Insights from the dashboard: From Russia to Serbia, the role of alternative facts and fake news in recent religious narratives
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Loading... - Perica Cakor
- 28 Mar 2023
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What does the EARS dashboard reveal about fake news, Russia, and religion?
The EARS dashboard is a collection of summaries of articles from European media on the topic of religion and society. The dashboard allows users to sort through these articles by selecting, for instance, specific topics and timeframes of interest. In the last year, over 2,500 summaries have been added to the dashboard. Between June and December 2022, 111 of those summaries featured the keyword alternative facts. Within these articles, three countries seemed to dominate coverage: Russia (51 times), Ukraine (37 times), and Serbia (34 times). This article will examine how political tensions and Church separations often lead to generation and allegations of alternative facts–or ‘fake news’.
Using the dashboard – a quick overview
The ‘Countries’ feature allows users to see which countries are mentioned and how often they appear. The darker the shade of brown, the more often the country appeared in the summaries on the dashboard. The insight from the ‘Countries’ tab is largely corroborated by the word cloud, which shows Ukraine as the largest word, with Russian and Serbian Church as smaller, yet still frequently used terms.
Autocephalous churches, Russia, and alternative facts or fake news
Though only a small word in the cloud, autocephaly appears to be a major theme throughout the many articles on alternative facts. Autocephaly is a term often associated with the Orthodox churches, describing when divisions or branches of a larger tradition break off and appoint their own heads. As such, it perhaps makes sense that church and churches are such large words in cloud, as numerous new autocephalous churches have formed recently.
Latvia, for instance, declared itself an autocephalous Church in October 2022.[1] This split, many argue, came about directly because of alternative facts employed by the Russian Orthodox Church, particularly regarding the invasion of Ukraine. Read More…
