Global Public Sphere Research Articles

Fact-Checkers on the Fringe: Investigating Methods and Practices Associated With Contested Areas of Fact-Checking

This study investigates the methods and practices used by self-identified fact-checkers situated on the fringe of the field of fact-checking to support their agenda for public recognition and legitimacy. Using a case study approach and selecting nine cases across five countries (Russia, Brazil, India, China, and Singapore), we identify the most common distinguishable attributes and tactics associated with this ambiguous collection of actors. In addition to identifying how fringe fact-checkers weaponize fact-checking practices and exploit or mimic the social standing of accredited fact-checkers, we critique examples where state-supported fact-checkers associated with authoritarian governance structures fact-check for national interests. We propose a spectrum of fact-checkers including those where public or general interest fact-checkers follow journalistic ideals and align with accredited communities of practice or non-accredited peer recognition, and a collection of fringe fact-checkers ranging from “special interest” actors promoting specific political agendas to hostile actors with disruptive, destructive, and openly propagandistic interests and aims to destabilize the global public sphere. The article contributes to current research and debates about the institutionalization of fact-checking and the understudied area of fact-checking impersonation, a problematic activity associated with misinformation and propaganda on platforms and the internet.

Ignited by the Qur’an

The Danish lawyer and politician Rasmus Paludan has gained notoriety for filming and uploading footage of demonstrations and burning copies of the Qur’an, first in 2019 in Denmark and later in Sweden. Based on videos and material from social and conventional media, this article investigates the background and political and legal opportunity structures of Paludan’s activism. It argues that Paludan’s actions are situated in reference to broader debates on freedom of expression in general and understanding of blasphemy in particular. Paludan’s treatment of the Qur’an resembles a global injustice symbol (Olesen 2015; 2016). The symbol becomes global in nature when it resonates cross-nationally and cross-culturally. In 2023, as the symbol spread to the global public sphere, the Danish government decided to introduce a blasphemy clause that had been repealed five years previously. This underlines Sherwood’s argument that blasphemy has made a paradoxical return as a contested global category in the twenty-first century.

Universal Ideational Warfare: Preemptive Ideocide in the Global South

Abstract The world is entering a post-universal historical conjuncture marked by a “great divergence” triggered by a paroxysm of crises exacerbated by the Western world’s reluctance to accept its diminishing global role. In a panic response, the West is consolidating itself into a Euro-American Confederal Empire, engaging in a form of universal ideational warfare against emerging civilization-states in an effort to maintain its civilizational hegemony. This has resulted in an ideological engineering contest within the global public sphere pursued through the practice of “preemptive ideocide,” which seeks to perpetuate a missionary universalism that imposes Western political-cultural norms upon the world’s divergent cultural and self-governing modes of existence. This ideational warfare is situated within an emergent Cold War Two. The protagonists of this ideational warfare represent a service class of ideocrats devoted to the preservation of Western global primacy. The article highlights the key themes addressed by members of this service class who act as an elite posse of a global thought police. In conclusion, the article argues that humanity is irreversibly divided into non-convergent but non-conflictual cultural identities and proposes the adoption in the Global South of a cultural polygenesis covenant as an exit strategy from the prevailing dependency on missionary universalism’s ideational framework.

How do English-Speaking Users Discuss the Wuhan Lockdown: A Longitudinal Analysis of Public Spheres on YouTube

Drawing on Chantel Mouffe, Mikhail Bakhtin, Judith Butler and others, we examined how English-speaking YouTube users discussed the Wuhan lockdown from late January to June 2020. We argue that news-prompted public spheres are affective, contextualised and short-lived and our findings suggest that the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic outside of China is closely related to the worsening sentiments of English-speaking publics on YouTube. Comments are also significantly associated with the changing severity of the pandemic, reflecting the changing concerns of publics regardless of the central theme of news stories. The divergence of the sentiment scores of user comments is also salient among different media spaces. These findings suggest that a de-localised, universal global public sphere is misleading and more nuanced and contextualised studies are warranted.

Globalization in Sanrio’s Virtual Festival: enhancing sacred places, character representation, and musical public spaces

ABSTRACT This paper discusses Sanrio Virtual Festival 2023, held on VRChat in 2022 by Sanrio, a company known for its character business, which includes Hello Kitty. This study explains how Sanrio is gaining global power toward creating a new utopia through multilayered live performances. To this end, the virtual Puroland reinforces the function of a sacred place in pop culture by incorporating diverse musical and cultural resources instead of the cult-like image of a cute sanctuary. Furthermore, media that mixes 2D/2.5D characters creates ones in dynamic 3D with enhanced ubiquity. Through parasocial relations with the user, this humanized digital medium provides users with a sense of life and presence as well as diminishes their perceptual discomfort, while promoting an experience of realism and community grafted onto the user’s extended cultural fantasy. Furthermore, the experience is characterized by stages with various conceptual designs that communicate nonverbally and multisensory, including optical live performances and DJ clubs, which have led to the creation of an interactive global Sanrio public sphere from the formation of a complex musical public space. However, the creation of such an emotional musical community is a communicative process that also voraciously consumes its users’ presence and involvement.

The political use of encrypted messaging applications: Evidence from southeast Asia and its implications for the global public sphere

Global Internet users face rising challenges with well-organized disinformation and propaganda campaigns. Scholars have studied this challenge by examining political communication over social media platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter). Much less work has examined the manipulative political role of encrypted messaging applications (EMAs), despite their massive popularity around the world. Our research examines EMAs as elements of the global public sphere through 16 qualitative interviews with people who design and track propaganda campaigns online in three ASEAN nations: Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines. Interviewees report that: 1) politicians and political groups harness EMAs in coordinated efforts to inorganically amplify their own agendas; 2) disinformation proliferates on EMAs, but civil society works to address this; and, 3) while citizens see the encrypted aspect of EMAs as powerful for civic engagement, they also feel it presents unique barriers to addressing what has become a serious problem with disinformation on EMAs.

Public sphere and global governance

This paper is about the effects of the absence and the possibility of the emergence of a normatively meaningful political public sphere. The effects of the lack of a global public sphere are far-reaching. Namely, the current crisis of global governance and the global political system can be traced back to the absence of a normatively meaningful public sphere that can mediate between global society and the authoritative institutions of global governance. At the same time, I argue that the absence of the public sphere is not primarily due to the population’s attitudes trapped in national horizons but must be primarily attributed to the deficient institutional structure of the global political system.

Shaping Global Public Spheres Through International Law: An Investigation Into International Climate Change Law

<p>This article makes three arguments to contribute to this thematic issue’s intention of examining the role of public spheres in global politics. To begin with, it attempts to develop the concept of “strong” public spheres to include plenary organs of international institutions. It believes in the potential of this concept as a heuristic fiction. The study then examines the role of international law in shaping global public spheres and their role in global politics. International law’s characteristics have contributed to the current incomplete manifestations of global publics. Not only has international law constructed the institutional frameworks of the “strong” public sphere within international institutions, but it has also integrated civil society actors into the deliberative processes of will formation of these institutions. Finally, this research turns to international climate change law as a case study. The institutional structures created by international climate change law have not only created one “strong” public sphere in the form of the conference of the parties but rely on a second “strong” global public, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which aims to institutionalise the global climate science community without abandoning an intergovernmental structure. What is more, the paradigm shift accompanying the Paris Agreement has made global climate change governance increasingly reliant on an active transnational global public sphere.</p>

Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation, by LIZ BUCAR

Liz Bucar’s new book creatively builds on debates on cultural appropriation that regularly take place in the global public sphere. Its central argument, that borrowing the religious practices of others always carries moral risks, is illustrated by three case studies: “Solidarity Hijab,” “Playing Pilgrim,” and “Respite Yoga.” The author argues that these three case studies are examples of what many would consider positive engagement with the “Other,” while causing harm. I initially became interested in the book because Chapter 1 addressed issues that came up in my own research, and I was curious about Bucar’s take on it. It is this: Non-Muslims using the hijab as a political symbol in liberal campaigns harms Muslim communities. To illustrate this, Bucar used two examples, a poster portraying a Muslim woman wearing an “American flag hijab” and a viral hashtag #HijabForHarmony (p. 46). The poster is presumably meant to express support for all Muslim women, but it uses a very stereotypical image of a Muslim woman of South Asian heritage in a head covering. Hence, it silences Muslim women who do not cover their heads and those of other racial and ethnic backgrounds, in particular Black Muslim women. Secondly, the poster is “whitewashed”—in the poster, compared with the photograph that was originally taken of the portrayed woman, her cheekbones are accentuated, her skin is lighter, and her face is narrower. Not only is she sexualized, but in the poster rendition, she also wears a head covering made out of the American flag as if to “compensate” for her Muslimness. #HijabForHarmony encouraged non-Muslim women to wear the hijab and post their selfies on social media after the white supremacist attack on the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Their cosplay made them the focal point of the news, while the Muslim community was erased from mainstream reporting on the fallout of the shooting.

Writing the Paris Commune in the Warsaw Ghetto

Abstract This article examines the emergence and abrupt disappearance of discourses about the Paris Commune in the global Yiddish public sphere during the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing upon publications produced in transnational centres of Yiddish culture, it traces the rise of the Paris Commune as a historical trope through which Jewish authors sought to make sense of the class and anti-Jewish racial violence that erupted throughout the era of social revolution. As a narrative of class violence that exploded within the national body, the Commune also provided a political framework to critique dominant structures of power and privilege within Jewish society. Writing and re-writing the history of the Commune thus became a central mechanism to inculcate the politics of socialist internationalism among Yiddish readers. With the onset of the inter-war crisis and the rise of fascism, the Commune returned as a key trope through which to comprehend the existential threats to Jewish life and the politics of internationalism, globally, culminating in a remarkable retelling by Abraham Blum, written in the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, which laid bare the political and class dynamics at the core of Nazi eliminationist violence.

Global Trends in Green Space and Senior Mental Health Studies: Bibliometric Review.

The Sustainable Development Goals and the World Health Organization have prioritized senior mental health as an important goal. Senior mental health is a critical issue within the global public health sphere. Notably, green spaces are a useful alternative for improving senior mental health. Many studies have focused on green space and senior mental health, especially on their connection and relationship. However, this research topic lacks a comprehensive and systematic review. Owing to the lack of critical reviews, this study clarified the trend, progress, status, and focus of studies on green spaces and senior mental health using bibliometric analysis of literature within the Web of Science database. The literature analysis within this study specifically focused on the following, including the country/region contribution analysis, institution contribution analysis, keyword analysis, and highly productive journal analysis. Furthermore, this study systematically recorded the content of green space and senior mental health, identified the gap that exists, and provided future frontier directions or issues for research. These contribute toward comprehending the progress and content of this research topic and further provide a guide, reference, and inspiration for possible future research.

Empirical support for the Al-Jazeera Effect notion: Al-Jazeera's Twitter following

Globalization scholars argue that the launch of Al-Jazeera has promoted a fairer horizontal news flow as a non-Western perspective entered the global public sphere leading to the Al-Jazeera Effect. In contrast, other scholars argue that Al-Jazeera outlets face biases and boycotts due to their Qatari origin, thus casting a shadow over the Al Jazeera Effect argument. This study employs an innovative approach to contribute to this debate by examining Al-Jazeera English (AJE) and AJ + 's Twitter following amongst four epistemic communities: ambassadors, foreign ministries, UN missions and journalists. The analysis found that AJE was consistently amongst the top five most followed new channels on Twitter, obtaining greater popularity than major Western news outlets such as Fox News and Sky News. This lends a unique empirical support for the Al-Jazeera Effect hypothesis. AJ + was found to be less popular, possibly due to its distinct nature as an online news platform.

Van den Bulck, H. (2018). Celebrity philanthropy and activism: Mediated interventions in the global public sphere. London and New York: Routledge. 160 pp.

Article Van den Bulck, H. (2018). Celebrity philanthropy and activism: Mediated interventions in the global public sphere. London and New York: Routledge. 160 pp. was published on September 1, 2022 in the journal Communications (volume 47, issue 3).

Global Public Sphere or Fragmentary, Ever-Diminishing Publics?

This article peruses the discourse concerning the European public sphere initiated by Habermas in the early 1960s and assessments of the arguments by a variety of commentators who have drawn attention to the globalisation of the public and its multiplicity. In this context I suggest that the notion of the public must be understood in relation to the concept of 'viral modernity' including viral and open media on the one hand, and technologies of post-truth on the other which systematically distort the messaging of the 'public' marring its future possibilities.

An Australian Politics of Indistinction: Making Refugees Visible

In this article I examine how the competing positions and claims of Australian citizens, First Nations people and refugees are negotiated visually in the global public sphere. Australian perspectives on struggles over citizenship and semi-porous borders must be understood within a history of nation-building, regional relations and the ideology of Whiteness. How does visual culture constitute categories of inclusion and exclusion? Visual strategies that define and contest the place of Indigenous Australians, as well as refugees seeking to come to Australia have been criticised for depicting their subjects as abject victims who lack agency or history, or simply rendering them invisible. Some have been critical of the visual discourse of spectacular violence that has been created and promoted by the Australian government in its pursuit of policies of 'deterrence'. Seeking to challenge this regime of erasure and de-humanisation, activists have adopted a range of innovative visual tactics, including self-representation by refugees themselves. Tactics of humanisation, such as depicting the love of a mother for her child, draw figures such as asylum seekers into the civil sphere. The extraordinary story of Iranian-Kurdish refugee and journalist Behrouz Boochani traces the emergence of a new humanitarian icon, rising from the invisibility shield of Australia's official border protection regime. I examine the extent to which these strategies shape debates around migration and refugees, and mediate between the historically powerful principles of Australian exclusion and the legitimate claims of refugees.

Successive Cohorts of Twitter Users Show Increasing Activity and Shrinking Content Horizons

The global public sphere has changed dramatically over the past decades: A significant part of public discourse now takes place on algorithmically driven platforms. Despite its growing importance, there is scant large-scale academic research on the long-term evolution of user behaviour on these platforms. Here, we evaluate the behaviour of 600,000 individual Twitter users between 2012 and 2019 and find empirical evidence for a cohort-level acceleration of the way Twitter is used. Across time, we observe changing user-level behaviours: more tweets per time, denser interactions with others via retweets, and shorter content horizons, expressed as an individual's decaying autocorrelation of topics over time. We show that the change in usage patterns is not simply caused by a growing user base. While behaviour remains remarkably stable within each cohort over time, we relate these observations to changing compositions of new users with each new cohort containing increasingly active individuals. Our findings complement recent empirical work on social acceleration by tracking cohorts over time, controlling for cohort size, and analyzing their behavioural composition.

Strategy in an Uncertain Domain: Threat and Response in Cyberspace

Over the last decade, "cyber power" has become an increasingly prominent concept and instrument of national strategy. This article explores the nature of contemporary cyber power, focusing on how states should respond to "cyber uncertainty." Cases of cyber operations against Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine, as well as cyber operations conducted (and suffered) by the United States, highlight the evolving role of cyber operations as an instrument of statecraft. Given the complexity of cyber forensics and the polluted information environment of the global public sphere, the public diplomacy of coordinated attribution statements cannot be expected to cut through conclusively or uniformly. States must therefore organise themselves effectively to produce and implement coherent cyber strategy, improving their relational cyber power. This should focus on cyber security and resilience, but also including effective cyber diplomacy, and assessment of what sovereign offensive capabilities are desirable and feasible.

The 2019 Venezuelan Blackout and the consequences of cyber uncertainty

In March 2019, Nicolás Maduro claimed that the blackout in Venezuela was caused by U.S. cyber-attacks. This statement was promptly denied by Mike Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State. Irrespective of the truth of Maduro’s allegation, this episode highlights the diplomatic challenges for states in the contemporary information environment, in which contested narratives proliferate and embed themselves more durably because of the deterritoriality and disintermediation of the Internet. This is particularly true in the context of an emerging pattern of state actors conducting cyber operations against critical infrastructure in other states. The cumulative impact of these different strands is that states will likely struggle to control the perception of their intentions in the cyber domain, not only amongst governments but across the many national audiences that comprise the global public sphere. Focusing on Maduro’s allegation, this article analyses the political utility of cyber uncertainty, and its corresponding implications for states’ cyber strategies and decisionmaking.

Antiviral Potential of Coconut (Cocos nucifera L.) Oil and COVID-19

Background: COVID-19 caused by the novel SARS Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is causing serious blockades in the global public health sphere. In the absence of a powerful antiviral treatment, exploration of plant-based products with antiviral potential has gained interest. Scope and Approach: This commentary presents the prospects of utilizing coconut oil directly or its derivatives such as monolaurin in treating COVID-19 with a special emphasis on their biochemical characteristics features. The potential pitfalls therein and way forward are also highlighted. Key findings and conclusions: There are enough research-backed evidences to demonstrate the antiviral capabilities of coconut oil and monolaurin. Possibility of developing a medium chain fatty acid-based nasal spray as a prophylactic or therapeutic is also discussed. Nevertheless, the potential impediments in devising suitable therapeutic models to treat SARS-CoV-2 are presented.

‘The Worst Moment of My Life’: Argentina, the 2002 World Cup, and the Global Public Sphere

This study explores the political and social significance of Argentina national team at the 2002 World Cup in Asia against the global backdrop of Argentina's economic crisis in 2001–2002. The efforts of the national team players in seeking to emphasize their solidarity with the Argentine people through mass media before and after their ouster from the tournament took on global significance. The public statements of members of the Argentine national team are considered as local and global projections. The national team's lofty expectations and early exit from the tournament offers an important avenue of historical reinterpretation for understanding the Argentine crisis played out in a global context.