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Fact-Checking Interventions as Counteroffensives to Disinformation Growth: Standards, Values, and Practices in Latin America and Spain
Full text linkAs democracy-building tools, fact-checking platforms serve as critical interventions in the fight against disinformation and polarization in the public sphere. The Duke Reporters’ Lab notes that there are 290 active fact-checking sites in 83 countries, including a wide range of initiatives in Latin America and Spain. These regions share major challenges such as limited journalistic autonomy, difficulties of accessing public data, politicization of the media, and the growing impact of disinformation. This research expands upon the findings presented in previous literature to gain further insight into the standards, values, and underlying practices embedded in Spanish and Latin American projects while identifying the specific challenges that these organizations face. In-depth interviews were conducted with decision-makers of the following independent platforms: Chequeado (Argentina), UYCheck (Uruguay), Maldita.es and Newtral (Spain), Fact Checking (Chile), Agência Lupa (Brazil), Ecuador Chequea (Ecuador), and ColombiaCheck (Colombia). This qualitative approach offers nuanced data on the volume and frequency of checks, procedures, dissemination tactics, and the perceived role of the public. Despite relying on small teams, the examined outlets’ capacity to verify facts is noteworthy. Inspired by best practices in the US and Europe and the model established by Chequeado, all the sites considered employ robust methodologies while leveraging the power of digital tools and audience participation. Interviewees identified three core challenges in fact-checking practice: difficulties in accessing public data, limited resources, and the need to reach wider audiences. Starting from these results, the article discusses the ways in which fact-checking operations could be strengthened
Debunking Political Disinformation through Journalists’ Perceptions: An Analysis of Colombia’s Fact-Checking News Practices
Full text linkFact-checking alliances emerged worldwide to debunk political disinformation in electoral contexts because of social concerns related to information authenticity. This study, thus, included the Latin American context in fact-checking journalism studies as a journalistic practice to fight political disinformation. Through analyzing RedCheq, the first fact-checking journalism alliance in an electoral regional context led by Colombiacheck, 11 in-depth interviews were conducted to identify the perceptions of regional fact-checkers regarding the usefulness of this journalistic practice, its achievements, and the key aspects for incorporating fact-checking into the regional media ecosystem. The study results revealed that RedCheq achieved the goal of fighting disinformation, and that fact-checking developed as transformational leverage for the regional media. Regional journalists perceived fact-checking as an element that restores credibility and social trust in regional media as the epistemology of this journalistic practice neglects the power pressure and dissemination of official narratives. Finally, this study highlighted how fact-checking journalism contributes to the democratic quality and civic empowerment in silenced and polarized environments. In addition, it discussed the need to expand fact-checking journalism’s coverage to new geographical areas and improve journalists’ professional competencies and training, thereby enabling them to function as using verification tools based on regional journalists’ requirements
The Loss of the Popular: Reconstructing Fifty Years of Studying Popular Culture
Full text linkThis article starts from the observation that popular culture resides in a contradictory space. On the one hand it seems to be thriving, in that the range of media objects that were previously studied under the rubric of popular culture has certainly expanded. Yet, cultural studies scholars rarely study these media objects as popular culture. Instead, concerns about immaterial labor, about the manipulation of voting behavior and public opinion, about filter bubbles and societal polarization, and about populist authoritarianism, determine the dominant frames with which the contemporary media environment is approached. This article aims to trace how this change has come to pass over the last 50 years. It argues that changes in the media environment are important, but also that cultural studies as an institutionalizing interdisciplinary project has changed. It identifies “the moment of popular culture” as a relatively short-lived but epoch-defining moment in cultural studies. This moment was subsequently displaced by a set of related yet different theoretical problematics that gradually moved the study of popular culture away from the popular. These displacements are: the hollowing out of the notion of the popular, as signaled early on by Meaghan Morris’ article “The Banality of Cultural Studies” in 1988; the institutionalization of cultural studies; the rise of the governmentality approach and a growing engagement with affect theory
Mapping Transmedia Marketing in the Music Industry: A Methodology
Full text linkOver the last decade, the music industry has adapted its promotional strategy to take advantage of the fluid, contemporary, platform-based transmedia landscape. For researchers of contemporary culture, the multiplicity of promotional activities creates substantial methodological challenges. In this article, we present and discuss such methodological approaches using two studies of contemporary promotional music campaigns as illustrative cases. Inspired by digital and innovative methods and guided by the Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR’s) ethical guidelines, we developed two data collection strategies—reversed engineering and live capturing—and applied two analytical approaches—visual mapping and time-based layering. The first case study traced already staged music marketing campaigns across multiple online media platforms, and the second followed an online promotional campaign in real time for six months. Based on these case studies, we first argue for the importance of grounded manual capturing and coding in data collection, especially when working around data access limitations imposed by platforms. Second, we propose reversed engineering and live capturing as methods of capturing fragmented data, in contemporary promotional campaigns. Third, we suggest the visual mapping and time-based layering of data, enabling researchers to oscillate between qualitative and quantitative data. Finally, we argue that researchers must pool their experiences and resources regarding how to transcend platform limitations and question a lack of transparency while respecting ethical norms and guidelines. With these arguments, we assert the researcher’s necessary role in understanding and explaining the complex and hybrid contemporary promotional landscape and provide tools and strategies for further research
Steering as Path Creation: Leadership and the Art of Managing Dependencies and Reality Effects
Full text linkWe develop a perspective on steering in governance which understands steering as intended path creation. Inspired by evolutionary governance theory, critical management studies and social systems theory, we argue that steering is shaped and limited by co-evolutions, disallowing for any formulaic approach. In order to illuminate the space for steering in governance, we analyze the interplay between different dependencies. Those dependencies are not just obstacles to path creation, they can also be pointers and assets. The steering discussion is further complicated by always unique sets of couplings between a governance system and its environment. After introducing the ideas of reality effects and governance strategy, we further develop our concept of steering and present it as the management of dependencies (in governance) and reality effects (outside governance) towards path creation. This management is ideally strategic in nature and requires leadership in a new role
European Union Climate Governance and the European Green Deal in Turbulent Times
Full text linkIn December 2019, the European Commission published the European Green Deal (EGD), an overarching policy framework to achieve climate neutrality in Europe by 2050. This thematic issue aims to understand the origins, form, development, and scope of the EGD and its policy areas. It uses the concept of turbulence to explore and assess the emergence of the EGD and the policy and governance choices associated with it. Focusing on different levels of governance, different policy domains, and different stages of policymaking, each contribution raises pertinent questions about the necessity of identifying sources of turbulence and of understanding how to govern with such turbulence, rather than against it. Overall, the articles in this issue demonstrate that, while specifying contextual factors, researching the sources of and responses to turbulence provides useful insights into the development, direction, and potential durability or advancement of EU climate governance
Social Investment Policies in the EU: Actively Concrete or Passively Abstract?
Full text linkAgainst the historical-conceptual background of EU social policy and evolutionary governance, this article analyses the approach with which the EU propagates social investment policies. Social investment, understood as an active rather than passive way of social protection, has become a salient instrument for reinvigorating the EU’s social dimension, especially in the aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis. By means of a large-scale document analysis, we develop four EU social investment propagation approaches (reference, objective, tool, and action) according to how active (passive) and concrete (abstract) the EU’s intervention in social investment is. The results show that the EU mainly propagates social investment with an active approach, i.e., policy recommendations targeted at national governments. In terms of substance, the EU’s treatment of social investment is based on labour activation policies backed by skills development and job search support policies, which is consistent with the main purpose of social investment
Mass University and Social Inclusion: The Paradoxical Effect of Public Policies
Full text linkThe objective of this article is to revisit the role of public policies in the social production and reproduction of university access inequalities that have been made evident more than ever in the current intensified mass higher education context. Although the situation is complex and varies from one societal context to another, a systematic review of the existing literature highlights the undeniable responsibility of public policies in this reproduction through three main channels: guidance systems and educational pathways, institutions’ stratification and hierarchization of fields of study and, finally, the financing of studies and tuition fees
Morphological Evolution of the Port‐City Interface of Algiers (16th Century to the Present)
Full text linkThis article traces the centuries-long morphological development of Algiers’ port-city interface across four historically relevant time periods that together span from the dawn of the 16th century up until today. Through a diachronic and geo-historical approach, we identify and analyse the origins of Algiers’ persistent port-city divide. In doing so, the notion of the interface is interpreted as a spatial threshold between city and port, which nevertheless supports the material flows of both entities. As a multi-purpose area, the interface holds the potential to weave the disparate entities of a port city back together. To further complement this conceptual angle, we provide investigations of porosity that determine the differing degrees of connectivity between the city and port of Algiers. This is combined with a spatial-functional analysis of Algiers’ current port-city interface, which is ultimately characterised as a non-homogeneous entity composed of four distinct sequences. These results contribute to a better orientation of imminent plans for waterfront revitalisations in Algiers. Whereas the interface was long considered as some kind of no man’s land in the past, port and municipal authorities nowadays aim to turn the interface into a tool of reconciliation, and can do so by acting upon its potential porosity. Finally, this article’s critical examination of the previously neglected case of Algiers can and should also be considered as an applicable model for the continuing study of southern Mediterranean and African port metropolises in general, which share a particular evolution in the relations between city and port
Transit Zones, Locales, and Locations: How Digital Annotations Affect Communication in Public Places
Full text linkThe article presents an analytical concept, the Constitution of Accessibility through Meaning of Public Places (CAMPP) model. The CAMPP model distinguishes different manifestations of public places according to how they facilitate and restrict communication between urbanites. It describes public places along two analytical dimensions: their degree of perceived accessibility and the elaboration of knowledge necessary to participate in place-related activities. Three patterns of communicative interaction result from these dimensions: civil inattention, small talk, and sociability. We employ the CAMPP model as an analytical tool to investigate how digital annotations affect communicative patterns and perceptions of accessibility of public places. Based on empirical observations and interviews with users of smartphone apps that provide digital annotations, such as Foursquare City Guide, we observe that digital annotations tend to reflect and reinforce existing patterns of communication and rarely evoke changes in the perceived accessibility of public places