Artificial Intelligence (AI) now enables the mass creation of what have become known as “deepfakes”: synthetic videos that closely resemble real videos. Integrating theories about the power of visual communication and the role played by uncertainty in undermining trust in public discourse, we explain the likely contribution of deepfakes to online disinformation. Administering novel experimental treatments to a large representative sample of the United Kingdom population allowed us to compare people’s evaluations of deepfakes. We find that people are more likely to feel uncertain than to be misled by deepfakes, but this resulting uncertainty, in turn, reduces trust in news on social media. We conclude that deepfakes may contribute toward generalized indeterminacy and cynicism, further intensifying recent challenges to online civic culture in democratic societies.
This paper examines how social media platforms X (Twitter) and Facebook algorithmically amplify financial disinformation and fraud, comparing two distinct archetypes: the relational deception of “Yahoo Boys” and the techno-utopian rhetoric of “Crypto Bros.” Using a mixed-methods approach—including algorithmic auditing, network analysis, and victim interviews—the research demonstrates that fraudulent content is amplified 67 times faster than legitimate content due to platform design that prioritizes high-arousal engagement. It reveals critical structural vulnerabilities in content moderation, including severe scale limitations and systemic biases that disproportionately fail non-English and African-language communities. The findings show that micro-targeting tools originally designed for advertisers are weaponized to prey on vulnerable users. The study concludes that platforms are active architects of digital financial risk, necessitating fundamental reforms in algorithmic design and moderation practices.
This paper explores transformative moments in media history when technological and cultural disruptions significantly reshaped the field of Media and Communication. Focusing on events ranging from the rise of pirate radio in the 1970s to current debates around digital sovereignty and platform regulation, it investigates how such disruptions have influenced media practices, regulatory frameworks, and scholarly discourse. Employing a historical-comparative methodology that combines archival research, discourse analysis, and case studies, the study examines key examples such as the effect of pirate broadcasting on UK media law, the role of social media in the Arab Spring, and contemporary calls for decentralised digital infrastructures. Through these cases, the research highlights how marginalised groups have used emerging technologies to contest institutional authority and amplify their voices. The findings point to a persistent tension between media innovation and institutional control, illustrating how media has functioned as a dynamic arena for political, social, and cultural negotiation. The study also emphasises the essential role of academia in identifying and analysing these disruptive moments, which enrich our understanding of the evolving media landscape. Ultimately, the paper argues for a future-oriented, engaged approach to Media and Communication studies. It calls on scholars to learn from historical disruptions in order to confront pressing contemporary issues such as platform monopolisation and unequal access to digital technologies. By doing so, the discipline can contribute to a more inclusive and responsive media scholarship that addresses global inequalities and supports democratic media practices.
Social media platforms facilitate the dissemination of science and access to it. However, gender inequalities in the participation and visibility of communicators persist. This study examined the differences in reach and audience response between YouTube and TikTok from a gender perspective. To do so, the ten most influential science accounts on YouTube and TikTok were selected, with the sample divided equally between men and women, to conduct a comparative study. A total of 4293 videos on TikTok and 4825 on YouTube were analyzed, along with 277,528 comments, considering metrics of views and interaction. The results show that on YouTube, men received more likes and views, while on TikTok, audience response was more balanced. The participation of women on both platforms also had a differential impact, as the number of women engaging with content on YouTube negatively correlated with interaction levels, whereas on TikTok, their impact was slightly positive. In conclusion, TikTok emerges as a more inclusive space for scientific communication, though structural challenges remain on both platforms, encouraging further research into strategies that promote gender equity in online science communication.
From role playing games to animated GIFs, from reenacted performances to poetic writing, this video essay asks: what is an authentic expression of anger?
Communication. Mass media, Social sciences (General)
AbstractCommunication is essential for organisations. The interaction of institutions with their publics and their reputation management depend on it. ‘An organisation that does not listen, or listens badly to its stakeholders and publics, will fail in its public communication,’ as Jim Macnamara says. This article deals with the listening work of the Opus Dei Information Office of the Basque Country and Navarra carried out in different phases: initiation, identification of interest groups, open listening, analysis of the findings, conclusions and transmission. It is offered as a good communication practice at the service of government that could be applied, with the necessary adjustments, to other institutions, especially Church communication offices. The text is divided into two parts: in the first, we review some concepts on institutional communication, governance, intangibles, reputation and listening, which serve as a framework; in the second, we summarise the case study, relying on interviews with people who were directly involved in the unfolding of events – Juan Carlos Mújika, the then director of the Office; Jesús Juan, who worked in the Prelature’s delegation; and Juan Manuel Mora, Vice Rector for Communication at the University of Navarra.
Philosophy of religion. Psychology of religion. Religion in relation to other subjects, Communication. Mass media
This study examines the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign movement, a feminist hashtag activism that began on Twitter (rebranded as X in 2023) in 2021. The movement was to defend a South Korean female archer and Olympic gold medalist, An San, from misogynistic attacks that accused her of being a man-hating feminist, given her short hairstyle. Informed by theories about social media’s affordances and affective politics, this article unpacks how women harness social media affordances to combat sexist oppression, particularly in the sociocultural context where women’s hair is fraught with gendered stereotypes and women’s bodies are historically deprived of agency under Neo-Confucian influence. The qualitative textual analysis of 1,849 tweets mostly written in Korean, with a focus on 811 selfies and images, suggests that #Women_Short Cut_Campaign functions as networked, affective counterpublics where oppressed women construct counter-narratives against the attempts to control women’s bodies. The hashtag also challenges the binary of online or offline and stretches the traditional notion of participation by urging digitally networked participants to take action offline. Participants practiced media solidarities by encouraging each other to protect themselves from potential sexual violence. In doing so, they realized affordances for practice through optimizing and contextualizing the original use of technologies. This research contributes to discussions on the sustainability of digital activism and the need for the pluralization and diversification of contemporary feminism. It also offers an opportunity to address the call for decolonial approaches in mobilizing Western-originated theories. Finally, it invites scholars to focus more on the visual in interrogating digital feminist activism.
In the swiftly advancing realm of communication technologies, Semantic Communication (SemCom), which emphasizes knowledge understanding and processing, has emerged as a hot topic. By integrating artificial intelligence technologies, SemCom facilitates a profound understanding, analysis and transmission of communication content. In this chapter, we clarify the means of knowledge learning in SemCom with a particular focus on the utilization of Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Specifically, we first review existing efforts that combine SemCom with knowledge learning. Subsequently, we introduce a KG-enhanced SemCom system, wherein the receiver is carefully calibrated to leverage knowledge from its static knowledge base for ameliorating the decoding performance. Contingent upon this framework, we further explore potential approaches that can empower the system to operate in evolving knowledge base more effectively. Furthermore, we investigate the possibility of integration with Large Language Models (LLMs) for data augmentation, offering additional perspective into the potential implementation means of SemCom. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework yields superior performance on top of the KG-enhanced decoding and manifests its versatility under different scenarios.
The large scale usage of social media, combined with its significant impact, has made it increasingly important to understand it. In particular, identifying user communities, can be helpful for many downstream tasks. However, particularly when models are trained on past data and tested on future, doing this is difficult. In this paper, we hypothesize to take advantage of Large Language Models (LLMs), to better identify user communities. Due to the fact that many LLMs, such as ChatGPT, are fixed and must be treated as black-boxes, we propose an approach to better prompt them, by training a smaller LLM to do this. We devise strategies to train this smaller model, showing how it can improve the larger LLMs ability to detect communities. Experimental results show improvements on Reddit and Twitter data, on the tasks of community detection, bot detection, and news media profiling.
Farzana Kulsoom, Pietro Savazzi, Fabio Dell'Acqua
et al.
Galvanic coupled-intra-body communication (GC-IBC) is an innovative research area contributing to transform personalized medicine by enabling seamless connectivity and communication among implanted devices. To establish a reliable communication link between implanted devices, the preambles play a crucial role by e.g. conveying syncronization information or supporting channel response estimation. The preambles are carefully designed to ensure that they are mutually orthogonal, to minimize self-interference and maximize separability. For that purpose, many permeable sequences are proposed in the literature for 5G and sensor networks. Golay code, Constant Amplitude Zero Auto Correlation (CAZAC) and Zadoff-Chu (Z-Chu) sequences are among the most popular ones. In this work, we performed a comparative analysis of these sequences to determine their suitability for the GC-IBC system. We evaluated the effectiveness of the preamble sequences on the basis of their correlation properties and probability of error.
Der österreichisch-mährische Schriftsteller und Journalist Jakob Julius David thematisierte um 1900 herum in seinen Werken die Beziehung zwischen Bildung und Medien. Trotz seines Engagements blieb er lange Zeit vergessen und wurde erst später als Teil der deutschmährischen bzw. österreichischen Literatur und als Grenzgänger der Wiener Moderne anerkannt. Sein medienkritisches Werk Die Zeitung (1906) zeichnet sich durch eine unsystematische Auseinandersetzung mit den Themenfeldern Bildung und Zeitungen aus. Dieser Beitrag versucht einige Schlaglichter auf Davids medienpädagogische Vorstellungen zu werfen und die Bedeutung von Bildung in seinem Denken sowie die Verbindung zu seinen literarischen und essayistischen Texten zu untersuchen.
Akinrosoye A.I., Adeagbo S.A., Adegbite I.O.
et al.
Advertising agencies are key players in any advertising campaign. They have several roles in the initiation, production and dissemination of commercial messages through a suitable medium. Advertising campaigns are undoubtedly very crucial and require being handled and executed by experts to avoid wasting human and material resources. As such, advertisers engage the services of advertising agencies to help them realize their commercial goals. This paper specifically examines the impact of advertising agencies on successful advertising campaigns. Empirically, this paper adopted a survey method to gather resourceful data from 250 respondents who were accidentally selected among media practitioners, including a certain class of residents of Osun State, for their in-depth knowledge of advertising. Asymmetric Theory and Persuasion Theory, that are relevant to this study, were adopted. In the end, analysis of data collected with the aid of descriptive statistics of frequency, percentage and pie chart, as well as inferential statistics of Chi-square, proved to the fact that the role of advertising agencies on successful advertising campaigns cannot be overemphasized. The study recommends that advertising agencies should put more effort in discharging their duty to clients and should step up and take their place in the present globalization revolution.
The digital revolution has created challenges as well as opportunities for people with acquired reading (= alexia) and writing (= agraphia) impairments. Although it is difficult to validly assess written discourse, it is imperative that people with alexia and agraphia (PwAA) receive reliable diagnostics for the following reasons: (1) discourse in written and oral forms is highly relevant to daily interaction and participation, but there are no established tests or diagnostic procedures to assess written discourse; (2) reliable diagnostic measures are a prerequisite for any language rehabilitation, especially for the complex skills needed for written discourse; and (3) the continuing trend in digitalization offers new opportunities for easily collecting and assessing written discourse via digital means. In our manuscript, we highlight the relevance of written discourse for social participation and in the digital world and argue that in order to improve social participation in general and digital participation in particular for PwAA, remote assessment of written discourse abilities can be the basis for speech and language therapy treatment focused on communicative abilities.
In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system, where a ground node (GN) communicate with a UAV assisted by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in the presence of a jammer with imperfect location information. We aim to improve the achievable average rate via the joint robust design of UAV trajectory, IRS passive beamforming and GN's power allocation. However, the formulated optimization problem is challenging to solve due to its non-convexity and coupled variables. To overcome the difficulty, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) based algorithm to solve it sub-optimally by leveraging semidefinite relaxation (SDR), successive convex approximation (SCA), and S-procedure methods. Simulation results show that by deploying the IRS near the GN, our proposed algorithm always improves the uplink achievable average rate significantly compared with the benchmark algorithms, while deploying the IRS nearby the jammer is effective only when the jammer's location is perfectly known.