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52. Mercenary Fighters in Libya and Ukraine: How Social Media Are Exposing the Russian Wagner Group
- Author:
- Biancamaria Vallortigara
- Publication Date:
- 05-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies
- Abstract:
- This issue of Bee-Hive explores the emerging reports of Libyan mercenaries involved in the current conflict in Ukraine.
- Topic:
- Social Media, Wagner Group, Mercenaries, and Russia-Ukraine War
- Political Geography:
- Russia, Ukraine, Libya, and North Africa
53. The Distinction between Anti-Semitism & Anti-Zionism in the Eyes of American Muslim Preachers
- Author:
- Elad Ben David
- Publication Date:
- 07-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies
- Abstract:
- In this issue of Bee Hive, Elad Ben David explores the views on Judaism and Zionism among Muslim preachers in the United States.
- Topic:
- Islam, Social Media, Judaism, Zionism, and Islamism
- Political Geography:
- Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and United States of America
54. Hizballah’s Narrative in the Service of Legitimizing Military Action
- Author:
- Shay Jovany
- Publication Date:
- 09-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies
- Abstract:
- In August issue of Beehive, Shay Jovany analyzes the online narrative regarding the "Karish" gas field dispute as developed by Hizballah.
- Topic:
- Gas, Social Media, Hezbollah, Disputes, and Military
- Political Geography:
- Middle East and Lebanon
55. Syria’s Wheat Crisis
- Author:
- Jesse Weinberg
- Publication Date:
- 10-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies
- Abstract:
- In September issue of Beehive, Jesse Weinberg analyses the food crisis in Syria.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Social Media, Syrian War, Food Crisis, and Wheat
- Political Geography:
- Middle East and Syria
56. Does Deplatforming Work? Unintended consequences of banning far-right content creators
- Author:
- Danny Klinenberg
- Publication Date:
- 10-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC)
- Abstract:
- Social media has become an outlet for extremists to fundraise and organize on, potentially leading to deadly consequences. While governments deliberate on how to regulate this challenge, some social media companies have removed creators of offensive content—deplatforming. I estimate the effects of deplatforming on revenue and viewership, using variation in the timing of removals across two video-streaming companies- YouTube, and its far-right competitor, Bitchute. I construct a novel dataset including Bitcoin wallets linking YouTube and Bitchute accounts for 79 far-right content creators, including propagandists for violent domestic extremist movements. Being deplatformed on YouTube results in a 30% increase in weekly Bitcoin revenue and a 50% increase in viewership on Bitchute. This increase in Bitchute activity accounts for about 65% of the estimated foregone revenue and 5.9% of viewership lost from YouTube, implying a negative net effect of deplatforming.
- Topic:
- Media, Social Media, Far Right, Censorship, and Digital Space
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
57. Perceptions of Turkey in the US Congress: A Twitter Data Analysis
- Author:
- Hakan Mehmetcik, Melih Koluk, and Galip Yuksel
- Publication Date:
- 12-2022
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Uluslararasi Iliskiler
- Institution:
- International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
- Abstract:
- The way we interact with individuals, companies, and communities has been altered by our usage of online social media sites and services. Simultaneously, the use of social media as a data source for social scientific inquiries has increased substantially in recent years. This study uses Twitter data analysis to investigate the views of United States (US) Members of Congress on Turkey, and to see if these perceptions reflect some of the trends in US-Turkey relations. Our initial view is that the Twitter conversations among Members of Congress appropriately reveal changes in the course of perceptions vis-a-vis relations between the two countries. With that assumption in mind, we evaluated Twitter data from 2009 to 2021, and analyzed it using statistical methodologies, network analysis, computational text analysis, and topic modeling tools. The findings indicate that Twitter data is a useful proxy for evaluating the perception of Turkey among US Members of Congress.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Bilateral Relations, Social Media, Twitter, and Congress
- Political Geography:
- Turkey, Middle East, North America, and United States of America
58. Some Thoughts on Central Bank Digital Currency
- Author:
- David Andolfatto
- Publication Date:
- 06-2021
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Cato Journal
- Institution:
- The Cato Institute
- Abstract:
- The literature examining the question of central bank digital currency (CBDC) has grown immensely in a very short time. Much progress has been made since I first learned of the idea in a blogpost authored by J. P. Koning in 2014. That modest article soon led me to openly speculate on the merits of a central bank cryptocurrency in a talk I delivered at the International Workshop on P2P Financial Systems in Frankfurt (Andolfatto 2015). My audience, which consisted mainly of entrepreneurs, seemed to receive my talk with a polite mixture of bemusement and anxiety. Surely, I couldn’t be serious? To be honest, I’m not sure that I was. But then the threat of Facebook’s Libra came along, and central bankers around the world suddenly began to take the idea very seriously indeed.
- Topic:
- Finance, Social Media, Central Bank, Currency, and Digital Currency
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
59. Influence for hire. The Asia-Pacific’s online shadow economy
- Author:
- Jacob Wallis, Ariel Bogle, Albert Zhang, Hillary Mansour, Tim Niven, Elena Yi-Ching, Jason Liu, Jonathan Corpus Ong, and Ross Tapsell
- Publication Date:
- 08-2021
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
- Abstract:
- It’s not just nation-states that interfere in elections and manipulate political discourse. A range of commercial services increasingly engage in such activities, operating in a shadow online influence-for-hire economy that spans from content farms through to high-end PR agencies. There’s growing evidence of states using commercial influence-for-hire networks. The Oxford Internet Institute found 48 instances of states working with influence-for-hire firms in 2019–20, an increase from 21 in 2017–18 and nine in 2016–17.1 There’s a distinction between legitimate, disclosed political campaigning and government advertising campaigns, on the one hand, and efforts by state actors to covertly manipulate the public opinion of domestic populations or citizens of other countries using inauthentic social media activity, on the other. The use of covert, inauthentic, outsourced online influence is also problematic as it degrades the quality of the public sphere in which citizens must make informed political choices and decisions.
- Topic:
- Elections, Internet, Social Media, and Economy
- Political Geography:
- Australia and Asia-Pacific
60. Buying and selling extremism
- Author:
- Ariel Bogle
- Publication Date:
- 08-2021
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
- Abstract:
- As mainstream social media companies have increased their scrutiny and moderation of right-wing extremist (RWE) content and groups, there’s been a move to alternative online content platforms. There’s also growing concern about right-wing extremism in Australia, and about how this shift has diversified the mechanisms used to fundraise by RWE entities. This phenomenon isn’t well understood in Australia, despite the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) advising in March 2021 that ‘ideological extremism’ now makes up around 40% of its priority counterterrorism caseload. Research by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) has found that nine Australian Telegram channels that share RWE content used at least 22 different funding platforms, including online monetisation tools and cryptocurrencies, to solicit, process and earn funds between 1 January 2021 and 15 July 2021. Due to the opaque nature of many online financial platforms, it’s difficult to obtain a complete picture of online fundraising, so this sample is necessarily limited. However, in this report we aim to provide a preliminary map of the online financial platforms and services that may both support and incentivise an RWE content ecosystem in Australia. Most funding platforms found in our sample have policies that explicitly prohibit the use of their services for hate speech, but we found that those policies were often unclear and not uniformly enforced. Of course, there’s debate about how to balance civil liberties with the risks posed by online communities that promote RWE ideology (and much of that activity isn’t illegal), but a better understanding of online funding mechanisms is necessary, given the growing concern about the role online propaganda may play in inspiring acts of violence as well as the risk that, like other social divisions, such channels and movements could be exploited by adversaries. The fundraising facilitated by these platforms not only has the potential to grow the resources of groups and individuals linked to right-wing extremism, but it’s also likely to be a means of building the RWE community both within Australia and with overseas groups and a vector for spreading RWE propaganda through the engagement inherent in fundraising efforts. The funding platforms mirror those used by RWE figures overseas, and funding requests were boosted by foreign actors, continuing Australian RWEs’ history of ‘meaningful international exchange’ with overseas counterparts.
- Topic:
- Internet, Social Media, Far Right, and Political Extremism
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus