Search

In this essay, we comment on two highly visible, popular tweets in our datasets around the #hijab that were flagged as highly popular in October 2022. These two tweets are demonstrative of two types of commonly visible strategies on social media—one based on a strategy of intentional context collapse and the other performative activism that serves to extract value for the Twitter user through selective allyship. The essay is taken from a larger investigation around the hashtaggification of “hijab” in 2022 that looks at debates and discussions specifically around two contexts that collide through #hijab—one context is from India and another from Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Misinformation on social media in the 2019 general election not only reached people through forwarded WhatsApp messages, but often circulated online through legitimate political entities. Our research utilizes social media posts from an archive of fact-checked articles , circulated widely and classified as fake or dubious by fact-checking organizations, in the campaign period from early March to late May 2019. Our sample of stories posted by major parties across the political spectrum shows that they incorporated online misinformation into their campaign strategies, which included both lies about their opponents as well as propaganda and other positive-themed information to show themselves in a good light, with the vast majority (N = 41) from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC); both parties were also sources and targets of misinformation. We discuss examples of misinformation as well as the predominant topics of BJP- and INC-targeted misinformation, including the campaign, corruption, religion, celebrity, nationalism, gender and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]