The other civil society: digital media and grassroots illiberalism in Bulgaria
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of the small-scale exploratory study presented in this article is to examine the digital mediation of grassroots processes unfolding within Bulgarian civil society that contribute to the strengthening of the social base and cultural influence of illiberal ideologies and citizen organisations. While ample attention has been paid to the utility of digital media in progressive movements and mobilizations, much less is known about their use by illiberal activists. The methodology comprises two case studies, each focused on a different collective actor that espouses ‘illiberal’, nationalist and intolerant views. Using the concept of ‘uncivil society’ proposed by Kopecký and Mudde ([2003]. Uncivil Society: Contentious Politics in Post-Communist Europe, London: Routledge), the paper approaches the analysis of the positions and activities of these organisations from two angles: (1) the way in which these actors appropriate discourses of ‘patriotism’ and ‘civil society’ and (2) the way they employ digital media to construct collective identities and build up support. The analysis casts light on the role digital media play – at the hands of such actors – in the rise of illiberal and ‘uncivil’ advocacy that could lead to the conquest of civil society by illiberalism and a continuing political backslide of liberal democracy.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it