#GirlGamers, Soldiers, and Public Relations: Analyzing Gender Representation in U.S. Army Esports

While interest in esports is widespread across demographic categories, the gendered norms surrounding video game play have been replicated, resulting in a male-dominated space. Scholars argue that broadening representations of gamers is necessary to normalizing women’s presence in esports. As nongaming organizations enter the space, they have a unique opportunity to disrupt established norms through their representations of esports competitors. This study analyzes the representation of U.S. Army Esports (USAE) team members via official social media channels. USAE was created as a public relations tool to engage with a younger audience, redefine the public image of the Army, and recruit soldiers. Using a critical public relations framework and critical discourse analysis, we examine the discourse around gender and esports constructed through USAE’s representation of team members and the role of public relations practice in reinforcing or disrupting existing norms.

Religion and Culture Intersected in 2M’s Mediated Discourse: Toruq Alarifeen Program as a Case Study

Early studies focused mainly on demystifying Sufism, but little has been said about its mediated broadcasting to the Moroccan audience. This article explores the ways Moroccan public media channels the Sufi dichotomies. Specifically, I investigate the binary oppositions of cultural rites versus Sufi esoteric practices through a reflexive thematic analysis. A purposeful inspection of Turouq Alarefeen’s TV program is gauged to identify the manifestation of Sufi and cultural aspects in this TV show as a sample for this study. Three themes are selected to contextualize the discussion: language absurdity, esotericism versus exotericism, and glorification of the shaykhs. The qualitative methodology seems to serve my research better as it is convenient for the nature of the subject matter. I have worked on the most recent ten program episodes as samples representing mainly an ongoing Sufi TV show. The main findings reveal how the Media reproduce the mystery of Sufism and the fact that coverage tends to amalgamate cultural dimensions of popular Islam with Sufi esoteric scopes.

Empowering the People’s Truth Through Social Media? (De)Legitimizing Truth Claims of Populist Politicians and Citizens

Right-wing populists have allegedly fueled increasing levels of distrust regarding expert knowledge and empirical evidence. Yet, we know little about how right-wing populist politicians and citizens use social media to construct and oppose truth claims. Using a qualitative analysis of Twitter and Facebook posts communicated by right-wing populists and citizens supporting populist ideas in the Netherlands, this article offers in-depth insights into processes of legitimization (confirming truth claims) and de-legitimization (opposing truth claims). The main conclusion is that right-wing populists and citizens supporting populism do not share a universal way of referring to reality. They use social media to communicate a confirmation-biased reality: Expert knowledge and evidence are de-contextualized or reinterpreted and aligned with right-wing populist agendas. References to the people’s experiences and worldviews, conspiracy theories and crisis sentiments are used to legitimize people’s opposition to expert knowledge and empirical evidence. Based on these findings, we coin the idea of an “adaptable construction of confirmation-biased truth claims” central in right-wing populist interpretations of reality. In times of increasing attacks on expert knowledge and empirical evidence, populist discourse may fuel an antagonism between the ordinary people’s experiences and the truth claims of established media channels and politicians in government. Social media offer a platform to members of the public to engage in discussions about (un)truthfulness, perceived deception, and populist oppositions—potentially amplifying divides between the ordinary people’s experiences and expert sources.

The Evolution of the Internet and Social Media: A Literature Review

This article reviews and analyses factors impacting the evolution of the internet, the web, and social media channels, charting historic trends and highlight recent technological developments. The review comprised a deep search using electronic journal databases. Articles were chosen according to specific criteria with a group of 34 papers and books selected for complete reading and deep analysis. The 34 elements were analysed and processed using NVIVO 12 Pro, enabling the creation of dimensions and categories, codes and nodes, identifying the most frequent words, cluster analysis of the terms, and creating a word cloud based on each word's frequency. The review presents updated information about technological trends, marketing, and chronological elements regarding the evolution of the internet and social media.

Fake News Detection Using NLP

The spreading of fake news has given rise to many problems in society. It is due to its ability to cause a lot of social and national damage with destructive impacts. Sometimes it gets very difficult to know if the news is genuine or fake. Therefore it is very important to detect if the news is fake or not. "Fake News" is a term used to represent fabricated news or propaganda comprising misinformation communicated through traditional media channels like print, and television as well as nontraditional media channels like social media. Techniques of NLP and Machine learning can be used to create models which can help to detect fake news. In this paper we have presented six LSTM models using the techniques of NLP and ML. The datasets in comma-separated values format, pertaining to political domain were used in the project. The different attributes like the title and text of the news headline/article were used to perform the fake news detection. The results showed that the proposed solution performs well in terms of providing an output with good accuracy, precision and recall. The performance analysis made between all the models showed that the models which have used GloVe and Word2vec method work better than the models using TF-IDF. Further, a larger dataset for better output and also other factors such as the author ,publisher of the news can be used to determine the credibility of the news. Also, further research can also be done on images, videos, images containing text which can help in improving the models in future. Keywords: Fake news detection, LSTM(long short term memory),Word2Vec,TF-IDF,Natural Language Processing.

A possible review by the European ministry of education in 2050—by a reluctant manager of Europe’s path towards educational dependency

Murat Adam is head of policy and curriculum for the European ministry of education. Political pressure is rising. Media channels across the European federation are labeling the continent as the most recent member of the education periphery. In Mr Adam’s world, curricular authority transpires from the big 3, the North American Union (NAU), China, and Russia. Credibility and endorsement are educational currencies—institutional capital as Bourdieu once defined it, reigns. Mr Adam’s battle is already lost, member states of the European federation have lost their educational means of production, but he cannot afford to admit that. European teachers’ credentials increasingly force graduates into care taking jobs at digital day cares. These are a response to US teachers’ and practitioners’ revolts of the late 20s, linked to perceived multisensory impoverishment of digitally schooled children. Just like in South Asia, Africa, and South America, digital day cares merely provide the digital and social framework and setup K-12 students to listen to internationally accredited professionals teach from China, Russia, and the NAU. Day and night shifts are common. He knows that the European federation lost the contest, by the time it decided not to invest into its own internet infrastructure. The educational first world’s curricular authority would not have been possible without the three nations’ proprietary server architecture, which commodified bandwidth and connectivity. The internet of the past is nothing more than a front for the three de-facto mutually exclusive digital ecosystems, provided by China, the NAU, and Russia.

Robust Video Steganography for Social Media Sharing Based on Principal Component Analysis

Most social media channels are lossy where videos are transcoded to reduce transmission bandwidth or storage space, such as social networking sites and video sharing platforms. Video transcoding makes most video steganographic schemes unusable for hidden communication based on social media. This paper proposes robust video steganography against video transcoding to construct reliable hidden communication on social media channels. A new strategy based on principal component analysis is provided to select robust embedding regions. Besides, side information is generated to label these selected regions. Side information compression is designed to reduce the transmission bandwidth cost. Then, one luminance component and one chrominance component are joined to embed secret messages and side information, keeping the embedding and extraction positions in sync. Video preprocessing is conducted to improve the applicability of our proposed method to various video transcoding mechanisms. Experimental results have shown that our proposed method provides strong robustness against video transcoding and achieves satisfactory security performance against steganalysis. The bit error rate of our method is lower than state-of-the-art robust video steganographic methods. It is a robust and secure method to realize reliable hidden communication over social media channels, such as YouTube and Vimeo.

Should I Ask Over Zoom, Phone, Email, or In-Person? Communication Channel and Predicted Versus Actual Compliance

Research has found that people are much more likely to agree to help requests made in-person than those made via text-based media, but that help-seekers underestimate the relative advantage of asking for help face-to-face. It remains unknown what help-seekers’ intuitions about the effectiveness of richer media channels incorporating audio and video features might be, or how these intuitions would compare with the actual effectiveness of face-to-face or email versus rich media requests. In two behavioral and two supplemental vignette experiments, participants expected differences in the effectiveness of seeking help through various communication channels to be quite small, or nonexistent. However, when participants actually made requests, the differences were substantial. Ultimately, help-seekers underestimated the relative advantage of asking for help face-to-face compared with asking through any mediated channel. Help-seekers also underestimated the relative advantage of asking through richer media channels compared with email.