Queer people increasingly use geosocial networking apps (GSNAs), such as Grindr and Blued, to find connections. These apps play a particularly important role in countries such as India, where being...

News reports and online comments suggest that social media applications like TikTok play an important role in challenging traditional notions of masculinity. Male creators who don jewelry and engag...

Recent scholarship has suggested the presence of website-delineated social identities within social media platforms, couched within the social identity model of deindividuation effects, and evidenc...

As people access news via digital platforms, existing literature provides foundations for institutional approaches to news organizations’ platform dependency. Yet, platform dependency also exists o...

Abstract This article studies the algorithmic project News values at Swedish public service radio, from the perspective of datafied managerialism. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with managers the study shows how the project, that outwardly works to automate news-sorting algorithmically, was employed to generate data about a number of internal journalistic activities, for a variety

Abstract This article examines how and why Israeli journalists use their military service as a shield in response to online violence and digital hate. This practice, termed here the military-as-alibi strategy, is highly consequential. First, it excludes Israeli citizens who are exempt from military service (mostly Palestinian citizens of Israel and ultra-orthodox Jews). Second, it affirms the presumption

Abstract “Alternative news media,” that explicitly position themselves against mainstream media have emerged as an increasingly visible aspect of media systems globally including in India. And although such media can espouse left/right political positions, in the Indian context, such outlets are supportive of right-wing politics of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In this

Abstract This article uses the notion of habit to explore how news users adopt a new subscription into their everyday routines, and identifies facilitators and obstacles helping or inhibiting this process. Sixty-eight participants received a three-week newspaper trial subscription and were interviewed about their experiences afterward. Facilitators of repeated use were concurrent rewards; embedment

Abstract Alternative outlets can differ in their degree of partisanship, activism, and their opposition to a perceived news “mainstream.” We expect this could lead to diverging contributions to overall news diversity. We assess how mainstream-like, partisan and activist media differ from mainstream reporting concerning migration and refugee policy in Germany. We combine a manual analysis of speaker

Published in Digital Journalism (Ahead of Print, 2022)

The aim of this study is twofold. First, this study develops a new scale measuring sarcastic trolling and investigates the reliability and validity of the Turkish version of the Troll Deviancy Scal...

Large social media platforms are generally designed for scalability—the ambition to increase in size without a fundamental change in form. This means that to address harm among users, they favor au...

People who lead anti-authoritarian digitally enabled movements face a leadership visibility dilemma—a necessity to balance security with publicity while mobilizing followers. The article asks how t...

In the wake of the US 2016 Presidential Election, concerns about misinformation traversing on social media have heightened. Since then, much of the public discourse has been on developing effective...

This article examines how imagined audiences and impression management strategies shape COVID-19 health information sharing practices on social media and considers the implications of this for comb...

Spanish-Moroccan mixed couples exemplify a case of cultural hybridization that reflects the colonial past between these two countries. In this context, social media is a space of opportunity and ri...

Internet privacy has been proposed as a new dimension of the digital divide. Although Internet privacy relates to all segments of the population, older Internet users are particularly vulnerable be...

Given the prevalence of misinformation on social media and accompanying negative externalities, platform regulation has become a highly contested public issue globally. This study investigated (a) ...

Recent decades have seen a blurring of the line between extremist movements and mainstream politics, driven by rising sectarian polarization. This development has been linked to digital media, with...

Persistent concerns about the digital divide are typically framed as a deficit of Internet access, skills or participation. Despite advances remedying first- and second-level divide issues, scholar...

Much scholarship across the humanities and social sciences seek to shed light on the intersection of far-right politics and social media platforms. Yet, scholars tend to focus on racist actors and ...

Abstract Advances in analytical methodologies and an avalanche of digitized data have opened new avenues for (digital) journalism research—and with it, new challenges. One of these challenges concerns the sampling and evaluation of data using (non-validated) search terms in combination with automated content analyses. This challenge has largely been neglected by research, which is surprising, considering

Abstract It has since been eleven years since the rise of the “Arab Spring”: a series of anti-government uprisings that spread across the Arab world, ultimately leading to regime changes in several countries including Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Using social media and other digital platforms to communicate and strategize, pro-democracy activists demanded increased transparency and freedom from their

ABSTRACT Internet memes are a fundamental aspect of digital culture. Despite being individual expressions, they vastly transcend the individual level as windows into and vehicles for wide-stretching social, cultural, and political narratives. Empirical research into meme culture is thriving, yet particularly compartmentalized. In the humanities and social sciences, most efforts involve in-depth linguistic

Many attention markets exhibit stable patterns of concentration, where a few producers attract and sustain a far greater share of the audience than others. This inequality often follows patterns consistent with cumulative advantage, a process in which performance compounds over time. Attention to news sources online possesses these characteristics; however, online audiences also fragment across many

ABSTRACT Modern democracies are built around the idea of representation: the electorate is represented, and perhaps more importantly, should feel represented. Yet recent decades have been marked by a growing gap between citizens and the political system. The emergence of new, more direct communication channels such as social media gave rise to expectations that the two sides can be brought closer together

Comparative political communication scholars repeatedly debated political parallelism as a tool to conceptualize the relation of media systems to political cleavages. Despite the fact that populism...

ABSTRACT Recent studies find that fiscal concerns strongly condition public attitudes toward immigration. To what extent do expert cues affect these worries? Original survey experiments in Japan reveal that citizens are more easily swayed by experts warning against negative fiscal effects of immigration than they are by suggestions of possible positive economic or cultural impacts. This strong responsiveness

ABSTRACT After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a flood of protest activity against racial injustice ensued around the world, and a significant uptick in support for Black Lives Matter followed. This study investigated the narratives produced in news coverage of Black Lives Matter protests and how media consumption and individual predispositions help us understand public support for the movement. Combining

Abstract In today’s online environment, children inevitably encounter personalized advertising. However, research suggests that children are not yet able to cope with this advertising type. This study therefore investigates whether literacy training helps children recognize personalized advertising. The 2 (personalized versus nonpersonalized ad) × 2 (literacy training versus no training) between-subjects

Published in Journal of Advertising (Ahead of Print, 2022)

Abstract Technological developments have changed the advertising landscape by extending the possibilities to collect, process, and share consumer data to optimize advertising. These developments have made data collection and consequently dataveillance—the automated, continuous, and sometimes unspecific collection, storage, and processing of digital traces—central concepts for advertising scholarship

Abstract The role news recommenders can play in stimulating news diversity is receiving increasing amounts of attention. Democratic theory plays an important role in this debate because it helps explain why news diversity is important and which kinds of news diversity should be pursued. In this article, I observe that the current literature on news recommenders and news diversity largely draws on a

Abstract Are journalists and Facebook users equally interested in political news? Introducing the conceptualization and measurement of the “news sharing gap”, this study compares the sharing of political news by Facebook users to the production of political news by news media organizations. To paint a broad picture of these differences, we compare the news sharing gap (a) across election and routine

Abstract Journalism of Things (JoT) is a new paradigm in digital journalism where journalists co-create sensor technologies with citizens, scientists, and designers generating new kinds of data-based and community-driven insights to provide a novel perspective on matters of common concern. This study locates Journalism of Things in existing theory and elaborates on innovation practices with the analytical

Abstract Mob censorship, which “expresses the will of ordinary citizens to exert power over journalists through discursive violence” is traditionally considered a grassroots phenomenon. However, within technically mediated systems, who is behind the mob is sometimes unclear. We therefore ask how the technical affordances of the Internet and telecommunications networks complicate the identification

ABSTRACT This study uses an inductive, qualitative approach to examine the perspectives of lower- and middle-class people in the United Kingdom who regularly access little or no professionally-produced news. Findings suggest that people’s preexisting perspectives about what news is (anxiety-inducing) and offers for them (little practical value) play an important role in shaping attitudes toward news

Integrating predictions derived from the self-memory system and biographic resonance theory, the current project investigated the relationship between media-induced reminiscence and appreciation. In two experiments, undergraduates consumed popular entertainment from either their early adolescence or the present day. Study 1 (N = 406) featured music, and Study 2 (N = 405) featured movies. Both studies

Social media users hardly know who is reading their posts, but they form ideas about their readership. Researchers have coined the term imagined audience for the social groups that actors imagine s...

ABSTRACT How do race and/or religion shape news media coverage of mass shooters and whether media associate mass shooters with terrorism? This article combines natural language processing (NLP), statistical analysis of U.S. mass shooting events (1990–2016) and an in-depth case-study comparison to evaluate whether media exhibit patterns in how they frame mass shooters from different racial and/or religious

A heuristic model aims to organize and synthesize the substantial body of work examining the social influences that shape media selection, experiences, and effects. The Social Influences and Media Use (SIMU) model describes three broad social forces (users’ internal social needs, their social environment, and the social affordances of media) and their recursive association with media use. This article

The spiral of silence theory suggests that those who hold a contrary opinion to the majority tend to remain silent; however, social media may be flipping this upside down. The majority may remain s...

ABSTRACT Studies assessing the effects of social media use are largely based on measures of time spent on social media. In recent years, scholars increasingly ask for more insights in social media activities and content people engage with. Data Download Packages (DDPs), the archives of social media platforms that each European user has the right to download, provide a new and promising method to collect

The violent spectacle of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot provides a case study of how online open-source investigation helped identify members of the mob and provide deeper understanding of the day’s events. Considering this form of investigation as an emerging network for the hybrid institution of journalism, an assemblage extending beyond the newsroom, this study takes a mixed-method, networked

Social media has been used to disseminate hate speech and racism. Racist opinions can be disguised through a language that may appear to be harmless; however, it can be part of a racist rhetoric to...

ABSTRACT This paper discusses ‘strong-form’ frequentist testing as a useful complement to null hypothesis testing in communication science. In a ‘strong-form’ set-up a researcher defines a hypothetical effect size of (minimal) theoretical interest and assesses to what extent her findings falsify or corroborate that particular hypothesis. We argue that the idea of ‘strong-form’ testing aligns closely

Abstract The concept of the metaverse was first coined in the science fiction novel Snow Crash published 30 years ago, serving as the pregenesis concept of the next groundbreaking development in communication and technology fields for several decades. Today, the concept of the metaverse is complicated and often discussed as a multidimensional notion, generally referring to multiple interconnected virtual

Although an increasing amount of aggressive and polarized tweets about climate change are being observed, little is known about how they spread on Twitter. This study focuses on how different types...

The shift in reliance from broadcast to online news sources has called into question the continued relevance and applicability of conventional frame building practices and frame setting processes i...

News media are increasingly interwoven with social media platforms. Building on institutional theory, we trace the repercussions of the platform infrastructure inside a media organization by focusi...

Hacktivists oftentimes challenge or subvert existing power relations or structures and attempt to promote reform. How the public perceives occurrences of hacktivism can influence the direction and ...

ABSTRACT This study integrates theorizing about supportive communication and computer-mediated communication to investigate how features of the interactional context, social presence, and evaluations of supportive messages shape recipients’ emotional improvement. Participants (N = 139) reported to the lab with a friend, where they were randomly assigned to experimental conditions that varied the lighting

ABSTRACT This study tested the effectiveness of fact-check format (regular vs. satirical) to refute different types of false information. Specifically, we conducted a pre-registered online survey experiment (N = 849) that compared the effects of regular fact-checkers and satirist refutations in response to mis- and disinformation about crime rates. The findings illustrated that both fact-checking formats

This study advances communication-centered resilience theory by examining adaptive capacity of nonprofit networks impacted by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Data show how formal structures set up conditions for adaptive/informal organizing. This highlights a quandary for disaster planning: improvising emerges from organizations having plans in place. Iterative processes between formal and informal structures

Digital false information is a global problem and the European Union (EU) has taken profound actions to counter it. However, from an academic perspective the United States has attracted particular attention. This article aims at mapping the current state of academic inquiry into false information at scale in the EU across fields. Systematic filtering of academic contributions resulted in the identification

Countering prevalent myths about informational and digital privacy, many promoted and propagated throughout the decades by big tech boosterism, Jaap-Henk Hoepman’s book, Privacy Is Hard and Seven Other Myths, argues for the importance of privacy by design (PbD): a framework that builds in privacy as the default setting throughout the entire engineering process. Through many illustrative examples provided

Digital trace data and computational methods are increasingly being used by researchers to study mental health phenomena (i.e. psychopathology and well-being) in social media. Computer-assisted mental health research is not simply a continuation of previous studies, but rather raises ethical, conceptual and methodological issues that are critical to behavioural science but have not yet been systematically

In this essay, the author considers the online community of Okayplayer (OKP) as a pivotal progenitor in the development of a Black digital ethos. In particular, the author situates and interrogates Okayplayer as a “dwelling space” where self-identified Black identities developed digital voices and a communal ethic of acknowledgment. Indeed, 5 years before Facebook, and 7 years before Twitter; Okayplayer

Recent research has highlighted the emergence of “alternative social media” platforms. Developed by open source communities with non-commercial goals, these platforms can offer more expansive parti...

Spatial computing – that is, a form of human–computer interaction that retains or manipulates referents of real object and spaces – is an increasingly intense focus for Meta. In 2018, Meta launched ‘Reality Labs’ (RL), a research and development division to oversee the company’s production of spatial computing technologies. Drawing on a media historiographical approach from platform studies, this article