Fact or Fiction
Fake News Is All Over the Net - Who Can Act as the Gatekeepers of New Media?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Harshini Arvind
There have been significant ongoing movements in the media ecosystem raising new concerns about the susceptibility of democratic societies to fake news and the society’s restricted capacity to contain it. Fake news as a type of deception benefits the quick pace that data goes in the present media community. The ascent of fake news features the disintegration of long-standing institutional defences against deception in the internet age and the concern over this particular issue is worldwide. This paper underscores the role of digital media concerning the essence fake news through web based life and how it’s being spread. This paper features examples which prompted disharmony in the world because of scattering of misinformation through social media. The researcher used a qualitative approach by conducting a focus group discussion on students from both media and non-media backgrounds. In addition to this, an expert interview was conducted in order to understand how the plenitude of data sources online leads people to depend vigorously on heuristics and meaningful gestures. Web-based networking media offers both, test for continuous identification algorithms and focus on socio-technical interventions. This work will enable individuals to decide the credibility of data and to shape their convictions, which are thus very hard to address or change.
Don't Trust Your Eyes: Manipulation of Visual Media in the Age of Deepfakes
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Johannes Langguth, Petra Filkukova
In 2017, a large number of internet users were shocked to discover that using deep learning technology, realistically looking videos depicting an arbitrary person performing arbitrary actions can be created easily using nothing but a modern personal computer. In 2018, it quickly became clear that such videos could fool all but the most alert observers. Since most people tend to trust video recordings over most other media, DeepFakes represent a dangerous new tool for manipulating public opinion and thus undermining democracy. In this study, we give an accessible introduction to the technological details that make DeepFakes possible. In the second part, we discuss technological countermeasures as well as the wider implications of this technology and its significance for public opinion in democratic countries.
Facebook Governs: Political Violence towards Kurds in Turkey in The Age of Content Moderation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ece Gurleyik
Through tracking the content moderation tactics of Facebook, I investigate how the complex conflict of the “Kurdish Question” in Turkey is negotiated through this platform and how it can polarize the public debate. Facebook’s leaked content moderation guidelines in 2011, shows most international entries target content on or authored by the Kurds and their insurgency. Turkish national identity has been cemented in opposition to the Kurdish insurgency, and the Turkish state continues to link violent acts by the PKK militia, with the general Kurdish culture. In 2011, the ongoing conflict escalated to a violent and divisive level, Facebook failed to distinguish between violent PKK attacks and the Kurds until 2015. I compare the foundational connections between Turkey’s public and anti-terrorism policy, its media and rhetoric in daily life to Facebook’s policies, mapping similarities in language and categorization among these, and differences in the censorship they enforce. I argue that when foreign policy debates manifest themselves on Facebook, their moderation policy has the power to frame and limit the conversation around public opinion and "terrorism", a category of violence that is defined and created within these mediated debates. I denaturalize the misinformed symbiotic linkage between “terrorism” and the Kurdish insurgency by demonstrating the arbitrariness underlying Facebook’s moderation. As Tarleton Gillespie says, “content moderation is a lived experience” especially for specific oppressed groups. Thinking of Facebook as a user generated platform the speech maker and the state - trying to fix these inconsistencies is a way to fight the political violence and invisibilities.
Return of the War on Terror: A Comparative Discourse Analysis of TRT World and BBC World Regarding The Syrian Civil War
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fatih Goksu
The discourse on terrorism, which has been built around global media networks is repeatedly structured and restructured through an ongoing process of text-frame-audience-media interaction within a broader socio-political context. Many years after 9/11 the assertive discourse of terrorism again dominates the news media and representation of specific terrorist events serves to legitimize ideologies and justify extreme acts against constructed other. Using Entman’s work on mediated public diplomacy, the researcher conducts an extensive comparative analysis of discursive practices of BBC World and TRT World news network on the so-called terror organizations (YPG and ISIS) regarding the Syrian civil war. Researcher examines terror discourses of BBC World News and TRT World from the beginning of Syrian civil war to argue that the news discourses was used as a foreign diplomacy tool in favor of the countries that owned the news networks and news and editorial reports went beyond informing people but to achieve better results in foreign policy. BBC World News here is selected to represent the dominant group of global media traffic due to its global reach and TRT World is selected to represent the contraflow category in the global news media.
