Freemium services such as music streaming, video sharing, and mobile games are often supported using advertisements, whereby consumer attention to these advertisements can be considered a proxy for...

Search advertising involves the purchasing of an ad’s position at the top of a search engine results page and accounts for more than 40% of all digital ad spending in the United States. Nevertheles...

The article discusses how TikTok has emerged as a platform for self-representation and political contestation during the Russia–Ukraine war. Shortly after the beginning of the conflict, journalists and broadcasters have begun to associate the events unfolding in those countries with the widespread use of this platform among young content creators, refugees, soldiers, and civilians. Described as the

Despite social media companies’ public commitments to do good, they regularly face international criticism. This article explores how platforms engage in corporate public relations campaigns to negotiate social and political responsibilities. Through a qualitative analysis of the values promoted in the social initiative TikTok for Good, I show how TikTok promotes messages that amplify positivity, minimize

The COVID-19 pandemic led to over one million American deaths, disproportionately suffered by those who resisted vaccination by championing individual autonomy over the collective good. The article takes as its point of departure that vaccine resistance is a recurring phenomenon in U.S. history with multiple origins. Among these are the absence of a consistent approach to public health policy—the combined

This article explores the interactions between journalistic actors and emerging open-source intelligence and investigation (OSINT) communities. It employs qualitative content analysis of discourse from two OSINT communities surrounding three events following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which received substantial coverage in news media. OSINT practices are rapidly becoming a mainstay of

Many employees are engaging in personal social media for work (PSMW), which involves posting work-related content from a user’s individual social-media account. Despite quantitative studies demonstrating the presence and outcomes of talking about work on social media, scholars know little about the process of using PSMW. To fill this gap, the current study uses social identity theory and boundary theory

Through two studies, this project examines the experience of awe in response to specific referents within a video game: the beauty of nature or the abilities of humanity. After playing an awe-inspi...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, health- and civil-contingency agencies—referred to here as public health authorities (PHAs)—in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark turned to social media to disseminate pandemic recommendations and information. This study explores the social media crisis management strategies employed by Scandinavian PHAs. Specifically, we apply a multiplatform research approach to assess

The present research draws from the work in narrative transportation to examine the impact of problematic news consumption (PNC) on increased political hostility among partisans. Because individuals with high levels of PNC tend to become absorbed and fixated on the mediated political world, which is filled with exaggerated depictions of political conflict, they should be more prone to view those who

As news organizations continue to adapt to the digital economy, they must integrate technological solutions aligned with journalistic ethics and values. Too often, the uncritical adoption of digita...

While the research on communication visibility has typically focused on how visibility is enacted among employees who are familiar with the networks, practices and technologies of the organization,...

Code studies have traditionally focused on how algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) systems are used in news organizations leading in their adoption of AI, based often in North America and W...

Evidence of discrimination against African Americans, based on high-quality field experiments, has become clearer, easier to communicate, and harder to counterargue. In two experimental studies, we...

The smartphone occupies a substantial part of adolescents’ daily life, from the moment they wake up to, for some, well beyond their bedtime. The current study compared the impact of adolescents’ daytime, pre-bedtime, and post-bedtime smartphone use on their sleep quality. In addition, it explored the differential effects of lean-back and lean-forward smartphone apps. We collected data from 155 adolescents

The coronavirus pandemic disrupted established ways of doing democracy. This was particularly the case for citizens’ assemblies that have been increasingly commissioned by public authorities to help tackle complex policy problems. The social restrictions adopted in response to the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the ‘deliberative wave’, making the in-person participation of citizens’ assemblies unviable

Despite opaque automated systems and few formal channels for participation, YouTubers navigate algorithmic governance on the platform through a strategy we call user-generated accountability: the generation of publicity via content creation to reveal failures, oversights, or harmful policies. Through an analysis of 250 videos, we identify common strategies, concerns, and targets of accountability.

This article examines ‘feminist chatbots’ as tools for activism through automation. Such bots aim to engage users in automated communication on feminist concerns. The article starts from the assumption that chatbots, like all technologies, have politics and that automation, including the automated communication of chatbots, is a feminist issue. We investigate how feminist chatbots mobilise automation

This article showcases a speculative methodology for recreating interactions between a human and Google Search’s Auto-Predict interface as conversations, to explore how AI-based systems are both persuasive and deeply personal. Using ethnomethodology tools and a symbolic interactionist lens, the paper presents three versions of a single Google search, each variation building a slightly different angle

Against the backdrop of calls for greater platform transparency, this exploratory article investigates Meta’s ‘Why Am I Seeing This Ad’ (WAIST) feature, which is positioned as a consumer-level explanation of Meta’s advertising model. Drawing on our own walkthroughs of Facebook and Instagram and data from the Australian Ad Observatory, we find the feature falls short in two ways. First, the explanations

The buzzword “smart borders” captures the latest instantiation of media technologies constituting state bordering. This article traces historical techniques of knowledge-production and decision-making at the border, in the case of Ellis Island immigration station, New York City (1892–1954). State bordering has long been enabled by media technologies, engulfed with imaginaries of neutral, unambiguous

In this article, we introduce the term “conjuration of algorithms” to describe how the tech industry uses the language of magic to shape people’s perceptions of algorithms. We use the image of the magician as a metaphor for how the tech industry strategically deploys narrative devices to present their algorithms. After presenting a brief history of the Western European and North American understanding

Despite the critical role that datasets play in how systems make predictions and interpret the world, the dynamics of their construction are not well understood. Drawing on a corpus of interviews with dataset creators, we uncover the messy and contingent realities of dataset preparation. We identify four key challenges in constructing datasets, including balancing the benefits and costs of increasing

TikTok has emerged as a powerful platform for the dissemination of mis- and disinformation about the war in Ukraine. During the initial three months after the Russian invasion in February 2022, videos under the hashtag #Ukraine garnered 36.9 billion views, with individual videos scaling up to 88 million views. Beyond the traditional methods of spreading misleading information through images and text

This article challenges prevailing assumptions that fringe social media platforms predominantly serve as unmoderated hate-filled spaces for far-right communication by examining the userbase’s emotional connection to these environments. Focusing on Gab Social, a popular alternative technology website with affordances akin to Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, and its subgroup, “Introduce Yourself,” the

Communication research has long explored the association between media trust and news consumption. However, the strength and direction of this relationship have remained elusive. This study suggests a new approach for investigating these complex relations, differentiating between usage and trust associated with different sources over time. Focusing on the 2022 French election and drawing on data from

Little is known about how different types of engagement with social media (active vs passive) relate to body image in men. This study explored relationships between social media use (active and passive), body image, and drive for muscularity in physically active men. A questionnaire containing measures of body image (appearance valence, appearance salience), drive for muscularity, and social media

We adopt a socio-material perspective to examine how developers translate privacy, as a social value, into user applications. Our comprehensive survey of the research on developers’ privacy highlights their key position as privacy mediators and their forums as productive settings for unobtrusive studies of their discourse. The open-source code-sharing platform GitHub contains both discourse and code;

Russian state propaganda outlets Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik are an important part of Russian foreign policy and key global sources of disinformation. Previous work has argued that they focus on exploiting social divisions among foreign audiences and worried that Russian propaganda may influence the broader media agenda. To date, though, there has been no comprehensive study of what RT and Sputnik

This study aims to evaluate how individuals are prepared to cope with or plan for their afterlife digital footprints, by examining how (1) access, (2) literacy, and (3) preparedness for digital afterlife work in concert to influence one’s wellbeing. We found the indirect relationship between access and wellbeing and the influence of digital literacy on wellbeing was indirect, illustrating that the

In 2014, a trans teenager named Leelah Alcorn posted a suicide letter to her public Tumblr account. Almost a decade later, in 2023, Eden Knight, another young trans woman, posted a suicide letter to her public Twitter account. Both suicide letters went viral and inspired memorial hashtags on the platforms where they initially circulated. In this article, I identify similarities between the cases, conceptualizing

Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, TikTok has emerged as a pivotal platform, where creators utilize its compressed video formats to mediate the harsh realities of war zones. In this article, we examine 97 videos produced by 12 Ukrainian and Russian TikTok creators in response to the 2022 war in Ukraine. We focus on the playful embodiment of trauma using digital ethnography, analyzing creators’ practices

This article provides findings from our dual-computational/qualitative analysis of r/Stoicism, a large subreddit in which self-presenting boys and men seek Stoic philosophical advice on various life matters. In choosing to investigate this decidedly (hetero)masculinized online space in which users share their anxieties and grievances, we expected to find substantial evidence of “toxic” manosphere-style

Building democratic communities and fostering inclusive participation is challenging, especially in participatory organisations where governance and sustained contributions are critical. This study explores the dynamics of election participation within the peer-production project Wikipedia, a prime example of an online collaboration model of democratic organisation where democratically elected administrators

This article presents a study of how and to what extent gig workers in Sweden experience a mediatization of work. We contend that previous mediatization research has assumed extensive and unified effects of mediatization, and that previous gig work research has focused on users of large-scale, transnational platforms. We conducted a set of qualitative, semi-structured interviews (N = 28) with Swedish

This study examines the dynamics of a social media campaign launched by Algerian feminists in 2018 in response to a video shared on Facebook that narrated a woman’s upsetting encounter with harassment. This movement occurred in a region often known for its autocratic systems of governance and the prevalence of its Islamic movements rather than for its prominence of feminist advocacy. Yet the Global

The article uses the concept of online self-disclosure and examines whether TikTok videos reveal information similar to what is reported in existing research on social media within this field. In addition, the study aims to identify the creators’ motivations and the meanings they attribute to disclosing cancer and asks whether this disclosure challenges or supports the concept of a positive culture

This study examines the #Women_Short Cut_Campaign movement, a feminist hashtag activism that began on Twitter (rebranded as X in 2023) in 2021. The movement was to defend a South Korean female archer and Olympic gold medalist, An San, from misogynistic attacks that accused her of being a man-hating feminist, given her short hairstyle. Informed by theories about social media’s affordances and affective

The rapid adoption of digital technologies during COVID-19 lockdowns offers a unique perspective on differences in privacy cultures. In this study, we compare how cultural predisposition and identities relate to privacy during the transition to remote learning in higher education in Estonia, France, and Israel. We conducted 83 in-depth interviews with academics, who talked about their adoption of communication

How does a community remain committed to an imagined digital future despite that future’s inherent contradictions? This article analyzes such a challenge as it was faced by Berlin’s NFT (non-fungible token) enthusiasts. Dominant narratives about NFTs and other blockchain technologies envision a virtual and ostensibly trust-free future, but these enthusiasts’ pursuit of such “trustless technologies”

Social media platforms are too often understood as monoliths with clear priorities. Instead, we analyze them as complex organizations torn between starkly different justifications of their missions. Focusing on the case of Meta, we inductively analyze the company’s public materials and identify three evaluative logics that shape the platform’s decisions: an engagement logic, a public debate logic,

Destructive or “toxic” behaviors in online gaming have received increased attention in recent years. These are forms of verbal harassment or behavioral misconduct which disrupt another’s experience of the game. While previous explanations have explained toxic behaviors as intentional acts of deviant individuals or a larger online “trickster” culture, this article provides empirical support for a recent

This article is a reflection on the ramifications of externalizing knowledge, first to gods, then to machines, and now to computers. That process has already led to the mortality of humanity and the jeopardy of the planet. What can “pan-humanism” mean or do in such a world?

This study investigated portrayals of women in STEM on TikTok focusing on their self-presentation of identity and use of platform features to promote audience engagement. This quantitative content analysis examined TikTok posts ( N = 400) from a 3-month sample of 100 TikTok accounts by individuals identified as women in STEM. Results for STEM-focused posts showed that these content creators provided

Based on interviews with app-based gig workers, this study uses Ganesh’s managing surveillance framework to explore relentless visibility and sousveillance (e.g., resistance, activism) to understand how app-based gig workers are being watched, watch others, and experience the economics and authoritative powers of gig work. Findings demonstrate how the intentionally designed technological aspects of

Existing scholarly discussions of the influencer industry often take a critical stance, marked by a narrow, westernised and homogenised theme of precarity. This raises the need to explore the empirical dynamics of precarity—how it is understood, managed, and ultimately lived for influencers from different social and cultural contexts. Based on in-depth interviews with 15 Instagram influencers and 12

On social media, people often value authenticity and realness, yet the ways in which platforms promote authenticity may conflict with people’s goals to present an idealized self. Launched in 2020, the social media app BeReal encourages authenticity by prompting users to post unfiltered front and back camera photos at a particular time, thereby limiting control over their online self-presentation. We

In a quantitative content analysis of 3,154 debunking articles from 23 fact-checking organizations, this study examines global misinformation trends and regional nuances across eight countries in Europe and Latin America (UK, DE, PT, SP, AR, BR, CL, and VZ). It strives to elucidate commonalities and differences based on political and media system indicators. Notably, countries with a substantial online

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a supervised machine learning task that finds various applications in automated content analysis, as the identification of entities is vital for understanding publ...

To examine how social media influencers aid in the growth of the wellness industry while simultaneously reifying dangerous existing ideologies, we conducted a thematic analysis of TikTok videos created by a social media influencer during her time at a popular wellness tourism retreat known as The Ranch Malibu. In the findings, we outline how wellness tourism discourse promotes extreme dieting, the

Do existing social inequalities translate into social media privacy management? This study examined racial/ethnic differences in privacy concerns and privacy management behaviors on social media to evaluate empirical evidence for an online privacy divide in the U.S. In addition, we tested two prominent theoretical perspectives–resource-based and identity-based explanations–for such divides. Results

Could a subtle shift in the language used by chatbots improve service interactions? This research suggests that a chatbot’s use of interjections (e.g., “wow” and “hmm”), can shape consumer attitudes and behaviors. Four experiments demonstrate that consumers are more satisfied, more willing to purchase, and more likely to remain loyal when chatbots use interjections. The studies find support for a sequential

This study employs a neural network approach to investigate the dissemination and content of populist ideas within the Israeli political Twittersphere. By analyzing a data set of Twitter activity by Israeli lawmakers from 2013 to 2022, the study reveals a consistent increase in the frequency and concentration of populist ideas, particularly among legislators from religious-nationalist parties. The

Beyond indexing content and creating networks, hashtags can also convey social meanings. From the perspective of social representation, this article investigates how gay men in Singapore use various hashtags to represent their complex identities and create a shared meaning of being gay in Singapore. Through a textual analysis of identity-related posts generated by gay Instagram users in Singapore,

Drawing from the theories of networked gatekeeping and affective publics, this study compares how news media and social media users shaped the discourse surrounding the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. We investigate both the substantive (topics) and affective (emotions) dimensions of news articles and tweets, showcasing how institutional media and the public engage in the social construction of mass shootings

The information-sharing practices within alternative health social media groups makes them important spaces for analyzing and understanding the factors shaping the online spread of alternative health and health science (mis)information. Through interviews and observation of participants in alternative health groups on both Facebook and Reddit, we explore how people use health science information from

Dating apps are a popular tool for finding sexual and romantic partners. Yet, these apps can pose risks that arise from gendered affordances of technology that users deploy to harass and victimize their matches, particularly matches who are women or sexual and gender minorities. Just as gendered affordances may facilitate risks, dating app users may also deploy technology in ways that mitigate risk

User-generated content about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most popular health topics on TikTok. Because most creators are lay people, yet they attract a wide audience, concerns have been raised about the accuracy of the information shared. Through critical discourse analysis of #actuallyADHD and #ADHDprobs videos, this study examines the content of these videos as they

While TikTok has established itself as a new platform for political communication, its role during elections remains understudied by researchers. In this article, we present a content analysis of actor dynamics and ideological content characteristics on TikTok during the early phase of the 2022 election campaign in Sweden, combined with an analysis of how political orientation and utilization of TikTok’s

The emergent body of scholarship on social media influencers (SMIs) highlights their potential to yield positive brand advertising outcomes. However, the literature is undermined by the lack of clarity regarding how SMIs conceptually compare to celebrity endorsers and their impact on advertising outcomes. The study aims to clarify these differences via a meta-analysis of 39 experimental studies (total