Between Institutional Inertia and Systemic Vulnerability: Understanding Invisible Threats to Journalists’ Safety

PurposeThis study aims to use institutional and upper echelons theories to comprehensively investigate the intricate interplay between TMT legal expertise and firms' adaptive strategies in legal contexts, notably within emerging economies. It explores how upper echelons experiences shape opportunistic compliance strategies, impacting value and risk perceptions. Drawing on upper echelons theory, the research probes how TMT legal expertise molds firms’ involvement in significant lawsuits, accounting for influential roles. It scrutinizes TMT’s impact on legal strategies, positing that managerial discretion emerges from environmental factors, organizational attributes and executive traits. The study underscores TMT’s internal incentives and external factors’ interplay, molding strategic legal engagement.Design/methodology/approachTo validate this framework, statistical analysis is performed on data from 2,584 Chinese-listed firms. The data set spans 2010–2015, with 5,713 material lawsuits. Chosen due to reliable institutional-level incentives data from the China Market Index Database, years 2016–2019 are excluded for methodological disparities. Moreover, 2007–2009 is omitted to mitigate the potential financial crisis impact. This study’s 11,272 observations ensure robust empirical exploration, offering insights into the interplay of TMT legal expertise, institutional factors and firms’ legal strategies.FindingsThe study reveals that firms led by executives with legal expertise are more prone to engage in significant lawsuits, indicating strategic use of legal skills. TMT age moderates this, with older teams less likely to engage. TMT tenure’s effect remains unclear due to tenure-risk preference complexity. Institutional factors matter; less legally mature regions reduce managers’ legal risk intention. Results confirm hypotheses and highlight executive human capital’s impact on firms’ legal strategies.Research limitations/implicationsThis study acknowledges contributions while highlighting limitations, including the need for detailed distinctions in lawsuit roles and exploration of heterogeneous TMT power dynamics. Further research is proposed for nuanced power dynamics and comprehensive TMT legal background data. The study advances upper echelons theory by introducing TMT legal expertise as a factor influencing strategic lawsuit behavior. It challenges institutional theory by showing the adaptable legal context, beyond fixed constraints. Moderating factors – group risk attitude and external knowledge – deepen understanding of upper echelons’ impact. Enhanced data collection is encouraged to address limitations and refine findings.Practical implicationsThis study’s implications extend to managerial practices. Firms should acknowledge the dynamic legal system, using TMT legal expertise for strategic legal challenges. Executives should pragmatically approach regulations. While legal professionals enhance compliance, caution is needed in selecting TMT members with legal expertise due to the risk of misusing it for unnecessary litigation, potentially misaligned with financial performance goals.Originality/valueThis study combines institutional and upper echelons theories to explore TMT legal expertise’s impact on firms’ adaptive strategies in emerging economies. It challenges the idea of a universally constraining legal environment and highlights how TMT legal expertise enhances firms’ management of complex legal risks. The research introduces TMT legal expertise as an influencing factor in strategic lawsuits, revealing nuanced relationships between legal contexts and strategic decisions. The findings enrich upper echelons theory, challenge conventional institutional views and identify moderating factors that deepen the understanding of upper echelons’ influence in legal landscapes.

The online harassment of journalists is a phenomenon which has been on the rise in Europe over the last decade and it affects journalists' working lives. As an expression of mob censorship, online harassment raises questions about how media organisations react to online aggressions targeting their journalists, the consequences on the victims’ well-being and on the role of journalism in society. Yet, previous research has shown the lack of support mechanisms provided by journalists’ employers. In this article, we explore the hypothesis that the lack of organisational support towards targeted journalists is partly due to the challenges faced by media managers when trying to make sense of the phenomenon. This article offers a unique viewpoint on how 22 Belgian media managers from five media organisations struggle to define what online harassment is and how to respond to it. In turn, it shows that the vague understanding of what online harassment is seems to favour case-by-case organisational responses. Missing words and unstructured actions related to online harassment impede media managers from addressing online harassment as a collective issue in journalism and its consequences on the democratic debate.

Blockchain technology is increasingly being recognized as a transformative tool for enhancing transparency, accountability, and efficiency in governance systems. This interdisciplinary research paper explores how blockchain can be integrated into governmental frameworks, assessing its technological capabilities, legal readiness, and administrative adaptability. The study examines the extent to which blockchain is currently utilized in public services, evaluates stakeholder perceptions, and identifies legal and institutional barriers to its broader adoption. Through a structured survey conducted among legal experts and administrative officers, the study investigates five core areas: current usage, perceived transparency benefits, legal preparedness, administrative training, and support for future implementation. While 82% of legal experts and 78% of administrative officers agree that blockchain can significantly enhance transparency, only 60% and 45%, respectively, confirmed active use in their domains. The data highlights that despite a shared belief in blockchain’s potential, actual deployment remains limited and uneven. Legal experts cited significant gaps in regulatory clarity, particularly around data privacy, contract enforcement, and liability frameworks. Administrative officers emphasized a lack of training and institutional inertia as major obstacles to implementation. Only 40% of legal experts and 35% of administrative officers acknowledged any formal training being offered in their departments. However, there was overwhelming support—90% and 85%, respectively—for expanding blockchain integration into governance processes. The case study contrasts Estonia’s blockchain-driven e-Governance model with India’s pilot projects, revealing a stark difference in scale, coordination, and legislative support. Estonia’s unified architecture and legislative alignment have enabled seamless digital governance, while India's initiatives, although promising, remain fragmented and experimental. This paper argues that for blockchain to move from experimental to essential in governance, it must be embedded in a supportive legal framework, backed by executive training, and coordinated across departments. The findings contribute to the discourse on digital governance by providing empirical insights into interdisciplinary readiness and by recommending strategic actions for broader, ethical, and impactful blockchain deployment in public administration.

Speaking hatefully is an antisocial conduct. Hate can be expressed on the basis of gender, race, or religion, ethnic, etc. The definition of “hate speech” is ambiguous. The Hate speech is defined by the Council of the European Union as “any types of expression which disseminate, provoke, or defend intolerance as a reason for racial hatred, xenophobia, antisemitism, or other types of hatred, including violent nationalism and ethnocentrism, as well as prejudice and hatred toward migrants, minorities, and those with immigrant backgrounds. The most pressing issue in recent times in social media and online groups is toxicity identification sites for networking. Therefore, it is necessary to create an automatic hazardous identification system to keep people out of and restrict their access to these online settings. The prevalence of hate speech presents significant difficulties for the cyber culture. Users can wish for social media sites and online forums to support anti-hate discourse. Hate speech detection, however, is still a young technology, and system designers must come up with a way to identify unwanted hate speech while upholding the atmosphere of online freedom of speech. No method for detecting excellence has yet been put forth. Identifying the form of communication is hate speech and automatically recognising the hate speech are the two typical obstacles for a hate speech detection task. People must first decide which kinds of speech fall under the category of hate speech before screening it out. The majority of social media platforms define hate speech differently. In this day and age, Internet is necessary, and ethics has to be followed, however several parties spread hate speech deviating on race, ethnicity, and religion. The user’s freedom and anonymity increase the harassment by hate speech. It also adds lack of regulation on social media communication. Cyber bullying and trolling are two kinds of abusive behaviour.

Social media platforms enable rapid communication, information sharing, and opinion expression. However, their misuse for hate speech targeting race, religion and political differences has become a growing concern. This issue is particularly sensitive for underrepresented languages like Amharic, a Semitic language with the second-largest number of speakers after Arabic and the working language of Ethiopia. This study addresses the challenge of detecting hate speech in Amharic text by analyzing posts and comments from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. A dataset of 7,590 labeled entries was collected using the Face pager tool, focusing on hate speech related to race, religion, politics, and neutral content. The dataset was annotated with the guidance of researchers, legal experts, and language specialists. Preprocessing techniques, including data cleaning, tokenization, and normalization, were applied, and feature extraction was performed using embedding layers. The dataset was split into training (80%), validation (10%), and testing (10%) sets. Several deep learning models LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU, BiGRU, and RoBERTa were developed and evaluated using precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy metrics. The RoBERTa model outperformed others, achieving an accuracy of 91%. This research highlights the effectiveness of advanced deep learning techniques in detecting Amharic hate speech, offering a valuable tool for mitigating this critical issue in Ethiopian social media contexts.

Throughout my career, advances in technology and global communications have enabled larger and more dispersed groups worldwide, new services and products that make groups more efficient, effective, and cohesive. As well, we see new threats and harms to group members and others: online harassment and hate speech, invasions of privacy, financial crimes, cyberbullying, AI-created false information, and threats to vulnerable group members. More than half of young women and girls survey state they have been harassed online and a quarter reported feeling unsafe (https://planusa-org-staging.s3.amazonaws.com/public/uploads/2021/04/Freedom_Online_2020_State_Of_The_Worlds_Girls_PIUSA.pdf). Health misinformation spread by online groups, such as that HIV does not cause AIDS, may have killed thousands in Africa. Misinformation promulgated by anti-vaccine groups has encouraged millions in the U.S. to forgo life-saving vaccines. Cyberspace today spills over into the physical world and all forms of telecommunication, furthering fraudulent services and goods, polarization of the electorate and distrust in elections, threats to journalism, misleading science, and real-world violence. High quality research and investigative journalism has made some gains in understanding and mitigating the tsunami of accidental and intentional harms online, but opposing lies and threats with truth can feel like a losing arms race. Understanding what causes these harms enabled by technology and tech-company business models, will rest in fundamental principles of group member psychology, group dynamics, and intergroup conflict. Ongoing and future group research could help us understand the benefits of new technology and counter negative group behaviors in the online world.

Is enclave deliberation leading to more hate speech? Can deliberation norms tackle hate speech or do they lead to “civilized” forms of group libel? None of these questions can be answered without first identifying how hate speech manifests in its various forms. Hate speech disparages an individual or group on grounds such as race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or sexual orientation. Studies on online harassment have often analysed hate speech as a matter of incivility. However, group derogatory comments are not the commonest form of online incivility, and nor is hate speech restricted to comments. Based on speech act theory and on the theory of digital objects, this chapter conducts an integrative literature review in order to provide a taxonomy of hate speech in digital conversations, allowing an identification of how hate speech manifests in digital conversations, how these forms can be assessed empirically, and what differentiated effects they have on online deliberation.

This work presents a study of scientific publications on hate speech with the objective to map the trends in the field. This study follows a scoping review using the PRISMA-ScR methodology. The search was conducted in four databases (Web of Science, Scopus, Social Science Data Base, and Social Science Research Network) using the terms ‘hate speech’ and ‘communication’. The research analysed a sample of 102 open-access scientific journal articles from the period 2016-2021. The analysis focused on production aspects, topics and relevance of the papers for hate speech studies. The study shows a significant increase in production since 2020. However, a low level of depth and specificity is detected when addressing hate speech. Many articles are loosely or barely related to the topic or do not provide specific definitions. There is a prevalence of studies linked to online cases, though not strictly hate speech but rather general topics of cyberbullying or online harassment and an increase in computer-based methodological approaches. Despite a growing scientific production on the subject, the overall quality of most articles does not offer a significant contribution to the understanding, debate, or prevention of hate speech.

The increased scale of cross-border journalistic investigations brings about severe challenges: online harassment, physical violence, legal threats, but also emotional challenges and mental stress that can lead to burnout. The latter has never been the focus of studies on cross-border investigative journalistic collaborations. This paper seeks to fill in this gap and contribute to the understanding of how the cross-border aspects of investigative journalists’ work shape their mental well-being. Based on eighteen semi-structured interviews conducted with investigative journalists across Europe in the first half of 2023, this study addresses the following research questions: What are the specific challenges, threats, and risks encountered by investigative journalists working on cross-border collaborations? How do these challenges and risks affect investigative journalists’ mental well-being? What coping mechanisms do investigative journalists employ? Our findings show that cross-border investigative journalists experience a systemic neglect of mental well-being in the profession. Moreover, journalists face country-specific challenges, stemming from varying legal constraints and disparities in institutional support and protection across countries. The lack of safety measures that protect journalists beyond physical safety, multitasking, and the lack of concern for cross-border investigative journalists’ mental well-being can prove particularly challenging for freelancers. At the same time, the cross-border collaborations are depicted as a source of mutual assistance, protection, and a sense of community among international journalists.

The fast paced digital spaces have become an extension of our physical existence and so have the institutions which were earlier limited to the offline world. This has also given rise to the problems surrounding delinquent activities such as cyber bullying. Online harassment is often done with the intention to humiliate the victim and subject them to social harms, irrespective of its implications, cyberbullying continues to be a commonplace among student populations in universities. The lack of a robust legal framework, redressal and institutional support worsen the problem, it is therefore important for educational institutions to observe, act, and inspire, safer online behaviour and spaces. A number of jurisdictions globally have attempted to define cyberbullying in various legal instruments. All of these definitions, unfortunately, are overbroad and therefore infringe on free speech. The Indian legal framework presently has no definition of cyberbullying, and it is difficult to fit every instance into the pigeon-hole of an existing civil, or criminal, wrong. We propose an objective definition of cyberbullying. This definition must be discovered by a sample survey of persons with internet access, mental healthcare professionals, and legal experts, to arrive at an objective definition that protects persons from cyberbullying to the fullest extent possible while not infringing on free speech. The institutional enforcement mechanism suggested is a comprehensive one with focus on ways to reduce cyber-bullying. Tackling cyber-bullying by holding offenders accountable at the same time respecting due process rights of the same alleged offender and channelling appropriate resources for the victim to reduce the harm brought in by cyberbullying. We focus on a fair impartial process. Even while the whole world loses respect for due process, we believe that it is non-negotiable.

In the modern era, with the massive development of social media, it is very necessary to have limits on expression so that no party feels disadvantaged because of someone's words or actions on social media. The problem that often arises due to the development of social media is the problem of hate speech. Islam as a perfect religion also regulates the problem of hate speech, therefore the purpose of this study is to analyze criminal sanctions against perpetrators of criminal acts of hate speech according to positive law in Indonesia and from the perspective of Islamic law and its contribution. The method in this study is normative juridical, with the main data source being secondary data obtained through library research in the form of regulations currently in effect in Indonesia, literature books, research results and journals as well as theory from legal experts, the research results were analyzed using a qualitative descriptive method. Research results In Indonesia freedom of expression is a constitutional right of every citizen which is explicitly guaranteed by the 1945 Constitution. 6 (six) years and/or a maximum fine of Rp. 1,000,000,000.00 (one billion rupiah). According to Islamic law, the penalty for spreading hate speech is ta'zir, namely sanctions that are not determined by Islamic law but are fully handed over to the authorities with a measure of benefit, both benefiting the perpetrators, victims and Public. The sanctions vary depending on the perpetrator and the type of action with the measure of benefit between the lightest penalties such as a warning to imprisonment.

A trial judge serves as gatekeeper in the courtroom to ensure that only reliable expert witness testimony is presented to the jury. Nevertheless, research shows that while judges take seriously their gatekeeper status, legal professionals in general are unable to identify well conducted research and are unable to define falsifiability, error rates, peer review status, and scientific validity (Gatkowski et al., 2001; Kovera & McAuliff, 2000). However, the abilities to identify quality scientific research and define scientific concepts are critical to preventing “junk” science from entering courtrooms. Research thus far has neglected to address that before selecting expert witnesses, judges and attorneys must first evaluate experts’ CVs rather than their scientific testimony to determine whether legal standards of admissibility have been met. The quality of expert testimony, therefore, largely depends on the ability to evaluate properly experts’ credentials. Theoretical models of decision making suggest that ability/knowledge and motivation are required to process information systematically. Legal professionals (judges and attorneys) were expected to process CVs heuristically when rendering expert witness decisions due to a lack of training in areas of psychology expertise. Legal professionals’ (N = 150) and undergraduate students’ (N = 468) expert witness decisions were examined and compared. Participants were presented with one of two versions of a criminal case calling for the testimony of either a clinical psychology expert or an experimental legal psychology expert. Participants then read one of eight curricula vitae that varied area of expertise (clinical vs. legal psychology), previous expert witness experience (previous experience vs. no previous experience), and scholarly publication record (30 publications vs. no publications) before deciding whether the expert was qualified to testify in the case. Follow-up measures assessed participants’ decision making processes. Legal professionals were not better than college students at rendering quality psychology expert witness admissibility decisions yet they were significantly more confident in their decisions. Legal professionals rated themselves significantly higher than students in ability, knowledge, and motivation to choose an appropriate psychology expert although their expert witness decisions were equally inadequate. Findings suggest that participants relied on heuristics, such as previous expert witness experience, to render decisions.

The rapid rise of social networking websites and blogging sites not only provides freedom of expression or speech, but also allows people to express society-prohibited behaviors such as online harassment and cyberbullying, which are known as offensive speech or hate speech. Despite the fact that various research work has been done on detecting hate or abusive speech on social networking websites in the English language, the opportunities for research for detecting offensive or abusive speech in the Bengali language remain open due to the computational resource constraints or the lack of standard-labeled datasets for accurate or effective Natural Language Processing (NLP) of Bangla language. In this paper, an Explainable AI approach is used for analysis as well as for detecting offensive comments or speech in the Bengali language is proposed. Moreover, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is used to extract and classify features. Since the Neural Network is time-consuming for extracting features from the dataset, our proposed approach allows people to save time and effort. In the dataset, we classified all user’s comments from social media comment sections into four categories: religious, personal, geopolitical, and political. Our proposed model successfully detects Bangla offensive speeches from the dataset (Bengali Hate Speech Dataset) by evaluating Machine Learning algorithms like linear and tree-based models and Neural Networks like CNN, Bi-LSTM, Conv-LSTM, and SVM models. Moreover, we calculate scores for completeness and sufficiency to assess the quality of explanations in terms of fidelity, achieving the results with the accuracy of 78% score, significantly outperforming ML and DNN baselines.KeywordsBangla offensive speech classificationExplainable AINLPCNNDNN

Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have connected billions of people and given the opportunity to the users to share their ideas and opinions instantly. That being said, there are several negative consequences as well such as online harassment, trolling, cyber-bullying, fake news, and hate speech. Out of these, hate speech presents a unique challenge as it is deeply engraved into our society and is often linked with offline violence. Social media platforms rely on human moderators to identify hate speech and take necessary action. However, with the increase in online hate speech, these platforms are turning toward automated hate speech detection and mitigation systems. This shift brings several challenges to the plate, and hence, is an important avenue to explore for the computation social science community.

In various regions of Indonesia, SLAPPs have often befallen environmental activists, investigative journalists, human rights defenders, and indigenous peoples who are fighting for their customary land. Lawsuits filed by parties with economic or political power are often not based on strong legal substance, but rather are intended to tire, suppress, and intimidate public interest defenders. The approach used in this study is a type of normative legal research, namely based on analysis of library materials as data sources and legal principles and statutory regulations related to the problems being studied. The substance of the discussion includes the importance of the early dismissal mechanism as the main strategy in dealing with strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) cases, both in the criminal and civil realms. As well as the restorative justice approach in handling environmental cases, especially in the context of anti-SLAPP, by emphasizing that this mechanism can be an alternative to resolving cases that is more humane and does not burden environmental activists who are often positioned as suspects/defendants/convicts. This study is important to analyze the reality of the implementation of anti-SLAPP regulations legally, and to formulate recommendations for the formation of effective and contextual legal policies for law enforcement and protection of environmental activists in Indonesia.