"Politics and religion are traditionally connected in large democracies, with many examples in the Global South. Recently in Brazil, a specific Bible verse has been assimilated into political expression and amplified by social media: John 8:32 (“And you shall know the truth, and the truth will set
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you free”). In this article, we employ thematic analysis of Twitter1 data referencing this verse, collected during the 2022 Brazilian presidential election. The analysis shows how the verse became symbolic shorthand for a bundle of values associated with political and religious righteousness, reinforcing the connections between conservative politics and religion. Strongly associated with the persona of former president Jair Bolsonaro, the verse wasdeployed by his supporters as a symbolic debunking tool against perceived misinformation but was also used ironically by Bolsonaro’s detractors to criticize the former president. By zooming in on the multifaceted use of this Biblical verse in the online political sphere, this article illuminates the multilayered interconnections between political expression on social media, religion, and misinformation in the context of Brazil." (Abstract)
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"Fruto do Ciclo de Estudos Interdisciplinares da Comunicação, atividade integrante do 45° Congresso Brasileiro de Ciências da Comunicação, a obra reúne pontos de vista convergentes, complementares e antagônicos sobre o tema desinformação. Além de uma versão textual da conferência de abe
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rtura, assinada por Eugênio Bucci, o livro é dividido em três seções, cada uma delas com quatro textos: Ciências da comunicação e da informação no combate à desinformação; Desinformação plataformizada e violações de direitos humanos; e Existe vacina para a desinformação?" (Resumo)
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"Journalists’ reputations are under assault around the world. Among journalists we surveyed, 63% reported at least monthly attacks on their individual reputations — and 19% reported facing them daily. Rates were even higher for attacks on the reputations of their news outlets or the broader news
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media sector. [...] We investigated how widespread reputational attacks contribute to the risks and challenges that journalists face. While there is extensive research on efforts to delegitimize news outlets and journalism — particularly efforts by political leaders — there has been little research that investigates how reputational attacks affect individual journalists’ safety and professional autonomy. With that in mind, we focused on five key questions: 1. How frequently do journalists face attacks on their reputations? 2. What are the forms and sources of these attacks? 3. What are the personal and professional consequences of reputational attacks, including their links to violence and legal repression? 4. How do reputational attacks and their consequences vary for journalists in countries with different press freedom contexts? 5. How do they vary for journalists with different gender, ethnic, racial, or religious identities? To explore these questions, in 2022 we conducted a global survey. It was completed by 645 journalists, who resided in 87 countries, spanning a wide range of press freedom levels. The survey was available in six languages (English, Arabic, French, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish). 42% of survey respondents identified as women and 23.1% identified as belonging to a marginalized racial, ethnic or religious group in their respective countries. We then conducted in-depth follow-up interviews with 54 journalists." (Executive summary, pages 7-8)
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"What might feminist approaches to the protection of journalists look like, and what benefits might they bring? From national organisations to grassroots networks, our findings document women’s monumental efforts to make structural changes, tackle entrenched patterns of gender-based discrimination
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and violence, and enhance the safety of women journalists. The initiatives showcased in these case studies are a testament to the creativity and resilience of those working on the feminist frontlines. The case studies: In 2021, ARTICLE 19 set out to make these sometimes invisible practices more visible, building on our existing programmes on the safety of women journalists worldwide. We undertook original research globally and specifically in six countries – three in Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and three in Latin America (Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay)." (Abstract)
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"Os pesquisadores, ao investigar e publicar, buscam contribuir para a construção de uma sociedade mais justa e franca nas suas relações. Seja por meio das telenovelas, das redes sociais digitais, do jornalismo independente ou do tradicional, reverberamos vozes, ao passo que amplificamos ancestra
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lidades, compreendendo seu papel em nossa formação. O cenário é complexo e sua compreensão demanda ouvir diferentes opiniões para ponderar sobre uma sociedade em constante mutação e apropriação dos canais de informação. Estas novas estruturas são marcadas pela convergência de linguagens e distribuídas das mais diversas formas, concatenadas com diversos canais e em tempo real. O cidadão é um elo em uma cadeia formada por diversos blocos de informação, retransmitidos e remixados. Estes artigos convidam o leitor para uma leitura que demanda a pausa necessária para a compreensão das informações, mas que será realizada junto de anotações tradicionais ou em sistemas de referência para uso em publicações futuras. Além disso, a obra representa a resistência do conhecimento em um momento importante do país. É preciso cada vez mais propagar o conhecimento, utilizando a reflexão para reconectar pessoas em um momento de polarização pelas mais diversas pautas. A alteridade do tempo atual carrega em si conflitos, que serão resolvidos através da empatia e de novas formas de construir um pensamento em sintonia com o porvir." (Descripção casa editorial)
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"Social media platforms are increasingly looked at as means to investigate social phenomena like collective events, issues or causes. Digital methods – techniques exclusively focused on online data and shaped by the environment hosting these data – have become part and parcel of these investigat
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ions, often approaching platforms as hybrid assemblages of users, infrastructures, and algorithms. In its ‘online groundness’, this type of digital methods research, however, often tends to skim over the socio-cultural, contextual dimension of both wider social phenomena and social media uses and practices. In this paper, we advance a threefold contribution aimed at both sparking future efforts to address this limitation and aligning digital methods inquiry with contemporary epistemological debates that counter universalistic views of platforms and data. First, we question the degree to which digital methods can inform social investigations of collective events, issues or causes. Second, we advance a digital methods paradigm that addresses platforms as socio-cultural artifacts rather than hybrid assemblages. Finally, by reflecting on how we accessed, handled, and explored 9,000 Instagram visuals and around 400,000 Facebook comments to understand influences on middle class understandings of food consumption in Brazil and South Africa, we illustrate a way to design culturally sensitive digital methods research built on ‘quanti-quali’ practices." (Abstract)
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"Across markets, only around a fifth of respondents (22%) now say they prefer to start their news journeys with a website or app – that’s down 10 percentage points since 2018. Publishers in a few smaller Northern European markets have managed to buck this trend, but younger groups everywhere are
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showing a weaker connection with news brands’ own websites and apps than previous cohorts – preferring to access news via side-door routes such as social media, search, or mobile aggregators.
• Facebook remains one of the most-used social networks overall, but its influence on journalism is declining as it shifts its focus away from news. It also faces new challenges from established networks such as YouTube and vibrant youth-focused networks such as TikTok. The Chinese-owned social network reaches 44% of 18–24s across markets and 20% for news. It is growing fastest in parts of Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America.
• When it comes to news, audiences say they pay more attention to celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities than journalists in networks like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. This contrasts sharply with Facebook and Twitter, where news media and journalists are still central to the conversation.
• Much of the public is sceptical of the algorithms used to select what they see via search engines, social media, and other platforms. Less than a third (30%) say that having stories selected for me on the basis of previous consumption is a good way to get news, 6 percentage points lower than when we last asked the question in 2016. Despite this, on average, users still slightly prefer news selected this way to that chosen by editors or journalists (27%), suggesting that worries about algorithms are part of a wider concern about news and how it is selected.
• Despite hopes that the internet could widen democratic debate, we find fewer people are now participating in online news than in the recent past. Aggregated across markets, only around a fifth (22%) are now active participators, with around half (47%) not participating in news at all. In the UK and United States, the proportion of active participators has fallen by more than 10 percentage points since 2016. Across countries we find that this group tends to be male, better educated, and more partisan in their political vie ws.
• Trust in the news has fallen, across markets, by a further 2 percentage points in the last year, reversing in many countries the gains made at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic. On average, four in ten of our total sample (40%) say they trust most news most of the time. Finland remains the country with the highest levels of overall trust (69%), while Greece (19%) has the lowest after a year characterised by heated arguments about press freedom and the independence of the media." (Summary, page 10)
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