JCS Focus | 《Information, Communication & Society》最新目录及摘要

国际顶刊推介

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Keeping Pegasus on the wing: legitimizing cyber espionage

Dan M. Kotliar & Elinor Carmi

NSO Group is an Israeli cyber surveillance firm notorious for Pegasus – an intrusive malware capable of covertly taking control of smartphones and remotely extracting their contents. In 2019, after a series of unflattering reports on governments’ use of Pegasus to infiltrate the phones of activists and journalists, NSO embarked on an uncharacteristically public legitimation campaign. This article focuses on this campaign and explores how this otherwise secretive spyware company publicly legitimizes its surveillance. Based on an empirical analysis of hundreds of public documents across various media, we explore NSO's legitimacy management practices and identify the audiences and contexts of this legitimation. Our analysis identified four legitimation practices: securitization, Zionist patriotism, ethics washing, and normalization. We argue that these legitimation strategies operate across two interrelated axes of legitimation: a local axis that echoes a particularly Israeli ‘security-driven populism’; and a universal axis that follows Silicon Valley's ethics washing. We show that these legitimation axes are designed to simultaneously ensure the company's survivability and to sustain surveillance realism – the perception of surveillance as the only viable option This article contributes to the emerging literature on cyber surveillance firms and to the burgeoning research on the legitimation of surveillance by shedding light on the discursive infrastructures behind contemporary cyber espionage. Moreover, while surveillance is often understood as a global phenomenon, this article highlights the need to focus on the local contexts from which surveillance originates to understand its sustainability, expansion, and vulnerabilities.

Self-branding and content creation strategies on Instagram: A case study of foodie influencers

Cristina Miguel, Carl Clare, Catherine J. Ashworth & Dong Hoang

The purpose of this study is to better understand the processes and procedures adopted by micro-influencers to create ‘instagrammable’ content. It is based on 17 in-depth interviews with foodie micro-influencers based in London and Barcelona. Interview data was complemented with participant observation in restaurants or cafes. This paper makes three original contributions. Firstly, the study expands the understanding of the concept of ‘instagrammability’ by approaching it from the perspective of influencers creating content to satisfy and/or grow an audience. Secondly, it illustrates how two dominant factors drive influencers’ content creation process: the self/audience focus content branding orientation. The ‘audience-focus’ content development process varied drastically, with some influencers being very conscious of responding to their audiences’ needs whereas others maintained first and foremost a very strong ‘self-focus’. However, even for the influencers who were the most responsive to their audiences’ perceived wishes, a sense of ‘self-focus’ was maintained as an anchor point in all developed content, often linked to a passion for a certain type of food. Thirdly, this paper maps and describes the behind-the-scenes content creation process adopted by micro-influencers, including four stages (1) Content Planning, (2) Media Gathering, (3) Editing, and (4) Publishing, which was followed by an engagement phase. This study offers a timely contribution to better comprehend the content creation cycle adopted by micro-influencers by using foodie influencers as a case study.

Mitigating information anxiety in COVID-19 contact tracing for BIPOC Communities

Jenny Lee, Jessa Lingel, Alexandra Sanchez, Theo Loftis & Amelia Mauldin

Contact tracing is a crucial process of information exchange in which health institutions share guidance with the public and obtain local health data to curb the spread of disease. But this data collection can exacerbate multiple forms of anxiety, particularly for people who have historically been excluded from and exploited by public health institutions. Given this history, our article centers the perspectives of contact tracers and BIPOC tracees in two US cities: Philadelphia, PA and Providence, RI. Our analysis shows that many BIPOC tracees experience information anxiety, shaped by complex relationships between their communities and health institutions, inconsistent access to care, and privacy concerns. At the same time, contact tracers have the potential to mitigate this anxiety, though this capacity is influenced by the institutional conditions in which they work. By analyzing both tracers’ and tracees’ perspectives on contact tracing, this study contributes grounded and holistic accounts of how public health institutions can better serve local communities, particularly communities of color in urban areas, during public health crises.

Producing green users: environmental protection practice in a platform society

Qing Yan, Hanbo Hou, Meiling Du & Fan Yang

In a platform society, the realization of the public value of platforms is not only affected by goals constructed based on national interest but also closely related to the rights and interests of platform users. In this context, how a platform mediates between the interests of a country, its users, and its businesses becomes a topic worthy of discussion. Through participatory observation and in-depth interviews, this study reveals that online platforms strategically transfer public values that enjoy national policy support and have a broad popular base into their ecosystems, employing techniques such as bridging different parties, gamification management, and the masking effect to produce green users. The findings reveal the unique logic of contemporary China’s platform-driven environmental protection practices and mainstream value cultivation while also highlighting the conflicts and contradictions inherent in realizing public values. This study provides a valuable perspective for understanding the Chinese platform society in terms of public value realization.

The (de)-politicization of Internet memes in Chinese national youth propaganda campaign

Jie Cui

Visual political communication in the social media sphere is increasingly valuable for its ability to more effectively persuade viewers in this increasingly cluttered media landscape. Using multi-model discourse analysis and following the theoretical framework of Everyday Politics, this study focuses on a random sample (N = 200) of user-generated Internet memes from Chinese national youth propaganda campaign Youth Study. In addition, the author observed the sharing and dissemination of these memes in online public discussions. The findings reveal that young participants maintain a varying distance from politics. They employ strategies such as dark humor, hyperbole, contrast, and appropriation of pop culture to portray two key roles – the charming, brilliant followers and the abandoned, hunted breakers, and to construct four main scenarios-cute threat, humble beg, funny politics, and veiled resistance. This politicized propaganda campaign is being transformed from state aspirations to the creative daily cultural consumption of young netizens. This analysis contributes to the scholarly literature on youth subcultures, political mobilization, and visual propaganda in post-socialist China.

Posting and framing politics: a content analysis of celebrities’, athletes’, and influencers’ Instagram political content

Anaëlle Gonzalez, Desiree Schmuck & Laura Vandenbosch

Instagram and its famous personae are nowadays an important news source for many users, which may stem from celebrities’ and social media influencers’ (SMIs) repeated engagement with political topics on their otherwise entertainment- or lifestyle-oriented accounts. Yet, to date, no study has systematically investigated the type and framing of this political content. This content analysis examined 1,256 Instagram posts and 2,936 stories of the 59 most popular opinion leaders (19 athletes, 20 celebrities and 20 SMIs) in Western countries, and documented, for the first time, the prevalence of types of political topics and their framing. Results from multilevel analyses suggest that SMIs and athletes are more likely to post lifestyle-oriented political topics, while celebrities engage more with conventional topics. Moreover, political topics appear more often in ephemeral than permanent content. Generic frames were overall rare, but the most dominant frame of political content was the human impact frame.

Socialism sucks: campus conservatives, digital media, and the rebranding of Christian nationalism

Catherine Tebaldi & Katie Gaddini

In this blended ethnography, combining fieldwork with campus conservative organizations/figures and digital ethnography of their social media, we explore how capitalism, Christianity, and conservatism are brought together and branded for youth. We argue that campus conservative organizations like Turning Point USA are important sites for mainstreaming, branding, and circulating an assemblage of conservative, Christian, and racialized discourses aligned with Christian nationalism and against the left. We analyze how this ‘friend enemy distinction’ occurs through gendered social media practices, constructing female ‘cuteservatives’, influencers who sell friendship and t-shirts, and masculine heroes who battle a socialist enemy. We explore how these discourses are produced, marketed, and circulated. And finally, through Turning Point’s celebration of Kyle Rittenhouse, we show the dangerous potential consequences of this violent rhetoric.

Online news in India: a quantitative appraisal of the digital news consumption landscape in the world’s largest democracy (2014–2018)

Subhayan Mukerjee

How do people in the world’s largest democracy consume news online? In this paper, I aim to answer this question by conducting a quantitative assessment of the online news consumption behavior of a large sample of Indian internet users (N≈50,000) over a period of 45 months. In doing so, I contribute to theoretical debates about global news media use, by systematically appraising the prominence and trends in audience share of different types of news sources, thereby shedding light on the digital news consumption landscape of a crucial, but understudied context. Theoretically, I engage with the displacement-complementarity hypothesis and find no evidence that digital-born media have contested the hegemony of legacy media in India online. Next, I investigate the regional-national media divide and find that regional, vernacular media have suffered significant declines in their audience shares over time. This begs the question whether the notion of ‘polycentrism’ – the idea that the Indian media environment is comprised of national and regional media of equivalent weight – is at all applicable online as it is offline. These findings also run counter to claims of ‘internet vernacularization’ that have been touted in the past. Finally, I propose the concept of audience mobility, and use it to identify qualitatively distinct dynamics in how vernacular audiences in India have migrated to national vis-à-vis international outlets. The findings and their implications are discussed in light of contemporary changes in Indian society that is characterized by rapid digitization and increasing literacy.

Visions of vectors: sense, race, and colonialism in machine learning practice

Jolen Martinez

This paper interrogates the informational practices shared between human and computer machine learners as they train to sense the world through lines of order, or vectors. The paper does this by exploring the affective conditions through which vectors draw relations of data over a persistent, colonial image of race. Through analysis of pedagogical practices at the Summer Institute for Computational Social Science in Chicago, and a corresponding year-long machine learning design group, this paper examines how contemporary machine learning practitioners train themselves to sense calculative relationality on the basis of racialized difference. The paper compares this vectorized sensibility with 20th century enumerative practices in the United States by analyzing the racial statistics of W.E.B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, and Frances Kellor to trace out affective histories of the vector. Ultimately, this paper asks how machine learners – whether algorithms or their human users – often project lines of colonial order upon other forms of life, and how, by questioning the claim of vector relations and their informational objects, we can confront this sense-training and reimagine ourselves.

Image-centrism in Africa’s political communication: a social semiotic analysis of self-presentation practices by women political candidates in Kenya’s social media space

Nancy Gakahu

This study explores self-visual presentation practices by female political candidates on Facebook during Kenya’s political campaigns that culminated in the national elections of 2022. The unit of analysis is the Facebook profile image of the women leaders. Image-centrism is operationalized as the extent to which ‘the image’ becomes the primary mode of self-presentation in political communication discourse. The study adopts a social semiotic approach to image interpretation postulated by Roland Barthes (1972. Mythologies. (A. Lavers. Trans) (Original work published 1957), 1977. Rhetoric of the image. In Image, music, text (pp. 32–51). Hill and Wang) and Kress and van Leeuwen (1996. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. Routledge, 2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). Routledge). Using Kress and van Leeuwen’s approach, images are studied as ‘linguistic codes’ that have their own ‘grammatical’ structure. Barthes’s approach explores the cultural dimension of the images. The argument here is that visual communication is context-bound, and the theoretical premise laid is that politics is given direction, shape, and impetus by the culture of a people. In order to understand visual political communication in Kenya, therefore, the study analyses and interprets images from the lens of the wider African cultural contexts within which this communication takes place. The overarching questions in this study include:

How did female politicians in Kenya strategically use Facebook images for self-representation during the political campaigns in 2022?

How have women politicians in Kenya interwoven cultural ideology with visual political communication on their Facebook pages?

The ultimate conclusion is that political images not only serve as discourses for communicating political ideas and making political statements, but they also serve as self-representation modes as well as cultural manifestation codes that illuminate specific societal concepts.

Riding the yellow wave: the online populist communication of Rassemblement National (RN) leaders in response to the Gilets Jaunes protests and the 2019 European elections

Lucia Posteraro, Timothy Peace & Marius Nyquist Pedersen

Radical-right populist parties will often try to exploit and ride a wave of popular discontent for their own electoral gain. This paper studies the online populist communication of the leaders of the Rassemblement National (RN) in France in the context of the Gilets Jaunes (GJ) protests and the 2019 European election. It analyses the Twitter activity of these leaders to determine whether they temporarily softened their nativist and exclusionary stances to align their communications with the anti-elitist discourse of the protest movement. We explored this question by employing a quantitative text analysis using R Studio tools of their tweets over a 12-month period in combination with a more qualitative analysis of their output on this social media platform. We carried out tests on bigram frequency, network structure, as well as qualitative analysis of posts on the GJ protests and then compared this data with existing works on the GJ, to identify whether and how the RN adapted its social media discourse at strategic times in the election cycle to better suit the Gilets Jaunes’ demands and themes. The results provide support for the expectation of a strategic modification and moderation of exclusionary populist discourse online with both politicians returning to nativist themes after the European election campaign was over and the GJ mobilisation lost momentum. We therefore suggest that the change in output is part of a strategic moderation or ‘de-demonisation’ in order to gain a wider pool of potential voters and in particular those sympathetic to the protest movement.