Online hate speech, especially on social media platforms, is the subject of both policy and political debate in Europe and globally - from the fragmentation of network publics to echo chambers and bubble phenomena, from networked outrage to networked populism, from trolls and bullies to propaganda and non-linear cyberwarfare. Both researchers and Facebook Community standards see the identification of the potential targets of hateful or antagonistic speech as key to classifying and distinguishing the latter from arguments that represent political viewpoints protected by freedom of expression rights. This research is an exploratory analysis of mentions of targets of hate speech in comments in the context of 106 public Facebook pages in Romanian and Hungarian from January 2015 to December 2017. A total of 1.8 million comments were collected through API interrogation and analyzed using a text-mining niche-dictionaries approach and co-occurrence analysis to reveal connections to events on the media and political agenda and discursive patterns. Findings indicate that in both countries the most prominent targets mentioned are connected to current events on the political and media agenda, that targets are most frequently mentioned in contexts created by politicians and news media, and that discursive patterns in both countries involve the proliferation of similar stereotypes about certain target groups.

El sitio de noticias ro.sputnik.md es la versión en lengua rumana de la plataforma web de noticias Sputnik, propiedad del gobierno ruso, uno de los principales canales utilizados por el Kremlin para difundir información errónea y desinformación a través de las fronteras rusas. La presente investigación pretende identificar en los textos mediáticos de ro.sputnik.md los marcos asociados a las vacunas anti-COVID-19 y los valores noticiosos utilizados para construir el discurso informativo sobre la vacunación. Para mapear los marcos mediáticos y las construcciones léxicas y discursivas, la investigación propone un enfoque mixto basado en el contenido, en el que el análisis automatizado del texto (frecuencia, co-ocurrencia, n-gramas) se combina con el análisis temático y del discurso. En el corpus se identifican seis marcos de énfasis (N=1.165): Superioridad de la vacuna rusa Sputnik V, efectos fatales/secundarios de las vacunas autorizadas por la UE, limitaciones de los derechos y libertades individuales, lucha de las autoridades de la ue y/o rumanía, protección de los niños/adolescentes y conspiración de las grandes farmacéuticas. Los resultados muestran que al valor noticioso de negatividad se asocian fórmulas discursivas específicas: muerte, efectos secundarios (coágulos de sangre, trombosis, coagulación), restricciones e interdicciones o advertencias (grave, riesgo, pánico), mientras que al valor noticioso de conflicto se asocian el vocabulario bélico (defensa, batalla, pólvora) y al elitismo, actores conocidos (líderes estatales, «conspiradores» famosos) y países (actores internacionales poderosos, vecinos significativos). Russian disinformation in Eastern Europe. Vaccination media frames in ro.sputnik.md

Political actors who adapt their performance to the logic of politainment gain visibility and success in the public sphere. Such is the case of George Simion, an emerging politician and leader of the newest parliamentary party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), a populist radical right party that proved especially attractive to Romanian diaspora voters. This study focuses on the discursive and stylistic dimensions of Simion’s newsworthiness and mediatization. Additionally, a multiplatform analysis of his populist communication content and style aims to determine degrees of populism. As such, we propose a mixed-methods multimodal approach that combines corpus linguistics and semi-automated content analysis with thematic coding and visual semiotic analysis. The media-reported performance analysis focuses on content (<em>n</em> = 963) produced by three popular online news media outlets (<em>Digi24.ro</em>, <em>Adevărul.ro</em>, and <em>Antena3.ro</em>) between May 13th 2015 and April 30th 2022, while the analysis of Simion’s discourse examines his Telegram channel’s feed (738 messages and 383 images) between March 15th 2021 and April 30th 2022, and his authored texts published in <em>Adevărul.ro</em> (<em>n</em> = 116) between July 8th 2014 and April 30th 2022. The results indicate that news media reports are defined by conflict (aggression, violence), scandalization, negativity, emotionality, and by a prevalent use of arresting quotes that employ colloquial language (sarcasm, vulgarity). Simion’s celebrity populism is styled through an “ideal candidate,” “populist campaigner” image and framed through the emotional glorification (unionism, patriotism, Orthodoxy) of a potentially united “homeland,” a democratic space that reflects the unadulterated will of ordinary Christian-Orthodox Romanians whose sovereignty is currently undermined by corrupt political elites. He invokes historical narratives (e.g., founding fathers, retrospective utopia) reinforced through othering the EU and ethnic/sexual minorities as forces that threaten the purity of “the people.”

As digital technology developed over the last decades, photojournalism experienced both oportunities and threats. Thus, digital photography opened a whole range of oportunities for the press photographers: they were able to take more photos, to check instantly their quality, to briefly edit and quickly send images to the newsrooms. But, on the other hand, as the cameras and the photo gear got better and cheaper, amateur photographers started to challenge the status of professional photographers. Media organizations increasingly went on publishing user-generated-content (UGC), partly under economical pressures. Nevertheless, there were several differences between the photographic content produced by professional photo journalists and the user-generated content. Due to these diferences, even if the photo-sharing platforms allowed both professional and amateur photographers to share and promote their photos, people were more inclined to share a pro’s photo as they were user-generated content. Starting from these premises, the present paper examines several Instagram dimensions of the photojournalism concept, in order to identify who are the visual elites on Instagram and how professional networks work; which are the most proeminent photographic genres that are associated with photojournalism; and how amateur photographers behave and how they promote themselves on Instagram.

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