-
Digital Affect Culture and the Logics of Melodrama: Online Polarization and the January 6 Capitol Riots through the Lens of Genre and Affective Discourse Analysis Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Megan Boler, Yoon-Ji Kweon, Míchílín Ní Threasaigh
Drawing on our 3-year digital ethnography of cross-partisan debates in the context of the 2020 US election and January 6 Capitol insurrection, this essay examines the affective and discursive dimensions of online polarization, contributing new understandings of how genre functions as a system of norms that shapes emotional performance online. Through a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework, we demonstrate
-
Twitter Communication Among Democracy Actors: How Interacting With Journalists and Elected Officials Influence People’s Government Performance Assessment and Trust Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-03-09 Homero Gil de Zúñiga, Manuel Goyanes, Araceli Mateos
Prior research highlights broad democratic benefits of sustained public trust in the government, and the confidence that the government performs responsively addressing citizens’ problems (i.e., unemployment, cost of living). As social media enhances citizens’ opportunities to interact with journalists and elected officials, little is known about these communication effects on people’s government trust
-
Peripheral Creator Cultures in India, Ireland, and Turkey Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Tugce Bidav, Smith Mehta
Drawing on Indian, Irish, and Turkish YouTube creators’ perceptions of their work, this article focuses on peripheral creator work cultures to broaden the understanding of creator labor precarity. We situate creator labor within not only the platform architectures but also within the geographical specificities of media production, distribution, and consumption. In doing so, we demonstrate that peripheral
-
Mainstreaming the Manosphere’s Misogyny Through Affective Homosocial Currencies: Exploring How Teen Boys Navigate the Andrew Tate Effect Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Craig Haslop, Jessica Ringrose, Idil Cambazoglu, Betsy Milne
During the summer of 2022, Andrew Tate became a focus of concern for the media, parents, and educational leaders as his sexist and misogynistic social media content became popular with young people, especially boys. To explore Tate’s appeal, we conducted a discourse and content analysis of Tate’s videos and a small focus group study with boys aged 13–14 from London (United Kingdom). We found that apart
-
Happiness and Sadness in Adolescents’ Instagram Direct Messaging: A Neural Topic Modeling Approach Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Tim Verbeij, Ine Beyens, Damian Trilling, Patti M. Valkenburg
We investigated the expressions of happiness and sadness in adolescents’ direct messages (DMs) on Instagram. Using neural topic modeling ( BERTopic), we analyzed 211,778 DMs belonging to 96 adolescents, who donated data from 101 Instagram accounts. Results showed that (1) expressions of happiness were more than four times more prevalent than expressions of sadness; (2) the number of DMs containing
-
Perceiving Affective Polarization in the United States: How Social Media Shape Meta-Perceptions and Affective Polarization Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Christian Staal Bruun Overgaard
Affective polarization is on the rise, not least in the United States. Recent scholarship has identified meta-perceptions, concerning how much opposing partisans think they dislike each other, as a potential driver of actual interparty animosity. I theorize that social media content shapes people’s political meta-perceptions, which in turn influence affective polarization. I integrate prior work on
-
A Practice Theory Perspective on Dribbble and the Evolving Design Industry Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Yiran Duan, Charis Owuraku Asante-Agyei, Rebecca Kelly, Jeff Hemsley
As social media continues to integrate into people’s everyday lives, some sites provide a space for people to present their work and connect with others. This study seeks to understand how Dribbble.com (hereafter, Dribbble), a site created in 2009 for visual designers to showcase their work, plays a role in the transformation of the visual design industry. We use practice theory perspectives to interpret
-
Digital Diaspora Activism at the Margins: Unfolding Rohingya Diaspora Interactions on Facebook (2017–2022) Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Anas Ansar, Julian Maitra
This study maps the Rohingya diaspora’s digital engagement on Facebook and explores how their participation has transformed over the years. Using the CrowdTangle analytics platform, this mixed-methods study presents the Rohingya community’s collective engagement on Facebook across six years, from January 2017 to December 2022. It comprises 47 Rohingya diaspora FB pages that published 34,905 posts and
-
Measuring the Effect of Presentational Context and Image Authorship on the Credibility Perceptions of Newsworthy Images Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-02-15 Brian McDermott, Tara Marie Mortensen, Robert A. Wertz
Photojournalists publish images they have created in news publications and on social media, and images captured by ordinary citizens sometimes appear in journalism spaces. This study examines how the professionalism of a photograph’s authorship and presentational context influence the perceived credibility of the image using a two (photographer; staff or amateur) by two (image presentational context;
-
Mechanisms Driving Online Vaccine Debate During the COVID-19 Pandemic Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Ozgur Can Seckin, Aybuke Atalay, Ege Otenen, Umut Duygu, Onur Varol
The prevalence of the anti-vaccine movement in today’s society has become a pressing concern, largely amplified by the dissemination of vaccine skepticism. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccination debate sparked controversial debates on social media platforms such as Twitter, which can lead to serious consequences for public health. What determines anti-vax attitudes is an
-
Social Media and Perceived Political Polarization: Role of Perceived Platform Affordances, Participation in Uncivil Political Discussion, and Perceived Others’ Engagement Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Macau K. F. Mak, Mengyu Li, Hernando Rojas
This research applies a perceived affordance approach to examine the distinctive role of social media technologies in shaping (mis)perceptions of political polarization. We argue that users’ perceptions of platform affordances influence both (a) their self-participation in uncivil political discussion on social media and (b) perceptions of others’ engagement, which eventually shape their perceptions
-
When Stories Turn Institutional: How TikTok Users Legitimate the Algorithmic Sensemaking Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Dragoș M. Obreja
Educational, political, or moral/religious content is increasingly present on TikTok, so contemporary social dynamics legitimize the process of digital mediation regarding these institutional values. Based on 286 open-ended survey answers and subsequent interviews with 45 Romanian TikTok users, this article applies social constructivism to explore the intersubjective side of algorithmic experiences
-
“Memes Save Lives”: Stigma and the Production of Antivaccination Memes During the COVID-19 Pandemic Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Stephanie Alice Baker, Michael James Walsh
Disinformation research is increasingly concerned with the hierarchies and conditions that enable the strategic production of false and misleading content online. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was revealed that 12 influencers were responsible for a significant volume of antivaccine disinformation. This article examines how influencers use antivaccination memes for commercial and political gain.
-
“It Was Very Hard for Me to Keep Doing That Job”: Understanding Troll Farm’s Working in the Arab World Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Marina Ayeb, Tiziano Bonini
This article investigates the production culture and routines of “troll farms” in three Arab countries—Tunisia, Egypt, and Iraq—from a production studies approach. A production studies approach enables us to focus on the working conditions of paid trolls. We employed qualitative methods to look inside the “black box” of Arab troll farms. From February to April 2020, we conducted semi-structured interviews
-
Deciphering Influence on Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Influential Account Detection Metrics in the Context of Tobacco Promotion Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Alex Kresovich, Andrew H. Norris, Chandler C. Carter, Yoonsang Kim, Ganna Kostygina, Sherry L. Emery
Influencer marketing spending in the United States was expected to surpass $6 billion in 2023. This marketing tactic poses a public health threat, as research suggests it has been utilized to undercut decades of public health progress—such as gains made against tobacco use among adolescents. Public health and public opinion researchers need practical tools to capture influential accounts on social
-
Identifying Dark Patterns in User Account Disabling Interfaces: Content Analysis Results Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Dominique Kelly, Victoria L. Rubin
Dark patterns are user interface (UI) strategies deliberately designed to influence users to perform actions or make choices that benefit online service providers. This mixed methods study examines dark patterns employed by social networking sites (SNSs) with the intent to deter users from disabling accounts. We recorded our attempts to disable experimental accounts in 25 SNSs drawn from Alexa’s 2020
-
Three Critiques of Disinformation (For-Hire) Scholarship: Definitional Vortexes, Disciplinary Unneighborliness, and Cryptonormativity Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Jayson Harsin
This article presents three critiques of disinformation scholarship, with an emphasis on “for-hire.” The article argues that disinformation is defined in unpromising and contradictory ways. Concepts have ontological and epistemological repercussions, and thus far, disinformation scholarship has failed to engage them. Partly because scholars are studying disinformation even when they do not use that
-
Make-Do-With Listening: Competence, Distinction, and Resignation on Music Streaming Platforms Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Massimiliano Raffa
In an age where music streaming platforms have become the primary media for music listening, the experiences of musically competent users are often overlooked. Employing a mix of research methods (semi-structured interviews, reflective diaries, and analysis of on-platform-activity metadata provided by Spotify’s APIs), this contribution aims to explore the viewpoints of musically competent users from
-
Representations of Palestinian Culture in the Digital Public Sphere: A Semiotic Analysis of the Thobe and the Keffiyeh Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Shadi Abu-Ayyash
Palestinian cultural identity has always been the flip side of the Palestinian people’s political resistance. While many studies have examined Palestinian culture from political and historical perspectives, limited academic works have investigated how social media plays a role in providing opportunities for Palestinians to resist negative stereotypes and provide alternative representations of their
-
Authenticity Governance and the Market for Social Media Engagements: The Shaping of Disinformation at the Peripheries of Platform Ecosystems Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Johan Lindquist, Esther Weltevrede
Social media engagements, such as likes and follows, have become crucial for driving algorithmic recommendations and underpinning platform economies. This has given rise to disinformation industries that focus on the production and sale of engagements, including Instagram followers—a phenomenon we term the “engagement as a service” market. However, this market poses significant challenges for empirical
-
Downlining Disinformation: How MLM Distributors Use Gendered Strategies for Recruitment and Pastel QAnon Indoctrination Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Frankie Mastrangelo, Gina Marie Longo
doTERRA and Young Living are multi-level marketing (MLM) companies sustained by distribution networks of women who sell their trademark essential oil products. We argue that women join essential oil MLMs based on an iterative, three-pronged strategy that not only recruits women as oil distributors but also simultaneously indoctrinates them to pastel QAnon conspiracy spaces: digitally driven, feminized
-
“Difficult to Just Exist”: Social Media Platform Community Guidelines and the Free Speech Rights of Sex Workers Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Amber Davisson, Kiernan Alati
The 2018 passing of FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) and SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) set new limits on the free speech protection of Section 230 of the 1996 Communication Decency Act. In the aftermath, many social media sites shut down forums used by sex workers, and on some sites sex workers were systematically deplatformed or shadow banned. Social
-
Who’s Viewing My Post? Extending the Imagined Audience Process Model Toward Affordances and Self-Disclosure Goals on Social Media Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Yueyang Yao, Samuel Hardman Taylor, Sarah Leiser Ransom
This study investigates how individuals use the imagined audience to navigate context collapse and self-presentational concerns on Instagram. Drawing on the imagined audience process model, we analyze how structural (i.e., social media affordances) and individual factors (i.e., self-disclosure goals) impact the imagined audience composition along four dimensions: size, diversity, specificity, and perceived
-
The Platformization of Violence: Toward a Concept of Discursive Toxicity on Social Media Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Raquel Recuero
Discourse has long been recognized as a source of symbolic violence, perpetuating power relations and reinforcing existing social hierarchies. With the rise of social media platforms, the influence of discourse on society has gained renewed attention. These platforms, while enabling social interactions, also serve as catalysts for violent behaviors, reinforcing and legitimizing forms of oppression
-
Shadow Politics: Commercial Digital Influencers, “Data,” and Disinformation in India Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Sahana Udupa
This article builds on ethnographic research among an emergent group of self-styled political consultants and digital influencers in India to highlight the contours of what is defined here as “shadow politics” and its implications for disinformation research and policy. Shadow politics refers to the dual structure of “official” and “unofficial” streams of campaign organization that can integrate diverse
-
Disinformation-for-Hire as Everyday Digital Labor: Introduction to the Special Issue Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Rafael Grohmann, Jonathan Corpus Ong
This introduction for the special issue “Disinformation-for-Hire as Everyday Digital Labor” carves out a specific area of inquiry within the ever-growing field of disinformation studies, with its sharp focus on the commercial transactions, organizational logics, and entrepreneurial practices that propel the production of disinformation. Inspired by traditions of political economy, media production
-
Whistleblower Memoirs: Deconstructing Data Consultants’ Insider Stories Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Charlotte Knorr, Margitta Wolter, Christian Pentzold
Whistleblowers have been instrumental in revealing the massive investments in state-sponsored and corporate digital surveillance and disinformation. Their personal accounts of what went on behind the scenes are usually presented in popular books marketed as offering insider stories. By interrogating the recapitulations of veteran data consultants, our article is interested in the way in which whistleblowers
-
Algorithmic Ventriloquism: The Contested State of Voice in AI Speech Generators Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Ido Ramati
This article explores the vocal human–machine relations embedded in text-to-speech (TTS) generators. Retracing the human sources behind the synthetic speech and tracking the remediation of the voice by the machine-learning algorithm, it argues that artificial intelligence (AI) speaking agents such as Siri and Alexa, as well as other TTS acts such as TikTok’s, are performing algorithmic ventriloquism
-
Play on Twitter During Health Crisis in Non-Democratic Context: Gratification or Dissent? Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Limukani Mathe, Gilbert Motsaathebe
There is scholarly debate on whether digital political participation influence decision-making or merely make citizens feel good. Using digital public sphere theory and play, this article explores political participation on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe. The study applies a qualitative content analysis on tweets as it answers questions: does perspective by media users in a health
-
The Making of #CovidTwitter: Who Were the Loudest “Covid Influencers” and What Did They Say About the COVID-19 Pandemic? Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Sylvia Jaworska, Michael K. Goodman, Iwona Gibas
This study explores COVID-19 communications disseminated by the top 100 most followed Twitter profiles—what we call the Twitter influencing elite. Focusing on a critical period from January to July 2020, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 6,602 tweets about COVID-19 produced by these Covid Influencers. The findings reveal that approximately two-thirds of the COVID-19 tweets in
-
Scrolling Through the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Perceived Effects of Increased Social Media Use on the Mental Health of Undergraduate University Students. Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Dario Giancola,Robb Travers,Simon Coulombe
Social media has become increasingly integrated into the lives of students for the past decade; however, the public health restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a sharp increase in social media use in a short period of time. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of social media use on university students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fifteen students from
-
Trustworthiness Over Time on Twitter: Three Critical Periods for the Norwegian Health Authorities and Political Leadership During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Jannicke Thinn Fiskvik,Andrea Vik Bjarkø,Øyvind Ihlen
Public health authorities and political leaders need to come across as trustworthy in their handling of a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. There is, however, little knowledge about how the affordances and dynamics of social media influence perceptions of trustworthiness, especially during a protracted crisis. In this article, we study how Twitter users were discussing the trustworthiness of the Norwegian
-
Automated Framing of Climate Change? The Role of Social Bots in the Twitter Climate Change Discourse During the 2019/2020 Australia Bushfires Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Stefan Daume, Victor Galaz, Petter Bjersér
Extreme weather-related events like wildfires have been increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change. Public online conversations that reflect on these events as climate emergencies c...
-
Fake News and the Web of Plausibility Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-05-05 Keith M. Murphy
This article explores the presentation of fake news, the most salient kind of disinformation, focusing neither on its text-based content nor its image-based form, but instead on its overall aesthet...
-
Politicians and the General Public Communicating on Facebook and Messenger: Public and Private Interactions in a Two-Level Online Sphere Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-05-05 Jón Gunnar Ólafsson
One of the early democratic promises of social networking sites concerned their potential to break down barriers between elites and citizens and facilitate two-way online interactions. More pessimi...
-
The Pluralization of Feminist Hashtag Landscapes: An Exploratory Mapping of Feminist Hashtags on Portuguese Instagram Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-05-02 Sofia P. Caldeira
Feminist hashtags are often studied in the context of concise and highly visible hashtag movements. However, most social media and hashtag use exist outside the narrow confines of such movements. T...
-
To Eat the Cake and Have It, too: How Marketers Control Influencer Conduct within a Paradigm of Letting Go Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Nils S. Borchers
The influencer industry follows a paradigm of letting go of control, which assumes that collaborations with influencers will only be effective if marketers grant influencers substantial autonomy in...
-
Local–Digital Activism: Place, Social Media, Body, and Violence in Changing Urban Politics Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Hadas Zur, Tali Hatuka
Recent studies demonstrate how violence, social media, and protest intertwine. This article complements this body of knowledge and indicates how social media enables new modes of small-scale protes...
-
One Dose Is Not Enough: The Beneficial Effect of Corrective COVID-19 Information Is Diminished If Followed by Misinformation Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Michael Craig, Santosh Vijaykumar
The World Health Organization (WHO) released a series of mythbuster infographics to combat misinformation during the COVID-19 infodemic. While the corrective effects of such debunking interventions...
-
Hands-On(ly) Vlogging: How Turkish Muslim Women Perform “Modesty” and “Piety” in Self-Branding on Their YouTube Cooking Channels Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Seyda Bagdogan
Studies examining the self-branding efforts of women producers of online content have proliferated in recent years. Typically focused on the production of content by young, white, and highly educat...
-
(Social) Media Logics and Visualizing Climate Change: 10 Years of #climatechange Images on Twitter Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Angelina Mooseder, Cornelia Brantner, Rodrigo Zamith, Jürgen Pfeffer
Images have become a key vehicle for communicating climate change, especially in a visually oriented social media ecosystem. However, few studies have examined the ways in which climate change is v...
-
Across the Cyberwaves: Twitter Campaigns for Gaeilge Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-28 Sarah McMonagle, Niamh Ní Bhroin
Research increasingly shows how speakers and learners of minority languages exploit online spaces to forge communication networks and create and consume content in languages that are otherwise marg...
-
Angry Posts Mobilize: Emotional Communication and Online Mobilization in the Facebook Pages of Western European Right-Wing Populist Leaders Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-26 Paolo Gerbaudo, Ciro Clemente De Falco, Giulia Giorgi, Silvia Keeling, Antonia Murolo, Federica Nunziata
The rise of right-wing populists in Western Europe has often been linked to their ability to exploit social media affordances to fuel anger. While scholarship has already examined the emotional dim...
-
How Disinformation on WhatsApp Went From Campaign Weapon to Governmental Propaganda in Brazil Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Joao V. S. Ozawa, Samuel C. Woolley, Joseph Straubhaar, Martin J. Riedl, Katie Joseff, Jacob Gursky
The popular encrypted messaging and chat app WhatsApp played a key role in the election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. The present study builds on this knowledge and showcases how t...
-
On the Meme Train to Sylt: Memetic Becoming and Ambivalent Identification Online Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Ryan M. Milner, Paul Wolff
In June 2022, the German government implemented a transit policy offering travelers an unlimited ticket to ride the country’s regional train system all summer long for a mere 9€. Conservative pundi...
-
Incidental News Exposure on Facebook and Its Relation to Trust in News Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-11 Sora Park, Jee Young Lee
There has been a growing interest in the impact of incidental news exposure on audiences as using social media as a source of news is becoming increasingly common practice. This article examines ho...
-
Social Media, the Public Sphere, and Public Space in Authoritarian Settings: A Case Study of Egypt’s Tahrir Square and 18 Years of User Generated Content Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-09 Rasha Abdulla
Taking Egypt as a case study, this article examines the relationship between social media and Habermas’ public sphere and public space in less democratic settings. Using a survey of Tahrir Square p...
-
Stumbling Blocks and Alternative Paths: Reconsidering the Walkthrough Method for Analyzing Apps Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-09 Stefanie Duguay, Hannah Gold-Apel
The walkthrough method was developed as a way to trace an app or platform’s technological mechanisms and cultural references to understand how it guides users. This article explores the method’s en...
-
The Intersectionality of Twitter Responses to Black Canadian Politicians Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Ahmed Al-Rawi, Betty B. B. Ackah, Wendy H. K. Chun
Research has shown that Black politicians in the Global North contend with higher instances of abusive language on social media platforms. The study investigates how public interactions engage with...
-
A God-Tier LARP? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Daniël de Zeeuw, Alex Gekker
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality g...
-
The Emotional and Financial Impact of De-Platforming on Creators at the Margins Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Carolina Are, Pam Briggs
This study provides one of the first examples of de-platforming’s direct emotional and financial impact on Instagram and TikTok content creators at the margins. Both platforms provide significant o...
-
Playful Activism: Memetic Performances of Palestinian Resistance in TikTok #Challenges Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Laura Cervi, Tom Divon
Palestinians have long been using social media as a tool for activism. Each platform provides unique socio-technological affordances that shape users’ communicative practices as networked publics. ...
-
User-Defined Relationships: Exploring the Dynamics of Attachment Style and Motives, Activities, and Outcomes of Social Network Sites Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Lynne Marie Stöven, Philipp Yorck Herzberg
The rise of social network sites (SNSs) provided users with new ways to initiate and maintain personal relationships. Numerous functions (e.g., messaging, sharing, and reacting on content) allow fo...
-
The Impact of What Others Do, Approve Of, and Expect You to Do: An In-Depth Analysis of Social Norms and Self-Disclosure on Social Media Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Philipp K. Masur, Natalya N. Bazarova, Dominic DiFranzo
There are many factors that account for disclosure of private information on social network sites, but a potentially powerful determinant that remains understudied is social norms, which refer to p...
-
The “Fox Eye” Challenge Trend: Anti-Racism Work, Platform Affordances, and the Vernacular of Gesticular Activism on TikTok Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Xinyu Zhao, Crystal Abidin
This article takes the “Fox Eye” challenge that trended on social media in 2020 as a case study in anti-racism activism by (East) Asian users on TikTok. The “Fox Eye” challenge was a trend in which...
-
Taking Humor Seriously on TikTok Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-02-26 Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández
Humor and play are at the center of TikTok culture. Through the platform’s unique functionalities such as the “Use this Sound” and “Duet” features, people use and repurpose sounds in combination wi...
-
The Use of TikTok for Political Campaigning in Canada: The Case of Jagmeet Singh Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-02-26 Aidan Moir
TikTok is a critical platform for political campaigns seeking to engage with new publics through digital advocacy. Jagmeet Singh, the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, has emerged as a TikTo...
-
#StopAsianHate on TikTok: Asian/American Women’s Space-Making for Spearheading Counter-Narratives and Forming an Ad Hoc Asian Community Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-02-26 Jeehyun Jenny Lee, Jin Lee
TikTok, one of the fastest growing entertainment platforms, is also a burgeoning space for hosting political expressions and movements. In this study, we examine how Asian/American women creatively...
-
TikTok as a Key Platform for Youth Political Expression: Reflecting on the Opportunities and Stakes Involved Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-02-26 Ioana Literat, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik
Reflecting on 6 years of our research—which began on musical.ly and transitioned into TikTok—we argue that TikTok is a vital space to study social movements due to its centrality in youth lives and...
-
Introduction to the Special Issue of “TikTok and Social Movements” Social Media + Society (IF 4.636) Pub Date : 2023-02-26 Jin Lee, Crystal Abidin
This Special Issue of “TikTok and Social Movements” emerges from an attempt to map out the landscape of social movements happening on TikTok, drawing from the online symposium “TikTok and Social Mo...