DIGITAL INTELLIGENCE: CONSUMPTIVE BEHAVIOR REDUCTION EFFORTS GLOBAL SOCIETY AGAINST HOAX INFORMATION

The development of information technology contributes to creating media diversity. This rapid development has triggered a shift in the availability of access from limited access to abundant media. The birth of cyber media is one sign of this diversity. However, not everything that develops has a positive impact, but many audiences complain about the reality that has entered the era of a world crowded with media. The existence of this phenomenon gives rise to freedom in the creation and dissemination of information which leads to the delivery of irresponsible messages. So that the phenomenon of the spread of fake news or hoaxes is increasing significantly in Indonesia and even in the world. Unfortunately, most netizens who take part in this new media era do not pay attention to cyber media law and ethics. In addition, they also lack knowledge about what, why and how media literacy is applied. From the emergence of this problem, it is important for netizens and audiences to know the importance of digital intelligence, as an effort to reduce the consumptive behavior of the global community in consuming information from hoax crimes.. Keywords: Cyber Media, Hoax, Digital Intelligence

Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity

The current media studies of COVID-19 devote asymmetrical attention to social media; in contrast, newspapers have received comparatively less attention. Newspapers are an integral source of current information that are syndicated and amplified by social media to a wide global audience. This is one of the first known studies to operationalize news media diversity and examine its association with cultural values during the pandemic. We tracked the global diversity of COVID-19 coverage in a news media database of 12 billion words, collated from 28 million articles over 7000 news websites, across 8 months. Media diversity was measured weekly by the number of unique descriptors of 10 target terms of the pandemic (e.g., COVID-19, coronavirus) and normalized by the corpus size for the respective countries per week. Government Stringency was taken from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and cultural scores were taken from Hofstede’s Cultural Values global database. Results showed that Media Diversity Rate increased 6.7 times over 8 months, from the baseline period (October–December 2019) to during the pandemic (January–May 2020). Mixed effects modelling revealed that higher COVID-19 prevalence rates and governmental stringency predicted this increase. Interestingly, collectivist cultures are linked to more diverse media coverage during COVID-19. It is possible that news outlets in collectivist societies are motivated to present a diverse array of topics given the impact of COVID-19 on every segment of society. Of broader significance, we provided a framework to design targeted public health communications that are culturally nuanced.

More or More of the Same: Ownership Concentration and Media Diversity in Egypt

The Egyptian media has witnessed various changes in the ownership spectrum after the 2011 revolution. To explore this evolution, and through the Habermasian lens, this study examined ownership concentration in the 2019 media sphere in Egypt by mapping media outlets and their owners. It also investigated the relationship between this concentration and content diversity in a sample of print outlets in the first quarter of 2019. Three patterns of ownership concentration in the Egyptian media were identified: concentrated state ownership, concentrated private ownership, and not concentrated private ownership. Based on these findings, I argue that the media sphere in Egypt is dominated by a few gatekeepers, mostly the state, that influence content diversity and jeopardize the democratic public sphere in postrevolution Egypt.