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

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

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

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

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

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”

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)

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

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

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

This study examines the perception–reality gap regarding the influence of technological affordances on cybersexual harassment (CSH) between remote workers. While previous research has recognized the existence of gender stereotypes and discrimination in online spaces, little attention has been given to how technological affordances impact—or are perceived to impact—incidents of CSH. By employing a theoretical

This study investigates the impact of YouTube’s 2021 policy, which hides dislike counts and limits a form of negative social feedback. It examines how this change affects social media herding behavior—the tendency of users to align with the majority opinion. We adopted a mixed-method approach, incorporating an online experiment that simulates the YouTube interface and an Interrupted Time Series analysis

Despite the growing popularity of digital narratives, research on digital storytelling and its spread through social media interactions remains limited. Inspired by the social contagion theory, we introduce the concept of narrative contagion—where a story shared by a person or organization prompts others to share their stories—and investigate its process and outcome in online cancer communities. Utilizing

The research comparing hedonic and eudaimonic media experiences has often conceptualized the two categories as monolithic wholes. Although thematic differences within each category have been identified, these differences are usually theoretically inconsequential: They are merely variations in hedonic or eudaimonic content. Adopting a conditional effects approach, this research shows that transience-themed

Research indicates that participation in metaverse environments and with virtual reality (VR) is increasing among younger populations, and that youth may be the primary drivers of widespread adoption of these technologies. This will more readily happen if their experiences are safe, secure, and positive. We analyze data from a nationally representative sample of 5005, 13- to 17-year-olds in the United

Dating apps have changed the way people establish contact with potential romantic partners. However, more and more dating apps use algorithms to keep their users’ engagement high. Studies suggest that trust in algorithms can shape offline dating experiences. We theorize that excessive swiping, driven by fear of missing out, predicts trust. We also explore the role of decision fatigue. Findings from

A funa, a public denouncement aimed at raising moral condemnation of a person accused of perpetrating a crime or injustice, has become a major digital activism instrument in Latin America, particularly in Chile. Originated in the human rights movement in the 1990s, funas re-emerged as a new form of online activism that hybridized with a Latin American and historical form of protest to exert informal

While the connection between social networking sites (SNSs) and body image has been reported more broadly in prior literature, the link between SNSs and muscle dysmorphia (MD) is less understood. The aim of this study was to investigate the strength and nature of the relationship between MD and SNSs among men in the general population. With SNSs allowing users to view and interact with online content

In light of the rising trend of self-disclosing stigmatized identities on social media and the insufficient understanding of its repercussions on societal attitudes, this study employs an intersectional framework to examine the impact of revealing dual stigmas related to sexual identities and health conditions on destigmatization. Drawing upon the intergroup contact hypothesis and social penetration

The recent surge in corporate responses to social and political crises marks a pivotal shift in how brands perceive their societal roles. This study explores “brand activism,” a phenomenon whereby brands engage in social advocacy through digital platforms, reflecting a strategic integration of social issues into their core identity and marketing practices. This proactive stance not only raises awareness

With ChatGPT’s rapid adoption, concerns regarding generative artificial intelligence (AI) have shifted from theoretical to practical. Drawing upon the “algorithmic imaginary” framework from critical algorithm studies and the anthropological concept of “ordinary ethics,” we analyzed Twitter discourse during ChatGPT’s initial deployment, examining 368,359 tweets. Our analysis identified five topics reflecting

Can players’ network-level parameters predict gaming perpetration, victimization, and their overlap? Extending the Structural Hole Theory and the Shadow of the Future Effect, this study examines the potential advantages and accountability conferred by key network metrics (i.e., ego network size, brokerage, and closure) and their behavioral implications. Using longitudinal co-play network and complaint

Live video is often used by protesters and political activists while broadcasting from conflict arenas since it gives the viewers a sense of “how it feels to be here.” This qualitative study suggests that digital “broadcast” technologies such as livestreaming can construct new forms of place-bound media events which intertwine “liveness” and “emplacement.” The article examines 97 Facebook Live videos

This article makes the case for what we call accountability contexts as a valuable heuristic to think about how facts matter in public life, drawing attention to how different discursive and institutional contexts shape the ways in which facts can count. We examine two environmental case studies: The Territory, a documentary about the struggle of the Uru-eu-wau-wau community in Brazil to protect their

This article examines how ‘pleasing the algorithm’, or engaging with algorithms to gain rewards such as visibility for one’s content on digital platforms, is treated from a moral perspective. Drawing from Harré’s work on moral orders, our qualitative analysis of Reddit messages focused on social media content creation illustrates how so-called folk theories of algorithms are used for moral evaluations

This article addresses how platform closure is produced by drawing on interviews with former employees of MySpace, the social media platform popular in the mid-2000s. Focusing on how staff grappled with user-generated content and user data while sunsetting an old version of the MySpace platform in 2011 to make way for a newly configured MySpace platform that debuted in 2013, it chronicles the decisions

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

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;

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

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”

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

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

The lockdown imposed in England in response to the COVID-19 pandemic involved an unprecedented ‘shift to digital’, including in relationships between non-cohabiting individuals. This article examines young people’s perspectives on and experiences of using networked communication technologies (NCTs) in romantic relationships during lockdown, based on 14 focus groups (n = 80) and interviews (n = 38)

Smart home technologies (SHT) are becoming more and more widespread. The commodification of the household and the surveillance of family life by companies have understandably sparked numerous questions. It should not be forgotten, however, that SHT also bring family members convenient tools to surveil each other. Parental and partner surveillance, further referred to as intimate surveillance, have

Online communities rely on effective governance for success, and volunteer moderators are crucial for ensuring such governance. Despite their significance, much remains to be explored in understanding the relationship between community governance processes and moderators’ psychological experiences. To bridge this gap, we conducted an online survey with over 600 moderators from Reddit communities, exploring