Academic literature on the topic 'Digital Fascism'

Abstract What comes after the New Man? An urgent dilemma for twenty-first-century anti-fascism is the global resurgence of a radical right masculinist consciousness that is at once nostalgic for strictly codified and hierarchical symbols of manhood while culturally immersed in accelerative, amorphous, and acentric digital networks. I trace this precarious and unsettled ultra-masculinity back to the material context of fascist psychedelic experimentation with consciousness in the sixties counterculture, through the example of the Lyman Family, to contend that Acid Fascism provides a new and important way to think about an emerging desire for an experimental—rather than utopian—reactionary manhood. Alt-right subjectivity requires a theoretical approach toward technological acceleration that is at ease with morphing affective complexions of nostalgic and paranoid masculine sensibility.

Abstract After summarizing Roger Griffin’s Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies (2018), I describe the academic subfield of Comparative Fascist Studies (CFS). I argue that CFS could be strengthened by integrating it with cognitive science, evolutionary psychol­ogy, and religious studies. That biocultural integration would make it more effective as both a scholarly endeavour and an antifascist vaccine for democratic societies. I explain the role of traditional mass media and digital social media in the rise of dominance-style leadership and radical-right populism, construct a neurosociological revision of the CFS concept of fascism as a “political religion,” and characterize ultranationalism as a set of maladaptive supernormal stimuli. These revisions of CFS aim at providing a cross-disciplinary frame­work able to explain the spread of alt-right conspiracy theories online and offline.

Classical fascism, as defined by Benito Mussolini, is widely recognized for its authoritarianism and extreme nationalism. By contrast, digital fascism refers to the reproduction and reinforcement of these ideologies through digital platforms, including social media and big data technologies. This study examines the evolution of classical fascism in the digital age, emphasizing how technological advancements have reshaped authoritarian ideologies. Utilizing a qualitative methodology, the research integrates an extensive literature review with detailed case analyses. Platforms such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and the Aadhaar biometric identification system, alongside their algorithmic applications, are analyzed to assess their roles in disseminating authoritarian ideologies and enabling individual surveillance. The study contends that digital fascism operates without requiring a central leader or organizational structure, instead exploiting social media algorithms to exacerbate social polarization. Furthermore, the manipulative use of social media and the unethical application of big data and artificial intelligence technologies are identified as key mechanisms for sustaining constant surveillance. This dynamic not only consolidates the authority of authoritarian regimes but also amplifies the power of large corporations. Within this framework, digital fascism is conceptualized as an extension of the authoritarian and oppressive dimensions of classical fascism into the digital domain. The research underscores the ideological continuity between classical and digital fascism, highlighting the growing suppression of individual freedoms in the digital era.

ABSTRACT Myths about pharmaka are especially useful during dramatic cultural and technical changes. This essay first explores a contemporary myth, Bernard Stiegler’s “Allegory of the Anthill,” as a warning about protocological fascism – the industrialized and undemocratic exercise of control through digital infrastructures. Following Stiegler, I suggest that the algorithms structuring many digital technologies threaten to impose ant-like efficiency logics on subjects, making them more susceptible to the homogenizing political impulses of fascism. If not the logos of the ant, what should we aspire to? To answer this question, I turn to the myth of the cicadas in Plato’s Phaedrus. Lysias, Socrates’ antithesis in the Phaedrus, is associated with an ant-like practical rhetoric that prizes industry over virtue. Opposed to the ant’s efficiency logics is the cicada, associated with poetic world-making, joy, and mania. I argue that the cicada might be recuperated as an icon of democratic renewal, resonance, resistance, and re-enchantment.

This article highlights the interrelated crises that the games industry, its digital game consumers, and the academic field of game studies are embedded in and responsible for reproducing. By couching our analysis in Marxist, feminist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist understandings of how our social relations arise from the historical-material basis of society, we identify several different conditions of modern digital games that everyone working in and around games should confront and take seriously, especially regarding contemporary and future impacts and restrictions on the type of research and education we are able to conduct. These crises emerge from social and economic structures including imperialism, racism, militarism, fascism, and patriarchy. To better confront them, we broadly define the causes from which the morbid symptoms we witness arise in primarily Western societies and how they manifest in the games industry, its consumers, and its academic institutions. Based off these aspects, we extrapolate their trajectory in how they will change and adapt to the future of games and of their study, as the ecological and social crises intensify and reverberate. This allows us to propose potential strategies for radically confronting and potentially overcoming the looming crises related to war, patriarchy, white supremacy, famine, destitution, fascism, and climate apocalypse.

This article analyzes the New Fascism Syllabus private Facebook discussion group, which came into being in the months following the 2016 US presidential election. Through the use of several scraping, data mining, and visualization programs and Facebook’s own platform analytics software, the article posits ways we might analyze Facebook fora as a mediated digital public sphere. It argues that digital spaces like these, however fraught, help users craft arguments and points of contention around how to oppose resurgent authoritarianism. Online discussion creates affective communities that help bond participants, who in turn shape the construction of popular memory around the history and legacy of fascism.

- Cliomedia Officina, managed by Chiara Ottaviano, has been dealing with historical research for about twenty years. This firm experimented various forms of cultural production by applying computer technology and the internet to multimedia projects, communication, archives, and history e-learning/teaching activities. In the last few years, Cliomedia Officina focused both on enciclopedic paper works, and on multimedia products concerning Fascist dictatorship (FASCISM). The article highlights the way these works have been built, from the point of view of the authors and the digital contents. Moreover, through the interpreting category of the public use of history, it reflects also on how such products were received and on some possible ways for using them.

Abstract The exhibit no. NOT EVER. opened at Interference Archive (IA) in January 2018. It featured a traveling installation from the Seattle-based collection If You Don’t They Will, which used stories from 1980s and 1990s rural working-class activism to inspire organizing against white nationalism in the current moment. This installation was contextualized with print culture from the IA collection. Creating this collaborative exhibition presented several challenges and opportunities, among them how to create a cohesive show with hybrid elements, how to create digital and physical safety for visitors and volunteers in a new storefront space, and how to foreground training and organizing through workshops.

Abstract This text was written on the occasion of the 200th issue of Maska magazine. My goal is to identify and interpret the time when the text is written and when the 200th issue of Maska will be published. I identified a situation of sociability at the time of the coronavirus pandemic and the dominance of digital/postdigital communications. I am interested in the difference between media representation, virus events and political-or-artistic interpretation of modern and transitional forms of human life. If we are talking about digital art/culture/society in relation to the technological turns from the mechanical to the analogue-electronic world, from the analogue to the digital world, from the digital world to the post-digital world, and from the post-digital world into a De Re media possible world, then we are facing a conflict between the dialectic of emancipation through the new and the differentiation of the production/and/consumption of the new in a time and space where the human being is becoming the product of its own product. It is important to index the contemporary antagonism between the ‘digital proletarian’ and ‘digital fascism’. Confronted with digital fascism, digital proletarians pursue a risky process of self-fulfilment and thereby liberation/emancipation in complex digital practices and their impacts on other forms of existence – in a critical and dialectic ontology. Therein lies the essential difference between the politics of functionalism and that of liberation.

This article deploys Spinoza’s ethic of joy alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s exposition of micropolitics to expose how fascist desires and affects bloom and circulate through digital communications ecosystems that generally promote a diffusion or decentralisation of power. Beyond the steady barrage of alt-right content conscientiously documented by liberal journalists and progressive watchdogs, a more persistent and widespread fascist impulse permeates the very forms of some of our most banal digitally mediated acts and encounters. Rather than a sole looming authoritarian figurehead, the network itself – particularly with the new image paradigms propelled by apps such as Instagram and TikTok – has become the rallying point for the circulation of fascistic affects, burnished through the art and ethos of following: of rules, routines, protocols, accounts. I contend that a joyful passion accompanies much of this everyday experience of keeping up with one’s feeds, engaging the platforms, participating in the spectacles. This is what Sontag, interrogating the appeal of the Third Reich, calls the ‘joy of followers’, a joy in fascist belonging, which is to suggest that fascist movements thrive not only on the circulation of negative affects like hatred and fear, but also on the profusion of pleasure and affiliation. Deleuze’s Spinoza, resolutely anti-fascist, helps us parse this situation as it plays out in the social media sphere. Spinoza offers a bipartite conceptualisation of joy that allows us to diagnose the pleasures particular to fascist belonging and network belonging alike as passive, partial and indirect. Ultimately, what we today share with historical fascisms is a ubiquitous aesthetic that merges art with life and bodies with information, and a corresponding ethos that cultivates conformism, barbarises critical thought and redirects joyful impulses into reactionary social forms. As fascistic power relations spread anew through digital cultures’ newly evolving modes of visuality, hapticity, vibration and expression, one can observe something of what Deleuze calls ‘sad joy’, a sort of joy rooted in conquest and domination. The aim of this article is to root out such sad joys, to appreciate their appeal, and ultimately to reject them in all their various forms.

La tesi si pone l'obiettivo di individuare, per il monitoraggio della fascia costiera per mezzo di droni, una soluzione di raccolta dati ed elaborazione veloce, per un controllo a supporto delle attività di protezione operate dagli Enti. Si è preso in considerazione il tratto di costa in località Lido Adriano. I droni si prestano come ottimo supporto alla fotogrammetria, risultando più economici dei classici voli aerei. Oltre la descrizione dei sistemi a pilotaggio remoto, vi sono i concetti teorici base delle metodologie adottate, nonchè i software utilizzati per estrapolare informazioni a valenza metrica digitali. La parte sperimentale prevede l’estrazione di informazioni, come la fascia sabbiosa, lo sviluppo altimetrico e la linea di riva, per monitorarne l’evoluzione temporale e territoriale. Il rilievo della rete topografica è stato eseguito tramite posizionamento GPS in NRTK. Si sono ottenuti tre modelli digitali della superficie attraverso il software Agisoft Metashape. I risultati sono stati confrontati nelle tre metodolgie di lavoro, in termini di precisioni raggiunte. Si sono realizzati i relativi prodotti GIS che permettono di catalogare, su più livelli logici raster e vettoriali, l’area in esame e di renderne disponibili le informazioni estratte agli Enti che operano per la salvaguardia del territorio. Ai fini di un risultato più organico ed integrato alle attuali metodologie messe in atto dalla Regione Emilia-Romagna, sono stati raccolti i dati relativi al monitoraggio da parte degli Enti preposti al controllo e le tempistiche da questi adoperate, per confrontare nonché proporre un metodo più intuitivo, semplice e veloce, al fine di operare in contesti di primo intervento. Grazie ai prodotti realizzati, in particolare elementi vettoriali, sezioni ed ortofoto, si è redatta una metodologia di studio basata su tecnica speditiva e sistematica ai fini di ottenere informazioni e renderle disponibili in un arco temporale adatto ad un contesto di emergenza.

Progettazione e realizzazione di un dispositivo elettronico con lo scopo di coordinare e sincronizzare la presa dati del beam test del LUCID (CERN, luglio 2009) e tener traccia di tali eventi. Il circuito è stato progettato in linguaggio VHDL, simulato con il programma ModelSim, sintetizzato con il programma Quartus e implementato su un FPGA Cyclone residente su scheda di tipo VME 6U della CAEN. Infine la scheda è stata testata in laboratorio (verificandone il corretto funzionamento) assieme all'intero sistema di presa dati, e confermata per il beam test del LUCID.

Plantar fasciitis is the most common disorder of the foot and is characterised by pain involving the inferomedial aspect of the heel that is exacerbated by activity after periods of non-weightbearing. Despite an abundance of anecdotal evidence indicating that aberrant function of the foot is an aetiological factor in the development of plantar heel pain, there is little scientific evidence linking abnormal arch mechanics with plantar fasciitis. The primary purpose of this thesis was to investigate the biomechanics of plantar fasciitis by evaluating the sagittal plane kinematics and kinetics of the medial longitudinal arch during gait. Specifically, a low-dose motion X-ray technique, known as digital fluoroscopy, was used to evaluate the sagittal plane kinematics of the arch and a capacitance-based pressure plate was used to determine regional vertical ground reaction forces acting on the sole of the foot during gait. Since digital fluoroscopy has not been widely used in gait analysis, the methodological phase of this study concentrated on identifying and quantifying the inherent limitations and potential errors in employing fluoroscopy as a gait analysis technique. In particular, the methodological phase evaluated the potential impact of the physical restrictions of the equipment on gait and the acquisition of gait data, as well as the magnitude of the distortion errors inherent in fluoroscopic images of the medial longitudinal arch. The findings indicate that digital fluoroscopy may be effectively used as a two-dimensional motion analysis technique for the evaluation of movement of the medial longitudinal arch during walking. The methodological studies demonstrate that the structural limitations of modem fluoroscopic systems are unlikely to substantially influence the acquisition of gait data. However, out-ofplane motion of osseous segments of the foot and the temporal response of the imaging system represent the major shortcomings of employing fluoroscopy as a gait analysis tool. Tests conducted on foot models and in vivo indicated that the application of published dist01iion correction procedures provided a method that is highly repeatable, with fluoroscopic image enors constituting less than 5 percent of the movement range. In the experimental phase of this thesis, a digital fluoroscope and a pressure platform were used to evaluate the kinematics and kinetics of the medial longitudinal arch in people with and without plantar fasciitis. While pressure analysis demonstrated that patients with plantar fasciitis make gait adjustments that reduce the level of force beneath the rearfoot and forefoot of the symptomatic foot, fluoroscopy indicated that neither the dynamic shape nor the motion of the medial longitudinal arch differed between subjects with and without heel pain. Consequently, abnonnal arch shape and motion are not associated with the progression of plantar fasciitis. The peak arch angle was, however, positively correlated to the increased fascial thickness that was prototypic of plantar fasciitis. Thus, arch mechanics may play an important secondary role in plantar fasciitis by modifying the severity of heel pain, once present. In addition, increased loading and flexion of the digits was observed in patients with heel pain, suggesting that digital function plays an important, and previously unidentified, protective role in plantar fasciitis by bracing the medial longitudinal arch and thereby reducing the loading in the plantar fascia. The findings also suggest that plantar fasciitis may represent a bilateral process and raise questions regarding the rationale behind current treatments aimed at modifying the mechanics of the medial longitudinal arch in heel pain.

This thesis presents work on investigations into the mechanical properties of connective tissue. A model system of hydrogels was used to investigate how volume change through water flow is coupled to relaxation. This was done using digital image correlation (DIC) and a custom built setup. It was found, in hydrogels, that water loss is directly coupled to an increase in tension and water intake is directly coupled to tension relaxation. The experimental setup was tested by investigating the mechanical properties of the well known material polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and the novel materials of carbon nanotube (CNT) elastomers, cholesteric liquid crystal elastomers (CLCEs), and 3D polydomain liquid crystal elastomers (3DLCEs). The setup accurately demonstrated the incompressibility of PDMS, even at short time scales, and demonstrated how DIC can map the inhomogeneity of material by locating clusters of CNTs in CNT elastomers by how they deform. Novel results for 3DLCEs were also found, where it was discovered that there is a softening of the bulk modulus at small time scales resulting in a volume increase following deformation, the bulk modulus then recovers and there is over all no volume change. This is in stark contrast to the typical case, where it is the shear modulus that becomes comparable to the bulk modulus, resulting in increased volume. A theoretical investigation was carried out into critical damping in viscoelastic oscillators, where the aim was to apply to the findings to connective tissue. The fractional Maxwell model and zener model where both solved for, where it was found that damping decreases as the material becomes more solid and the peak of critical damping becomes broader. Finally, investigations into how strain relates to the viscoelastic properties of connective tissue were carried out on horse tendon and rat fascia. How relaxation changes was determined through the relaxation constant, where a large constant means it takes the sample longer to relax and it is more solid like. It was found, that in general, the relaxation constant increases quickly with an imposed strain and then either stabilises or increases more slowly. This growth of relaxation constant also occurs during the initial stages of tissue injury, where irreversible deformation occurs.

This PhD work has been carried out at the Legnaro National Laboratories (LNL), one of the four national labs of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). The mission of LNL is to perform research in the field of nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics together with emerging technologies. Technological research and innovation are the key to promote excellence in science, to excite competitive industries and to establish a better society. The research activities concerning electronics and computer science are an essential base to develop the control system of the Selective Production of Exotic Species (SPES) project. Nowadays, SPES is the most important project commissioned at LNL and represents the future of the Lab. It is a second generation Isotope Separation On-Line (ISOL) radioactive ion beam facility intended for fundamental nuclear physics research as well as experimental applications in different fields of science, such as nuclear medicine; radio-pharmaceutical production for therapy and diagnostic. The design of the SPES control system demands innovative technologies to embed the control of several appliances with different requirements and performing different tasks spanning from data sharing and visualization, data acquisition and storage, networking, security and surveillance operations, beam transport and diagnostic. The real time applications and fast peripherals control commonly found in the distributed control network of particle accelerators are accompanied by the challenge of developing custom embedded systems. In this context, the proposed PhD work describes the design and development of a multi-purpose Input Output Controller (IOC) board capable of embedding the control of typical accelerator instrumentation involved in the automatic beam transport system foreseen for the SPES project. The idea behind this work is to extend the control reach to the single device level without losing in modularity and standardization. The outcome of the research work is a general purpose embedded computer that will be the base for standardizing the hardware layer of the frontend computers in the SPES distributed control system. The IOC board is a Computer-on-Module (COM) carrier board designed to host any COM Express type 6 module and is equipped with a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and user application specific I/O connection solutions not found in a desktop pc. All the generic pc functionalities are readily available in off-the-shelf modules and the result is a custom motherboard that bridges the gap between custom developments and commercial personal computers. The end user can deal with a general-purpose pc with a high level of hardware abstraction besides being able to exploit the on-board FPGA potentialities in terms of fast peripherals control and real time digital data processing. This document opens with an introductory chapter about the SPES project and its control system architecture and technology before to describe the IOC board design, prototyping, and characterization. The thesis ends describing the installation in the field of the IOC board which is the core of the new diagnostics data readout and signal processing system. The results of the tests performed under real beam conditions prove that the new hardware extends the current sensitivity to the pA range, addressing the SPES requirements, and prove that the IOC board is a reliable solution to standardize the control of several appliances in the SPES accelerators complex where it will be embedded into physical equipment, or in their proximity, and will control and monitor their operation replacing the legacy VME technology. The installation in the field of the IOC board represents a great personal reward and crowns these years of busy time during which I turned what was just an idea in 2014, into a working embedded computer today.<br>Questo lavoro di dottorato è stato svolto presso ai Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro (LNL), uno dei quattro laboratori nazionali dell’Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. La missione principale dei LNL è la ricerca di base nella fisica e astrofisica nucleare, sostenuta da un’importante ricerca relativa alle tecnologie emergenti. Le attività di ricerca nell’ambito dell’elettronica e dell’informatica sono essenziali per lo sviluppo del sistema di controllo del progetto SPES (produzione selettiva di specie esotiche). SPES è il progetto piú importante e rappresenta il futuro dei laboratori di Legnaro. Si tratta di una infrastruttura di tipo ISOL (separazione di isotopi in linea), di seconda generazione, il cui obiettivo è quello di generare e accelerare un fascio di ioni radioattivi dedicato alla ricerca nel campo della fisica nucleare, astrofisica nucleare, e ad applicazioni sperimentali in diversi campi della scienza come la produzione di particolari radionuclidi per la medicina nucleare che saranno utili per la diagnosi e la cura di patologie oncologiche. Il progetto del sistema di controllo di SPES sarà basato su tecnologie innovative che consentiranno di monitorare e controllare dispositivi tra loro molto diversi e che eseguono funzioni differenti che vanno dall’acquisizione e visualizzazione dei dati, condivisione dei dati in rete, memorizzazione delle informazioni, operazioni di sorveglianza, diagnostiche e trasporto del fascio. In questo contesto, il dottorato di ricerca proposto descrive il progetto e la realizzazione di una scheda elettronica di controllo (IOC) multifunzione capace di controllare quasi tutte le apparecchiature coinvolte nel trasporto del fascio di ioni radioattivi. L’idea di base di questo lavoro è quella di estendere il controllo a livello di singola apparecchiatura o piccoli gruppi di dispositivi senza rinunciare alla modularità e alla standardizzazione dell’elettronica. Il risultato del lavoro di dottorato è un computer embedded multifunzione progettato con tecnologie all’avanguardia che diventerà lo standard, a livello hardware, su cui si baserà il sistema di controllo distribuito di SPES. Questo controllore multifunzione integra tutte le funzionalità di un computer commerciale e in aggiunta è equipaggiato con un dispositivo programmabile sul campo (FPGA) e alcune periferiche non standard dedicate ad applicazioni di controllo specifiche. L’utente finale potrà sfruttare questa scheda elettronica come un qualunque pc commerciale, oppure, potrà sfruttare le potenzialità della FPGA per le elaborazioni digitali dei dati in tempo reale, per il trasferimento dei dati ad alta velocità su fibra ottica, per chiudere anelli di controllo a larga banda e per avere tempi di risposta agli stimoli in ingresso dal campo deterministici e molto brevi. Il documento apre con una introduzione sul progetto SPES prima di descrivere la progettazione, prototipizzazione e validazione della scheda IOC dando particolare risalto alle attività in cui il mio contributo è stato fondamentale. La tesi si chiude descrivendo l’integrazione della scheda IOC nel sistema di diagnostiche di fascio di SPES. Le misure del profilo di fascio eseguite sul campo e l’estensione della sensibilità di corrente a pochi pA confermano che la scheda elettronica progettata è una soluzione affidabile per standardizzare, a livello hardware, il controllo di diverse apparecchiature nel complesso degli acceleratori del progetto SPES. Questa scheda sostituirà la tecnologia VME in diverse applicazioni e sarà la base su cui implementare un sistema di trasporto di fascio automatico e di qualità, fondamentale per il successo delle attività di ricerca ai LNL. L’installazione in campo della scheda elettronica rappresenta una soddisfazione personale enorme e corona questi anni di duro lavoro durante ai quali ho trasformato quella che nel 2014 era solo un’idea, in un computer embedded pienamente funzionante.

♦ Dupuytren’s disease is characterised by contracture of a finger resulting from thickening and shortening of the palmar fascia♦ A genetic component to the aetiology is apparent, smoking, alcohol and diabetes can increase the risk♦ The pathogenesis of Dupuytren’s disease remains elusive♦ Non-surgical treatment options include splintage, steroid injection and collagenase injection♦ Surgery cannot cure the disease but can straighten bent digits and minimize recurrence♦ Operative methods can be considered with regards to incision, management of the diseased fascia and closure techniques♦ Operative complications include injury of digital nerves and arteries

The audio-visual culture of Europe right after 1945 was a culture in ashes in a Europe soon to be divided into east and west under the Cold War. It was a Europe where nation-states had to reconstruct and revitalise a cinema culture damaged by war, and where television did not emerge until the 1950s, or in some countries even later. Already during the 1980s, a cultural policy and a policy for film and media was starting to develop, and both the MEDIA programmes (from 1987) and the EURIMAGE programme (from 1988) represented the institutionalisation of support for the diversity of film and media culture in Europe as a whole. This article explores European images in cinema and television culture during the postwar period. It also discusses fascism and new wave cinema in Southern Europe, new wave cinema in Scandinavia and the rise of a modern welfare culture, European media culture and the Communist ‘Ice Age’, European art television and national fiction series, the transnational power of television, documentary film and television, and digital television and film in European perspective.

Little magazines made modernism. These unconventional, noncommercial publications may have brought writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens to the world but, as Eric Bulson shows in Little Magazine, World Form, their reach and importance extended far beyond Europe and the United States. By investigating the global and transnational itineraries of the little-magazine form, Bulson uncovers a worldwide network that influenced the development of literature and criticism in Africa, the West Indies, the Pacific Rim, and South America. In addition to identifying how these circulations and exchanges worked, Bulson also addresses equally formative moments of disconnection and immobility. British and American writers who fled to Europe to escape Anglo-American provincialism, refugees from fascism, wandering surrealists, and displaced communists all contributed to the proliferation of print. Yet the little magazine was equally crucial to literary production and consumption in the postcolonial world, where it helped connect newly independent African nations. Bulson concludes with reflections on the digitization of these defunct little magazines and what it means for our ongoing desire to understand modernism's global dimensions in the past and its digital afterlife.

The article studies some of the leading disinformation narratives on COVID‐19 and the war in Ukraine (2021-2022) and their dissemination channels. The study proves that the same disinformation narratives have been used to oppose the COVID‐19 restrictions and vaccines and justify Russian aggression in Ukraine. The research focuses on three leading narratives: genocide/crimes against humanity committed, the policy of nazism/fascism conducted by the authorities, and biological weapons used/experiments performed on people. The study finds that the same actors spread disinformation on both issues using mainly, but not only, social media. The main focus of the dissemination study is on Bulgaria and Central and Eastern Europe, but it also includes examples from other EU countries. Although the official Russian state propaganda pushes these narratives, we find local adjustments and specifics due to specific motivations behind using these narratives. The findings are based on the research provided by six organisations: EUvsDisinfo, EU Disinfo Lab, European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, SCIENCE + and Factcheck.bg.

Abstract The ability of traditional tensile tests to determine mechanical properties of human tissue can be affected by several factors, which may include failure within the clamping area of standard clamp designs. The use of custom-designed 3D printed clamps seems to provide success in preventing tissue failure and minimizing slippage during testing. Additionally, due to the nonhomogeneous characteristics of tissue, the mechanical properties often vary along the length of specimens, therefore a full-field measurement technique is required to capture the complete behavior of the tissue. Non-contact imaging techniques can be used to quantify full-field deformation during the test, allowing behavior to be quantified in different regions of the sample. Digital image correlation (DIC) is investigated in this work and is able to calculate strain by comparing successive images taken during the sample deformation. In order to measure changes in the pictures, the analyzed surface must have a well-defined high-contrast random pattern. Currently, methods for tensile testing of human tissues combined with DIC typically use an airbrush to create a random pattern on the tissue surface. Replication of this existing technique can be challenging based on the lack of control of the paint applied by the airbrush. This work presents an approach for tensile testing of well-preserved human tissue using 3D printed clamps and DIC. The samples investigated in this work include plantar fascia and Achilles tendons to analyze the performance of the proposed clamp design in thin and thick human tissue. The failure of thin and thick well-preserved human tissue was reached with a maximum load of 1124.9 N and 2167.08 N, respectively. The 3D printed clamps showed signs of clamping-related failure during the test even after increasing the infill percentage and adjusting the clamp layer orientation. The samples were dyed in methylene blue and painted with a user-defined random pattern. A custom resin roller generated by OpenSCAD was used to paint the surface of the plantar fascia allowing standardization of the creation of a random pattern on the sample surface. However, the curvature of the Achilles tendon in the most distal region where it attaches to the calcaneus bone (i.e. heel bone) precluded use of the roller. Therefore, a random pattern was hand-painted instead. The hand-painted random pattern had a performance similar to the pattern made by the resin roller which followed commercial roller characteristics. Results of this study can be used in the future to help standardize tensile testing techniques for mechanical evaluation of human tissue.