Regulation by users – the crowdsourced adjudication entities and emerging regulabour on Douyin This article examines the regulatory practices within community-driven regulatory entities on Douyin, the Chinese sister app of TikTok and a leading short video platform. Drawing upon ethnographic ...

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Drawing on ethnographic research, this study traces how Douyin’s crowdsourced adjudication system turns community moderators into a form of regulatory labour, or 'Regulabour.'

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Wrap your head around it: algorithmic self-making and performances of taste on Spotify Wrapped This paper examines how Spotify Wrapped is perceived and understood by Brazilian users, exploring the algorithmic imaginaries (Bucher, 2017). that surround its appropriation in everyday life and ho...

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Looking at Spotify Wrapped as an 'Algorithmic Event,' this article explores how Brazilian users engage with datafied listening histories, turning them into fleeting performances of taste and shared recognition.

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Protest movements and the mainstreaming of radical and extremist ideologies: the case of COVID-19 protests Radical and extremist actors leverage social media to subtly embed their worldviews into everyday discourse. Drawing on mainstreaming theory, we examine whether protest movements can facilitate suc...

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Can protest movements help mainstream radical ideas? Analysing Telegram data from Germany’s Querdenken protests, this study develops the concept of 'protest-facilitated mainstreaming' to trace how fringe narratives become more accessible.

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Navigating intersectional expectations: a computational multimodal analysis of the effects of identities and communication styles on public engagement with science on TikTok Communication research has long established the impact of the communicator's social identity on persuasion. However, few communication studies have applied an intersectional lens to examine identit...

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Who gets seen and heard in science communication on TikTok? Analysing 10,800 videos and 448,000 comments, this study shows how gender, race, and communication style interact to shape audience engagement.

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Modular messaging and multimodal influence amidst democratic fragility in Greece: unpacking New Democracy’s party–funded media network This article examines how New Democracy’s party-funded media ecosystem in Greece organises multimodal campaigning through a division of rhetorical labour between static cartoons and online video. F...

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In Greece, party-funded media do not repeat the same message across formats. Analysing cartoons and YouTube clips, this article shows how different media carry different parts of a shared campaign strategy.

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Online interactions and the gravity model We study digital interactions between people across the globe. We develop a simple model of online interactions that incorporates insights from communication studies and can be tested using the str...

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Do online interactions follow the same patterns as trade? Using data from 25 million Age of Empires matches, this study shows how cultural proximity still shapes who interacts with whom online.

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Social media platforms and the spreading of hate speech targeting sexual and gender minorities: a scoping review Today, social media users can access various social media platforms with different characteristics that offer distinct opportunity structures for the spread of hate speech. Yet little is known abou...

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Most research on platformed hate speech looks at text and a small set of platforms. Reviewing 145 studies, this article highlights what remains underexamined, particularly affordances and visual forms.

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Platforms, journalism and the amplification of terror: an ecological account While research examines terrorists’ use of digital platforms for recruitment, mobilization and operational planning, less attention is paid to how technological change reconfigures sensemaking and ...

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How do platforms reshape the public meaning of terrorism? Walsh develops the concept of 'Platformed Amplification' to explain how attention competition, eyewitness content and algorithmic curation intensify coverage.

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Digital resistance and gendered dispossession: Palestinian women’s struggles for inheritance justice This study examines the systemic denial of inheritance rights among Palestinian women, situating their lived experiences within broader socio-legal and cultural frameworks that entrench gendered di...

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Through thematic analysis of online support groups, this article foregrounds Palestinian women’s digital resistance to inheritance denial, linking property injustice to dignity, belonging, and citizenship.

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Favela aesthetics: digital influencers in Brazil contesting Instagram visual cultures and favela stigmas This article proposes the concept of favela aesthetics as a visual and discursive practice developed by digital influencers from Brazil's urban peripheries. In Brazil, favelas are informal settleme...

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Focusing on Nathaly Dias, known as “Blogueira de Baixa Renda”, this article theorises favela aesthetics as a visual practice that contests Instagram’s dominant influencer norms and long-standing stigmas surrounding favelas.

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Evaluating the potential and limits of trace-based interviews when studying news use Digital trace data have expanded possibilities for studying news use but often obscure how people make sense of their encounters with journalism. This paper examines trace-based interviewing as a m...

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By combining participants’ digital traces with in-depth interviews, this study examines how behavioural data capture news use and where they fall short in explaining everyday meaning.

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Racism, resistance, and Reddit: how popular culture sparks online reckonings This study examines how Reddit users engaged with the racial narratives of HBO’s Watchmen (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020), two television series that reimagine historical racial trauma. Drawing...

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When HBO’s Watchmen and Lovecraft Country revisited histories of racial violence, Reddit became a site of contestation. Analysing thousands of comments, this article traces how users resist, defend, and rethink racial narratives online.

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Drawing on data from Germany and Spain, this paper examines how lurking on social media relates to expressive and defensive political engagement under conditions of value-incongruent exposure.

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Who engages with fact-checking? Identifying factors influencing exposure to and reading of multi-platform verification Fact-checkers have the potential to guide citizens toward accurate information, but it is unclear to what extent fact-checkers are reaching this potential among the general public as research on th...

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Who engages with fact-checks?

Drawing on survey data from Flanders (N=2520), this study applies the Opportunity-Motivation-Ability framework to examine exposure and deeper reading across platforms.

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Ong and Jackson draw on insights from over 100 Global South civil society leaders to argue that mainstream counter-disinformation funding models are often disconnected from local priorities and can reinforce donor power asymmetries.

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How do users feel when algorithms cross privacy boundaries? Based on interviews in the United States and Singapore, this study links emotions such as fear, annoyance, and helplessness to different privacy coping strategies.

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Using two-wave panel data from South Korea’s 2024 election, this article shows that partisan YouTube channels are associated with conspiracy mentality only under specific conditions of discussion and interests.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

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Drawing on archival research and interviews, Dowell analyses how AWS coordinates sovereign regions, zones, and outposts to strategically recalibrate territory in the governance of digital infrastructure.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

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Rivero and Jacobo examine how Twitch emotes function as linguistic and multimodal resources in race discourse. Drawing on multi-sited digital ethnography, they trace how specific emotes reproduce and contest racialised harassment.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Mobilization in motion: how radical movements adapt their communication on Telegram amid evolving crises This paper examines how Germany's far-right and Querdenken movements adapted their communication strategies in response to evolving societal crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukra...

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Analysing 8,852 Telegram posts from 151 German radical channels, this study examines how far-right and Querdenken actors adapted their messaging across the pandemic, the Ukraine war, and the energy crisis.

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Between disclosure and conspiracy: the transparency effect on r/UFO and r/UAP subreddits While there exists genuine scientific inquiry seeking to understand Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), the lore of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) is deeply intertwined with narratives del...

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In this new article, Bastos and Duarte analyse Reddit discussions alongside a timeline of UAP hearings and announcements, showing that official disclosures are associated with declines in conspiratorial narratives.

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This new article examines the conditions under which organisations integrate generative AI and links that process to organisational agility and effectiveness using structural equation modelling.

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Based on reconstruction interviews with 15 intermediaries in the Netherlands, this article examines how community actors tailored health information and prioritised trust over direct correction when countering COVID-19 misinformation.

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What role do emotions play in populist politics?

Reviewing 51 studies across disciplines, Bliuc et al analyse how anger, fear, resentment, and nostalgia drive populist mobilisation and communication.

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Diagnosing multimodal disinformation: the integrative ‘Three-M' framework of multimodality, manipulation, and malintent The ubiquity of short-video platforms (e.g., TikTok, Douyin, Kuaishou) has amplified the circulation of multimodal disinformation. To address this challenge, this study proposes an integrative theo...

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How should multimodal disinformation be analysed? This article proposes the Three-M framework, arguing that multimodality, manipulation, and malintent must be examined together.

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Protecting democracy: comparing codes of conduct for generative AI use during elections 2024 has been called the ‘super election year’ with more than four billion citizens participating in national elections in 74 countries. The introduction of Generative Artificial Intelligence was d...

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From voluntary guidelines to mandatory rules, this article compares emerging election-time AI codes across 11 countries and assesses their enforceability and clarity.

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Style and substance on The Alex Jones Show predict InfoWars sales: a multi-modal analysis of a media empire Alex Jones, a prominent conspiracy theorist, has garnered substantial influence and wealth through his InfoWars media empire, which includes The Alex Jones Show and InfoWars.com. This study leverag...

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This article examines the business model of disinformation through the case of InfoWars. By linking broadcast features to next-day sales, it shows how media style and commercial incentives reinforce one another.

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From tech wars to tech culture wars? ‘Values shaping’ and ‘values signaling’ in AI system design and governance As Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated in emulating human communication and expressing social values, they also gain greater relevance for questions of cult...

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As generative AI systems increasingly express social values, conflicts shift from technical competition to cultural contestation. This article theorises values shaping and values signalling in AI design and governance.

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Payment systems and priorities: artists’ fragmented perspectives on music streaming reforms The debate around alternative payment systems on music streaming has been active for over a decade but it was not until 2024 that the platforms Spotify and Deezer announced their first changes to t...

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In this article, Jensen explores how artists understand and evaluate music-streaming payment systems, showing why reform debates often clash with everyday career realities and with opaque payout structures.

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‘Spread kindness not virus’: theorising the vulnerability of online mutual aid communities While rooted in altruism and solidarity, the sustainability of mutual aid communities – particularly those born in times of crisis – depends on their capacity to maintain social cohesion and ensure...

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Using Michel Serres’ parasite logic and a netnographic study of a large Facebook caremongering community, this article uncovers interferences that both threaten and sustain solidarity in digital mutual aid.

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