Browsing by Author "Napoli, Philip"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Ambush on Black Veterans: Foreign Disinformation Swayed the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election by Targeting Black Voters
    (2023-04-19) Jackson, Chandlee A. IV
    A Russian-orchestrated influence campaign spread disinformation using social media during the 2016 United States (U.S.) presidential election. Digital evidence shows that Russian operatives developed presumptions about differing identity groups and tailored their interactions to sow strife between groups. The inferred intent was to influence and negatively impact African Americans’ voting practices during the 2016 election campaign. Russian influence agents targeted the Black community more heavily than any other identity group. Influence operations also targeted veterans and veteran-adjacent communities; therefore, African American veterans (Black Vets) received twice the indoctrination because of their dual identity. The online impersonations of Black people and veterans on social media platforms was problematic for a myriad of reasons, but the Russian leadership’s facilitation of disinformation represents adversarial exploitation of protection gaps uncovered in the Digital Age. Currently the First Amendment inhibits the U.S. government and social media platforms from performing the desired protective measures to maintain a healthy online environment that nurtures an informed citizenry. For Black Vets in particular, foreign entities suppressed the voting power of their ethnic group and sought to instigate members of their profession to join domestic violent extremist groups. The following project will propose that the U.S. government ought to change its approach in teaching digital media literacy competencies so that vulnerable populations receive the care and skills necessary to reduce their potential of becoming radicalized. Russian disinformation on social media and how the U.S. will embrace an identity-centric approach to educating digital media literacy is a matter of U.S. national security.
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    Dialogue in a Divided Nation: Student Perspectives on the Policies and Culture Surrounding Campus Speech
    (2020-11-20) Sommer, Luke
    Free speech policy on college campuses faces the unique challenge of balancing the allowance of open expression with the protection of a safe, inclusive community. In an effort to address the growing concern of self-censorship and limited civil discourse on college campuses, researchers have conducted nationwide surveys measuring student perception. While these surveys provide valuable insight into understanding general trends in free speech opinions, they fail to explore the motivation and rationale behind these beliefs. This study analyzes comprehensive interview data from 17 Duke undergraduates who shared their thoughts on controversial free speech incidents. It found that interviewees typically demonstrated a strong understanding of the core principles of free speech but failed to differentiate between protected versus unprotected speech; interviewees also revealed poor familiarity with Duke speech policy. Respondents’ perceptions of contentious free speech incidents fell consistently along party lines, but respondents overall demonstrated a nuanced understanding of hate speech and how it differs from other racist/bigoted speech. Finally, interviewees regarded Duke’s speech policy as vague, superficial, and overly subjective. This study leverages students’ sentiments in order to recommend a more comprehensive, concrete speech policy that balances a dedication to open expression with key protections for marginalized students.
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    Engaged Journalism, Democratic Engagement?: The Impact of Newsroom Listening Sessions on Political Participation
    (2021-04-21) Kenmore, Abraham
    This paper explores whether regional engaged journalism impacts democratic engagement in local government. Carolina Public Press, a non-profit newsroom in Western North Carolina, carried out a number of community listening sessions in 2014 and 2015. This paper uses a difference in difference model to see if these listening sessions resulted in changes to voting, political donations or testimony at county budget hearings in the counties where these listening sessions were held. Across several statistical models the presence of a listening session in a county does not appear to have any statistically significant impact on any of the markers of democratic engagement.
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    Fact-Checking in Buenos Aires & the Modern Journalistic Struggle Over Knowledge
    (2019-04-15) Flamini, Daniela
    In news environments all around the world, journalists are frazzled about what they consider to be a deplorable state of the media. With large demographics of consumers having access to digital technologies and new methods of story-telling via social media platforms and the Internet, newspaper reporters of the past are finding themselves constantly having to catch up to a rapidly changing realm of knowledge-production. This thesis uses fact-checking as a lens through which to study the modern relationship between power, information, and the creation of narrative, and it is rooted in observations from my various engagements with fact-checkers in Buenos Aires and at an international conference in Rome. Applying Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ‘the intellectual,’ I examine how Argentina’s polarized political environment and clashing of class interests inspired the organic rise of Chequeado, a fact-checking organization committed to holding elite groups accountable to the rest of society by establishing a new kind of journalistic authority over knowledge-producing processes. Using my experience traveling with the Duke Reporters’ Lab to Global Fact V in Rome, I broaden this discussion to fit a globalized framework. In spaces where ideological battles wage and the very definition of reality is at stake, fact-checkers are vying for a narrower kind of authoritative power over the information that gets exchanged between classes, one that mobilizes the public to use their access to knowledge and counter hegemonic narrative.
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    Fake News as a Threat to the Democratic Media Environment: Past Conditions of Media Regulation and Their Contemporary Applicability to New Media in the United States of America and South Korea
    (2018-12) Park, Jae Hyun Jackie
    This study uses a comparative case study policy analysis to evaluate whether the media regulation standards that the governments of the United States of America and South Korea used in the past apply to fake news on social media and the Internet today. We first identify the shared conditions based on which the two governments intervened in the free press. Then we examine media regulation laws regarding these conditions and review court cases in which they were utilized. In each section, we draw similarities and differences between the two governments’ courses of action. The comparative analysis will serve useful in the conclusion, where we assess the applicability of those conditions to fake news on new media platforms in each country and deliberate policy recommendations as well as policy flow between the two countries.