Southern Communication Journal

Celebrities have been known to endorse and amplify conspiracy theories over various forms of media. This study experimentally examines the influence of celebrity endorsement of a conspiracy theory over social media on belief in fringe theories about chemtrails, destigmatization of conspiracy belief, and the subsequent spread of the counter-narrative on social media. The findings reveal that celeb…

ABSTRACTThis essay advances racialized therapeutic rhetoric as a framework for analyzing how whiteness mobilizes strategically in antiracist discourse. Racialized therapeutic rhetoric functions to center and soothe reactionary white emotions and promote white self-introspection and personal transformation over collective antiracist praxis. My analysis reveals that racialized therapeutic rhetoric …

This study explores and discusses the impact of political talks as a mediator of social media use on online political participation. It uses a survey method to collect data on college students in West Java concerning the 2019 Indonesian presidential election, and a total of 1,050 students filled out the questionnaires. The results showed that online political talk served as a mediator instead of …

The theoretical and practical relationship between memory and forgetting are often separated as rhetorical acts of history. However, this separation may fail to account for the important interconnectedness of the two terms. Public memory and forgetting raise significant implications for philosophy of communication. The increased and “unprecedented politicization of memory” increasingly bears witn…