The Social Paradox of Citizen Denunciation: Informing Practices in Modern Poland

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542097764
Author(s):  
Jolanta Arcimowicz ◽  
Mariola Bieńko ◽  
Beata Łaciak
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Media Report ◽  
Civic Society ◽  
Individual Interviews ◽  
The Social ◽  
Communist Countries

Within sociological literature, including that which analyses systemic changes in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, denunciation is one of the least studied issues, both empirically and theoretically. In Poland after the political transformation, as well as in other post-communist countries, the problem of dealing with security service and secret police informers and collaborators has not gone away. News media report a rapidly growing number of denunciations directed to various institutions and administrative offices, and legal regulations regarding denunciations have also appeared. In public discourse, denunciation and whistleblowing are increasingly often equated. Encouragement to inform about aberrations, confronted with the consequences that whistleblowers face, shows the legal and social vacuum around the institution of whistleblowing in Poland. This article, in response to questions about the modern social image of denunciation, is based on analysis of in-depth individual interviews conducted during 2015–2017 with children, adults, and administrative officials in three Polish cities. The results show that both children and adults treat denunciation as a form of harming others, though they do differentiate their moral judgments depending on the delator’s intention, but they rarely attribute any motive other than personal gain to whistleblowers’ actions. Finally, the existing administrative acquiescence and institutional support for denunciation are sometimes interpreted in terms of the weakness of democracy, immaturity of civic society, and the legacy of a totalitarian state.

scholarly journals More than a trivial pursuit: Public order policing narratives and the ‘social media test’

2020 ◽  
pp. 174165902091863
Author(s):  
Justin R Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Excessive Force ◽  
The Social ◽  
Police Accountability ◽  
Trivial Pursuit ◽  
Media Narratives ◽  
Depth Interviews

Social media has transformed public discourse on policing and the contest of control over the police image. This article draws on original, empirical research to conceptualise the phenomenon of the ‘social media test’ – the evolution of social media into a legitimate measure of police performance. Through in-depth interviews with police and non-police respondents the article maps the genealogy of, and provides perspective on, one of the first viral cases of bystander video of police excessive force in Australia filmed and uploaded to YouTube. The study shows the video’s impact on hegemonic mainstream and police news media narratives, processes of criminalisation and police accountability and the merit of narrative criminology in unpacking these phenomena. Police alluding to the ‘social media test’ in in-depth interviews shows that digital media in general and social media in particular can no longer be dismissed as peripheral or subsidiary to public discourse on policing in a digital society.

scholarly journals Turning Words Into Consumer Preferences: How Sentiment Analysis Is Framed in Research and the News Media

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511879772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelius Puschmann ◽  
Alison Powell
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Consumer Preferences ◽  
The Public ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
The Social

Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular instrument for the analysis of social media discourse. Sentiment scores seemingly represent an objective means of assessing the mood of social media users, consumers, and the public at large. Similar to other computational tools, sentiment analysis promises to reduce complexity and mitigate information overload, and to inform the decisions of marketers, pollsters, and scholars with reliable data. This article argues that the assumptions encoded into sentiment analysis as a method are accompanied by a number of constraints, both regarding its technical limitations (in terms of what sentiment analysis can and cannot accomplish) and conceptually (in terms of what the notion of sentiment implicitly represents), constraints which are often de-emphasized in public discourse. After providing an overview of its history and development in computer science as well as psychology and the social sciences, we turn to the role of sentiment as a currency in the attention economy. We then present a brief study of common framing of sentiment analysis in the news media, highlighting the expectations that exist regarding its analytical capabilities. We close by discussing the kind of conceptual work that takes place around computational methods such as sentiment analysis in specific cultural environments, highlighting their influence on the public imaginary.

scholarly journals Article 13 on social media and news media: disintermediation and reintermediation on the modern media landscape

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-157
Author(s):  
José Moreno ◽  
Rita Sepúlveda
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Online News ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Social Relevance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Ease Of Access

The former Article 13 (now Article 17) of the European directive on copyright and the internet (Directive EC2019/790) has been under negotiations since 2016 and was finally approved in 2019. In Portugal, however, the issue was mostly absent from public scrutiny and debate until November 2018. In that month, the issue arose to a prominent level, both in news media and in social media, following a wave of alerts issued by various young youtubers, incentivized by YouTube management. In this paper, we engage in the discussion concerning disintermediation, studying the way in which such alerts spread both in news media and social media, and understanding the role played by the users of social media platforms in modelling the social relevance and the social discourse of the issue of copyright and the internet. To do so, we used digital methods, collecting and analysing data from Twitter, YouTube and from online news media, mapping Article 13 discussions and identifying key actors in each field, as well as the connections between them. The results show that the ease of access provided by platforms such as Twitter or YouTube converts some users to prominent influencers and that, in some cases, those influencers are able to shift and model the public discourse about relevant collective issues.

Political transformations in the CEE post-communist countries: theoretical and metodological approaches

2017 ◽  
pp. 40-49
Author(s):  
Vira Burdjak
Keyword(s):  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Hybrid Regimes ◽  
Illiberal Democracy ◽  
Final Destination ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Political Realities

Theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of political transformations in the CEE post-communist countries have been analyzed. The author argues that democratic transits do not guarantee transition to democracy and its consolidation. They are just polymorphic conversion processes from one political state to another, where the final destination is not always a democracy. They are influenced by general international factors, which allows us to consider the democratic transits, which may not consolidate into democracy, as integral components of the modern global democratic wave. Their real democratic value is not a definite variable. Political realities indicate that some of the transits proceed to illiberal democracy and hybrid regimes with different (non-) democratic features or often with versions of a new authoritarianism. In electoral democracies, only the external, formal sides of the democracy and democratic procedures are imitated, especially elections, which does not give grounds to relate these regimes to the democratic ones. Keywords: Post-communist countries of CEE, theoretical and methodological approaches, political transformation

Double, triple or quadruple hits? Exploring the impact of cybercrime on victims in the Netherlands

2021 ◽  
pp. 026975802110106
Author(s):  
Raoul Notté ◽  
E.R. Leukfeldt ◽  
Marijke Malsch
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Victim Blaming ◽  
High Prevalence ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Insight Into

This article explores the impact of online crime victimisation. A literature review and 41 interviews – 19 with victims and 22 with experts – were carried out to gain insight into this. The interviews show that most impacts of online offences correspond to the impacts of traditional offline offences. There are also differences with offline crime victimisation. Several forms of impact seem to be specific to victims of online crime: the substantial scale and visibility of victimhood, victimisation that does not stop in time, the interwovenness of online and offline, and victim blaming. Victims suffer from double, triple or even quadruple hits; it is the accumulation of different types of impact, enforced by the limitlessness in time and space, which makes online crime victimisation so extremely invasive. Furthermore, the characteristics of online crime victimisation greatly complicate the fight against and prevention of online crime. Finally, the high prevalence of cybercrime victimisation combined with the severe impact of these crimes seems contradictory with public opinion – and associated moral judgments – on victims. Further research into the dominant public discourse on victimisation and how this affects the functioning of the police and victim support would be valuable.

Austerity against the Homo Sovieticus

Focaal ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (59) ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Daiva Repečkait
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Shock Therapy ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Class Background ◽  
The Media ◽  
Economic Shock ◽  
Homo Sovieticus

This article analyzes the public discourse on the riots of 16 January 2009, in Vilnius, when protest against economic shock therapy ended in violent clashes with the police. Politicians and the media were quick to ethnicize the riots, claiming an “involvement of foreign influences” and noting that the rioters had been predominantly “Russian-speaking.” Analyzing electronic and print media, the article identifies a wider tendency, particularly among middle-class Lithuanian youth, of portraying the social class consisting of “losers of the post-soviet transition” as aggressive and primitive Others. A pseudo-ethnicity that combines Rus sian language and culture with lower-class background into a notion of homo sovieticus comes to stand for what is hindering the “clean up” of Lithuania and middleclass aspirations to form a new European identity. As such, the riots serve as a lens that illuminates the way ethnicity is flexibly utilized to shift political loyalties.

Biased Benevolence: The Perceived Morality of Effective Altruism Across Social Distance

2021 ◽  
pp. 014616722110027
Author(s):  
Kyle Fiore Law ◽  
Dylan Campbell ◽  
Brendan Gaesser
Keyword(s):  
Relationship Quality ◽  
Social Distance ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Cooperative Behavior ◽  
Physical Distance ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
The Social ◽  
Effective Altruism ◽  
Quality Study ◽  
Matched Study

Is altruism always morally good, or is the morality of altruism fundamentally shaped by the social opportunity costs that often accompany helping decisions? Across four studies, we reveal that in cases of realistic tradeoffs in social distance for gains in welfare where helping socially distant others necessitates not helping socially closer others with the same resources, helping is deemed as less morally acceptable. Making helping decisions at a cost to socially closer others also negatively affects judgments of relationship quality (Study 2) and in turn, decreases cooperative behavior with the helper (Study 3). Ruling out an alternative explanation of physical distance accounting for the effects in Studies 1 to 3, social distance continued to impact moral acceptability when physical distance across social targets was matched (Study 4). These findings reveal that attempts to decrease biases in helping may have previously unconsidered consequences for moral judgments, relationships, and cooperation.

New Indian online rules risk state overreach and abuse

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Online News ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Digital Service ◽  
The Government

Significance The new rules follow a stand-off between Twitter and the central government last month over some posts and accounts. The government has used this stand-off as an opportunity not only to tighten rules governing social media, including Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook and LinkedIn, but also those for other digital service providers including news publishers and entertainment streaming companies. Impacts Government moves against dominant social media platforms will boost the appeal of smaller platforms with light or no content moderation. Hate speech and harmful disinformation are especially hard to control and curb on smaller platforms. The new rules will have a chilling effect on online public discourse, increasing self-censorship (at the very least). Government action against online news media would undercut fundamental democratic freedoms and the right to dissent. Since US-based companies dominate key segments of the Indian digital market, India’s restrictive rules could mar India-US ties.

Folklorisation and the Emergent Moral Degeneration: A Functionalist Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Siziwe Mandubu
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
South African ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Behavioral Norms ◽  
South African Society ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
The Social ◽  
Functionalist Approach

Living in an egalitarian society has resulted in the corrosion of the moral base among certain sectors in the community. Some people misconstrue egalitarianism as an authorisation to act as they see fit. Young people, in particular, are gradually losing touch with reality in relation to acceptable behavioral norms in the South African society. Based on the functionalist theory of balancing the social equilibrium among people, the article delineates moral standards as the most fundamental and general principles of behaviour and reflects on how the society expects one to act in certain situations. The article, therefore, explores the primary concepts within functionalism and attempts to outline that the society is a system of interconnected parts that work together in harmony to maintain a state of stability and social cohesion. The article will use the folktale “uDyakalashe noMvolofu” (“The Jackal and the Wolf”) to reflect on the expected societal norms. It demonstrates that folktales, which used to transfer values, morals and shape the conduct of people in the olden days are still appropriate in reshaping the outlook and perceptions of today’s generation. As such, the shrewd nature of folklore in the moral regeneration of the current generation of young people is exposed. While there are many folktales in this category, “uDyakalashe noMvolofu” (“The Jackal and the Wolf”) provides the theme relevant for the analysis of the topic to highlight that moral standards generate moral principles and moral judgments.

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