Keyword – social media

Falyuna, Nóra:

A case study on the discourses of flat earth believers’ online community

The Web 2.0 has fundamentally changed the nature of the public sphere and the construction of reality, as well as the behaviour of communication actors. It has also had an effect on how both scientific and seemingly scientific but in fact invalid and non-credible contents appear and then spread very rapidly on the internet. This paper presents a case study of the Flat Earth Believers by analysing the discourse of a Hungarian Facebook group. The Flat Earth Believers disseminate a scientifically refuted and rejected theory, and are therefore a good example of online participatory culture: they cultivate their own, alternative “science” on the internet. The research asks the questions of what lingual, rhetorical and other discursive tools are involved in constructing the identity of this group. The analysis focuses on two elements of their identity construction: how they oppose other groups, and how they create their own scientific credibility. Based on these, the paper investigates 1) how polarisation plays a role in the construction of their identity and their credibility; and 2) how they use elements of scientific communication in their discourse. The investigation shows that in the group’s discourse, anti-scientific attitude is equally representative to the recognition of the authority, credibility and reliability of science they themselves wish to possess. The aim of this research is to draw attention to the need for new approaches in science communication in a changing world ever more defined by information technology and the internet, and to demonstrate that online communication may provide new contexts for studying the public understanding of science (PUS).

Keywords: conspiracy theory, critical skills, digital communication, digital and media competence, media awareness, participatory culture, pseudo-science, public understanding of science, science communication, social media

Torbó, Annamária:

“I’m entertained, I’m horrified, and I become informed – all at the same time.”

The starting point of this study is that in the age of social media, news consumption is similar to entertainment consumption. We may think that our news consumption is fundamentally driven by rationality, but we are much more likely to pick the news on an emotional basis. The functions of information and of entertainment are even more closely connected to date than before, owing to memes and various infotainment videos, among other things. The communities we belong to represent similar values and have a decisive impact on which contents grab our attention. Consequently, we evaluate highly the opinions of people who are close to us and whom we follow on social media platforms. These individuals and groups also play an important role in how we assess the credibility of the news. This empirical research is based on interviews with university students aged 20 to 25, subjected to qualitative content analysis.

Keywords: credibility, emotions, group-belonging, information and entertainment, news consumption, social media, university students, journalists vs. experts

Bene, Márton – Petrekanics, Márton – Bene, Mátyás:

Who spends how much?

This study looks into Facebook’s political advertising sphere in the contexts of the 2019 European Parliamentary and the municipal election campaigns in Hungary. It focuses on the distribution of advertising expenditure between pro-government and oppositional actors, and in light of the ‘stealth media’ thesis (Kim et al., 2018) it also investigates the question of what type of Facebook pages are active in this advertising platform. Its findings show that there was an opposition dominance in terms of advertising expenditure in both campaigns. Also, the advertising sphere was largely dominated by official political actors, but a few highly partisan media outlets also played an important role. Pages with unidentifiable background, however, were marginal in this sphere, refuting the ‘stealth media’ hypothesis.

Keywords: political advertising, political communication, social media, stealth media

Veszelszki, Ágnes – Falyuna, Nóra:

Using linguistic-argumentative tools to disclose pseudo-scientific contents

Pseudo-scientific contents can spread quickly and widely in the ever-changing information and media environment, which makes scientific analysis on identifying these contents particularly valuable. This paper presents the linguisticargumentative characteristics of pseudo-scientific contents spreading on the internet via three case studies (flat earth theory, anti-vaccination movement and parasitic infections), and offers some analytical tools to identify pseudoscientific and unreliable information. It concludes with a list of critical questions based on the relevant literature and the authors’ own teaching practices.The aim of this paper is to show that the analysis of the linguistic-argumentative characteristics of pseudo-scientific contents as a means of evaluating information credibility can contribute to the development of critical interpretative skills and communicational-pedagogical methodologies.

Keywords: argumentation techniques, critical skills, deception, digital communication, fake news, media awareness, pseudoscience, science communication, social media, terminology

Egres, Dorottya:

The discursive sanctioning of political incivility in the Blanka Nagy case

Blanka Nagy, a high school student spoke up at a protest organised against the Hungarian overtime law in 2018. In her speech, she uttered profanities against the ruling political elite. This paper explores a case of incivility that broke the norms of political communication, while discussing the context-dependency and politically motivated nature of discursive sanctioning. It employs the methodology of frame analysis and studies how the most visited news media outlets and the comments under the news articles shared on social media framed and discursively sanctioned the high schooler and her profanities. Its findings suggest that the positive framing of the incivility can be tied to the addressees of the speech, while the negative framing can be connected to the attributes of the speaker

Keywords: Blanka Nagy, discursive sanctioning, framing, incivility, news media, political communication, profanity, social media

Sztáray Kézdy, Éva – Kovácsné Hegedűs, Dóra:

Examining the changing father image in the light of Instagram posts

As a result of the transformation of fatherhood in recent decades, besides the traditional, primarily breadwinning, protective father model, a modern father role has emerged, according to which the father is increasingly involved in the lives of his children. To date, social media are saturating more and more areas of life, and the mediatisation of parenthood and of fatherhood is on the rise. The presentation of fatherhood and the discussion of new trends in fatherhood are becoming increasingly popular among social media players and celebrity fathers. The main aim and question of this research is to explore the new father image and father identity in the context of Hungarian fathers’ Instagram posts. The findings of our explorative research, conducted through quantitative and qualitative textual analysis and visual analysis, point to the fact that the fatherly identity represented on Instagram portrays the image of the modern, actively caring father emotionally involved in his children’s lives. The focus on Instagram posts is mainly on the positive, idyllic, side of fatherhood, with the more difficult moments of parenthood not being portrayed.

Keywords: father’s involvement, Instagram, mediatisation, modern fatherhood, social media, text analysis

Burai, Krisztina:

(Un)following for political reasons?

The proliferation of the internet and social networking sites has created a medium that enables users to access a wide range of news sources, and the multitude of content available means that citizens are forced to choose from the content available, for which the platform in the focus of my research, Facebook, offers a number of possibilities. My research attempts to answer the question of whether users use the various functions for managing political content on Facebook, which can reinforce the homogenisation of the information. This question is explored through a survey of 1,000 people, representative of key demographics. The findings show that only a small part of users use the positive or negative newsfeed editing features regularly.

Keywords: curated flows, Facebook, social media, political communication

Vicsek, Ferenc:

Mass media versus mass informedness

The Political Propaganda Indicator (PPI) measures abuses of information management, following the models of the Democracy Index created by Freedom House and of the Corruption Perceptions Index compiled by Transparency International. It is a method for measuring how corrupted the information disseminated to the public is. The PPI shows what percentage of people accept news items spread by political propaganda as true, even though they are otherwise often difficult to verify as factually correct. It shows what share of the public has a false perception of reality because of propaganda and manipulated news services. It also shows what percentage of people fall prey to false news streams and, consequently, how many of them decide in free elections on the basis of misleading, deliberately false information or concealed information as compared to a situation in which there is a level informational playing field.

Keywords: brainwashing, fake news, information policy, informedness, media regulation, media system, propaganda, press freedom, social media

Parapatics, Andrea:

Regional language features and their judgement in social media

This study investigates social media as a possible linguistic data source of empirical research. Since the paper draws attention to the existence of linguistic data that can be collected by passively observing digital communication, the studied sample is random and not representative. However, the information not affected by the presence of the researcher has an enormous role (beside other data garnered via different methods). This kind of reliable data is provided by the quasi faceless, oral-like, and less reflected language use on social media platforms. The study presents a great number of self-collected objective and subjective data (language facts and attitudes), highlighting that the sample shows prescriptive, one-norm language view of the users who judge and correct phonetical, syntactical and lexical regionalisms and the users of them. The paper also draws attention to the role of social media in developing metalinguistic awareness and forming attitudes by users and by direct science communication.

Keywords: dialect, dialectology, digital media, language attitude, language myths, metalinguistic awareness, mother tongue, social media, regionalism, sociolinguistics

Mátyus, Imre:

Diversification in community and interaction within FLOSS communities

The spread of world wide web use in the 1990s and the increasing importance of social media platforms in the 2000s did not only result in a paradigm shift in mass communication, but also generated deeper social changes. In the last few decades, we witnessed the creation of new kinds of communities and practices, generated by the new media devices that play an ever-increasing role in the organisation and operation of communities. This study is to demonstrate such tendencies through the example of open source software communities. More precisely, it shows the changing role and diversification of online platforms in the context of Hungarian Linux users’ interactions. It also attempts to illustrate the connection between the modal and topic-related changes of interactions and the expansion of Linux user communities.

Keywords: interaction, internet studies, Linux, new media, online community, open source, social media

Szász, Veronika Sára:

Personal brand in the context of creative arts

This study briefly presents the personal branding strategies of emblematic Hungarian creative artists who have gained professional recognition and built up their following before the advent of information technologies. It is based on research related to the discourse on digital identity construction previously discussed in the media studies quarterly Médiakutató and expands it with the specificities of the artistic context.

Keywords: consciousness, creative arts, digital identity, interaction, personal brand, self 2.0, self-brand, social media

Juhász, Vanessza – Bene, Márton:

The online argumentation of political parties and their leaders during the 2022 parliamentary election campaign

Based on the 2022 legislative election campaign, this paper studies how frequently and in what ways certain elements of political debate occur in political actors’ social media communication. We analysed 2,441 Facebook posts issued by parties and party leaders prior to the election. Our findings suggest that political actors engage in opinionated discourse on social media and largely focus on public policy issues. They rarely rely on factual reasoning, but ad hominem fallacy plays a significant role in their Facebook posts. However, other argumentation mistakes occur rarely in their communication. Different actors evince largely identical patterns, but opposition parties and politicians tend to take a more argumentative stance compared to coalition parties and politicians.

Keywords: 2022 parliamentary election campaign, ad hominem, argumentation, Facebook, Frans van Eemeren, political debate, pragmadialectics, social media