Considering online social media's importance in the Arab Spring, this study is a preliminary exploration of the spread of narratives via new media technologies. Via a textual analysis of Facebook comments and traditional news media stories during the 2011 Egyptian uprisings, this study uses the concept of " memes " to move beyond dominant social movement paradigms and suggest that the telling and re-telling, both online and offline, of the principal narrative of a " Facebook revolution " helped involve people in the protests. RESUMEN: Éste es un estudio preliminar sobre el rol desempeñado por un estilo narrativo de los medios sociales, conocido como meme, durante la primavera árabe. Para ello, realiza un análisis textual de los principales comentarios e historias vertidas en Facebook y retratadas en los medios tradicionales, durante las protestas egipcias de 2011. En concreto, este trabajo captura los principales " memes " de esta historia, en calidad de literatura principal de este movimiento social y analiza cómo el contar y el volver a contar estas historias, tanto en línea como fuera de línea, se convirtió en un estilo narrativo de la " revolución de Facebook " que ayudó a involucrar a la gente en la protesta.

In light of the current Russia-Ukraine war, traumatic stress in civilian Ukrainians is a critical issue for psychological science to examine. Social media is often viewed as a tribune for authors' self-expressing and sharing stories on the war's impact upon their lives. To date, little is known about how the civilians articulate their own war experience in social media and how this media affects the processing of traumatic experience and releasing the traumatic stress. Thus, the goal of the study is to examine how the personal experience of the Russia-Ukraine war 2022 is narrated on Facebook as a popular social media venue. The study uses a corpus of 316 written testimonies collected on Facebook from witnesses of the Russia-Ukraine war and compares it against a reference corpus of 100 literary prosaic texts in Ukrainian. We analyzed both corpora using the Ukrainian version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software-LIWC 2015 (Pennebaker et al., 2015). We identified psychological and linguistic categories that characterized the war narratives and distinguished it from the literary reference corpus. For instance, we found the style of Facebook testimonies to be significantly less narrative and more analytic compared to literary writings. Therefore, writers in the social media focus more on cognitive reappraisal of the tragic events, i.e., a strategy known to lead to a reduction of stress and trauma.

The research is focused on the emerging practices of digital photojournalism in war contexts, in relation to the use of user-generated content from social networks. The focal point is the coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict by the two main online newspapers of the belligerent countries: Ukrayinska Pravda and Rossiyskaya Gazeta. From the analysis of an initial sample of 7,194 articles (6,646 Ukrainian and 548 Russian), published during the first semester of the war, the preferred type of graphic content and the degree of presence of images from the different social platforms will be determined. Likewise, the article offers a theoretical innovation on the current state of the routine of war digital photojournalism, introducing the definition of the concept of “false collective source” due to the appropriation of mechanisms of collective intelligence for potential propaganda purposes. The informative use of the social web has generated a transition from “gatekeeping” to “gatewatching” that makes it necessary to review the state of the art to avoid a possible instrumentalization of the role of users. Finally, a decalogue is proposed to combat digital illiteracy and identify new appropriation practices, by distinguishing the use of the social web as an information source versus its use as a mere distribution channel.

Ukrainians responded to Russia’s full-scale invasion not only militarily, but also with an explosion of creativity on the linguistic and cultural fronts, in the form of wartime songs, sayings, art, jokes, and memes. I view this rapid cultural production as a cultural immune response, and consider how it functioned as a defense against the cultural and ideological threats that Russia presented along with its military invasion. I focus on three key threats in Russian propaganda: the denial of Ukraine’s existence, the insistence that Ukrainian and Russian are the same, and depictions of Ukrainians as weak and demoralized. These threats were countered by three themes in Ukrainian social media: the affirmation of Ukrainian existence, the assertion of Ukrainian distinctiveness, and the celebration of courage and resilience in the face of assault. The Russian aggression, instead of disrupting Ukrainian identity, prompted a consolidation and renewed vigor in Ukrainianness. Social media amplified the power of this burgeoning cultural resistance. The digitally circulating memes helped to construct a community that is imagined as bound and yet is pervasive and boundless, including its displaced and diasporic members. An effect of the cultural explosion was the creation of unity across status, class, region, age, gender, and language in Ukraine, and with Ukrainians in diaspora. (This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.)

Through technological advancements as well as due to societal trends and developments, social media became an active part and a catalysator of the ongoing conflicts and wars carried out in the physical environment. A direct example on this behalf are the cyber/information operations currently conducted in conjunction with the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. Due to such operations packaged in social media manipulation mechanisms like disinformation and misinformation using techniques such as controversies, fake news, and deep fakes, a high degree of confusion and uncertainty surrounds the events happened and users’ behaviour and beliefs. These operations also impact the civilians directly affected in the battlefield or their dear and known ones. To tackle this issue, currently limited scientific and objective effort is dedicated in this direction due to, e.g., data, strategic, and emotional implications. It is then the aim of this research to capture the main topics discussed and the ...

Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24 th, 2022, "Ой у лузі червона калина" ("Oh, the red viburnum in the meadow") has become a symbol of the Ukrainian people's resistance and unity against the aggressor. When Ukrainian pop-musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk posted his performance of the song on Instagram, multiple social media platforms exploded with numerous mashup versions of the song, all manifesting a symbolic counterargument toward the war narrative of the attacker. Employing invitational rhetoric as our framework, we analyze three video products created within what we call the "Kalyna" movement, one featuring the original performance by Khlyvnyuk along with other Ukrainian celebrities, and two others that stem from Estonia and Georgia. We suggest that, rather than serving as a direct call to arms, the song's renditions reflect the performers' own negotiation of their national selfhood and thus enact support of a nation under assault by celebrating its history and its right to freedom. We conclude that the media content produced in the participatory culture of the "Kalyna" movement all but validates its voluntary participants' perspectives on issues of independence, cultural identity, and human and national values.

The war in Ukraine has been the most important topic in the information space of Russia for more than half a year. The report focuses on how both state-controlled media and social media users discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The corpus of messages on the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been formed using Scan Interfax and Brand Analytics media and social media monitoring systems.

A previous Teaching Note on the name "Yogesh Raut" provoked some thoughts on linguistics and thence some thoughts on Noam Chomsky's work in political science. Since then, I have been creating Teaching Notes on many people. In this Teaching Note, I discuss: (a) virality of posts on Social Media; (b) the Civil War in Syria; (c) the Reign of Aurangzeb; and (d) a few thoughts on the Disruptive Dependency Theory a year after it was proposed.