Abstract
The year 2024 so far has witnessed kaleidoscopic global public spheres. The assassination attempt against the presidential candidate Donald Trump has torn the United States further apart (New York Times, 2024). The Olympic Games in Paris is expected to bring all of us together, but the opening ceremony has caused quite a ripple effect as the unorthodox performance offended some religious groups (CBS News, 2024).
I did not intend to pinpoint all unusual global public affairs here, but to highlight the difficulties we encounter in online public spaces, especially in this unique election year of 2024. According to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (Robinson, 2024), a total of 76 nations—home to nearly half the world's population—have already selected or will soon select their own leaders, including the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Russia, Indonesia, France, Mexico, and Pakistan, to name a few. In early 2024, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released the Global Risks Report 2024 (WEF, 2024). Based on the insights of nearly 1500 global experts, a deteriorating global outlook was pictured. Among the short-term global risks, misinformation and disinformation were ranked No. 1, followed by extreme weather events (No. 2), societal polarization (No. 3), and cyber insecurity (No. 4). That means, among the five severest risks faced globally, three of them are related to the online public sphere and public opinion.
On top of that, artificial intelligence (AI) has further muddled the water. Ever since the public release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022, the global communication ecosystem has been revolutionarily shifted. The AI-generated content (AIGC) provided by ChatGPT and other generative AI tools allows for the creation of digital content, such as images, video, music, and natural language, at a faster pace (Cao et al., 2023). The employment of AIGC in journalistic practice (e.g., Fang et al., 2024), education (e.g., Chen et al., 2024), design (e.g., Wu et al., 2024), and many other fields have achieved remarkable success. However, the phenomenon of AI hallucination has been the ghost in the machine haunting us since its birth, where the large language models such as ChatGPT provide “confident responses that seemed faithful and non-sensical when viewed in light of the common knowledge” (Alkaissi & McFarlane, 2023, para. 10). And given the massive training data is subject to human biases and misconceptions, the generative AI is not immune to language abuse, discrimination, and hate speech (Hagendorff et al., 2023), not to mention humans may proceed neutral AIGC simply based on the heuristics of the authorship and source of technology (Chen & Zeng, 2024).
Against the backdrop of the fast-evolving technology, it is easy to understand the challenges we humans encounter together. The dawn of the digital age brought an unrealistic Utopian view for us as the Internet was expected to eventually enable the realization of Habermas’ (1962) ideal of rational communication in a public sphere (Rheingold, 1993). A few decades after the inception of the Internet (exactly 30 years since the beginning of the Internet in China), the rosy picture has turned dire. The pressing question has become: How should we hold the reins of technology and pull it back from the brink of the precipice?
By no means we could answer this grand question in one single issue, but at least we could shed some light on this topic. This special issue is centered on governing, misinformation, and discrimination. It consists of three research articles and two research notes by authors from five geographical regions, notably three from the Global South. Peng Hwa Ang and Sherly Haristya (2024) from Singapore and Indonesia taps the governing issue from a corporate responsibility perspective. In 2020, the social media giant Meta (formerly Facebook) outperformed its peers by establishing an Oversight Board as an initiative of self-regulation. Five years have passed; has this board fulfilled its promise or simply paid lip service? This research article entitled “The Governance, Legitimacy and Efficacy of Facebook's Oversight Board: A Model for Global Tech Platforms?” details the analysis of the board's structure for legitimacy and decision efficiency. Despite the room for improvement, the author argues for a positive prospect to promote this approach for other tech giants alike.
Two other research articles similarly investigate social media users’ derailed engagement with misinformation and verbal attacks. In his article entitled “Social Media Users’ Engagement with Religious Misinformation: An Exploratory Sequential Mixed-Methods Analysis,” Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman (2024) identifies three ways users engage with misinformation: their topics of discourse, reactions, and appraisal. The findings have crucial implications for understanding the largely neglected Bangladeshi society as the world's fourth-largest Muslim country. Rachel G. A. Thompson and colleague (2024) focuses on the response comments related to the use of offensive comments in Ghanaian political discourse on GhanaWeb in her article entitled “‘… you were reared’: Response comments on verbal attacks in political discourse on GhanaWeb.” In the crossroad where the right to freedom of speech meets the traditional norms and values in Ghana, those response comments on verbal attacks in political discourse are intriguing and worth investigating.
Two research notes bring some insights into AI. Chen et al. (2024) summarize four thought-provoking ethical paradoxes of AI in media addressing human morality, journalism's gatekeeping, the echo chamber effect, and responsible AI. A sense of satirical humor in those paradoxes shall not eclipse their importance as the skepticism and optimism in AI have a great impact on humanity (Kuo, 2024a). Julia Barroso da Silveira and Ellen Alves Lima (2024) from Brazil tackles the racial biases in AI by examining Bard's inability to write narratives about black people. The alarming message delivered in this research note surely demands further attention from the tech industry, regulators, and larger society.
As much as I enjoy the pieces that contributed to the special theme, I find the other two research notes also fun to read. Inspired by Dr Kouta Minamizawa's keynote address at the 2024 Emerging Media for Communicating Sustainable Development Goals conference (held at Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, 30 March 2024), Jiunde Lee (2024) from Taiwan explores the technical aspects and transformative potential of haptic design and human augmentation. Max Murphy (2024) from the United States tests the large language models’ (LLMs) ability to predict personality type based on tweets. With up to 76% accuracy level, LLMs provide promising tools for micro-targeting, a prevalent commercial practice.
Last, the book entitled “Social Processes of Online Hate” edited by Joseph B. Walther and Ronald E. Rice has been reviewed by Liangwen Kuo (2024b). Joseph Walther has been well recognized for his pioneering work on computer-mediate communication, and Ronald Rice has devoted his far-reaching work to media technology. This book explores the social forces among and between online aggressors that affect the expression and perpetration of online hate. It can be deemed as a timely academic response to the online hate incidents prevalent in almost all societies.
