Insights