It is well-known that former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro used social media to spread fake news with the assistance of his public official supporters also known as the “hatred cabinet”. This practice started during his campaign and continued throughout his government. This political strategy was guided by a selected group influenced by Olavo de Carvalho and inspired by his far-right thinking. This paper aims to analyze Bolsonaro’s political strategy of using social media to manipulate his followers by applying Carlo Ginzburg’s evidence method. The theoretical reference is based on Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas from the vision of Mauro Wilton and Wilson Gomes, Zygmunt Bauman, Hanna Arendt, Yuval Harari, Pierre Lévy, Gilles Lipovetsky, Georges Balandier, among others. In the post-truth era, Bolsonaro and his supporters continue to disseminate fake news through a giant network in social media - such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook - about many different issues including politics, dictatorship, racism, homophobia, environment, COVID-19 treatment, and vaccines. Keywords: fake news, social media, public space, digital communication, post-modernity

LGBT nonprofit organizations in Lebanon use social media videos to foreground the rights of sexual minorities in a society that institutionalizes homophobia. Employing content and thematic analysis to study twelve of these videos within the Lebanese sociopolitical context, I examine how the organizations enact the online affordance of visibility to transgress local hegemonic discourses and claim representativity and political rights. Engaging in politics online comes with the fear of offline homophobia. Lebanese LGBT nonprofits have therefore adopted strategies to mitigate offline persecution, including the invisibility of individuals within the visibility of the collective. They have also engaged in Pan-Arab activism and relied on local Arabic terms for sexual minorities to create a more nuanced activism for the Arab region than found in transnational LGBT activism. Keywords: LGBT, Lebanon, nonprofits, social media, visibility

The purpose of the study is to find out the actual numbers or ratio of clickbait headlines used by specific Bangladeshi media, the reason behind the rise of clickbait headlines in the era of social media, and to disclose the perception of media personnel regarding clickbait headlines and their effect on audiences’ credibility. The qualitative method of research has been followed for the research. Content of four top-ranked media of Bangladesh have been analyzed and 12 media personnel from these media outlets have been interviewed. The study revealed a huge presence of clickbait components in each media’s content. Factors like getting more clicks to generate money, competition, and audience demand have been identified behind the rise of clickbait headlines in recent times. Media personnel have acknowledged that clickbait headlines have some negative effects on various dimensions, of which, losing audience credibility is notable. Keywords: clickbait, social media, competition, credibility, Facebook

A plethora of studies state that a perceptible gap can be observed concerning disinformation influence analysis, which is presented by a lack of research on this phenomenon. In a crisis precipitated by the pandemic disruption, the necessity to scrutinize these topics becomes particularly transparent, as an individual’s critical thinking is incapacitated, which leads to a surge in fake news sharing. The article aims to expose and investigate the characteristics of a new, pseudo-positive disposition of false information and the reasons behind its extensive dissemination. By analyzing the original sources of fake news published on "Facebook", conducting an in-depth interview with eight field experts, integrated with a small survey of 204 Georgians, we identify that to overcome the pandemic-induced stress and create an optimistic environment, any positive information that is apprehensible under these conditions becomes effortlessly shareable and consequently, pseudo-positivity is utilized as a manipulator to foment a wave of disinfodemy. Keywords: disinformation, pseudo-positivity, social media, COVID-19, manipulation, crisis, Facebook, mental health, media psychology

This article investigates the dissipation speed of positive and negative news in a geopolitical context. We perform a sentiment analysis of geopolitical news and measure the gamma of the corresponding sentiment scores per time unit in order to compare the travel speed of news with positive sentiment scores with news having negative sentiment scores. While prospect theory suggests that bad news is perceived as more impactful than good news, we show that this does not necessarily hold for the travel speed of news. On the contrary, we find that good news linked to keywords, which have usually a negative association, travel faster than bad news, and vice versa; a seeming repudiation of folk wisdom. Since our use cases were geopolitical crises, we associate phrases connected with conflict or the potential for conflict to have a broadly negative association. The implications of our insights suggest that the dissipation speed of news can be improved by framing and releasing positive news about events or entities with a negative association. Keywords: sentiment analysis, sentiment score, sext mining, geo-politics, news flow

This paper delves deeply into the pivotal role that solidarity journalism plays in shaping media discourse, particularly during times of wartime and crisis, with a central focus on its profound impact during the course of Russia's war on Ukraine. By conducting a thorough investigation into the multi-dimensional aspects of solidarity journalism, this study delves into the intricate strategies media outlets employ to utilize various indicators of solidarity. These strategies are deployed not only to foster collective stress resistance, but also to provide essential psychological support to audiences during periods of upheaval. The paper emphasizes the importance of media's portrayal of prosocial behaviors and positive micro-moments, which collectively contribute to the reinforcement of resilience within communities when they are facing challenging circumstances. To contextualize its findings, the paper offers a detailed analysis of the specific case of Russia's war on Ukraine. In doing so, it underscores the instrumental role that media solidarity plays in empowering the communities directly affected by such conflicts. By leveraging solidarity journalism's inherent capacity to foster unity and resilience, media outlets can significantly contribute to mitigating the often-negative effects of fear-laden narratives during times of wartime. Keywords: Ukraine, Georgia, solidarity journalism, wartime media discourse, media solidarity indicators

The study addresses a concern over the quality of online news reader comments. Specifically, it examines how online reader comments contribute to deliberation from cognitive and interactive perspectives. The results of content analyzing, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the comments from an online publication The Diplomat suggest that comments were mostly deliberative and serious, and they were more neutrally oriented than degrading in terms of feelings. There was some association between reasonings and feelings but not very strong. The study concludes that comment fields can be a good platform for participatory journalism and enrich deliberation on issues. Keywords: comment fields, reader comments, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute, User Generated Content (UGC), analytic process, social process, public deliberation

The aim of this study is to assess the communication apprehension (CA) among the communication students of Bangladesh. The data were collected from 283 students from 10 public universities through the survey method. McCroskey's (1982) Personal Report of Communication Apprehension, also known as the PRCA-24 test was adopted for this study. The data were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics of SPSS 23 software. The study explores that the mean communication apprehension score of communication students of Bangladesh is 68.12 which ascertains the medium level of CA of the students. It also says that 12.6% of students have high CA, 64.7% have medium CA and the rest 13.8% have a low level of communication apprehension. Students are more apprehensive in public communication rather than in group, meeting, and interpersonal communication. Male students have less CA than female students. This research also reveals that those students experience more CA who suffer from depression, prefer loneliness, and spend more time on social media. Communication apprehensive students prefer to sit in the back row or alongside in the classroom setting. Also, CA score is decreased when the age of the student is increased. The study also assesses that students involved with co-curricular activities have less CA than the other students. The study recommends that universities should offer more practical courses in communication to overcome communication apprehension. Keywords: communication, apprehension, communication students, Bangladesh, university students

Emoticons break down the traditional text communication and spread quickly across the Internet, becoming an indispensable network communication tool. They make up for the lack of non-verbal information in Internet communication, dispel the communication gap between the disseminator and the audience. Along with the advancement of information technology, many a business communication has changed from the traditional offline face-to-face communication to the virtual online kind. In daily life, due to the ritualistic, profit-oriented and transactional characteristics of business communication, emoticons in the customer service communication of the e-commerce platform are somewhat different from personal one. This paper selects 4 typical conversation texts from Taobao customer service to support the present case study. According to Mead and Blumer's symbolic interactionism, it analyses the role of emoticons used in business conversations as well as people’s motivations behind. On the basis of analyses, it attempts to summarize the role of emoticons in business communication and the problems existing in emoticons usage. The results demonstrate that emoticons can show professionalism and business etiquette, construct a communicator's business self-image, influence interpersonal mutual understanding so as to improve the accuracy and efficiency of business communication, and enhance group identification. Keywords: role of emoticons, non-verbal expressions, symbolic interactionism, business communication, customer service

A large number of Bangladeshi women journalists are facing gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. This is one of the contributing factors in excluding women journalists’ voices from the public sphere. Drawing on the feminist approach of structure and agency theory, the study investigated the causes and consequences of workplace gender discrimination and sexual harassment. A mixed method of survey and in-depth interviewing were conducted, and the data were thematically analyzed. The findings outlined gender discrimination and harassment are evident in the media industries of Bangladesh, commonly maneuvered by both internal and external perpetrators. The situation causes frustration among women journalists. As a coping-up endeavor, they often remain silent due to their lack of trust in protection mechanisms e.g., sexual harassment prevention committee in workplace, and sometimes they withdraw from their responsibilities. Keywords: women journalists, Bangladesh, media, gender discrimination, harassment, sexism, silence, withdrawal, free agency