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Introduction: This research has analyzed the visual discourse on Instagram of the European far-right parties in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Austria and Poland on the COVID-19 vaccines carried out during 2021. The main objective has been focused on in discovering the position of these parties regarding the vaccination process against the coronavirus and the use of biased strategies or frames linked to misinformation. Methodology: (N=1050) Instagram posts have been analyzed using visual content analysis. The results show that the European far-right parties studied have not used their Instagram accounts to spread health strategies to alleviate the effects of COVID-19. Results: The contents disseminated have turned out to be individualistic and consistent with the ideals of each party. Except for specific exceptions, in general all the parties have shown a neutral position without being very explicit in their positions. Discussion: What these findings reveal is an inclination not to make decisive speeches that could make them lose voters, despite maintaining a critical position that pretends to be an alternative to the official one. Conclusions: Their main speeches allude to the lack of individual freedom, the voluntariness in the administration of the dose, the rejection of vaccination of children and the denial of the COVID passport.Alternate :En esta investigación se ha analizado el discurso visual en Instagram de los partidos de extrema derecha europeos de Italia, Alemania, Francia, España, Bélgica, Austria y Polonia sobre las vacunas contra la COVID-19 realizados durante 2021. El objetivo principal se ha centrado en descubrir el posicionamiento de estos partidos frente al proceso de vacunación contra el coronavirus y el empleo de estrategias o encuadres sesgados vinculados con la desinformación. Metodología: Se han analizado (N=1050) publicaciones de Instagram mediante un análisis de contenido visual. Los resultados evidencian que los partidos de extrema derecha europeos analizados no han empleado sus cuentas de Instagram para difundir estrategias sanitarias con las que paliar los efectos de la COVID-19. Resultados: Los contenidos difundidos han resultados ser individualistas y acordes con los ideales propios de cada partido. Salvo excepciones puntuales, en general todos los partidos han mostrado una posición neutra sin ser muy explícitos en sus posiciones. Discusión: Lo que revelan estos hallazgos es una inclinación para no realizar discursos determinantes que puedan hacerles perder votantes, a pesar de mantener una postura crítica que pretende ser alternativa a la oficial. Conclusiones: Sus discursos principales aluden a la falta de libertad individual, a la voluntariedad en la administración de la dosis, al rechazo de la vacunación a niños y a la negación ante el pasaporte COVID.
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En esta investigación se ha analizado el discurso visual en Instagram de los partidos de extrema derecha europeos de Italia, Alemania, Francia, España, Bélgica, Austria y Polonia sobre las vacunas contra la COVID-19 realizados durante 2021. El objetivo principal se ha centrado en descubrir el posicionamiento de estos partidos frente al proceso de vacunación contra el coronavirus y el empleo de estrategias o encuadres sesgados vinculados con la desinformación. Metodología: Se han analizado (N=1050) publicaciones de Instagram mediante un análisis de contenido visual. Los resultados evidencian que los partidos de extrema derecha europeos analizados no han empleado sus cuentas de Instagram para difundir estrategias sanitarias con las que paliar los efectos de la COVID-19. Resultados: Los contenidos difundidos han resultados ser individualistas y acordes con los ideales propios de cada partido. Salvo excepciones puntuales, en general todos los partidos han mostrado una posición neutra sin ser muy explícitos en sus posiciones. Discusión: Lo que revelan estos hallazgos es una inclinación para no realizar discursos determinantes que puedan hacerles perder votantes, a pesar de mantener una postura crítica que pretende ser alternativa a la oficial. Conclusiones: Sus discursos principales aluden a la falta de libertad individual, a la voluntariedad en la administración de la dosis, al rechazo de la vacunación a niños y a la negación ante el pasaporte COVID.Alternate :Introduction: This research has analyzed the visual discourse on Instagram of the European far-right parties in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Austria and Poland on the COVID-19 vaccines carried out during 2021. The main objective has been focused on in discovering the position of these parties regarding the vaccination process against the coronavirus and the use of biased strategies or frames linked to misinformation. Methodology: (N=1050) Instagram posts have been analyzed using visual content analysis. The results show that the European far-right parties studied have not used their Instagram accounts to spread health strategies to alleviate the effects of COVID-19. Results: The contents disseminated have turned out to be individualistic and consistent with the ideals of each party. Except for specific exceptions, in general all the parties have shown a neutral position without being very explicit in their positions. Discussion: What these findings reveal is an inclination not to make decisive speeches that could make them lose voters, despite maintaining a critical position that pretends to be an alternative to the official one. Conclusions: Their main speeches allude to the lack of individual freedom, the voluntariness in the administration of the dose, the rejection of vaccination of children and the denial of the COVID passport.
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Objective: This study aimed to categorize and analyze the public response toward third/booster shots of COVID-19 on Twitter. Methods: We downloaded the COVID-19 vaccine booster shots related Tweets using the Twitter API. The collected Tweets were pre-processed to prepare them for analysis by (1) removing non-English language tweets, retweets, emojis, emoticons, non-printable characters, the punctuation marks, and the prepositions, (2) anonymizing the identity of the users, and (3) normalizing various forms of the same words. We used the state-of-the-art BertTopic modeling library to identify the most popular topics. Results: Of 165,048 Tweets collected, 36,908 Tweets were analyzed in this study. From these tweets, we identified 9 topics, which were about Biden administration, Pfizer & BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, eligibility for booster shots, side effects, Donald Trump, variants of the Novel Coronavirus, and conspiracy theory & propaganda. The mean of sentiment was positive in all topics. The lowest and highest mean of sentiments were for the Donald Trump topic (0.0097) and the Johnson & Johnson topic (0.1294), respectively. Conclusions: The topics identified in this study not only accurately reflect the contemporary COVID-19 discussion, but also the high degree of politicization in the USA. While the latter might be a result of our rejection of non-English tweets, it is reassuring to see our fully automated, unsupervised pipeline reliably extract such global features in the data at scale. We, therefore, believe that the methodology presented in this study is mature and useful for other infoveillance studies on a wide variety of topics.
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Purpose>The purpose of this study is to show that the spread of conspiracy theories has resulted in many tragic incidents, such as January 6 Insurrection at the US Capitol Building. Interestingly, many of the conspiracy theory followers are religious individuals. In response to this phenomenon, this study will investigate the impact of religious (un)beliefs on consumer ethics. Secondly, this study will investigate the mediating role of conspiracy theory on consumer ethics. Finally, this study will investigate the moderating role of ethical ideology (i.e. relativism) on the relationship between consumers’ (un)belief (e.g. religiosity and atheism) and consumer ethics.Design/methodology/approach>Overall, 328 participants living in the USA (32% female and 68% male) were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in exchange for financial compensation.Findings>The results show the negative impact of a belief in a conspiracy theory. These conspiracy beliefs can skew any individual irrespective of their beliefs or unbelief. Religious leaders, policymakers and educators need to keep this in mind when designing a campaign to reduce unethical behavior. Everyone is prone to conspiracy theories.Originality/value>This is one of the first few studies exploring the impact of belief in conspiracy theories on consumers’ ethical beliefs. There are still limited studies investigating whether conspiracy beliefs lead individuals to engage in unethical behavior.
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[...]Musk – that is to say, Elon Musk, the boss of car-maker Tesla. In 2020, Musk tweeted that the “Tesla stock price too high” which promptly wiped $14bn from the market value of Tesla. The share price had peaked at $77 one year earlier but had subsequently fallen by roughly one-third – much in line with other tech stocks and widely attributed to the emergence from COVID-related restrictions that had resulted in a deluge of social media communication by people stuck at home with nothing better to do.
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The US presidential election in November will therefore be a critical juncture, either deepening disputes and hardening attitudes if Donald Trump is reelected, or possibly opening a new chapter in relations if Joe Biden wins. On the three global issues—trade, climate change, and the pandemic —that dominate US-China debate, Gregory Chin shows that while the Trump administration has brought "major global institutions to the point of legal or political crisis," China has seized opportunities to stand as the guardian of globalization in multilateral institutions, notably the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization. [...]Chin ends on a cautiously optimistic note, namely, that a Biden White House might be open to cooperation with China on climate change and global health, while also rejoining multilateral institutions such as WHO and the Paris climate accords. [...]he cautions that the future will be non-zero-sum and messy.
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Purpose>The purpose of this study was to explore issues of gender and diversity raised by the 2020 US presidential election.Design/methodology/approach>Samples from two populations (n = 667) described either an ideal president or one of the major-party candidates for president (Donald Trump and Joe Biden) or vice president (Mike Pence and Kamala Harris) on an instrument that assessed self-ascribed masculinity and femininity. Androgyny was calculated as the difference between masculinity and femininity;the closer the score to zero, the more androgynous the candidate.Findings>The ideal president was viewed as androgynous (i.e. balanced in masculine and feminine traits) rather than masculine as in previous studies of presidential leadership. Compared to the White male candidates, Harris, a woman of color, displayed the most androgynous profile. The Democratic ticket represented a “balanced” team, with one candidate (Biden) higher on femininity and the other (Harris) higher on masculinity;in essence, an androgynous ticket. In contrast, the Republican ticket (Trump and Pence) represented a decidedly masculine ticket. Ideal president profiles differed according to respondents’ gender and preferred president.Practical implications>The Democrats winning the election with an androgynous ticket suggests that a more level playing field for female vis-à-vis male candidates for political leader roles may be arriving.Originality/value>The finding of an ideal president as androgynous rather than masculine is an original contribution to the literature on presidential leadership.
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The examination tried to research how the language utilized in Donald Trump's and Justin Trudeau's Speeches given on the pinnacle of the expansion of COVID-19. The explicit focus was on how language is utilized to connote, produce and challenge inconsistent force relations. Likewise, the investigation not just tried to unload how the language utilized serves belief system and force, yet in addition how it empowers a superior comprehension of the political reason for the talks. The examination utilized a subjective exploration plan. Fairclough's (1989, 2010) three-level model of depiction, understanding, and clarification was utilized by zeroing in on both miniature and full-scale talk investigation. Then again, a linguistic portrayal of belief system, force, and predominance was uncovered: the talk shows the relationship of America with different nations and the activities taken by both the leader of a superpower and a non-super power. The investigation uncovered that Donald Trump set himself in the principal position and sees himself as generally able than some other government, the situation of most noteworthy accentuation, which is my hypothesis depicts him as egotistical and troublesome. Then again Prime Minister Justin Trudeau depicts himself as a profoundly sympathetic leader. He is taken the circumstance of the pandemic genuinely and taken intense measures.
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Since 2015, Donald Trump, his administration and supporters have repeatedly abused the history of Second World War Japanese American incarceration. In contrast to preceding Presidents who recognised the miscarriage of justice authorised by Franklin Roosevelt, Trump and his administration have used this history to justify racism. All post-war presidents before Trump, regardless of political affiliation, agreed what happened under Executive Order 9066 was wrong and should never be repeated. Donald Trump and his administration have, by contrast, not only failed to condemn the incarceration but instead attempted to use test cases brought against the United States government during the war as questionable legal precedent to justify racist policies. The travel ban for those travelling to the USA from Muslim majority countries was compared to Executive Order 9066;Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents and placing them in separate detention centres was disturbingly similar to the internment of orphans of Japanese parentage at Manzanar children’s village;and Trump’s use of terms like ‘China virus’ during the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in attacks on Asian Americans. This article considers Asian American responses to these three case studies of Trump’s anti-Asian rhetoric and abuse of the history of Japanese American incarceration.
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Key words: meatpacking, plant shutdown, oligopoly, oligopsony (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) Introduction The unprecedented spike in beef price spreads (Figure 1) and drop in cattle slaughter (Figure 2), as beef-packing plants closed or slowed production because of COVID-19 (Dyal, 2020;Taylor, Boulos, and Almond, 2020) prompted calls for investigations into "inappropriate influence" during the pandemic by the highly concentrated packers in the beef market (National Cattlemen's Beef Association, 2020;R-Calf, 2020;Grassley, 2020). The extent to which packer concentration and market power are believed to have triggered or exacerbated the widening of the beef price spread during the pandemic is revealed in a series of letters from cattle producer groups to lawmakers and lawmakers to government agencies. On April 29, 2020, R-Calf (2020) wrote to President Trump and congressional leaders stating that packer concentration "stymies producers' market access and robust competition for cattle... [and] also transfers any marketing power America's cattle farmers and ranchers might possess to the highly concentrated beef packing industry." On July 22, 2020, 5 months into the pandemic, the USDA released the Boxed Beef & Fed Cattle Price Spread Investigation Report, which summarized, in addition to the market impacts of the Tyson fire on beef price spreads, the market impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2020a).
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Just as in the film, far too many in America and across the world have demonstrated a homicidal rejection of truth and scientific fact in favor of unquestioning allegiance to a fascistic demagoguery rooted in cultish devotion to Donald Trump, the embrace of white supremacy, and an unwillingness to care for or protect the lives and health of others. The past two years have been the most depressing and distressing of my adult life, chiefly because they have exposed how incredibly selfish, immoral, and ignorant wide swaths of the human population are. Don't Look Up magnifies and lampoons these tendencies, as the human race is unable to band together in collective self-interest to deflect the oncoming comet that at the end of the film, impacts Earth and eliminates all life on the planet.
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Heads of states are currently focusing on containing the spread of the coronavirus pandemiccommonly called Covid-19, and grappling with a series of strategies for addressing the pandemic. Political discourse concerning Covid-19 can be examined to better understand the ideology of the speaker and its impact on the audience. In this paper, we use Van Leeuwen's (2007) and Van Leeuwen and Wodak's (1999) legitimation strategies that social actors use to justify courses of action/political decisions in a critical discourse analysis approach. Drawing on presidential speeches specifically made by Donald Trump (USA) and Xi Jinping (China), this paper elucidates how legitimation strategies are linguistically constituted and fashioned to justify the leaders' particular policy decisions and actions for controlling and containing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, thus achieving their political goals.
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This article aims at examining the strategic partnerships Brazil developed with China and Japan, between 2003 and 2020, and assessing how these privileged rapports contributed to the country’s quest for autonomy. This will be made through the lenses of Pragmatic Institutionalism and against the backdrop of major developments in global and regional governance that impacted on the Brazilian autonomist project.
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DefinitionCOVID-19 can be defined as a global pandemic caused by a coronavirus that first surfaced in 2019. Fake news refers to false reports that can be found in digital media. The combination of these two concepts creates an especially mismanaged situation that can result in widespread unease among the population, to whom the news appears continuously and without quality filters.
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The growing competition between Beijing and Washington and the coronavirus pandemic are not only changing the regional landscape but also China-ROK-Japan cooperation in arctic affairs. For the three countries, changes in the Northeast Asian landscape present both opportunities and challenges for trilateral exchange and cooperation. China, South Korea, and Japan all depend on international trade, shipping, and energy for their sustained economic growth. As extra-regional actors with major interests in arctic affairs, China-ROK-Japan share similar policy positions as observers on the Arctic Council. At the same time, the three economic powers also have inescapable competing views and conflicts of interest in the arctic region. Amid a shifting global landscape and the coronavirus pandemic, Northeast Asia is also undergoing profound changes, which requires higher levels of trilateral cooperation in arctic affairs to provide further momentum for maintaining regional stability and harmony. The best policy for China, South Korea, and Japan, three interdependent major economies in a world of growing uncertainty and competition is more coordination and cooperation. The Arctic could be a region where higher levels of Northeast Asian cooperation and integration can set a new paradigm of sub-regional coordination in the service of regional stability and prosperity.
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This opinion article, by Channarong Intahchomphoo and Christian Tschirhart, explains the evolution of data and how it becomes useful information and then insightful knowledge. In the current era we are witnessing a high increase in the development and adaptation of artificial intelligence (AI) in society. AI technologies have the ability to process large volumes of data and information to help in finding insightful knowledge. However, AI is not perfect and there are ethical concerns, particularly when unintended negative consequences result from it;this paper also discusses ethical concerns currently confronting our society related to the freedom of expression and hate speech issues with AI. Importantly, this paper notes that governments are working to find ways to regulate social media and internet companies through legal channels as governments are no longer confident in the ability of social media and internet companies to self-regulate and thereby to guide society on what content is right or wrong. This is a critical new development in internet and AI governance that information and technology professionals and public and private organizations need to monitor closely the situation as it evolves.
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This study examines the phenomenon of disinformation as a threat in the realm of cybersecurity. We have analyzed multiple authoritative cybersecurity standards, manuals, handbooks, and literary works. We present the unanimous meaning and construct of the term cyber threat. Our results reveal that although their definitions are mostly consistent, most of them lack the inclusion of disinformation in their list/glossary of cyber threats. We then proceeded to dissect the phenomenon of disinformation through the lens of cyber threat epistemology;it displays the presence of the necessary elements required (i.e., threat agent, attack vector, target, impact, defense) for its appropriate classification. To conjunct this, we have also included an in-depth comparative analysis of disinformation and its similar nature and characteristics with the prevailing and existing cyber threats. We, therefore, argue for its recommendation as an official and actual cyber threat. The significance of this paper, beyond the taxonomical correction it recommends, rests in the hope that it influences future policies and regulations in combatting disinformation and its propaganda.
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Magyarországon 2020-ban, a koronavírus-járvány megjelenése után azt figyelhettük meg: a kormányzati kommunikáció mindennapos elemévé vált, hogy a kormánnyal szemben kritikus médiát álhírek létrehozásával vádolja. Ez a a populista politika jellemzo eszköze. Ráadásul Magyarországon új színezetet is kapott: az álhír-vádakat ellenzéki politikusokkal szemben is alkalmazták. Ez az elemzés a magyar közszolgálati média hírportálja, a Hirado.hu felületén vizsgálja, hogyan jelentek meg az álhírekre vonatkozó tartalmak az elmúlt évtizedben. Nem az ott esetleg megjeleno álhírekkel foglalkozunk, hanem azzal, hogy a Hirado.hu cikkei alapján mit jelent ez a fogalom a közbeszédben, és miként alakultak át jelentései idoközben;megjelentek-e például 2020 elott a médiára és a hazai ellenzékre irányuló populista álhírvádak?Alternate :In Hungary in 2020, after the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, government communication began to accuse critical media of spreading fake news. This typical tool of populist politics has taken on a new colour in Hungary: fake news accusations have also been used against opposition politicians. This analysis looks into content on fake news published over the past decade on Hirado.hu, the news site of the Hungarian public service media. It does not study fake news items that may be published there, but looks into what the concept means in the public discourse on the basis of the articles on Hirado.hu, and how the meaning of the term has evolved over time;for example, whether populist fake news accusations targeting the media and the domestic opposition appeared before 2020.
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The question of how to address the spread of misinformation in the digital era has become an international issue. Drawing from the field of communication, this article discusses three perspectives that could inform the debate and potential policy responses. First, the article covers the concept of the public sphere and how it applies to information flow. Second, it covers how responses that focus on media literacy development often fall short. Lastly, it provides an alternative account of misinformation as a process in which cultural groups are demarcated. All three perspectives are contextualized through contemporary issues like "fake news," the 2020 presidential election, communication during the presidency of Donald Trump, COVID-19, the conspiracy theory QAnon, and the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, along with a historical review of misinformation culture in the United States.
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Donald Trump a transgressé de nombreuses normes présidentielles, dont celle de la prépondérance de l'expertise dans la formulation et la mise en oeuvre de la politique étrangère des États-Unis. Alors que ses prédécesseurs ont fait preuve d'une méfiance relative envers l'expertise de l'appareil de sécurité nationale, Trump a pleinement assumé son hostilité à l'égard de ces institutions et de leurs experts. Cet article propose une analyse des trois principales conséquences de cette hostilité : fausse tension entre loyauté et compétence dans le choix des conseillers ;priorisation des gains symboliques et sous-utilisation des ressources organisationnelles qui ont nui à la mise en oeuvre de la politique étrangère et à la pérennité des changements instaurés ;et gestion de crise défaillante (COVID-19).Alternate :Donald Trump broke many presidential norms, including the preponderance of expertise in the formulation and implementation of u.s. foreign policy. While his predecessors have shown a relative distrust towards the national security apparatus's expertise, Trump has fully embraced his hostility towards these institutions and their experts. This article analyzes the three main consequences of this hostility : false loyalty-competence tension in the selection of advisors;prioritization of symbolic gains and underutilization of organizational resources that have jeopardized the implementation of foreign policy and the sustainability of instituted changes;and flawed crisis management (COVID-19).