In the midst of armed conflict, fake news spreads rapidly across digital platforms, shaping not only what people know but also how they interpret and respond to unfolding events. Prior research has paid limited attention to how fake news is structured as narrative content in crisis contexts characterized by uncertainty and emotional strain. Addressing this gap, this study reconceptualizes wartime fake news as a form of functionally structured narrative communication. Drawing on Uses and Gratifications Theory as an analytic lens, this study develops a Functional Narrative Typology (FNT). The typology is based on a thematic analysis of 163 verified Hebrew-language posts collected from social media platforms during the first three months of the 2023 Israel–Gaza war. The data, sourced from FakeReporter, an Israeli civil initiative dedicated to identifying and debunking fake news, capture instances of false content circulating during the early stages of the conflict. This analysis identifies six recurring narrative types: cognitive clarity, dramatization and arousal, emotional coping, identity reinforcement, behavioral guidance, and erosion of institutional trust. Rather than representing fixed content categories, these narrative forms reflect recurring patterns in wartime fake news. By shifting the analytical focus from content accuracy and producer motivations to the functional orientations reflected in fake news narratives, this study extends existing research that has primarily focused on diffusion, belief, and sharing behavior. It offers a theoretically grounded framework for understanding how fake news operates as narrative content in high-uncertainty crisis contexts.
This article explores how Russian English-speaking media, Russia Today and Sputniknews, framed the roles of the West on one side and Russia on the other in the case of the imposition of Western sanctions against Russia in 2014, reacting to the outbreak of conflict in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea annexation, and in reaction to the assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal in 2018. The text shows the peculiarities of the media’s techniques to convey specific narratives to an international audience. At the same time, the article contributes to the research focused on the role of media and information campaigns in conflict escalation. The results have shown that pro-Kremlin narratives clearly dominated the examined outlets’ discourses in both cases, albeit often veiled as objective journalism, masquerading opinions as standard news articles. The results have also demonstrated a growing emphasis on blaming, blame avoidance and moral judgment, deepening the rift between Russia and the West.
This study examines the role of military and civilian media in a hybrid digital media system during wartime, using the Ukrainian case as an empirical example. Based on a comparative analysis of 36 military and civilian media outlets, the study applies platform-based metrics of visibility and engagement, including views, comments, shares, and speaker participation. The results show that military media exhibit a high operational dissemination capacity, characterized by a significantly higher publication frequency and rapid distribution of factual information. Civilian media, in contrast, tend to influence the interpretation of events and audience engagement within the digital public sphere. Direct persuasive or behavioral effects are beyond the scope of this study. Instead, the emphasis is placed on platform-based visibility (the volume of text and video content and its view counts) and audience engagement (user comments and speaker participation). In this paper, these two interrelated dimensions are conceptualized as the essential structural factors that determine a media subsystem’s estimated communicative reach within a hybrid platform environment. The findings contribute to research on hybrid media systems and strategic communication by clarifying the functional differentiation between military and civilian media in digital warfare.
This study theorizes the co-constitution of digital diplomacy and information operations (IO) as symbiotic vectors of platformized statecraft, addressing a gap in scholarship predominantly centred on state-versus-state conflicts. Using methodological triangulation (netnography, Botometer analysis, computational network analysis, and NVivo coding) to examine a state-versus-non-state civil war, the author conceptualizes digital power as a tripartite dialectic of strategic exercise, institutional contestation, and discursive negotiation. The findings demonstrate how actors weaponize digital ecosystems to produce legitimacy, amplify transnational advocacy, and privilege narratives algorithmically. These findings confirm their co-constitution via a diplomatic-informational complex, formalized as: Geopolitical Influence = α(Platform Manipulation) + β(Discourse Capture). This model establishes their combined function as a constitutive element of 21st-century statecraft and an operational bridge between digital and physical conflict domains.
The idea of fighting World War II again has been an important feature of Russian state-aligned discourse about the ongoing war in Ukraine. This article examines how state-aligned Russian-language Telegram channels affectively mobilized the wartime past in the present in 2023 through the memory of the Battle of Stalingrad, whose 80th anniversary took place in that year. The authors conduct a meso-level network analysis of circulation around “Stalingrad,” treating the battle as the symbolic centre of Russia’s official war narrative, on almost 300 state-aligned Telegram channels in 2023 – a year that bisects both the ongoing war against Ukraine and the state-led memorization of the 80th anniversary of the battle. They chart how short textual strings that mention “Stalingrad” traverse and bind this network. The combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals how an apparent heterogeneity amongst clusters of channels within the network produces a simulacrum of spontaneity around “Stalingrad.” Re-worked, re-circulated, and re-contextualized by sub-communities of grassroots news services, military bloggers, and prominent propagandists, “Stalingrad” sheds its historicity to saturate the feed of the present, entangling World War II and the war against Ukraine. The authors term this affective saturation “ambient war,” a networked condition in which repetition, rhythm, and availability make war(s) feel continuous. The saturative and consistent quality of “ambient war” challenges scholarly perspectives on connective memory and war that emphasize fragmentation of narrative in platformed conditions.
Refugee arrivals have been widely analyzed, but the visual politics of return remain underexamined. This article examines how Syrians’ prospective return is visually framed in Türkiye’s polarized, increasingly authoritarian media during a critical conflict transition following the fall of the Assad regime. Analyzing 630 lead images from 10 major news outlets over a 32-day period (December 2024–January 2025), the authors identify three recurring visual logics: dehumanizing crowd management, conditional humanization at the threshold of farewell, and politician-centered visuality. Dehumanizing frames predominated, followed by politician-centered frames, while humanizing frames remained marginal. Crucially, a shared leader-centered hierarchy consistently places state actors at the center of the frame while refugees recede into the background, regardless of outlet political orientation. Drawing on Gramsci ( Selections from the Prison Notebooks , 1971) and Hall ( Encoding/Decoding , 1980), the authors theorize this persistence as a hegemonic visual grammar: a symbolic order reproduced across the political spectrum because it has been naturalized as the self-evident way political events are pictured.
In conflict and post-conflict contexts, social media can play an important role in peacebuilding efforts. Therefore, it is essential to understand who disseminates what messages and who has the power to influence debates. This article, using a social network perspective, studies Twitter interactions during the 2021 Cyprus peace talks with a focus on Twitter influencers and elites. The findings show that elite influencers dominated the Twitter debate about these peace efforts, and politicians and media organizations were the top influencers. The platform was used for elite-to-elite communication within each side, with little to no dialogue between negotiating elites. Overall, communication on Twitter reflected traditional media, with male elite influencers’ perspectives taking centre stage in parallel political monologues, blocking the prospects for reunification. Consequently, the micro-blog mirrored and subsequently reproduced elite dominated offline politics that sustain the de-facto ethnoterritorial division.
Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies has attained quasi-mythological status through its depiction of children’s suffering in wartime and audience accounts of emotional distress. For this reason it is conventionally described as an exemplary “anti-war” film. More critical views of the film highlight how the narrowly focused pathos of the narrative obfuscates a critical engagement with the history of the Asia-Pacific War. The following analysis expands upon this relative scepticism by focusing on the film’s ideological implications rather than its affective potency. The theoretical framework used here will draw heavily on theories concerning military affairs, particularly those developed by Morris Janowitz and Samuel P. Huntington. The film’s portrayal of social and individual behaviour is read here in relation to the demands of militarism: a concept that is clarified through a comparison between feudal or fascistic models of militarism, on the one hand, and an American vision of modern militarism as formulated by Huntington, on the other. Through this lens, this article investigates the ways in which Grave of the Fireflies is legible as a reorientation of Japanese militarism towards a modernist qua postwar American model of military professionalism, concerned with collectivist rather than heroic military conduct.
This study explores the role of war-related commemorative stickers in participating in the mediation of public memory and discourse in Israel following the October 7, 2023, massacre. Utilizing agenda-setting theory and memory setting, the authors examine how these grassroots visual communications personalize the fallen, celebrate their values, and frame their deaths within a broader moral narrative. Through ethnographic and visual data analyses of 600 stickers, the authors identify three main themes: personal connection, core values, and the struggle between good and evil. Their findings reveal that these stickers contribute to the visibility and salience of those lost within the public sphere. The integration of traditional stickers with digital media, such as QR codes linking to memorial pages, exemplifies an innovative approach to mediating public engagement. This study points to the relevance of non-traditional visual media for public discourse and suggests that visual communication deserves greater attention in media and communication research. In this context, commemorative stickers appear to operate as everyday mnemonic forms that make individual loss visible and provide a modest but meaningful medium for public remembrance.
The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan in August 2021 has had far-reaching implications not only for press freedom in the country but also for the mental well-being of journalists in Afghanistan. Even before the Taliban’s takeover, Afghanistan was consistently ranked among the most dangerous countries in the world for media workers (yet, little attention was paid to the mental health of journalists. The situation got worse after the Taliban returned, as hundreds of media outlets shut down and thousands of journalists lost their jobs, with many fleeing the country amid rising violence against them. Emerging evidence indicates increased mental health issues among Afghan media professionals, both those who remained in the country and those now living in exile. Although there is awareness of issues like PTSD, depression, and anxiety among reporters, research in this area is both limited and fragmented, leaving critical gaps in our understanding of the long-term psychological effects on journalists working in conflict zones (Feinstein and Osmann, 2024, ‘Predictors of psychological distress in frontline journalists: Common denominators across three decades of conflicts’; MacDonald et al., 2021, ‘Journalists and depressive symptoms: A systematic literature review’). This is a pressing public health concern that demands urgent scholarly attention to safeguard journalists’ mental well-being. We urge fellow researchers and editors to consider this issue not as a peripheral problem, but as a core challenge at the intersection of media, politics, and mental health. The psychological toll of reporting in high-stress environments demands a shift in how we prepare and support journalists. Integrating trauma-informed approaches into journalism training and curricula, and providing meaningful support for journalists in conflict zones, must be recognized as a core academic and societal responsibility.
As contemporary conflicts expand beyond the physical domain, and unfold within mediated communication, the social domain of cognitive warfare has become central yet underexplored. This article examines how strategic ambiguity operates as a key dynamic within hybrid media environments through the analysis of communicative dynamics observed during the Mare Aperto 2025 military exercise. Using a multi-method analytical approach combining natural language processing, social network analysis, and qualitative interpretation, the study reports interactions on a closed-instance social media platform. The analysis shows that emotionally salient, concise, and timely messages were associated with higher engagement, while actors with ambiguous identity signals contributed to delayed attribution, fragmentation, and escalation. A case analysis of a hybrid actor further illustrates how ambiguity can disrupt interpretation. The article conceptualizes strategic ambiguity as a communicative mechanism shaping attention, interaction, and attribution in mediated conflict.
This article uses the case of the Cabo Delgado conflict in northern Mozambique to answer the question: What factors determine news media logic in conflict news coverage? Drawing on interviews with journalists from the Mozambican media and conceptualised on news media logic, the article makes three interrelated arguments. Firstly, it argues that when journalists are unaware of the complex and deeply-rooted causes of the conflict, the military logic can foreground media conflict coverage. In the Mozambican context, ignorance of the conflict is worsened by this military logic that shapes mainstream news coverage. Secondly, media funded mainly by philanthropic organisations may have their own agendas and may not focus on the conflict in question. Conflict news coverage is backgrounded in a disrupted media ecosystem driven by financially lucrative news logic. To understand the media’s conflict coverage routines and practices, it is essential to comprehend these dynamics.
This article investigates how Indian and Pakistani newspapers mediated the April-May 2025 Pahalgam crisis. Using computational text analysis of 5,972 war and conflict-related news articles concerning the issue, published during the period from the 22 April incident through the 10 May ceasefire, the study tests three hypotheses on attribution, treaty securitization, and the emotional framing of kinetic action. First, it was expected that Indian outlets would emphasize accusations more than evidence, while Pakistani outlets would stress denial and demands for proof. Second, coverage of the Indus Waters Treaty was anticipated to illustrate securitization, with Indian press framing suspension as punitive strength and Pakistani press emphasizing coercion and humanitarian risk. Third, during the 7-10 May kinetic exchange, Indian outlets were expected to merge anger and pride, while Pakistani outlets would highlight fear and victimhood. The results largely confirm the first two hypotheses, while the third reveals an inversion of expected patterns. These findings extend scholarship on the mediatization of war by specifying how legitimacy, treaties, and emotions are discursively constructed in Indian and Pakistani press narratives. The implications for theoretical, practical, and methodological debates are also discussed.
The war between the Ethiopian Federal Government and Tigray forces, spearheaded by TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front), drew extensive local and international media attention. This study examined how Bekur newspaper portrayed the conflict and peace agreement, and how frontline reporters perceived their roles. Using an explanatory sequential design, 57 newspaper items (39 war reports, 18 peace negotiation stories) were analyzed, and five frontline journalists were interviewed. Galtung’s War Journalism (WJ) and Peace Journalism (PJ) framework guided the study. Findings indicate that Bekur newspaper framed the peace process in line with PJ principles while emphasizing conflict escalation during the war. Journalists functioned as propagandists, mobilizers, patriotic actors, and advocates. The study recommends that journalists should adhere to ethical reporting standards and journalistic professionalism in both peace and times of conflict.
This article explores rhetorical operations and effects of nationalistic tropes in crisis communication. The authors aim to show how nationalist agendas rhetorically manipulate crisis narratives to consolidate power and deflect accountability. They focus on two case studies of nationalism: Hungary and India both offer examples of nationalism leveraging tropes of environmental degradation in different ways for similar ends of power. The article explores how these two different hybrid regimes, at once democratic and autocratic, craft nationalism rhetorically through tropes of environmental degradation. The comparative rhetorical study, representing both Eastern European and South Asian case studies, shows how, in Hungary, nationalistic rhetoric turns attention away from environmental degradation linked to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, downplaying the increased need for Ukrainian migration to neighboring Hungary; while, in India, media reports from government sources turn attention to environmental degradation from climate change as causing the Chamoli disaster, downplaying the role of dam construction that Raini villagers have spent decades voicing as making the mountain uninhabitable. The study highlights how, in these case studies, media circulation of tropes of environmental degradation serves nationalistic ends in varying but related ways, and how these tropes both interpellate and undermine public trust, resulting in a threat accelerant to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock. The study highlights, too, that solutions range from critical awareness of the rhetoric of environmental degradation tropes in media circulation to legal advancements, to collaborative efforts between science, local communities, and policymakers to restore balance and trust in crisis communication.
This article examines the patterns and functions of Internet political cartoons relating to the insecurity crisis in Nigeria, with a view to identifying the conceptual metaphors that underlie the creation of the political cartoons. Forty cartoons, drawn from digital platforms, were analysed qualitatively using aspects of Forceville’s multimodal metaphor theory. The findings reveal that the verbal and pictorial resources in the political cartoons enhance the conceptualization of the multimodal metaphors inherent in them. The study also shows that the multimodal metaphors lay bare the dangerous nature and dimensions of the insecurity crisis in Nigeria. The study concludes that identifying and analysing the multimodal metaphors in the political cartoons is a good method to demonstrate the pervasive concern about insecurity in Nigeria.
