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Information Nightmare: Fake News, Manipulation and Post-Truth Politics in the Digital Age

by Tirşe Erbaysal Filibeli (Volume editor)
©2020 Edited Collection 210 Pages

Summary

Today, we live in a post-truth era. Creating alternative realities, and making people believe fake realities become easier. Digital platforms tend to promote dramatic, sensational and emotional content that harms democracy. This book examines different aspects of the matter: rise of populist politics, impact of digital social platforms, engagement-oriented algorithms, spread of disinformation and counter-measures like fact-checking mechanism and developing digital media literacy skills.
 
"Journalists, academics and civil society groups are increasingly working together to help people confront the confusion caused by the post-truth realities of digital communications, which is no longer the stuff of propaganda from the state, but comes from all sides of the internet. In this information space every fact is challenged by an alternative fact, and all of these different versions of the truth look the same online."
– Aidan White

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the editor
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Foreword (Yasemin Giritli İnceoğlu)
  • Acknowledgments
  • Contents
  • Contributors
  • 1. Disinformation Warfare in the Post-Truth Era: An Attempt for Classification (Orhan Şener and Hossein Derakhshan)
  • 2. The State of (Dis)information Sphere: The Rise of Fact-Checking Initiatives (Tirşe Erbaysal Filibeli)
  • 3. From Useful Idiots to Useful Facts: What Is Behind the Fake News Debate? (Sarphan Uzunoğlu and Ahmet Alphan Sabancı)
  • 4. The Accuracy Crisis of (Online) Journalism in Turkey: Unverified News Reports During the 2018 Presidential Campaign (Can Ertuna)
  • 5. Breaking News: A Look into Turkey’s Polarized Mobile News Notifications (Emre Kızılkaya)
  • 6. Fake News and Politics in Italy (Giovanni Brancato and Melissa Stolfi)
  • 7. Populism and Media in Turkey: Partners in Crime (Burak Özçetin and Ayşegül Akaydın Aydın)
  • 8. Mapping the Mechanics of Truth: Fake News and Suburban Young Adult News Consumers in India (Sushmita Pandit)
  • 9. Understanding the Dark Social and Shedding Light on Online Deception among Children (Sinan Aşçı)
  • 10. Survival in the New Communicative Sphere: Is Media Literacy the Remedy? (Eylem Yanardağoğlu and Dilara Eldaş Baş)
  • 11. New Literacies for Disinformation and Manipulation Through Digital Sound and Video (Orhan Şener)
  • 12. Online Foreign News: Are We Capable of Recognizing Manipulation? The Role of Political Competence and Media Literacy Context (Vasyl V. Kucherenko)
  • Afterword. Digital Disorder: The Challenges of Taming Big Tech and Building Trust in Journalism (Aidan White)
  • List of Figures
  • List of Tables

Contributors

Yasemin İnceoğlu, professor of journalism, member of the UNESCO International Clearinghouse on Children and Violence on the Screen and of the American Biography Institute, was a visiting scholar at Columbia University (1994) at the Salzburg Seminar (2003), New Delhi University Media Studies Center (2014) and EUI -European University Institute (2017). She has published several books: The Persuasion Process in Communications: With Some Examples of the Political Campaigns (1997); Media and Society, Women in the Media and Women Journalists (2002); International Media (2004); A Guide to Media and Children (2008); Text Analysis (2009); Women and Their Body in the Spiral of Femininity, Sexuality and Violence (2010); Hate Speech and Hate Crimes (2012); Minorities, The Other and Media (2014); Internet and Street (2015); News Readings (2016); LGBTI’s and the Media (2019) with Dr. Savaş Çoban and co-edited Journalism “a Peacekeeping Agent” at the Time of Conflict with Dr.Tirşe Erbaysal Filibeli (2018).

Hossein Derakhshan is a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and a research associate at the MIT Media Lab. He recently co-authored the report Information Disorder for the Council of Europe on the theory and practice of what is known as ‘fake news’ with Claire Wardle. He spent six years in prison in Iran from 2008, which inspired an essay on the demise of blogs and “The Web We Have to Save” (Matter, 2015). His current research is focused on the future of journalism and also on the theory and sociopolitical implications of digital and social media. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Wired, Libération, Die Zeit, and Corriere Della Sera.

Orhan Şener obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Business-Economics, and has started his Master’s Degree in Information, Communication and Society at City University London. He has graduated from the program with his dissertation titled ‘Online Political Participation of University Students in Istanbul’. Since 2014, he has been enrolled to the PhD Program in Media and Communication Studies at Galatasaray University. The title of the PhD dissertation is ‘Informational Access and Filtering Practices: A Study on Turkish Journalists’. He is the director of Journalism Academy of the Journalists’ Union of Turkey and editor at Journo.com.tr which is a bipartisan media organization aiming to enhance quality of journalism practices in Turkey. He gives lectures on communication studies, new media and digital transformation and innovation at Bahçeşehir University.

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Tirşe Erbaysal Filibeli is an assistant professor and the chair of the Department of New Media at Bahçeşehir University. She received her PhD from Galatasaray University, Doctoral Program in Media and Communication Studies with her thesis focusing on ‘new social movements and peace journalism’. She works as a researcher in the country team of Turkey of the Media Pluralism Monitor Project that is supported by Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF). She is the co-editor of Journalism a ‘Peacekeeping Agent’ at the Time of Conflict that came out in December 2018 from Brill Publication. She has many publications on contemporary issues in journalism and new media studies. Her recent research interests focus on digital and algorithmic manipulation, big data and data privacy, fact-checking, ‘fake news’ about minorities and othering in the post-truth era.

Sarphan Uzunoğlu is an assistant professor of Multimedia Journalism at the Department of Communication Arts and Online Security Director for Institute of Media Research and Training in Lebanese American University. Before, he worked as an associate professor in UiT Arctic University of Norway Language and Culture Department and as a senior lecturer at Kadir Has University (Istanbul) in New Media, and Public Relations and Information Departments. Dr. Uzunoğlu is also a founder and editor-in-chief of NewsLabTurkey, as well as a regular contributor to Punto 24 and other independent media organizations. Before his academic career, Uzunoğlu worked in Turkish Grand National Assembly as a political communication advisor; and in Agora Publishing as an editor.

Ahmet Alphan Sabancı is a writer, journalist and researcher. He has BA in Philosophy. He is mainly working on philosophy, human rights, technology, information security, future studies and science fiction. As a writer and journalist, he has contributed to outlets The Guardian, Journo.com.tr, Globalvoices.org, Daily Dot, Susma 24, Inside Turkey and more. He’s one of the co-founders and Newsletter Editor of the NewsLabTurkey. His work on future studies and philosophy is mostly published at Tuhaf Gelecek and his personal website.

Can Ertuna studied Sociology (BS) and Urban Policy Planning (MS) in the Middle East Technical University. He got his PhD from Media and Communication Studies programme of Galatasaray University. He has been working as an assistant professor at Bahçeşehir University, New Media department since 2019. His areas of interest are political economy of mass media, broadcast journalism and new media tools in storytelling. He has also been working in the Turkish media for more than 20 years fulfilling different roles as writer, editor and correspondent. He has written a book in Turkish called Arab Uprisings Diary (2014).

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Emre Kızılkaya worked at Hürriyet Daily, one of the largest news organizations in Europe, for more than 15 years. Throughout his career, he served as the Turkish newspaper’s chief editor of foreign news and head of digital, and also as the managing editor of its English language edition. In 2019, he resigned from Hürriyet and studied media sustainability at Harvard University as a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow. He is a PhD researcher at Istanbul’s Galatasaray University, probing the question of how public trust is built through digital user experience. He also teaches International Journalism at Bahcesehir University as a part-time lecturer. Beside his academic work, Kizilkaya continues journalism as the managing editor of journo.com.tr, an independent website for next-generation reporters, supported by the European Union and the Journalists’ Union of Turkey. He is also the vice president of the Vienna-based International Press Institute’s (IPI) national committee in Turkey.

Giovanni Brancato is a Post-Doc Research Fellow at the Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome. He carries out research activities in the field of public communication of science and technology and health communication in collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. He is a PhD in ‘Communication, Research, Innovation – Curriculum in Communication Science’ and an expert in the subject of broadcast journalism. Other areas of interest are the media representation of migration phenomena, sociology of journalism and political communication. Currently, he collaborates in the research activities of the ‘Mediamonitor Politica Observatory’ and the ‘Observatory Tg Eurispes’. He is also a member of the ‘Interfaculty Medical Education Commission’ (CMEI) at Sapienza University of Rome. Among his most recent publications is: S. Vaccaro, F. Rizzuto, G. Brancato eds. (2019), La Comunicazione alla sfida della (dis)informazione, Roma: Aracne.

Melissa Stolfi is a PhD in ‘Communication, Research, Innovation – Curriculum in Communication Science’ at the Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome. She is a member of the Italian research group within the project ‘Platform Europe’ funded by the European Parliament and the Jean Monnet ‘Vote for Europe’ funded by the European Commission both about the 2019 European Elections and led by Roma Tre University. Currently, she is involved in the research activities of the ‘Mediamonitor Politica Observatory’ and the ‘Observatory Tg Eurispes’ about the media coverage of the Italian politics, and she collaborates at the ‘Bejour - Becoming a Journalist in Europe’ program. Her areas of interest are political communication, journalism, media representation of migration, electoral and European studies. Among her ←17 | 18→publications: Stolfi, M. (2017), “Per una memoria europea: il caso della House of European History”, in Comunicazionepuntodoc, 17, pp. 243–267.

Burak Özçetin is an associate professor of communication at Istanbul Bilgi University, Faculty of Communication. Graduated from Middle East Technical University (METU) Department of International Relations in 2001, Özçetin received his master’s degree from Department of Political Science (METU) in 2005. As a Fulbright Scholar, he visited The New School for Social Research Political Science Department between 2006 and 2007. Özçetin received his PhD degree in political science from METU in 2011. He worked at METU, Akdeniz University and Kadir Has University respectively. Özçetin took part in several national and international research projects. Most recently, he supervised a nationwide audience study titled Television Viewing Among Conservatives: Identity, Popular Taste, and Boundaries (funded by TUBITAK). Currently he is working on a book on the history of populism in Turkey, with a specific focus on the media and popular culture. His book Mass Communication Theories: Concepts, Schools, Models (Turkish) was published in 2018.

Ayşegül Akaydın Aydın studied Television Journalism (BA) in İstanbul Bilgi University and Media Management (MA) in Marmara University. She got her PhD degree from Radio-TV Cinema department in İstanbul University. She worked as research assistant in İstanbul Bilgi University between 2009 and 2017. She has been working as assistant professor at Nisantasi University, Journalism department, Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Science. Her interests include communication theories, new television technologies and television culture.

Details

Pages
210
Year
2020
ISBN (PDF)
9783631816042
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631816059
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631816066
ISBN (Softcover)
9783631812211
DOI
10.3726/b17038
Language
English
Publication date
2020 (March)
Keywords
Fake news post-truth populism disinformation fact-checking digital media literacy
Published
Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2020. 210 pp., 10 fig. b/w, 8 tables.

Biographical notes

Tirşe Erbaysal Filibeli (Volume editor)

Tirşe Erbaysal Filibeli is an assistant professor at the Department of New Media at Bahçeşehir University. She received her Ph.D. from Galatasaray University with her thesis focusing on ‘new social movements and peace journalism’. Her recent research interests focus on digital and algorithmic manipulation, big data and data privacy, fact-checking, ‘fake news’ about minorities and othering in the post-truth era.

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212 pages