Liebesraum

Over the past decade, the far-right has become normalised globally. The tolerance and wilful welcoming of these once-shunned ideologies challenge the weakened modern liberal order and signify its limitations as modernity’s symbolic authority. This phenomenon involves an unprecedented ontology in which far-right fantasies of “stolen” ethnocultural wholeness and supremacy propagate through social media governed by anti-democratic, neoliberal imperatives of attention hoarding. Fantasies of self-continuity amidst “permanent crises” – ontological security – are diffused via social media, whose algorithmic governance of our everyday shapes our identities and experience of the political. This problem points to the pressing need to explore the psycho-political and techno-mediatic dimensions of far-right normalisation. This thesis provides a novel perspective by mobilising Lacanian ontological security to investigate the role of these dimensions in normalising the far-right. First, examining the link between White supremacy and deglobalisation discourses, I find that these pushbacks against liberal democracy become affectively influential in justifying violence against essentialised others. Second, social and traditional media enable the emotional governance of far-right actors, generating feelings of ontological (in)security that position them as legitimate interlocutors. Third, I examine how mainstream right-wing politicians partake in transgressive enjoyment with the far-right against “threatening” others. I find that far-right normalisation is inextricable from the reformation of identities, in which previously held liberal beliefs recede due to the anxiety of becoming politically undesired. Finally, I analyse far-right normalisation as a fantasy of ontological security produced by social media. I find that, in commodifying political antagonisms between liberals and the far-right, these platforms reinforce neoliberalism while gradually eroding the modern liberal order.

Government Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media: The Case of Iran (2009)

What is ontological (in)security? Recent scholarship on ontological security in International Relations has increasingly turned to the concept's theoretical origins in psychoanalysis and existential philosophy to address the field's (meta)theoretical limitations. This article argues that this development also necessitates an interrogation of the concept of ontological security itself to address the field's theoretical tensions. Further developing the nascent Kleinian approach to ontological security, this article conceptualises ontological (in)security as two distinct positions that denote the different ways in which subjects, be they individuals, groups, or states, manage anxiety. To develop this proposition, the article draws on Melanie Klein's work on the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions to elucidate these positions of ontological (in)security, their respective defence mechanisms against anxiety, and their socio-political implications. This Kleinian approach facilitates a clear theoretical distinction between security and insecurity, providing an analytical toolbox to differentiate the various ways in which anxiety is managed in different positions. This framework particularly underscores the ethical, reparative, and transformative potential of the position of ontological security, aspects that have received limited theoretical and empirical attention to date.

This study aims to provide rationality regarding Donald Trump as a fake news aggregator. Donald Trump's leadership from 2017-2020 is controversial and created a massive wave of fake news. As a populist leader, he often issued statements that confused the public during his reign, causing people's trust in the Trump administration to decline. He made the statement not only on national television but also on social media. Social media is the right political communication funnel for any populist leader when it comes to audience reach. Donald Trump is an active user especially on Twitter and uses it to spread misinformation and disinformation to spread what he calls as a truth. Many statements make Donald Trump worthy of being called a fake news aggregator. This study uses a qualitative approach with the content analysis method. Thirty-two samples of Donald Trump's hoax statements that were examined found that the hoaxes spread by him were not limited to just one topic. This research has both theoretical and practical significance. From a theoretical point of view, this research contributes to the development of literature regarding the relationship between hoaxes and populist leaders. In practical terms, this literature contributes to understanding the characteristics of populists and how social media is used as a funnel to spread hoaxes.Keywords: Hoax; Donald Trump; Populism; social media; TwitterTrump, Twitter and Fake NewsAbstrakPenelitian ini bertujuan untuk memberikan rasionalitas terkait Donald Trump sebagai fake news aggregator. Kepemimpinan Donald Trump pada periode 2017-2020 ini sangat kontroversial dan menciptakan sebuah gelombang fake news yang masif. Sebagai seorang pemimpin populis, dalam masa pemerintahannya, tak jarang dia mengeluarkan pernyataan yang menimbulkan kebingungan kepada masyarakat sehingga menyebabkan turunnya kepercayaan rakyat terhadap pemerintahan Donald Trump.Pernyataan itu dia lontarkan tidak hanya di media televisi nasional, tetapi juga media sosial. Bahkan, apabila berbicara jangkauan audience, media sosial menjadi corong komunikasi politik yang tepat bagi setiap pemimpin populis. Donald Trump merupakan pengguna aktif media sosial, khususnya Twitter. Donald Trump memanfaatkannya untuk menyebarkan misinformasi dan disinformasi untuk menyebarkan kebenaran versi miliknya. Ada banyak pernyataan yang membuat Donald Trump layak disebut sebagai fake news aggregator. Studi ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dengan metode analisis konten. Sebanyak tiga puluh dua sampel pernyataan Donald Trump dikaji. Penulis menemukan bahwa berita bohong yang disebarkan olehnya tidak terbatas hanya satu topik semata. Penelitian ini memiliki signifikansi teoritis dan praktis. Dari segi teoritisnya, penelitian ini berkontribusi terhadap perkembangan literatur terkait hubungan antara hoaks dan pemimpin populis. Dalam segi praktisnya, literatur ini menjadi sumbangan pemikiran untuk memahami lebih lanjut karakteristik populis dan bagaimana media sosial digunakan sebagai corong untuk menyebarkan hoaks. Kata Kunci: Hoaks; Donald Trump; Populisme; Media Sosial; Twitter Трамп, Твиттер и фейковые новости АннотацияЭто исследование направлено на то, чтобы дать разумное представление о Дональде Трампе как агрегаторе фейковых новостей. Руководство Дональда Трампа в период 2017-2020 годов было очень спорным и вызвало массовую волну фейковых новостей. Как лидер популистов во время своего правления он часто делал заявления, которые вызывали замешательство у общественности, вызывая снижение доверия людей к правлению Дональда Трампа. Эти заявления он делал не только по национальному телевидению, но и в социальных сетях. Фактически, когда дело доходит до охвата аудитории, социальные сети являются правильной воронкой политической коммуникации для любого лидера популистов. Дональд Трамп - активный пользователь социальных сетей, особенно Твиттера. Дональд Трамп использует его для распространения недостоверной информации и дезинформации, чтобы распространить свою версию правды. Есть много заявлений, которые делают Дональда Трампа достойным называться агрегатором фейковых новостей. В этом исследовании используется качественный подход с методом контент-анализа. Были изучены 32 образца заявлений Дональда Трампа. Автор считает, что распространяемые им фейковые новости не ограничиваются одной темой. Это исследование имеет как теоретическое, так и практическое значение. С теоретической точки зрения, это исследование способствует развитию литературы о взаимоотношениях между обманом и популистскими лидерами. На практике эта литература является вкладом в дальнейшее понимание характеристик популистов и того, как социальные сети используются в качестве канала для распространения лжи.Ключевые слова: обман; Дональд Трамп; популизм; социальные сети; Твиттер

Social media has been an effective vector for spreading disinformation about medicine and science. Informational hygiene can reduce the severity of falsehoods about health.

Is banning political figures who propagate controversial political speech from mainstream social platforms an effective way to improve the health of the public debate? Looking at the most conspicuous case of an anti-mainstream politician’s deplatforming – Donald Trump’s ban from several major social media platforms in January 2021 – we explore the less immediate effects that such measures can have on a wider information ecosystem. Specifically, we analyze the right-wing segment of social platform Telegram that has reportedly seen an influx of politically conservative users as a result of Trump’s expulsion from the mainstream social media. We demonstrate that the largest right-wing communities on Telegram has seen a multifold increase in user base during the period of observation. Furthermore, we employ network analysis and topic modelling to uncover familiar structures, agendas, and media repertoires characteristic to right-wing ecosystems that exist on mainstream social media platforms. These findings suggest that deplatforming should not be seen as the ultimate solution to the problem of toxic speech, and that further research into fringe political communities emerging on alternative social media in response to perceived free speech suppression is needed.

The growth of online communities and social media has led to a growing need for methods, concepts, and tools for researching online cultures. Particular attention should be paid to polarizing online discussion cultures and dynamics that increase inequality in online environments. Social media has enormous potential to create good, but in order to unlock its full potential, we also need to examine the mechanisms keeping these spaces monotonous, homogenous, and even hostile toward some groups. With this need in mind, I have developed the concept and theory of othering online discourse (OOD). This chapter introduces and defines the concept of OOD and explains the key characteristics and different attributes of OOD in relation to other concepts that deal with disruptive and discriminatory behavior in online spaces. The attributes of OOD are demonstrated drawing on examples gathered from the Finnish Suomi24 (Finland24) forum.

The Trump presidency ushered in a heightened sense of ontological insecurity in the US, based on a national self-narrative that portrayed an emasculated America. Trump promised to return the US to primacy by pursuing policies and practices that focused on border protection, militarisation, and the vilification of external others, while amplifying racial tensions within the country. From caging immigrant children at the border, to an enabling of white supremacy and the Capitol riots, Trump's presidency was broadly seen as aberration in the self-narrative of America as a tolerant, democratic nation. In this article, I am interested in how gendered bordering practices inform ontological (in)security in Trump's narrative of the nation, domestic and external policy, and discourses. While Trump's electoral loss to Biden in 2020 has been described as a ‘return to normal’, this article instead considers how Trump's presidency exhibited lines of continuity when examined through a gender lens. Understanding how masculinism informs ideas of ontological security reveals how notions of gendered bordering, hierarchy, and ordering have been persistent threads in US politics, rather than simply an anomaly under Trump. This suggests greater potential to read ontological security in more complex terms through gendered bordering practices.

In this brief essay, I explore the relationship between ‘states’ (or more broadly, institutions of political authority) and ontological security. Drawing from historical examples, I argue that it is a mistake to assume that all ‘states’ seek ontological security: this generalisation applies only to those polities that claim to be the main ontological security providers. I then develop a typology of institutional ontological security provision arrangements as have existed throughout history, arguing that another reason the concept of ontological security is valuable for international relations (IR) is because it offers a way to compare systems across time and space without assuming the primacy of politics or religion. In summary, IR does not have to limit its use of the concept of ontological security to a synonym for ‘state identity’ – ontological security can offer much more than that by helping the discipline reach across time and space.

In today’s social media dominated world the effort to undermine democracy comes in an increasingly wide variety of forms. One example is the use of social media by contemporary leaders and groups where they engage in waging information warfare within their own nations upon their own citizens. This paper will examine how this has occurred with the group QANON. One of QANON’s central conspiracy theories maintains that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is not only in control of running the world’s governments, but this cabal is also running a global child sex-trafficking ring. This cabal is also involved in plotting against US President Donald Trump, who is in turn engaged in combatting the cabal. Another QANON theory also claims that Trump is planning a day of reckoning against the cabal and its followers known as “The Storm.” This refers to an event when thousands of members of the supposed cabal will be arrested. There are currently no indications that any part of the theory is based on fact. The conspiracy theory began with an October 2017 online post by a supposed individual known as ‘Q’, who at the time was presumed to be a single American citizen. It is now also assumed and more likely that Q is actually a group of people. Q as an individual claimed to be a high-ranking government official with Q level clearance in the U.S. government with access to classified information related to the Trump administration. Perhaps more significantly Q also claimed to have classified information about the opponents of Trump in the United States. NBC News was the first member of the media to report that three distinct people took the original Q post and distributed it across multiple media and social media platforms in an effort to build an internet following. We take the activities related to Q to be a method of Hybrid Warfare, which here is defined in the context of social media. Hybrid warfare which is now often practiced in all forms of media but particularly within social media, does not have a universally recognized definition. In this analysis the phrase is employed to describe how any individual or group such as QANON can employ non-military tactics in social media in the effort to undermine and destabilize a government. We argue that disinformation and propaganda dissemination, are not new techniques, but that they have been adapted to current technologies and social media. It is assumed in this analysis that every conspiracy theory, when a conspiracy is identified, presents a moral issue. When a conspiracy theory is presented as an explanation for an action or as the cause of an event this serves the function of making an accusation. The accusation that lies at the center of the conspiracy is an attack upon the truthfulness of what is claimed to be true by the party that the conspiracy theorist is attacking. This analysis has as its goal an identification of the ethical issues with conspiracy theories used by political leaders and groups such as QANON in social media and attempts to anticipate ethical and political issues with the continued use of these conspiracy theories in social media in cthe effort to undermine democracy.

This article examines the role of social media in the development of political crises and its impact on political processes and public opinion. The introduction describes the significance of social media in the context of political crises, emphasising their ability to quickly disseminate information and shape public opinion. Social media provide a platform for expressing opinions and organising mass actions, making them key players in times of political instability. The examples of the Arab Spring and the Hong Kong protests demonstrate how social media can help mobilise populations and draw international attention to political events. The research methods include content analysis of social media publications and posts related to key political events, as well as analyses of academic publications and reports. It allows the comparison of data from social media with the findings of researchers and experts in the field of media and political science.The results of the study show that social media play a significant role in political crises by influencing public opinion and political processes. The analysis reveals that in times of crisis, social media users' activity increases dramatically, which contributes to radicalisation of sentiments and increased polarisation of society. Social media also prove to be a source of misinformation and propaganda, which can exacerbate a crisis and make it more difficult to resolve.The discussion in the article emphasises the need to develop strategies to prevent the spread of misinformation and ensure transparency and credibility of information in social media. This requires co-ordination of efforts between different actors including government agencies, civil society and private companies. The article concludes with the importance of social media in political processes and the need to develop strategies for their effective use in political crises.The article offers a comprehensive analysis of the role of social media in political crises and presents important findings for understanding their impact on contemporary society and the political landscape.

Information trustworthiness assessment on political social media discussions is crucial to maintain the order of society, especially during emergent situations. The polarity nature of political topics and the echo chamber effect by social media platforms allow for a deceptive and a dividing environment. During a political crisis, a vast amount of information is being propagated on social media, that leads up to a high level of polarization and deception by the beneficial parties. The traditional approaches to tackling misinformation on social media usually lack a comprehensive problem definition due to its complication. This paper proposes a probabilistic graphical model as a theoretical view on the problem of normal users credibility on social media during a political crisis, where polarization and deception are keys properties. Such noisy signals dramatically influence any attempts for misinformation detection. Hence, we introduce a causal Bayesian network, inspired by the potential main entities that would be part of the process dynamics. Our methodology examines the problem solution in a causal manner which considers the task of misinformation detection as a question of cause and effect rather than just a classification task. Our causality-based approach provides a practical road map for some sub-problems in real-world scenarios such as individual polarization level, misinformation detection, and sensitivity analysis of the problem. Moreover, it facilitates intervention simulations which would unveil both positive and negative effects on the deception level over the network.

As part of the wider debate interrogating ethical consequences of managing mobility through borders, questions related to everyday ontological security (i.e. the identity of the self) and disruptions of self-referential ways of seeing the world need to be taken seriously. Identitary bordering within the EU is not only fed by social media and populist discourses but is also part of intellectual and philosophical arguments that, for example, interpret liberal, humanitarian understandings of migration and idealistic notions of regional neighbourhood (e.g. with Ukraine, Russia and the South Mediterranean) as naive and misguided. At the same time, despite all proclaimed intentions of re-setting its Neighbourhood agenda the EU appears to insist on ‘asymmetric conditionality’ and maintenance of the basic policy architecture that so far has failed to promote genuine partnerships. One reason for this is related to the maintenance of an EU identity and the fact that the EU’s ontological security is bound up in the continuity and perceived coherence of its policy frameworks. In order to transcend the ‘coherence trap’ and the selective visibility of social issues that it engenders, alternative understandings of Neighbourhood as a context for societal interaction – and not a merely an ‘objective’ policy – are required. While cross-border migration has become a fact of life in much if the EU, the discursive and practical securitisation of labour migration and other forms of cross-border mobility challenges basic principles of and prospects for regional cooperation. Understanding the EU as an integral part of any neighbourhood idea, joint engagement with socio-economic, cultural and group-specific concerns could help create a new self-narrative of EU actorness and contribute to a more tolerant and humane border policy.

Objective: To introduce the concept of ontological security, as well as the notions of mnemonic anxiety and mnemonic security into academic discourse within memory studies, historiography, political science, and international relations. The article also aims to propose, as an analytical tool, a categorization of types of historical policy related to ontological security. Methodology: The discussion employs methods of textual analysis, historical comparative studies, neo-constructivist approaches, memory studies, and security studies. The article is interdisciplinary and is aimed at expanding the methodological toolkit of historical research and collective (cultural, social) memory studies, which simultaneously emphasizes its novelty. Conclusions: The concept of ontological security enables a non-linear understanding of empirical data and theoretical reflection. It allows for a significantly deepened research and interpretative perspective on the motives, modes of action, and outcomes of political actors' behavior in the realm of historical policy. Over the past two decades, mnemonic anxiety, associated with problems of ontological security, has transformed from a variable into a constant: mnemopolitics in all its variants—reactive, proactive, and preventive—has become a global phenomenon. The increase in the number of institutional actors involved in mnemo-politics, the expansion of its domains and intensity of informational influence, the digital revolution, and the growing importance of social media—all this heightens the pressure on modes of perception and the maintenance of ontological security, particularly its core component: mnemonic security.The escalation of mnemo-politics, especially in the sphere of international relations, its expansion beyond the exclusive domain of state competence, the rise of mnemonic activism, the proliferation of state institutions and civil organizations specializing in mnemopolitics, the transformation of certain forms of collective memory into state-supported civic cults, the intensification of antagonistic mnemo-politics accompanied by growing ontological anxiety—all these trends indicate that the securitization of historical memory is becoming an increasingly significant factor in both domestic and international politics. The concept of ontological security, when applied to mnemopolitics, provides useful tools for analyzing and understanding phenomena that are largely impervious to other theories and approaches focused on rational choice, strategy development, and Realpolitik-style calculations. Addressing issues of ontological anxiety allows us to grasp actions and behaviors that appear irrational or illogical from the standpoint of other theories. The cognitive and analytical potential of the concepts of ontological and mnemonic security, the understanding of the nature of mnemonic anxiety and ways to manage it, are valuable not only for academic research in historiography, political science, and sociology (including applied fields), but also for the current analysis of politics, development of information security strategies, and responses to hybrid forms of aggression.

ABSTRACTReactions to nostalgia-evoking content on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube suggest an unconscious motive of ontological security, defined as a ‘sense of presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and in a temporal sense, a continuous person’. In addition to the unprecedented access to the past provided by social media, additional factors such as increasing human longevity, the acceleration of technological and social change, the expanded size and greater interconnectedness of social networks, the proliferation of directly and vicariously experienced places and the secularisation of society have contributed to a growing need for ontological security. Engagement with nostalgia-evoking social media content fulfils the need for ontological security by reintegrating memories of the past into an ongoing, self-affirming narrative or ‘life story’, while the digital archiving of photos and videos offers the possibility of ‘digital immortality’ for a virtual self that can be projected into the future.