Communication Cultures

This paper explores the important balance between freedom of the press and national security in democratic countries. On one hand, the press plays a crucial role in keeping the public informed and holding the government accountable. On the other hand, the government sometimes needs to limit press freedom to protect national security, especially in times of crisis or war. This study looks at key legal cases and examples to show how countries handle these competing interests. It also examines the impact of digital media and whistleblowers, who often reveal government secrets to the public, on this balance. By comparing different countries' approaches, the paper emphasizes the need for clear laws to ensure that national security measures do not unfairly restrict press freedom. Ultimately, the research argues that finding the right balance is essential for protecting democratic values while addressing genuine security threats.

Since 2010, there has been a deluge of reporting and commentary in the traditional press and online about the consequences and implications of WikiLeaks and its activities for journalism, diplomacy, democracy, law, and trust. Reactions to its releases of huge caches of classified documents and diplomatic correspondence throughout 2010 ranged from outrage and borderline hysteria (U.S. politicians Sarah Palin and Senator Joseph Lieberman called for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange) to bemused skepticism ("It would be an exaggeration to say that diplomacy will never be the same again"; "Unpluggable," 2010, p. 34). Somewhere in between, some officials and journalists took a more nuanced view, at least some of the time. While calling for aggressive criminal prosecution of Assange and WikiLeaks, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also praised the high level of professionalism, acute observation, and stylish writing on view in the leaked State Department cables. In a November 2010 Pentagon press briefing, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates observed, "Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest" (Bumiller, 2010, para. 7). In January 2011, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, defended its publication of classified documents obtained from WikiLeaks: The idea that mere publication of such a wholesale collection of secrets will make other countries less willing to do business with our diplomats seems to me questionable.. .. David Sanger, our chief Washington correspondent, told me, "At least so far, the evidence that foreign leaders are no longer talking to American diplomats is scarce. I've heard about nervous jokes at the beginning of meetings. .. but the conversations are happening.. .. American diplomacy has hardly screeched to a halt." (Keller, 2011, p. 46) In September 2011, the WikiLeaks saga took another turn with the unexpurgated release of WikiLeaks' entire remaining inventory of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange and WikiLeaks claimed that the release was inadvertent, blaming it on the publication of the decryption key to the file containing the cables in a book by David Leigh, a journalist for The Guardian, and Luke Harding.

Every referendum brings forth a crisis of legitimacy. Traian Băsescu experienced this political situation in 2007 when he was suspended by the Romanian Parliament. Having as theoretical background social semiotics (Kress, van Leeuwen [1996] 2006; van Leeuwen, 2005), our paper focuses on four semiotic systems (represented participants, composition, multimodality, interactive participants) applied to the images produced by the Romanian citizens, who had been "called up" to an unconventional political campaign through a personal production of a digital guerilla. Beyond its mere iconic function, number "322" has an indexical function of pinpointing the MPs who voted for Traian Băsescu's impeachment. This number constitutes the main reason for the embodiment of these Romanian MPs in pictorial metaphors. Metaphors activate the semiotic system of multimodality because they become a sign of creativity by combining layers belonging to different iconic isotopic cluster...

Did WikiLeaks change the world? Lost in the sensationalism, personalization and media spasm of the event was any historical or political assessment of how or even whether the revelation of state secrets actually a ects the conduct of diplomacy and war. Taking one step back, two steps forward, this essay compares historic whistle blowing – like Trotsky’s opening of the Tsarist diplomatic archives after the Russian revolution and Wilson’s call for a transparent new diplomacy after the First World War – to the polarized reaction that fol- lowed the passing of over a half million classi ed documents and two videos by Private Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks. e signi cance of the event should be judged less by the content of the documents and more by the emergence of a new networked medium of global transmission that further erodes the institutions and prerogatives of statecraft. 

As an electronic whistle-blower platform with global reach, WikiLeaks poses a unique challenge to state and commercial institutions. Yet, its efforts to galvanize the public have met with uneven success. To understand why, and to appreciate WikiLeaks' significance as an expression of counterpower, it is necessary to consider the informational and communicative paradoxes the group faces. These paradoxes must be examined in relation to the contingencies and longer-term political and economic trends affecting WikiLeaks' fortunes, and the shifting strategies the group has pursued over time. Attention to these matters provides insight into the nature of the networked, post-truth media environment and the challenges it poses to activists today.

Wikileaks have released classified US diplomatic cables which raise some ethical question. This question revolves around the uneasy relationship between freedom of information and national security. In the Philippines, journalists and broadcasters have been pushing for the passage of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Bill in the Congress but with the sudden breakthrough of the Weakileak in the media, the government with the suggestion of the military has carefully revisited the Bill and drafted a Malacanang version of the FOI. The proponents and defenders of Wikileaks argue that this information provides people with the disclosure of truth while critics and opponents of the Wikileaks insist that this information is detrimental to diplomatic relationships. Wikileaks open the secrets of the US in the world that would expose the US Foreign Policy and Diplomatic Relation to shame. We know that Information is a source of power. With information, people are enlightened with the issue and e...

Leaked information, such as WikiLeaks' Cablegate, constitutes a unique and valuable data source for researchers interested in a wide variety of policy-oriented topics. Yet political scientists have avoided using leaked information in their research. This article argues that we can and should use leaked information as a data source in scholarly research. First, the methodological, ethical, and legal challenges related to the use of leaked information in research have been considered, concluding that none of these present serious obstacles. Second, how political scientists can use leaked information to generate novel and unique insights concerning political phenomena using a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods have been shown. Specifically, how leaked documents reveal important details concerning the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, and how leaked diplomatic cables highlight a significant disparity between the U.S. government's public attitude toward traditional knowledge and its private behavior have been demonstrated.

Wikileaks have released classified US diplomatic cables which raise some ethical question. This question revolves around the uneasy relationship between freedom of information and national security. In the Philippines, journalists and broadcasters have been pushing for the passage of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Bill in the Congress but with the sudden breakthrough of the Weakileak in the media, the government with the suggestion of the military has carefully revisited the Bill and drafted a Malacanang version of the FOI. The proponents and defenders of Wikileaks argue that this information provides people with the disclosure of truth while critics and opponents of the Wikileaks insist that this information is detrimental to diplomatic relationships. Wikileaks open the secrets of the US in the world that would expose the US Foreign Policy and Diplomatic Relation to shame. We know that Information is a source of power. With information, people are enlightened with the issue and e...

This article analyzes two major threads of academic discussions on the WikiLeaks phenomenon and its influence on international and communication studies, which cause a refuelling and reframing of both the questions and the solutions offered by academics and practitioners in these fields. The research examines a sample of the academic literature produced in 2010-2012, in order to trace how WikiLeaks reframed age-old academic debates: In international relations and politics, the major debate is between transparency and secrecy/security. In media and communication studies the major debate is openness versus control. Perspectives are further divided, not only by discipline but also ideologically by the author's position on the state-network dichotomy. In turn, different academic disciplines can be themselves mapped in terms of their relative closeness to the statist or network side of the controversy.

The present paper is one in a series of in-print "Nez-à-Nez" (nose to nose) debates organized by Global Brief, a world affairs magazine for each issue of the magazine. The print magazine comes out quarterly while the website (www.globalbrief.ca) has constantly updated content, including by a stable of 16 "geobloggers" blogging in eight different languages (English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Russian and Turkish). The present version appears on the website at: . A substantially identical version of the present debate will appear, differently formatted and with final edits, in the print edition.

While the social media optimists believe online political communication implies a bigger participation of the audience, this study shows that politicians are preoccupied with their political image and less concerned of building a dialogue with their voters. Our hypothesis is that politicians use online communication to build a certain image and they use social media less for developin g a relationship with their target audience. The content analysis method was applied on the Facebook accounts and on blogs belonging to the leaders of the Romanian parliamentary parties at two different moments: January-February 2012 riots and July-

What do WikiLeaks' narcissist-in-chief and the United States Navy have in common? Flash Answer: Apart from a fascination with diplomatic cables and media attention, they're both interested in trademarks. Julian Assange, avowedly a critic of the state, seeks its protection to control the use of his name in what he calls "public speaking" and "entertainment" (Halliday, 2011). He has sought this protection through the splendidly Dickensian law firm, Finers Stephens Innocent 2-an aptly 19th-century name for a very traditional business, working on behalf of a very traditional person, craving very traditional state aid, with each party having embarked on a search for secondary accumulation. The U.S. Navy wants similar ownership, of the expression "A Global Force for Good™." 3 Since 2009, it has orchestrated a multimedia recruiting and public relations campaign around these words, as opposed to its previous slogan, which promised young people that the Navy would "Accelerate Your Life." Examples of this newly beneficent, though no doubt still speedy, work are offered in television commercials that show Navy personnel capturing Somali pirates, treating Haitian earthquake survivors, and handing toys to impoverished children. But there is always another side to this notion. An unbridled nationalism rides sidesaddle with civil society mythology. The Navy twins these duties via its trite but revealing slogan, "First to Fight, First to Help" and insists that "The strength and status of any nation can be measured in part by the will and might of its navy" (United States Navy, n.d.). These two highly state-dependent entities, the narcissist-in-chief and the Navy, have something else in common. They rely on the bourgeois media. The Navy craves advertising space and friendly coverage. WikiLeaks craves coverage and knowledge, because it lacks people who know what to make of 1 Thanks to Anne-Marie O'Connor and Bill Booth for putting me onto the story. 2 Later renamed HowardKennedyFSI.com. 3 Yes, the Navy has sought to trademark "Global Force for Good" (Ewing, 2009).

What do WikiLeaks' narcissist-in-chief and the United States Navy have in common? Flash Answer: Apart from a fascination with diplomatic cables and media attention, they're both interested in trademarks. Julian Assange, avowedly a critic of the state, seeks its protection to control the use of his name in what he calls "public speaking" and "entertainment" (Halliday, 2011). He has sought this protection through the splendidly Dickensian law firm, Finers Stephens Innocent 2-an aptly 19th-century name for a very traditional business, working on behalf of a very traditional person, craving very traditional state aid, with each party having embarked on a search for secondary accumulation. The U.S. Navy wants similar ownership, of the expression "A Global Force for Good™." 3 Since 2009, it has orchestrated a multimedia recruiting and public relations campaign around these words, as opposed to its previous slogan, which promised young people that the Navy would "Accelerate Your Life." Examples of this newly beneficent, though no doubt still speedy, work are offered in television commercials that show Navy personnel capturing Somali pirates, treating Haitian earthquake survivors, and handing toys to impoverished children. But there is always another side to this notion. An unbridled nationalism rides sidesaddle with civil society mythology. The Navy twins these duties via its trite but revealing slogan, "First to Fight, First to Help" and insists that "The strength and status of any nation can be measured in part by the will and might of its navy" (United States Navy, n.d.). These two highly state-dependent entities, the narcissist-in-chief and the Navy, have something else in common. They rely on the bourgeois media. The Navy craves advertising space and friendly coverage. WikiLeaks craves coverage and knowledge, because it lacks people who know what to make of 1 Thanks to Anne-Marie O'Connor and Bill Booth for putting me onto the story. 2 Later renamed HowardKennedyFSI.com. 3 Yes, the Navy has sought to trademark "Global Force for Good" (Ewing, 2009).

This article aims at understanding the character of ‘Fyataru’ that the Bengali author Nabarun Bhattacharya created. This character returns again and again in many of Nabarun’s stories and novels. It is an important signifier of Nabarun’s literary vision, since it represents the politics of dissent that the author believed in most prominently. Through the dissection of the fictional Fyataru, this article aims to understand the politics that guided Nabarun’s writings. It also tries to determine the philosophy behind this journey of fiction, the history of Nabarun’s thought, as well as its broader implications in contemporary reality. Reading Nabarun’s literature in the light of the theory of anarchism illuminates the purpose of  Fyataru, and how this fictional creature can identify its own reflection in individuals of today’s society who have tried to rebel against institutional oppression with the weapon of anarchist practices. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and other underground ac...

This paper addresses the emergence of various social movement challenges to concentrated state power that have taken place in the last 10 years, notably that posed by what might be loosely termed the radical transparency movement. This is best reflected by the work of WikiLeaks, a publishing outfit that emphasises scientific journalism and a form of radical transparency by publishing sensitive documents obtained through whistle-blowers. 1 It seeks to examine the role played by WikiLeaks in lifting the lid on clandestine discussions on such negotiated instruments as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), the Trade in Services Agreement and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), with the main focus on the TPP. These agreements, negotiated with minimal participation from the citizenry of negotiating states, suggest a grand capitulation to various centres of power, mainly of a corporate nature. Furthermore, it is a capitulation without broader public discussion. Seen as a unified whole, they also exclude the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) while undermining sovereignty and the delivery of affordable public services. This discussion, to that end, examines the political movement centred around targeting the non-transparent agenda on trade, spearheaded by the WikiLeaks publishing organisation, with specific reference to the TPP. It firstly considers the concept of "technospheric activism," an ever increasing realm where battles over information take place through hacktivism. The place of radical transparency, the central ideology of WikiLeaks' publication project, is then examined. The provisions of the TPP, gleaned from released draft chapters from the organisation, are also considered, followed by examples of public discussions and engagement in direct response to the releases. 2 In doing so, the implications of emerging movements of civic power and accountability in influencing the global political economy are considered. This, it is argued, constitutes a test of will between the unaccountable corporate boardroom and the meeting hall of citizens; between the profit-based corporate interest and the welfare based public interest. The former is characterised by opaque, clandestine practice; the latter, by transparent availability of material for debate and deliberation.

What do WikiLeaks' narcissist-in-chief and the United States Navy have in common? Flash Answer: Apart from a fascination with diplomatic cables and media attention, they're both interested in trademarks. Julian Assange, avowedly a critic of the state, seeks its protection to control the use of his name in what he calls "public speaking" and "entertainment" (Halliday, 2011). He has sought this protection through the splendidly Dickensian law firm, Finers Stephens Innocent 2-an aptly 19th-century name for a very traditional business, working on behalf of a very traditional person, craving very traditional state aid, with each party having embarked on a search for secondary accumulation. The U.S. Navy wants similar ownership, of the expression "A Global Force for Good™." 3 Since 2009, it has orchestrated a multimedia recruiting and public relations campaign around these words, as opposed to its previous slogan, which promised young people that the Navy would "Accelerate Your Life." Examples of this newly beneficent, though no doubt still speedy, work are offered in television commercials that show Navy personnel capturing Somali pirates, treating Haitian earthquake survivors, and handing toys to impoverished children. But there is always another side to this notion. An unbridled nationalism rides sidesaddle with civil society mythology. The Navy twins these duties via its trite but revealing slogan, "First to Fight, First to Help" and insists that "The strength and status of any nation can be measured in part by the will and might of its navy" (United States Navy, n.d.). These two highly state-dependent entities, the narcissist-in-chief and the Navy, have something else in common. They rely on the bourgeois media. The Navy craves advertising space and friendly coverage. WikiLeaks craves coverage and knowledge, because it lacks people who know what to make of 1 Thanks to Anne-Marie O'Connor and Bill Booth for putting me onto the story. 2 Later renamed HowardKennedyFSI.com. 3 Yes, the Navy has sought to trademark "Global Force for Good" (Ewing, 2009).

ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to present an analysis of the emotive argumentation exponents present in the computer-mediated dialogue recorded on the personal blog of a Romanian politician, now an ex-major player on the political scene. The mini-corpus that ...

Organization outside Formal Organizations: Settings, Practices, and Processes 37 th European Group for Organizational Studies colloquium Amsterdam, July 8-10 2021 "Among all the things of this world, information is the hardest to guard, since it can be stolen without removing it." When Goffman (1959) wrote this, he might have had in mind a fugacious glimpse at someone's love letter. Now, the scale and societal relevance of information outside the envelops of formal organizations makes online organizing worth considering in new terms...

Her dissertation analyzed the social construction of US securitisation agendas across the twenty-first century. She is currently working in Muscat, Oman as an English Lecturer at the Oman Medical College. She has been accepted as a PhD candidate at Monash University starting March 2016 where she will be specializing into the migration-security nexus and conflict-resolution in the Middle East. Her interests include security and development, migration, peacebuilding, conflict resolution, security studies, transnational studies, foreign intervention and the Middle East region.

If we exaggerate a little, we can say that the whole history of diplomacy can be divided into two periods: "before" and "after" WikiLeaks, because never before has there been such a sweeping release of documents describing the routine, practice and style of diplomacy, as well as the extent of the interaction between diplomats, special services, politicians and government organizations. When the scale of these secretive operations and the facts themselves, such as the U.S. presence in Iraq or how American diplomats watch Russia, were revealed seven years ago, it was nothing short Stanislav L.

This paper analyses the effect of the WikiLeaks documents leaked in 2010/2011 of US diplomatic cables on the Arab Spring and on relations between countries, and the consequences of the Snowden leaks in terms of how they affected the fight against terrorism, as well as the spread of surveillance.

This paper is an attempt to analyze the age-old phenomenon of leaks - the deliberate disclosure of secret information - and its relationship with the principle of transparency in a democracy. Secrets might be deliberately leaked by the political establishment, which works to reproduce a negative dialectic in the public's handling of politics. Leaks can also take the form of public scandals that the press exposes as part of its function and as the product of the balance between the media and political establishments. Thirdly, there are what we might term denunciatory leaks, which are performed by a dissident or an actor from outside the establishment, and are generally motivated by reasons that have no bearing on the relations connected with the reproduction of the political and media establishments.

As social/political crises erupt around the world, people are increasingly turning to the Internet to act against injustices, highlighting the capacities of digital platforms in social justice battles. In this essay, I explore hacktivism as a space for fighting repression by identifying two modes of freedom that emerge within this practice: virality and imperceptibility. Examining the work of the controversial hacktivist group Anonymous in Tunisia during the 2011 uprisings, this essay explains how virality and imperceptibility work as weapons against control societies. Ultimately, I argue that in order to understand the subversive nature of virality and imperceptibility, we must first see these forces as desirable, and this re-articulation offers one point of departure for imagining liberatory alternatives to repressive social structures.

While the social media optimists believe online political communication implies a bigger participation of the audience, this study shows that politicians are preoccupied with their political image and less concerned of building a dialogue with their voters. Our hypothesis is that politicians use online communication to build a certain image and they use social media less for developin g a relationship with their target audience. The content analysis method was applied on the Facebook accounts and on blogs belonging to the leaders of the Romanian parliamentary parties at two different moments

Drawing on major leaks from Assange, Manning, and especially Snowden, this piece focuses on two major issues in the ethics of information: (1) the tension between the ends of national security and the principles of transparent, open governance in a democracy, and (2) the emergence of a networked public sphere as a fourth estate check on abuses of power, highlighting: (a) just what the competing ends and meanings in discussions of freedom, democracy, and power, are, especially as seen in the Information Wants To Be Free trope, clarifying the often very different normative ends at work in the rhetoric; and, in conclusion, (b) the ironies throughout the discourse of information ethics, democratic futures, and human freedoms.

The global release of 250,000 US Embassy diplomatic cables to selected media sites worldwide through the WikiLeaks website, was arguably the major global media event of 2010. As well as the implications of the content of the cables for international politics and diplomacy, the actions of WikiLeaks and its controversial editor-in-chief, the Australian Julian Assange, bring together a range of arguments about how the media, news and journalism are being transformed in the 21st century. This paper will focus on the reactions of Australian online news media sites to the release of the diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, including both the online sites of established news outlets such as The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the ABC's The Drum site, and online-only sites such as Crikey, New Matilda and On Line Opinion.

This paper exposes the advent of WikiLeaks and emphasizes its role in the fight for transparency of information on the Internet. Nowadays, WikiLeaks is used as the destination document sharing and as a source of information to establish a strategic action against the war on secrecy. In the Information Age, it's been discussed the confidentiality of technology resources against diplomatic interests digital issues by governmment. The contribution of WikiLeaks in the Cablegate episode, opened discussions on the use of alternative tools of digital technology and traditional journalism tactics of activism on the Internet, causing changes in the technical and ethical journalistic. Since then, WikiLeaks has become a crucial player in current scenario of investigative journalism.

Hacktivists by their non-state and often transnational nature, can sit anywhere in the world and put pressure on any government to demand transparency, accountability and protection of human rights among others. Hacktivism thus immediately presents a complex for states particularly in
terms of security. Is this assertion merely an optimistic guess? In practice, has hacktivism had any significant effect (positive and/or negative) on security in the international system? Guided by Keohane and Nye's pluralism theory, this paper discusses the implications that hacktivism has had for international security by analyzing the activities of Wikileaks, Anonymous and Edward Snowden. It concludes that the effect that hacktivism has had for international security is significant. Such effects include instigating security reforms and helping fight global terrorism among others.

Cite as: Oduro-Marfo, Smith. "Implications of Hacktivism for International Security”. Legon Journal of International Affairs and Diplomacy (LEJIAD) 8.1: 110-126.

This short essay explores how the notion of hacktivism changes due to easily accessible, military grade Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). Privacy Enhancing Technologies, technological tools which provide anonymous communications and protect users from online surveillance enable new forms of online political activism. Through the short summary of the ad-hoc vigilante group Anonymous, this article describes hacktivism 1.0 as electronic civil disobedience conducted by outsiders. Through the analysis of Wikileaks, the anonymous whistleblowing website, it describes how strong PETs enable the development of hacktivism 2.0, where the source of threat is shifted from outsiders to insiders. Insiders have

The past decade witnessed the emergence of numerous Internet based social justice groups, some of which have readily apparent social roles and follow traditional organizational paths, while others occupy more ambiguous spaces, and blur any clearly demarcated lines of classification. Groups such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks present researchers with difficulty in strict categorization and as such are often labeled in ways that obscure their classification and understanding. Situating these two groups within network society and social movement literatures, this study offers a sociological explanation for the rise of these groups and attempts to knit their disparately understood practices of "hacktivism" and "journalism" together in a coherent framework. Frame analysis is employed to examine how each group attends to core framing tasks, finding that both groups do so in substantially similar ways, employing complimentary frames concerning the asymmetrical distribution of information. Moreover, their embeddedness in digital information networks, and their particular opposition to information asymmetry, acts as a unifying thread that enables these apparently disparate actors to be studied within a single analytical framework as part of an emerging digital, peer produced, movement concerned with the asymmetrical distribution of information.

What changes introduced Twitter in political communication? Which are the advantages and disadvantages of Twitter usage in electoral communication for candidates and for voters? As the specialized literature barely mentions the use of Twitter in the Romanian elections, we shall answer the question regarding the way in which the 2009 presidential candidates used their own Twitter accounts. This article starts from the assumption that presidential candidates use the online communication tools in order to convey negative messages about their opponents. The hypothesis of the study was that the candidates used Internet, especially social media, in the negative campaign for attacking the competitors. The hypothesis was contradicted by the results of the research, which was conducted on the official Twitter accounts of the presidential campaign candidates.

he 2004 electoral campaign marks the beginning of internet use in the political communication in Romania. It has also been
the first campaign that resorts to negative communication
via online tools. The main actors of this negative campaign, motivated and involved in it by the strategic planners and PR specialists, were the sympathizers of the DA Alliance 2. Its communication consultants launched an online platform on their candidate’s website on which the party members and sympathizers could upload electoral materials . The funnier and
more depreciate the electoral materials regarding the
Social Democratic Party (SDP) counter-candidate were
, the more visible they were online, being sent through email, through visited blogs or viewed on video - sharing websites.
As a space dedicated to the freedom of expression, situated beyond any official (state) censorship, the online environment became the space where the DA Alliance sympathizers got actively involved in its campaign. One of the fundamental reasons was that the prime minister in 2004 (a SDP member) was easy to be mocked at and treated on internet as if he were a peer of
the DA Alliance voters. This pseudo-democratization transformed the DA Alliance candidate and its communication strategic
planners into winners.

What changes introduced Twitter in political communication? Which are the advantages and disadvantages of Twitter usage in electoral communication for candidates and for voters? As the specialized literature barely mentions the use of Twitter in the Romanian elections, we shall answer the question regarding the way in which the 2009 presidential candidates used their own Twitter accounts. This article starts from the assumption that presidential candidates use the online communication tools in order to convey negative messages about their opponents. The hypothesis of the study was that the candidates used Internet, especially social media, in the negative campaign for attacking the competitors. The hypothesis was contradicted by the results of the research, which was conducted on the official Twitter accounts of the presidential campaign candidates.

This article focuses on the academic reinscription of the WikiLeaks affair, focusing on the different receptions received within different literatures and fields. The WikiLeaks affair – with or without its hypothesised connections to the Anonymous collective and the Arab Spring – has had massive ruptural effects on aspects of the global political system. A small, movement-based website has inflicted a tremendous informational defeat on the world's last superpower, revealing the possible emergence of a global networked counter-power able to mount effective resistance against the world-system, possibly even the emergence of the state-network conflict as the new great-power bipolarity after the Cold War. Therefore, in many respects, and notwithstanding WikiLeaks' relatively closed political structures, the WikiLeaks affair expresses the power of networked, decentred social movements to disrupt hierarchical arrangements of state and capitalist power. WikiLeaks has struck a tremendous blow for the power of transnational activist networks, against the power of states. How this blow – and the corresponding redistribution of global power – is perceived, will depend fundamentally on how the commentator feels about the current distribution of global power in favour of states. Perspectives can thus be divided, not only by discipline, but also by the author's position on the state-network dichotomy. Furthermore, different academic disciplines can be mapped in terms of their relative closeness to the statist or network side of the controversy.

The aim of this paper is to present an analysis of the emotive argumentation exponents present in the computer-mediated dialogue recorded on the personal blog of a Romanian politician, now an ex-major player on the political scene. The mini-corpus that we base our study on consists of the replies given to a blog posting written by the politician with regard to a statement made by the current Romanian president in a press conference. The emotive exponents identified and discussed in the present study are: slang / jargon words and expressions; use of foreign words and expressions; use of idiomatic utterances; forms of address (e.g. terms of endearment, etc.); value judgments; presuppositions; euphemisms; punctuation (exclamation marks, suspension points, etc.). We will also discuss these emotive exponents with regard to the relationships established between interlocutors, as well as to their politically-laden illocutionary force.

The global release of 250,000 United States Embassy diplomatic cables to selected media sties worldwide through the WikiLeaks web site was arguably the major global media event of 2010. As well as the implications of the content of the cables for international politics and diplomacy, the actions of WikiLeaks and its controversial editor-in-chief, the Australian Julian Assange, bring together a range of arguments about how the media, news and journalism are being transformed in the 21st century. This paper will focus on the reactions of Australian online news media sites to the release of the diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, including both the online sites of established news outlets such as The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the ABC’s The Drum site, and online-only sites such as Crikey, New Matilda and On Line Opinion. The study focuses on opinion and commentary rather than straight news reportage, and analysis is framed around five issues: WikiLeaks and international diplomacy; the Australian government’s reaction to the cable release; implications of WikiLeaks for journalism; WikiLeaks and democracy; and debates about the organisation and its leader and public face, Julian Assange. It also whether a ‘WikLeaks Effect’ has wider implications for how journalism is conducted in the future, particularly the method of ’redaction’ of large amounts of computational data