Central News Research Articles

In the Footsteps of Wolfgang Franke: Revisiting Chinese Temples in Bangkok

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese immigrants constituted up to 50% of the population in Bangkok. Beyond their religious role, Chinese temples served as community centers, fostering social connections, news exchange, and providing entertainment for newcomers in the Thai capital. With archival records scarce, the preserved epigraphy within these temples emerges as a crucial historical source. This article revisits Wolfgang Franke’s documented sites from the 1970s and 1980s, finding that the inscribed objects generally remain intact, and indicating stability in Bangkok’s Chinese temple culture over the last fifty years. Addressing the lack of a comprehensive listing of Chinese temples and their locations, the article presents a geo-referenced survey, significantly expanding previous lists. The survey data are available online as supplemental material, contributing to the documentation of Chinese religious sites in Southeast Asia. The article concludes by reflecting on the historical evolution of temple construction in Bangkok.

ІСТОРІЯ ЄВРЕЙСЬКОЇ ГРОМАДИ ТА СИНАГОГ НА ТЕРИТОРІЇ М. ХАРКІВ

The article explores the history of the Jewish community in Kharkiv and the role that synagogues played in its life. Focusing on the significance of synagogues as centers of spiritual and cultural life, the article emphasizes their importance in shaping the city's cultural landscape. Through the analysis of historical sources and documents, the article unfolds the process of the Jewish community's development in Kharkiv and the challenges it faced over the years. In the early stages of Kharkiv's development, the Jewish community was an integral part of urban life. Synagogues became gathering places not only for religious ceremonies but also for the exchange of news, discussions, and important decisions for the community. They played a key role in preserving cultural traditions, education, and the preservation of language and rituals. However, the history of the Jewish community in Kharkiv also reflects challenges and upheavals. Political and social changes, such as revolutions, wars, and periods of repression, significantly influenced its life. Synagogues remained important during these turbulent times, often becoming centers of support and hope for the community. They played a role not only in the religious sphere but also in supporting social and charitable initiatives. Additionally, the article examines the influence of political, social, and cultural factors on the Jewish community and its synagogues. For example, the period of severe restrictions during the communist era affected religious practices and the free expression of cultural identity. In such conditions, synagogues became not only places of prayer but also symbols of resilience and faith in the future. The article provides important insights into how synagogues influenced the development and life of the Jewish community in Kharkiv during different historical periods. It emphasizes not only the religious significance of these buildings but also their importance in shaping the social and cultural identity of the community.

Blockchain Enabled Social Network for Detecting Fake Accounts

Front end technology with permanent accounts is employed in online social networks to help people get to know one another. In an effort to maintain connection with everyone, Facebook and Twitter are changing along with the users. OSNs are used by them for planning events, news exchange, interpersonal communication, and even running their own online enterprises. Because of OSNs' quick growth and the abundance of personal data that its users have shared, attackers and imposters have been lured to them with the intention of stealing personal information, spreading disruptive activities, and publishing false information. A further rationale for creating fictitious profiles for hateful accounts. In an attempt to harm the reputation of the person they detest, these users make profiles using their usernames and publish photographs and articles that aren't related to them. to use blockchain technology, Aadhar number verification, and SVM profile classification to create a reliable solution for detecting phoney social network profiles. By analysing several aspects of social media profiles, the SVM classification uses machine learning to discern between real and fraudulent accounts. By verifying Aadhar numbers through legitimate channels, Aadhar number verification is integrated into the registration process, guaranteeing the authenticity of user identities. A decentralised and secure identity management system is made possible by the use of blockchain technology, with smart contracts providing immutable storage for verified user data.

ЭТНОГРАФИЯ УЛИЦЫ У ЧУВАШЕЙ БАШКОРТОСТАНА

The domesticated objects of the Chuvash people of Bashkortostan and adjacent territories, represented by settlements, housing and outbuildings, are an important component of traditional views about space. The example of these objects clearly demonstrates how the conditions that create a life support system interconnected with the natural geographic landscape, sociocultural and socio-economic state of the population are reproduced. A man demonstrates a personal (special) attitude towards settlements, houses and outbuildings. First of all, these are the traditions of the construction business that have formed over the centuries, as well as religious and ceremonial views projected onto domesticated objects and reflecting the ideological picture of the world. The article presents factual confirmations of the existence of stable connections between the Chuvash people living within the ethnic territory of settlement and the Chuvash people who moved to other regions. The transformation was expressed in the development and modernization of settlements, in the traditions of building of housing and outbuildings, as well as in the ethnography of the street. The village space was actively involved in the cycle of family rituals — in wedding, maternity and funeral and memorial activities. The street of the settlement served for communication and exchange of news, where inhabitants made decisions on holding ritual events or convocation of help. The crossroads of the street and the alley, as the central square of the settlement, was also often a place of gathering and communication. Innovations associated with new conditions of the natural geographical landscape, interethnic interactions, legislation and administrative regulation, collectively demonstrate the particularities of the studied region. The combination of the traditional and the new in ethnic culture presents a synthesis of historical memory and innovations.

AntiFake System: Machine Learning-Based System for Verification of Fake News

Fake news has become extremely popular in recent years and is widely used in social networking. The Internet has enabled an unprecedented number and speed of news exchanges between users. With the exponential growth of social media, information spreads among individuals at an unprecedented amount and speed. Verifying the news has effective ways to combat misinformation. Facilitating online data verification is an effective strategy to deal with the often overwhelming amount of misinformation. AntiFake is a machine-learning-based system that relies solely on its content and enables simple, cost-effective, and time-efficient news verification. The system is equipped with professional integration tools. The developed system uses machine learning techniques to automatically identify fraudulent or misleading information, thereby contributing to establishing trust in published content efficiently and cost-effectively. The results show that the developed system is effective and efficient.

Authoritarian Media Coverage of International News: The Case of North Korea

What determines authoritarian media’s coverage of international politics? Existing scholarship on media outlets in authoritarian countries has largely focused on their domestic political dynamic. This paper extends this literature by analyzing the patterns of authoritarian media reporting targeting international audiences. Analyzing 85,313 English news articles published by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) from 2008-2020, I find different effects of the North Korean regime’s security and economic interests on the coverage frequency and favorability of other countries in the reports. Security interests affect both coverage frequency and favorability whereas economic interests, especially the size of imports, affect only coverage frequency to a limited extent. This implies that English broadcasting in North Korea is used as a tool frequently signal to its adversaries frequently and occasionally signal to economic partners.

Comparative Analysis of International Environmental Communication Practices of DPRK and ROK in the Perspective of Framing Theory

Since the disclosure of the plan in 2021, the incident of Japan's Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge into the sea has been strongly concerned by the international community, especially by the neighboring Asia-Pacific countries, and it has been intensifying in recent years, and it has triggered the world's public opinion once again before the official discharge of the plan in the summer of 2023. The media industry's coverage of this issue needs to consider the cross-cutting fields of environmental, health, and international communication, making it a good case for academic research. Meanwhile, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) the and Republic of Korea (ROK), which are located on the Korean Peninsula and have been greatly affected by the incident, have similar linguistic, cultural, and historical backgrounds, but the existing literature has not provided satisfactory comparative studies on the media industries of the two countries, especially on the mainstream media. In this regard, under the guidance of the framework of high and low levels, this paper selects the relevant reports of the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and the Korea JoongAng Daily (KJD) from June to July 2023, conducts content analysis and text analysis, reveals the main points of characteristics, similarities and differences, and provides an operational basis for the establishment of a diversified international communication system.

Deterrence or Coercion: Analyzing DPRK’s Nuclear Intentions with Its Propaganda Texts

Although the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) nuclear program has been a challenge to international security for three decades, the world still knows little about its nuclear intentions. A recently available dataset of Korean Central News Agency’s English publications (1997–2018) provides a complete coverage of DPRK’s nuclear activities in the time span. Our study employs the Louvain method of community detection in large networks to detect patterns and trends in North Korea’s nuclear rhetoric. We have two findings: Pyongyang’s primary objective is deterrence, although it also utilizes nuclear development to boost regime legitimacy. This secondary intention of legitimization is more prominent under Kim Jong-un than under Kim Jong-il, but still not as salient as deterrence. Our results suggest a policy approach of engagement and deterrence.

Framing of poverty in TV reporting in Serbia

The paper analyzes how poverty is presented in the television discourse in Serbia. The theoretical-methodological framework of research relies on quantitative-qualitative content analysis and the concept of media framing in which the usage of patterns of selection, emphasis and exclusion result in the interpretation and assessment of certain events. The sample for analysis consisted of 35 central news programs broadcasted on five television stations on seven cyclically selected days in the period from 10 th October to 27 th October 2021. The goal of the research was to determine the dominant frames of the representation of poverty and to examine whether and to what extent used frames differ in comparison to the previous research. The results show that television framing of poverty is consistent with the general pattern of problematic media polarization in Serbia. Two frames are dominantly represented: general economic poverty and propaganda-populist frame. In the case of the first one, poverty is presented as a background theme in analytic reports on the political and macroeconomic issues. It is reduced to an impersonal approach that does not have the strength to indicate the seriousness of the multidimensional problem of poverty. The second frame is characterized by a blurred picture of poverty. It is distributed through reports on the promotional activities of the president ? the opening of factories and road infrastructure and explains the increasingly pronounced mutual connection between the ruling elite and journalists in the use of demagoga and propaganda matrices in conveying and setting frames as generally acceptable.

Development of Students’ Psychological Media Competence in the Process of Analyzing News Content

Young people are active users of social media and instant information and news exchange platforms. However, youth do not tend to verify the information they receive. This inability to critically approach information makes it absolutely necessary to equip curricula with educational programs aimed at developing media competence and skills of psychological analysis of content. The article presents the results of testing an experimental program within university environment. The program involves 1) increasing students' knowledge about the nature and means of manipulative influence, 2) developing skills of psychological analysis of media texts. Developing psychological media competence (PMC) is likely to become an effective strategy of processing media information and contribute to a more responsible approach when interacting with it. The study was conducted with the assumption that the developed program would enhance students’ ability to critically evaluate and verify news content. The survey was carried out according to the methodology compiled by the authors, which allows to measure degree of students’ trust in media information. The study involved 115 respondents. The results revealed that students perceive news content without applying critical thinking. Based on the analysis of the obtained data it was substantiated that the experimental program aimed at developing students’ psychological media competence, in particular, their skills of analyzing news media texts, is relevant and proved to be effective.

Tiktok Content in Communication Strategy: Politics of the 15th General Election in Malaysia

Political communication is the exchange of the latest news between the government and society or vice versa. The purpose of political communication is to get support or votes from the people. Nowadays, social media is increasingly important in political communication because social media can be used by anyone interested without any limitations. Therefore, this study aims to examine the ability of TikTok as one medium of political communication strategy. This study looks at the extent by which the main youth political leaders in Malaysia optimize the use of TikTok as a political communication strategy, evaluates the adaptation of political leaders with TikTok in terms of content, identifies the type of interaction with TikTok users, evaluates the political communication strategies through TikTok and the effectiveness of TikTok use in influencing improvement political supporters ahead of GE-15. This study selected two TikTok accounts, namely Y.B. Syed Saddiq and Shahril Sufian Hamdan as a study sample. The results of the study indicated the significant advantage of Y.B Syed Saddiq in using TikTok as a political communication tool in comparison to Shahril Sufian Hamdan. The youth-friendly interaction demonstrated by Y.B. Syed Saddiq made him one of the most highly followed politicians with successful message sharing. Shahril Sufian Hamdan and other politicians should adapt to a new era in efforts to political communication. Politicians should use social media more effectively and post more friendly content to social media users and increase interaction activities with them. Keywords: content; Malaysia; politic; TikTok

Political patterns in literary messages in the eras of modern sects and the Almoravids, the Diwani model

The study seeks to shed light on the political patterns in the literary messages in the era of the sects and the Almoravids, and that the political messages are concerned with matters of concern to the state. Therefore, the caliphs worked on investing writers and writers, so the writers were the mouthpiece of the state. The study concluded that these messages carried several formats, including the order and prohibition system, which is through which orders are issued and directed to the soldiers and the people in compliance with the system. On the Sultan and the authority, and there the format of media correspondence is what was circulated between the kings of the sects and the Almoravids of correspondence in the exchange of information and news between them in all circumstances of accidents; These media discourses are one of the ways that develop trust between individuals, enhance communication and develop relations. These formats expressed the political aspects in some ways, with the most accurate expression.

The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea

The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea

Visualizing Dunhuang: The Lo Archive Photographs of the Mogao and Yulin Caves

Visualizing Dunhuang: The Lo Archive Photographs of the Mogao and Yulin Caves

ALGORITHM OF DATA MINING AND PROCESSING OF RELATED DATA IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

We live in a time of rapid growth of information technology, which is firmly entrenched in our daily lives. It is simply impossible to imagine a modern person without social networks, because they perform a communicative and informational function, namely: communication, information retrieval, news exchange, etc. Five hundred million tweets are posted daily, making Twitter a major social media platform from which topical information on events can be extracted. So, there is a lot of information available to the user, which is difficult to identify something specific and necessary in the usual way viewing. Accordingly, there is a need for technologies that can quickly process large amounts of data and highlight only the information that is useful to a particular user. This technology called recommender systems. It automatically suggest items to users that might be interesting for them. Due to the desire to unite people with common interests, it is relevant to develop a recommendation system based on social networks that help in personification of the user and compilation of his psychotype using his profile. The paper has description and results of the creation of recommendation system. The basis of this work is one of the algorithms used in recommendation systems – the recommendation system is based on content filtering. It analyzes users’ Twitter posts and calculates their interests. If we consider all the words, our model will not have good results and do not pay attention to what is important to use. Therefore, the most important step is always filtering data, so the number one task is to speed up the time of filtering text and retrieving data from the social network for further processing. The feature of this system is that this algorithm uses parallel calculations and frequency analysis of the text.

Analisis Penulisan Preposisi pada Berita Media Center Kabupaten Indragiri Hilir

The presence of the right preposition in a sentence will lead to attachment both from a grammatical and semantic perspective. If the use of prepositions is not appropriate in the sentence, there will be a blurring of the sentence structure and the meaning of the sentence. This research raises the problem, namely, how is the analysis of prepositional writing on Media Center news in Indragiri Hilir Regency? With a qualitative approach. The technique used is the hermeneutic technique. The theoretical reference in this study is Chaer (2009). From the results of processed data related to the Analysis of Writing Prepositions at Media Center News in Indragiri Hilir Regency, it is known that there are as many as 45 prepositional word data in Media Center News, Indragiri Hilir Regency. In this case, it is also known that the preposition in the sentence used to express "where-is" is placed to the left of the noun which states the actual place. There are as many as 5 prepositional data used to express "where is located". The preposition is placed to the left of the name of the institution or institution. There is as much as 1 inner word data that has one proposition, namely, there is an inner word that shows within a period because it only states the inner preposition which states the preposition where it is located, the place of origin indicator has a prepositional word only from having a total of 11 data. This is the proposition of the place of origin is a preposition that states the place of origin of the noun that follows, for example, the preposition of the place of origin is the preposition of.

Propaganda photographs as a tool of North Korean public diplomacy: an experimental analysis of the Kim Jong-un effect

A growing body of research shows that the pariah regime of North Korea—as other countries too—cares about how it is perceived internationally. However, so far, we know very little about how effective North Korea’s strategic efforts are in improving its image among foreign audiences. As a first step toward addressing this gap, we employ a rigorous survey experiment among a representative sample of US adults (N = 800) to demonstrate that propaganda photographs of Kim Jong-un—produced and distributed by the regime’s official mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)—succeed in improving perceptions of North Korea, albeit only among audiences with limited political knowledge. By providing evidence that news photographs are effective strategic communication instruments, our paper also makes an original and significant contribution to general scholarship on mediated public diplomacy, which has until now paid little attention to visual media as a tool of image management.

Framework Analysis of Scientists and Technicians Reporting from China's Mainstream Media's WeChat Official Accounts based on Six Central News Agencies

Nowadays, the world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century, and public communication of science & technology has been becoming more and more vital. It is one of China's media's responsibilities to create "Star Scientists" and to tell unique stories of scientists and technicians well with Chinese characteristics. The rapid development and deep integration of new media have put forward higher requirements on mainstream media for the typical reports and public opinion guidance of scientists and technicians. In this quantitative research, 272 reports on Chinese scientists and technicians from six central news agencies' WeChat official account within six months, including Xinhua News Agency and Guangming Daily, were taken as study objects by using content analysis. Based on Zang Guoren's Three Levels of Frame Theory, original texts were coded for statistical analysis of each report's theme, genre, schematic structure, characters, rhetorical context, form, page views, likes and wows. In the end, the study explored characteristics of different media, reflected on existing problems of science & technology communication, and made five suggestions for advancing integrated media reports on typical scientific figures in the new era, in order to accelerate to build China into an innovative country, as well as a science & technology giant.

Change in News Access, Change in Expectations? How Young Social Media Users in Switzerland Evaluate the Functions and Quality of News

Online media environments have changed the way young people access news. Despite much research on the topic, the expectations of journalistic news by young adults who have turned their back on traditional news media remain unclear. We use a novel multimethod qualitative online study design to investigate the perceived quality, functions, and expectations toward journalistic news of young adults in Switzerland who use social media as their main source for news and rarely consume traditional media. Nineteen young adults between 20 and 25 years of age with different educational levels participated in our study in May 2020. Our results show that even though the participants only occasionally use traditional news media channels, they still consider journalistic news relevant and appreciate quality standards of professional journalism such as actuality and veracity (Swart 2021b). Among the functions of news, the participants highlighted sociability and identification. Exchange and discussion of news are, thus, of high relevance online but also offline. Also, the participants show a high affinity toward news on mobilizing topics, which are of interest to themselves and their peers, and motivate them to engage with news more intensely. According to the participants, news should be attractively prepared, such as with audiovisual formats and easy to understand and integrate into everyday life. The participants also expressed a preference to consume news articles from different media brands within a single platform. Our study outlines a fruitful path for comprehensive qualitative research with innovative online tools.

LIKES, SARCASM AND POLITICS: YOUTH RESPONSES TO A PLATFORM-INITIATED MEDIA LITERACY CAMPAIGN ON SOCIAL MEDIA

When it comes to youth and media literacy, the focus of both research and practice has been on the integration of media literacy instruction into young people’s various educational experiences, rather than studying, implementing and evaluating such initiatives in situ, on social media—which is known to be youths’ central news source. Furthermore, existing studies focus on older platforms like Facebook or Twitter, and we lack a nuanced understanding of these dynamics on the platforms most popular with youth today. The present study aims to fill this gap, by analyzing how users responded to a media literacy education campaign on the popular youth-oriented social media app TikTok, with a focus on the lessons that we might draw in terms of targeted media literacy education initiatives for youth. Our large-scale qualitative content analysis—which included 11,449 public comments posted on 5 educational TikTok videos about media literacy—facilitated a naturalistic study of young people’s attitudes towards such initiatives. We found that reactions to the campaign were mixed, and highly political in nature. While many users appreciated the media literacy campaign and TikTok’s role in implementing it, there was also resistance to the campaign, due to factors related to video content, dissemination approach, and the very identity of TikTok as a platform. Across the board, comments were highly political, illustrating the politicized nature of media literacy education today. These reactions serve as rich feedback that can usefully inform future media literacy campaigns on social media, and especially those targeting youth audiences.