This study examines racial diversity in co-authorship in articles published in communication journals and its association with citations accrued over time. We analyzed 76,217 publications from 73 communication journals, spanning from 1990 to 2023, with a focus on racial diversity in authorship as an indicator of collaboration diversity. Our results reveal that diversity is positively associated with

Evidence suggests that the conception of “mental health,” as well as Western health care models, needs to be reimagined to better reflect the unique care needs of Black people. Within these systems, Black people are more likely to experience secondary victimization and retraumatization. Despite these systemic failings, Black people often find ways to manage self-care, wellness, and healing. Within

Despite the growing body of research on people disclosing sensitive details about their identities or experiences online, few studies have focused on how individuals with intersecting stigmas manage these disclosures. Those facing multiple, overlapping sources of discrimination may encounter compounded challenges, which can complicate their assessment of the perceived benefits and risks of disclosure

Smartphones have become daily companions and store many personal information, including contact lists, photos, and videos. Even though users download smartphone apps for various purposes, they are also data collection instruments. Within the Protection Motivation Theory research streamline, the present research focuses from a comparative perspective on young adults’ concerns and engagement with privacy

Studies have found limited evidence consistent with the theory that partisan and like-minded online news exposure have demonstrable effects on political outcomes. Most of this prior research, however, has focused on the particular case of the United States even as concern elsewhere in the world has grown about political parallelism in media content online, which has sometimes been blamed for heightened

A 2 (influencer type: nano with 5000 followers vs mega with 1.1 million followers) × 2 (influencer self-disclosure: low depth vs high depth) between-subjects online experiment tested the different pathways social media influencers take to achieve persuasion outcomes in one model. Participants viewed an Instagram influencer’s profile page with either 5000 or 1.1 million followers, and a post from the

There has been much debate concerning the changing nature of cultural production and distribution in the digital creative economy. Music production work has been especially affected by promotional conventions established by social media and music streaming platforms. This article critically builds atop perspectives on the platformisation of cultural production to investigate how independent hip-hop

Calls to “do your own research” (DYOR) on social media promote a range of claims, from expert-recommended treatments to conspiracy theories. Exploring how the slogan is used offers insight into how individuals navigate concerns about information accuracy in an abundant but low-trust media ecosystem. This quantitative content analysis investigates how DYOR messages in Facebook and Instagram posts about

Changes in global journalism are reflected in myriad cross-national professionalization efforts, including the development and exportation of models for journalism practice. Literature on peace journalism, for instance, suggests that its adaptation across contexts is shaped by forces on several levels, including the influence of individual media practitioners. However, little research examines those

Children and young people’s online privacy is increasingly challenged by the datafication of the digital world, and this is an increasingly important area of policy concern. Understanding what young people understand online privacy to be, and what they want done to protect it, is key to creating effective and rights-realizing policy responses. This article explores young people’s perceptions across

This study explored youth’s intention to engage in active bystander behavior in response to non-consensual forwarding of sexts (NCFS). The study paid attention to the possible conditional boundaries of these suggested dynamics based on youth’s empathy levels and sex. An online survey was conducted among 1337 Belgian respondents, of which 78.4% were female ( Mage = 21.64 years, SD = 3.57 years). Structural

How is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as machine learning (ML) algorithms and Large Language Models (LLMs), in social chatbots transforming friendship and love? This study investigates Replika, an app offering AI friends and/or lovers to users. Unlike most AI companion research grounded in Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) and interpersonal communication theories, this study

Following the death of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini, tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets in Iran—and the whole world watched through their screens. Several Iranian diaspora journalists stepped up to cover the events in Iran for western news outlets. In this study, we interviewed fourteen Iranian diaspora journalists on how they define their role when reporting on Iran and how

Collaborative work represents a communicative context in which organizational actors navigate the blurring of knowledge and authority boundaries as they address complex problems. This article theorizes about expertise tension that arises when individuals with valuable insights lack corresponding authority to act, or vice versa. Using observations and interviews, we studied how physicians and nurses

This article reports on and analyses data from a situated and in-depth project on the experiences of six cisgender South Asian-Australian women/people who gave birth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, negatively racialized women experienced barriers to health care and a lack of social support, which were further exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. International border closures

The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) facilitates the creation of multimodal information of mixed quality, intensifying the challenges individuals face when assessing information credibility. Through in-depth interviews with users of generative AI platforms, this study investigates the underlying motivations and multidimensional approaches people use to assess the credibility of AI-generated

Algorithms profoundly shape user experiences on digital platforms, raising concerns about their negative impacts and highlighting the importance of algorithm literacy. Research on individuals’ understanding of algorithms and their effects is expanding rapidly but lacks a cohesive framework. We conducted a systematic integrative literature review across social sciences and humanities (n = 169), addressing

Public broadcasters are bound by strict guidelines to ensure balance in representing different demographic and political groups, and to better reflect the distribution of these characteristics within the public and political elites. How are these decisions affected when the biggest political issues of the day create further cleavages that not only cross-cut existing divides but also deserve representation

This study advances the theoretical understanding of the effects of incidental news exposure on political knowledge by probing the mechanisms through which exposure transfers to learning. Two studies in the U.S. across both non-election and election settings test the centrality of political discussion on social media with strong and weak ties in explaining this relationship. Findings across both studies

Webtoons optimize interactivity and participation of media users in the world of digital media by consolidating a unique digital culture. This article examines the role of users in interactive media by exploring the case of webtoons in the context of a changing global political economy and cultural dominance. Korean platform monopolies have established a new business model for webtoons and developed

Social media offer opportunities for companies to promote their image, but companies online also risk being denounced if their actions do not align with their words. The rise of social media bots amplifies this risk, as it becomes possible to automate such efforts to highlight corporate hypocrisy. Our experimental survey demonstrated that bots and human actors who confront a corporation touting their

While online hate speech has become a serious problem in multimedia environments, most studies in this area have examined text-based hateful content, with less attention paid to its other visual aspects. From a multimodal perspective, we conducted an online experiment ( N = 799) to investigate how multimodal hate speech (i.e., text and images presented together to convey hateful meanings) on social

This article investigates the characteristics and communicative values of the popular PoV meme on TikTok to uncover mechanisms of community building on the platform. An analysis of the content, form, and stance of 250 videos revealed that creators of PoV memes lip-sync to audio remediated from pop culture and mimic how they imagine “you” would act in a given scenario. I offer the concept of “echoic

The mainstreaming of conspiracy narratives has been associated with a rise in violent offline harms, from harassment, vandalism of communications infrastructure, assault, and in its most extreme form, terrorist attacks. Group-level emotions of anger, contempt, and disgust have been proposed as a pathway to legitimizing violence. Here, we examine expressions of anger, contempt, and disgust as well as

The gynaecological examination (GE) is a major public health issue, with bad experiences of this examination widely reported as a disincentive to cervical cancer screening. In France, a movement to denounce gynaecological and obstetrical violence is expressed through a massive publication of testimonies on social networks. Via a socio-representational approach and from a critical gender perspective

Building upon platform-swinging, this study introduces the concept of identity-driven “group-swinging” within a single platform, focusing on how users with multiple minority identities strategically curate corresponding identities through this process. Collecting all created and engaged posts ( n = 31,084) from 102 lesbian gamers in both lesbian gamer and female gamer groups, this research utilizes

Drawing from a two-year ethnography with sixteen adults in Flanders and Brussels, Belgium, this study disentangles the social, material, and individual obstacles experienced in day-to-day life that hinder and foster digital well-being. Findings show how these obstacles are interrelated, laying bare the tensions that cut across social relations, digital devices, and spaces. Moreover, (gendered) responsibilities

Political satire is often believed to enrich the public sphere in ways distinct from traditional journalism. This study examines whether deliberative qualities of online political talk in response to satire differ from those in response to regular news or partisan news. The analysis focuses on four normative standards: interactivity, diversity, rationality, and civility. A manual content analysis of

Media criticism is a crucial part of meta-journalistic discourse, ensuring that journalists adhere to their democratic functions, such as informing citizens in an honest and complete manner. However, the profession increasingly faces hostile, nonevidence-based attacks from politicians that attempt to strategically fuel distrust among citizens and delegitimize opposed viewpoints. Despite this reality

This study introduces computer vision models for image analysis in advertising research. It reviews the literature in social science and computer science and identifies three categories and nine ty...

This article develops a phenomenological approach to examine the intersection of global migration and rising concerns about disinformation. Drawing on interviews with Venezuelans en route to the United States-Mexico border through Central America, the article analyzes how undocumented migrants live amid information precarity, how they relate to disinformation, and how disinformation affects their decisions

This article explores how podcasters address their invisible—and thus imagined—audience. Based on in-depth interviews, we examine how different ways of imagining the listener evoke specific strategies of addressivity and analyze the connection between these imaginaries and the concept of intimacy as understood and performed by podcasters. We introduce a working definition of the “imagined podcast listener”

Since Internet pornography (IP) is widespread and can become problematic for some users, investigating the personality traits which correlate with its consumption is important. Though many studies have been conducted on the relationship between IP, personality traits, and attachment, no meta-analysis has been conducted to synthesize this literature. We aimed to address this gap through a meta-analysis

As a sociotechnical practice at the nexus of humans, machines, and visual culture, text-to-image generation relies on verbal prompts as the primary technique to guide generative models. To align desired aesthetic outcomes with computer vision, human prompters engage in extensive experimentation, leveraging the model’s affordances through prompting for style. Focusing on the interplay between machine

Female gamers have long suffered from gender-based online abuse in the gaming community. Apart from commonly observed quitting and gender-masking behaviors from female gamers, this study explores what female gamers understand as sexism, how female gamers react to it, and why they choose certain reactions instead of others. Findings show that female gamers are keenly conscious of normalized sexism in

This study proposes affordances for discursive opportunities (ADO) as a theoretical framework that leverages the concept of technological affordances and the theory of discursive opportunities to understand platform potential in shaping social media activism. Specifically, ADO underscores how social media platform affordances (e.g., algorithmic curation, shared group identity and culture, connectivity)

This study sought to investigate the prominence of U.S. birth control pioneer and eugenicist Margaret Sanger in social media discourse through a critical disinformation studies lens. Using computational and qualitative analysis techniques, 60 months of public Facebook posts and Google search data were analyzed to explore the scope, reach, and engagement with messages that reference Sanger and examine

Rumors spread on social media overshadow the truth and trigger public panic. One effective countermeasure to address this issue is online rumor-combating. However, its effectiveness on social media has not been fully verified. In this study, drawing on construal level theory, we use temporal distance—the time interval between a rumor-combating post being released and receiving responses from social

People report receiving ads on their mobile device that are seemingly related to previous offline conversations (i.e., conversation-related advertising). They may think that this is because their electronic devices are eavesdropping (i.e., e-eavesdropping). To gain insights into the scope and characteristics of conversation-related advertising and e-eavesdropping beliefs, we conducted a survey in the

Political expression is a focal point for understanding how digital media have transformed political engagement. Privacy concerns tend to impede online political expression, but this relationship is still poorly understood. Based on the theory of reasoned action, this study focuses on the role of social influence and institutional privacy concerns in political expression on Facebook. We draw on research

Misinformation thrives on social media, prompting much research into social media interventions such as debunks. This paper tests debunking’s effectiveness against an understudied but prominent form of online misinformation: misleading organizational claims of corporate social responsibility, or CSR-washing. British participants ( N = 657) took part in a preregistered experiment with a 2 (debunk: present

Prior research on thriving has primarily portrayed it as a positive experience, which it often is; however, we extend past theorizing by showing how there can be a “cost” to thriving. Specifically,...

Social media are an important source of news during crises such as terrorist attacks. However, how news media and their audiences make sense of terrorism on social media is subject to bias, for example, given their differential treatment of terrorism by right-wing versus Islamist extremist perpetrators. In this study, we analyze how incident- and perpetrator-related characteristics of terrorist attacks

The current study integrates communicated narrative sense-making (CNSM) theory with the ecological systems model to investigate intergenerational family storytelling (IGFS) in Palestinian families....

While numerous studies have documented an association between mainstream media trust and mainstream media use, only little is known about potential causal mechanisms underlying the association. We theorize that selective exposure, social influence, and the reinforcing spirals model offer three possible mechanisms that may underlie the association. These possibilities were studied using random intercept

The superdiffuser model predicts that the diffusion of a new behavior can be accelerated if superdiffusers (people who are connectors, persuaders, and mavens) are recruited to promote the behavior. We propose an expanded model where the importance of these traits varies by network structure and other network member characteristics. We assessed the plausibility of these proposed moderators using a simulation

This article makes a case for the value of infrastructure studies in analyzing journalism’s evolving landscape. It argues that infrastructural thinking is valuable to understand the changing neighb...

This paper illustrates how to implement state space grid analysis for analyzing the back-and-forth multi-turn dynamics that manifest in dyadic conversations. In doing so, we contribute to a dynamic...

Efforts to scale up fact-checking through technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), are increasingly being suggested and tested. This study examines whether previously observed effects of reading fact-checks remain constant when readers are aware of AI’s involvement in the fact-checking process. We conducted three online experiments ( N = 3,978), exposing participants to fact-checks identified

Mounting concern surrounds the influence of political actors on journalism, especially as media outlets face increasing financial pressures. These circumstances can give rise to instances of media capture, a mutually corrupting relationship between political actors and media organizations. However, empirical evidence substantiating such mechanisms and their consequences remains limited, particularly

Despite the ubiquity of dating apps, there is little longitudinal research examining the mental health and well-being of dating app users. To fill this void, this study takes a social compensation approach to exploring dating app users’ burnout experiences (i.e., emotional exhaustion, inefficacy, and depersonalization) over time. Four hundred ninety-three active single dating app users were surveyed

This study, grounded in the interpersonal deception theory (IDT), aims to analyze the new form of digital deception known as “visual poverty” in livestreaming rooms. Through a multimodal discourse analysis of the collected data, this study found three distinct linguistic strategies employed in “visual poverty” livestream: illocutionary strategy, discourse strategy, and nonverbal strategy. These strategies

Computational content analysis (CCA) has experienced a surge in popularity in the field of advertising research. Despite advancements, a comprehensive methodology guide in this area is lacking, pre...

This paper demonstrates the performance of the Joint Sentiment Topic model (JST) and the reversed Joint Sentiment Topic model (rJST) in measuring sentiment in political speeches, comparing them aga...

The Rohingya refugee crisis, a humanitarian tribulation involving the persecution of the Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority group in Myanmar, has led to a massive exodus of refugees, primarily women and children, to neighboring Bangladesh. Analyzing public opinion toward the Rohingya crisis poses a challenge due to the time complexity of manually assessing individual expressions from the vast amount of

Widespread concerns about the pervasiveness of misinformation have propelled one antidote to the center of scholarly attention: the journalistic fact check. Yet, fact checks often do not work as intended. While most fact checks are text only, a compelling theoretical argument can be made for using a video format instead. In this pre-registered experiment conducted in Germany ( N = 1,093), we investigated

Mass layoffs offer a unique and understudied context to understand how affected workers communicate the involuntary, collective nature of their organizational exit. In this study, we explored the communicative strategies that workers affected by mass layoffs in the technology industry used to engage in impression management by analyzing LinkedIn posts ( N = 362). Our findings showed that workers engaged

In this article, we review Alice Marwick’s book, The Private is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media, published by Yale University Press in 2023. In the book, Marwick argues that the digital nature of the social media landscape fundamentally changes contemporary notions of privacy. We trace three specific elements of her argument, namely: (1) the design of networked technologies to connect

This exploratory study focuses on the public as a listening ensemble that takes part in public diplomacy on Twitter. Here, listening is considered as the receiving component of communication, and responsive behavior as its visible product. The focus is on public communication that followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. A total of 4,392 quote tweets (citing the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky’s

This study investigated the dilemmas faced by emerging adults serving as supporting siblings (SS) for their sibling with depression (SWD). A thematic analysis of 49 interviews revealed the family system as central to sibling depression. Family histories of dysfunction contributed to SWDs’ lasting symptoms, prompting SSs’ felt obligation to their sibling. SSs managed mental health communication in the