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Purpose – In a digital environment, a simple accusation has the potential to permanently attach to a person’s identity. Our purpose here is to identify several types of accusations that persist in the internet environment: person to person accusations, media documented accusations, and accusations by the state. Approach – Using a typology of cases and legal analyses, the authors trace how accusations proliferate and persist across the internet and offer a set of social and legal explanations for the salience of public accusation online. Findings – The authors ultimately find that in contemporary society, the act of accusing increasingly replaces the desire or need for a fair and just outcome. The authors close by discussing implications for the accused and potential avenues for remedy. Originality – Our contribution bridges sociological and legal perspectives on the intersection of free speech, defamation, and digital media.

Misinformation is notoriously difficult to combat. Although social media firms have focused on combating the publication of misinformation, misinformation accusations, an important by-product of the spread of misinformation, have been neglected. The authors offer insights into factors contributing to the spread of misinformation accusations on social media platforms.

The authors use a corpus of 234,556 tweets about the 2020 US presidential election (Study 1) and 99,032 tweets about the 2022 US midterm elections (Study 2) to show how the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by locomotion orientation.

The study findings indicate that the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by writers' lower locomotion orientation, which is amplified among liberal tweet writers.

Practitioners and policymakers can use the study findings to track and reduce the spread of misinformation accusations by developing algorithms to analyze the language of posts. A limitation of this research is that it focuses on political misinformation accusations. Future research in different contexts, such as vaccines, would be pertinent.

The authors show how social media firms can identify messages containing misinformation accusations with the potential to become viral by considering the tweet writer's locomotion language and geographical data.

Early identification of messages containing misinformation accusations can help to improve the quality of the political conversation and electoral decision-making.

Strategies used by social media platforms to identify misinformation lack scale and perform poorly, making it important for social media platforms to manage misinformation accusations in an effort to retain trust. The authors identify linguistic and geographical factors that drive misinformation accusation retweets.

Malice – knowingly doing harm – has been attributed to special education, threatening its continued existence. Malicious education may include inferior education, exclusion from opportunities, miseducation, unnecessary stigmatization, or failure to meet individual needs. Malice may be overt or covert, unselective or selective, or be directed toward those included or those excluded. Attributions of malice may be evaluated by a series of questions comprising a decision model, and this decision model may be applied to attributions of malice to special education. Suggestions that special education is malicious are not confirmed by application of the decision model. False accusations that special education is malicious are derived from inappropriate comparisons, unreasonable expectations, and assertions that are not grounded in realities.

The climate crisis presents a global threat. Research shows the necessity of joint communication efforts across different arenas—media, politics, business, academia and protest—to address this threat. However, communication about social change in response to the climate crisis comes with challenges. These challenges manifest, among others, in public accusations of inconsistency in terms of hypocrisy and incapability against self-declared change agents in different arenas. This increasingly turns public climate communication into a “blame game”.

Strategic communication scholarship has started to engage in this debate, thereby acknowledging climate communication as an arena-spanning, necessarily contested issue. Still, a systematic overview of specific inconsistency accusations in different public arenas is lacking. This conceptual article provides an overview based on a macro-focused public arena approach and decoupling scholarship.

Drawing on a systematic literature review of climate-related strategic communication scholarship and key debates from climate communication research in neighboring domains, the authors develop a framework mapping how inconsistency accusations of hypocrisy and incapacity, that is, policy–practice and means–ends decoupling, manifest in different climate communication arenas.

This framework creates awareness for the shared challenge of decoupling accusations across different climate communication arenas, underscoring the necessity of an arena-spanning strategic communication agenda. This agenda requires a communicative shift from downplaying to embracing decoupling accusations, from mutual blaming to approval of accountable ways of working through accusations and from confrontation to cooperation of agents across arenas.

Recent studies in education attempt to ‘criminologise’ some of the current practices and policies of higher education institutions – that is, to deconstruct certain philosophies and practices which may be discriminatory, offensive, and biased to certain social groups. Recent theoretical frameworks problematize current higher education policies, many of which are taken for granted. This paper adopts a critical perspective, shedding light on some practices as they occur in higher educational institutions, by human and non-human agencies. The study applies a ‘detective’ approach examining some problematic uses of technology a higher education institution. In this proposed approach, researchers play the role of ‘detectives’, investigating possible breaches of good practice (possibly discriminatory) committed by higher education actors (referred hereafter as ‘defendants’). Most of these offences are committed through the use of educational and institutional technologies. The purpose of this theoretical approach is to empower alienated social groups against such practices by identifying ‘defendants’ and the implications of their acts. The study uses empirical data from interviews, visits, and observations to explain the ways in which defendants respond to the accusations levelled against them by other users of educational technologies. The investigation revealed that technology was used, among many other functions, to manoeuvre around the legal and ethical system serving the interests of some stakeholders. Then, the study categorises these manoeuvres, explaining the legal implications of each category, and recommending consideration of important academic and institutional issues.

The incident in 2006 at the Vattenfall owned plant in Forsmark turned out to be one of the most serious ever in Sweden. Vattenfall's communication during this crisis did not meet the accusations, instead their line of defence was not to engage in discussions of the accusations, but to refer only to their own character as safe, thorough and scientific. Apparently, this strategy worked; the company ranked high in public confidence before the incident, and according to polls this confidence remained unharmed throughout the crisis. This paper aims to analyze under which circumstances a defence built on character may meet the demands of the stakeholders, especially those of the general public.

The purpose is reached through a mainly rhetorical analysis of both Vattenfall's press releases during the crisis, and the media coverage.

The analysis shows that the success of Vattenfall's communication strategy relies on their use of the general reputation held by the company at the start of the crisis. With a high level of general trust, not addressing accusations directly can be a successful move.

The paper shows that to a company facing a crisis situation, context analysis is crucial. The strategy adapted by Vattenfall could seem potentially damaging to themselves, but worked in the actual circumstances.

The paper shows that not meeting accusations may work as an apologetic strategy, if the reputation established in the pre‐crisis situation is sufficiently strong.

This chapter studies a political rationale by which colonial law forged socially assigned individuals as criminally accused persons. Focussing on archived documents of a preliminary examination that took place in 1883 in the North West Territories (now Alberta), it highlights how an accused person was moulded as a culpable individual. Arranged by a justice of the peace, and member of the North West Mounted Police, the investigation in this case reveals how colonial law unleashed an individualising force that obscured power relations behind the settlement it aimed to further. The unequal ways in which certain distinctions of person were legally recognised and individualised may be traced to long-standing western uses of social hierarchies as ‘masks’ from which law unequally recognised persons. Challenging such approaches to personhood, the analysis works off Naffine’s ‘legalistic’ ideas of persons as fictions, calling for a retelling of the fictions around accused persons. By pointing out the possibility of accusing relational rather than individual constructions, it concludes with a brief insinuation of legal forms directed at ‘collective persons’, interrupting a key political logic of colonial criminal law with allied promises of social justice beyond colonisation.

Through an ethnographic content analysis of 936 letters to the editor, op-eds, and editorials and 1,195 online comments, this chapter examines how participants in the public sphere neutralized accusations of racism leveled against Donald Trump in the early phase of his presidential campaign. The study shows that both supporters and opponents effectively (if not purposefully) neutralized racism through a number of techniques. Trump’s opponents neutralized racism by calling attention to a number of other perceived flaws in his candidacy. Trump’s supporters obscured the charges of racism by endorsing him and calling attention to positive qualities. Others neutralized racism by changing the subject or making neutral observations. Supporters neutralized charges of racism in three additional ways. Most commonly, they framed Trump’s comments as accurate. Some defensively drew a distinction between legal and illegal immigration. A relative few claimed that others were also racist or xenophobic. That there were a number of ways of defining Trump’s stance toward Mexican immigrants demonstrates the role of human agency in producing social structures. Structural factors in the discursive field such as the stock of existing conservative frames, Trump’s absurdity shield, and political partisanship also facilitated the neutralization of accusations of racism.

This paper aims to investigate the significance of academic accusations of magical practice towards marketing communication, asking what might motivate such accusations and what meaning they have for marketing's relationship with persuasion.

The paper examines the ways in which four distinguished scholars (Raymond Williams, Judith Williamson, Sut Jhally, and Stephen Brown) have accused marketing of either sharing its transformative power with the social effect of magic or in some way offering a metaphorical parallel with the manner in which magic works to cast a glamour over the “reality” of the world. The paper outlines a rhetorical understanding of magic and uses it to construct a reading of these accusations which focuses around a discomfort with the pursuit of persuasion. The analysis is then extended to contemporary marketing theory, particularly the communicative aspects of service-dominant logic and the broader service perspective.

The argument is advanced that understandings of marketing as “magical” are largely dependent upon a prejudicial view of the role of persuasion and rhetorical technique in mass media marketing communication. The paper demonstrates that this view of persuasion has also become manifest in the contemporary service perspective and limits the “dialogue” approach to marketing communication.

The paper warns against the counter-productive demonisation of persuasion in contemporary marketing theory and seeks to highlight the manner in which accusations of magic have been used to deflect clear debate around the place of persuasion in marketing communication.