Visuals not only mediate but they also make politics. Increasingly, we encounter events visually from around the world. A video of two women paraded naked by a group of men and subjected to violence in Manipur, India went viral in July 2023, resulting in extensive debates and discussions in the new media ecosystem. The paper situates the Manipur video as a hate visual within a larger history of the representation of violence against women across various media forms and online platforms. The paper also explores the ways in which digital platforms have come to reshape public discourse in India, where we witness polysemic, hierarchical discourses on the framing of violence against women and its delegitimisation in the media ecosystem.
This paper asks: What is participatory digital democracy (e-participation)? It is organized in the form of six sections: The introduction summarizes the background. The next analyzes the notion of participatory democracy. We then work out an understanding of e-participation, and analyse how participatory (digital) democracy has been subsumed under the logic of far-right and authoritarian ideology. The conclusion presents a summary and recommendations. Participatory democracy has three key features: self-management; the extension of democracy to society at large; resources and skills that enable participation. We argue for a broad understanding of participatory democracy that goes beyond the political system and includes the economy and culture. Much research on participatory (digital) democracy assumes that participation as such is normatively always positive for society. We argue that participation is not an independent political value as such. It does not always and not necessarily have a positive impact. Participatory (digital) democracy should be combined with constitutional (digital) democracy in order to guarantee the respect of human and basic rights.
Despite the recent increase in research on algorithmic literacy, how online content creators understand and engage with social media algorithms from a user-centric perspective has been relatively understudied. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 19 online content creators in Singapore, this study examines how online content creators perceive and navigate social media algorithms. Although the workings of social media algorithms remain opaque, online content creators in Singapore actively reflect on and experiment with their content strategies to better understand these systems. They differ in their level of activeness in engaging with and leveraging social media algorithms to increase visibility, depending on their perceived difficulty in harnessing algorithms, their goals, and abilities. The findings contribute to research on online content creators' algorithm literacy by revealing three key dimensions of their engagement with social media algorithms: first, creators in Singapore perceive algorithms as both opportunities for visibility and unpredictable systems that shape their creative decisions; second, creators adopt distinct strategies to navigate algorithmic filtering; and third, creators' motivations, whether commercial or expressive, directly influence the extent and manner of their engagement with algorithmic mechanisms.
The purpose of the study is to map and interpret the structure, actors, and dynamics of Iran's eSports ecosystem, and to develop a context-sensitive understanding of how competitive digital sport sustains and evolves under political, infrastructural, and economic constraints. The study adopts Clarke's situational analysis, a post-modern extension of grounded theory. Data sources comprised semi-structured interviews with 19 Iranian eSports stakeholders (professional gamers, organizers, streamers, and policy influencers), document analysis of institutional reports and policy statements, and digital media analysis of platform content (Aparat, Telegram communities, Persian forums) and international coverage. The mapping process identified complex interdependencies among human and non-human actants and foregrounded a dominant pattern of fragmented grassroots resilience: community-led practices (local tournaments, LAN centers, VPN-enabled streaming, mobile adoption) sustain activity in the face of censorship, internet instability, limited payment access, and underrepresentation of women. The maps make visible structural bottlenecks (governance fragmentation, infrastructural fragility) and adaptive strategies; these mapped findings are then interpreted in the Discussion as analytical positions that theorize developmental pathways and stakeholder roles.
The evolution of the internet and social media has fundamentally changed how we communicate, access information, and build connections. Extremist actors have been shown to benefit from these developments, providing them with new opportunities to communicate, recruit, spread ideologies, and, ultimately, radicalize. However, scholarly perspectives on the internet's role in radicalization processes yield mixed conclusions. To synthesize existing knowledge, we conducted a scoping review, systematically searching for publications from 2000 to 2025 that address radicalization in relation to the internet. This resulted in 382 relevant publications focusing on the roles of digital environments in radicalization processes. We define radicalization as (1) a process (2) shaped not by a single factor but by a combination of multiple interacting factors through which (3) individuals incrementally adopt more radical or extremist ideologies and/or increasingly condone, support, or engage in (violent) action in the pursuit of radical or extremist ideological goals. Coming from this perspective, our literature review contributes to work on (online) radicalization by providing a synthesis of existing knowledge, a conceptual overview, and a summary of factors that can contribute to radicalization across the communication process and within online environments. While the internet can accelerate radicalization, we argue that it neither makes sense nor is it possible to strictly separate online and offline radicalization in today's digital society. Finally, this review identifies future research directions and highlights the need for multi-faceted approaches in research, policy, and prevention to address the evolving nature of extremism, terrorism, and radicalization in light of digital developments.
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an ambitious government-led project that has attracted sustained media attention since its launch in 2013. This article employs multimodal critical discourse analysis, in conjunction with van Dijk's (2000) ideological discourse analysis, as a theoretical framework to examine the narratives presented in four episodes-Ecuador, Panama, Jamaica, and Mexico-from the BBC World Service podcast series Stories from the New Silk Road: The Americas. The analysis focuses on the discourse features embedded in the multimodal resources of the podcasts, including images, episode introductions, and the narratives of both BBC reporters and local interviewees. The findings show that these four countries are depicted as facing significant economic, social, and governance challenges as a result of the BRI. Additionally, this article contributes to the theoretical development of the ideological square model by elaborating on the dynamics of defining "us" and "them," the uneven distribution of discourse properties, the hierarchical structure of the four polarized representations, and the discursive strategies of neglecting, reframing, and coloring.
Women are advised to avoid urban settings after dark and to carry a mobile phone. These precautions can reduce experiential fear of crime (EFC), which is influenced by the surrounding environment. However, these measures do not allow women to completely avoid potentially risky spaces. Women students commuting to urban universities are a prime example of this challenge. However, research on higher education and fear of crime (FoC) has largely focused on the university campus as the main site of activity, utilizing conventional methods that overlook experiences beyond campus, which limits a comprehensive understanding of student life. Between May and June 2022, 24 women students attending an urban university used a custom chatbot that documented their experiences commuting to campus over two weeks, before being interviewed. This research explores (1) women students' self-protective behaviors commuting to an urban university, (2) the settings these students use their mobile phone to alleviate EFC and (3) the impact that these behaviors have on students. Our findings reveal the protective behaviors that women students exhibit beyond campus, the limits of mobile devices to alleviate EFC in situ, and how experience methods can help articulate a more nuanced understanding of student life.
Online dating apps such as Bumble are frequently credited with empowering women to take control of their dating experiences. However, few studies have examined how patriarchal norms manifest as embodied intrusions in digital contexts, particularly in collectivist societies like India. This study addresses that gap by investigating Indian women's experiences of intrusion on Bumble through a feminist phenomenological lens. Twenty-two women aged 18-35, each with at least six months of Bumble use, participated in semi-structured interviews combined with a scroll-back method. Thematic analysis revealed multiple forms of intrusion, unsolicited sexual advances, fetishization, image-based abuse, cross-platform harassment, catfishing, and retaliatory doxing-rooted in male entitlement and guided by socio-historical values of honor and modesty. These findings illustrate how cultural expectations, toxic technocultures, and app design flaws jointly reinforce offline power asymmetries in digital dating. Drawing on a feminist phenomenological lens, this study reveals how Indian women's embodied responses to intrusion reflect enduring patriarchal legacies on platforms like Bumble.
This paper presents the first structured scoping review of the new generation of feminist activism in China, synthesizing scholarship published between 2012 and 2024. The analysis maps the evolving landscape of Chinese feminist discourse, practices, and critiques. It contextualizes Chinese feminisms as plural, locally grounded, yet globally entangled practices. Findings reveal a strategic shift from early confrontational, highly visible street protests to a more strategic, pragmatic, and digitally mediated movement shaped by state repression, censorship, and renewed patriarchal norms. While feminist activists have fostered new feminist counterpublics and contributed to legal and cultural shifts, their feminist practices face scholarly critiques regarding elitism, overgeneralization, and the marginalization of rural, working-class, and minority women. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory, intersectionality, and traveling theory, this review examines how these critiques vary among domestic Chinese, Western-based, and transnational feminist collaborations, highlighting the situated nature of knowledge production and the importance of reflexive, context-sensitive scholarship. The study underscores Chinese feminists' adaptive creativity despite persistent challenges and hostile environments. It offers insights into digital feminist resistance in authoritarian contexts and enriches global feminist theory from a non-Western perspective.
This article examines reaction videos as a distinctive case of interpassive media consumption in the platform society. Rather than reading them through the dominant frame of interactivity, we argue that reaction videos foreground forms of delegated affective and interpretive labor that trouble conventional understandings of agency in digital environments. By drawing on philosophical accounts of passivity as an ethical and aesthetic openness to otherness and on sociological theories of aesthetic cosmopolitanism and hermeneutic reflexivity, we show that some reaction videos-particularly those engaging with culturally "other" media-can foster receptive orientations toward alterity, enabling viewers to suspend judgment and inhabit unfamiliar perspectives. At the same time, these practices reveal the structural ambivalence of platform capitalism. The same mechanisms that enable encounters with difference-virality, algorithmic amplification-also sustain datafication, monetization, and homophilic filtering. Reaction videos thus illuminate how interpassive practices can be simultaneously exploited by platform logics and oriented toward subtle forms of ethical-aesthetic re-signification. As a conceptual case, they shed light on broader dynamics through which contemporary platform environments reconfigure the relationship between power, aesthetic forms, and online relationality, showing that even within algorithmically steered systems, opportunities for reinterpreting and redirecting digital relationality remain possible.
This study examines the dynamics of agenda setting among social media, traditional media, and political candidates. We draw evidence from the 2020 political campaigns led by Donald Trump and Joe Biden for the presidency of the United States, as a political marker in agenda setting dynamics. Data was gathered from different sources in the 251 days leading up to November 2, 2020. Although mainstream media display a weakened agenda setting effect, a complex interplay of intermedia agenda setting influences involving the candidates' Twitter (X) activity, traditional media, Facebook reactions, Google search patterns and random events such as Trump's sickness, constitute a vortex of hybrid records of salience.
This study is motivated by the need to understand how emerging blockchain-based data infrastructures are envisioned by their designers to create public value for Europe's media and creative industries as well as societies, particularly amid persistent concerns about fair remuneration and data sovereignty. Conceptually, it draws on institutional cryptoeconomics - treating blockchain as a new institutional layer that coordinates industry evolution - and public value theory, highlighting collaborative and socially beneficial outcomes. The central inquiry is how alternative imaginaries of decentralization - some disruptive, some integrative - shape the future of media data infrastructures. Methodologically, the paper compares two European firms, White Rabbit and Valunode, building on 34 semi-structured interviews alongside multi-year observational data. Findings reveal that radical, peer-to-peer imaginaries aim to disintermediate gatekeepers but often collide with entrenched legal frameworks, while standards-driven imaginaries ally with policymakers and established stakeholders, favoring gradual reforms and widespread adoption. The study demonstrates how distinct, but co-evolving, sociotechnical visions could determine the pathways and possibilities for generating meaningful public value by media data infrastructures.
This article explores how Gazans represent the impact of war on non-human victims. The civilian portrayal of war has evolved, moving beyond human perspectives to encompass the effects on animal victims, deliberating on the emerging concerns of animal rights in the ongoing Israel war in Gaza. The study employs a phenomenological research design and focuses on understanding the subjective experiences of Gazan human survivors, exploring how they interpret and attribute meaning to the plight of non-human war victims. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted with local Gazan smartphone activist survivors who witnessed and documented the impact of war violence on non-human victims in Gaza. Furthermore, Visual Discourse Analysis (VDA) was applied to ten videos of smartphone users to examine how internally displaced people portray the effects of war on nonhumans. We identified five significant themes within the narratives of non-human victims' representation by civilians in the ongoing war in Gaza. These themes include "inclusive invisibility and victimhood," "mediated narratives of loss and bereavement," "(en)forced displacement and migration," "making invisible violence visible," and "enabling inclusivity." Perspectives on human and non-human subjects in war create new opportunities to promote non-human rights and inclusivity, encouraging citizen reporting and representation through discursive design.
The death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 sparked one of the most significant protest movements in Iran's recent history, marked by the global rallying cry #WomenLifeFreedom. This paper investigates the role of Twitter (now X) in shaping the most popular and high-engagement discourse during the Mahsa Amini movement. We analyze 78,088 popular Farsi tweets (>1000 likes) from 10,308 users and examine the political orientations, user types, tweet tones, and content strategies that characterized the movement's digital discourse. The findings reveal a dynamic interplay of anti-regime, reformist, and pro-regime actors, with diverse engagement patterns ranging from personal storytelling to state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. While anti-regime activists utilized Twitter to mobilize support and amplify dissent, pro-regime entities employed sarcastic and hostile tones to undermine the movement. The study highlights the dual nature of Twitter as both a tool for grassroot resistance and a site for state propaganda and surveillance. This research contributes to understanding digital activism in authoritarian contexts by exploring how Iranian users navigated repression and censorship to sustain momentum. This movement underscores the transformative potential and inherent challenges of social media as a battleground for political resistance and systemic change.
