The rise of opaque algorithmic systems presents new challenges for journalism, particularly regarding transparency. This includes not only openness about journalistic processes but also about how technologies, like front-page personalisation and audience metrics, shape news production and consumption. Yet, news users’ views on these systems remain underexplored. In this study, I investigate how active Finnish news users respond to features of datafied journalism, especially the use of user data. Using a qualitative longitudinal interventionist approach, I engaged 21 participants in quizzes, group interviews, and chat discussions. After 1.5 years, 18 were re-interviewed to reflect on their earlier participation. Inductive analysis revealed varied reactions to the initial information, differing transparency assessments, and changes in engagement with datafied journalism. Three user response profiles emerged: opt-outs, compliants, and vigilants. These profiles offer insight into how understanding datafied journalism influences users’ perceptions and news consumption.
In this article, I analyse the processes through which extremist discourses are mainstreamed via social media influencers, with a particular focus on the Norwegian context. Drawing on insights from feminist scholarship, extremism research, and media and communications theory, I investigate how young male influencers reproduce, adapt, and negotiate ideas and symbols associated with Andrew Tate and the manosphere. The study concentrates on-2023, when Tate's visibility surged internationally and became a prominent topic in Norwegian mainstream media. Through qualitative analysis of ten YouTube and Instagram posts produced by Oscar Westerlin, Norway's most prominent male influencer, both explicit references and more subtle incorporations of manosphere-related ideas are identified. A key argument in the article is that Westerlin acts as an "ironic spectator", a figure who strategically brings extremist content into the mainstream to attract attention in today's digital media landscape. Situated within the Norwegian society where gender equality is highly valued, the article contributes to an understanding of how influencer culture can facilitate the normalisation of extremist ideologies in a specific context.
In this article, we examine Finnish alternative actors using Telegram within the right-wing and anti-systemic frameworks. We draw on Chantal Mouffe’s concept of political passion to argue that it offers a useful lens for explaining the underlying dynamics among these actors. Using Finnish Telegram groups as an approximated example, we conducted a network analysis to map the landscape, identifying four distinct clusters of actors. We also qualitatively analysed how different modes of political engagement manifest among these antagonistic groups through their selection of topics and rhetoric. Our results reveal how alternative voices can rapidly shift from general critique to extreme viewpoints, driven by far-right ideology and amplified through anti-democratic Russian propaganda.
Recruitment into right-wing extremism (RWE) through combat sports groups is a growing phenomenon in Europe and beyond. In Finland, Active Club Finland, Veren Laki, and Club 8 follow the international White Nationalism 3.0 strategy, seeking to mainstream extremist values through subcultural activities. Using their public Telegram channels, they circulate hyper-masculine, white-supremacist, and (neo)Nazi-inspired content aimed at drawing young men into regional RWE combat sports networks. In this study, I employ critical discourse analysis and ritual theory to examine 245 recruitment-oriented Telegram posts (2020-2024) and one related podcast episode. I explore how RWE symbols and subcultural activities function as rituals that construct collective identity and foster emotional solidarity, facilitating the transition from online discursive spaces to offline activism. The findings indicate that recruitment relies more on emotions and rituals than on arguments. Narratives of societal decline and historical struggle are employed to evoke negative emotions, which are transformed into a desire for action through promises of brotherhood and honour. Posts are saturated with RWE symbols and coded gestures that signal in-group belonging. Combat sports training serves as a central embodied ritual of discipline and collective duty, while public performances, such as street activism and Black Bloc-style demonstrations, build internal cohesion and project strength externally. Together, these practices turn ideology into emotionally charged experiences, normalising extremist ideals and moving recruits from the liminal space of online curiosity to offline activism, illustrating how the Finnish RWE milieu applies the broader strategy of White Nationalism 3.0.
Social media have created new opportunities for Jewish community-building and education but are also used to disseminate antisemitic content. Individuals and political actors from various ideological backgrounds exploit these platforms, while algorithms amplify such hate speech. The Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on 7 October 2023 intensified this issue, leading to a surge in Israel-related antisemitism online. With this case study, we examine antisemitic discourse on the social media accounts of a Swedish Jewish youth organisation and its impact on the youths’ engagement with these platforms following the attack and ensuing conflict. We draw on data from interviews, a focus group, and posts (n = 115) and comments (n = 2,964) from X and Instagram. The findings reveal how rising antisemitism, particularly the “Israelisation of antisemitism”, affected young Jews, prompting self-censorship and withdrawal from unsafe online spaces. This study provides insights into the evolving nature of antisemitism in the digital age. It highlights the need for societal and technological responses to address the challenges posed by online hate speech.
This study extends the communicative approach to populism - widely used in research on populist communication - to the analysis of extremist narratives, enabling a differentiated examination of populism and extremism as two related but distinct phenomena that are often conflated in academic and public discourse. We distinguish analytically between populist communication (people-centrism, anti-elitism, out-group exclusion) and right-wing extremist narratives that reject liberal-democratic EU values, and we investigate how the use of populist communication and extremist narratives varied across countries and parties and to what extent their prevalence overlapped. Our manual coding comprises 2,700 Facebook posts by political parties and politicians in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden during the 2024 European Parliament election campaign. Findings show that populist communication was present across the political spectrum, with notably higher levels in Sweden, while extremist narratives were rare and largely confined to right-wing fringe actors. These results challenge the notion of a uniform "Nordic pattern" and suggest a contagion effect in Sweden, where radical-right rhetoric appears to influence mainstream discourse. By operationalising both strategies within a shared analytical framework, this study provides a promising way of measuring and comparing populist and extremist messaging in digital campaign environments in a nuanced way.
In this article, we consider revenue and concentration developments of Nordic media and communication sectors within the wider framework of the network Internet ecology, the aim of which is to understand and contextualise what media concentration is in today's digital platform economy. By comparing revenue data from the telecom, content media, Internet, and backbone service sectors in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden between 2018-2022, our analysis shows that telecom is the most profitable sector, particularly wireless (mobile). Traditional content media displayed revenue recessions during Covid-19, however most sectors were recovering by 2022, and many show growth. While content media are moderately to highly concentrated across the region, telecom and core Internet services - particularly search - display the highest concentration levels overall. Finland has the most concentrated media and communications ecology, while Denmark is the least concentrated. High revenue coupled with high concentration thus indicates that small markets may benefit from concentration to attain economies of scale to enable funding of quality services in competition with global providers. The Nordic context furthermore suggests that such concentration levels are only sustainable with appropriate regulations. Our research thus shows that concentration in communication markets should be understood within context-dependent market dynamics, contributing to the political economy of communication.
News reporting is a key source of public information on climate change. Over the past three decades, public communication about climate change has intensified, contributing to ongoing public negotiation over the meanings of climate change. This systematic longitudinal study uses computational methods to explore the semantic shifts in climate reporting. We examine three common terms - greenhouse effect, global warming, and climate change - as a means to trace the development of climate news. Our findings indicate that each keyword is associated with distinct semantics, and media coverage of climate change varies according to the prevailing term. While the greenhouse effect dominated early climate reporting, the term global warming was used as a transitional term before climate change became the predominant term. These variations have significant epistemological, political, and methodological implications. They demonstrate how media reporting on climate science is constantly evolving; indicate how public discussions of climate change are informed by climate news; and highlight the importance of aligning sampling methods with the changing semantic landscape of public climate communication.
The concept of sustainable journalism can be used to analyse many different aspects of environment and society, while the downside is that it becomes too much of a floating signifier, in need of some terminological precision. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to theoretically elaborate sustainable journalism as a particular means of framing society, with a clear connection to sustainability literature. We argue that such frames could be operationalised based on a few core principles of sustainable development thinking, found in texts such as Brundtland's report, Our Common Future: Report of the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development, for the United Nations. Three prominent frames of sustainable journalism - namely the three-pillar, time reflexive, and cross-spatial frames - are empirically exemplified through their hybrid combination of generic and issue-specific aspects of sustainability. By means of framing theory, media theory, and journalism studies, our intention is to present them as tools for conducting empirical analyses of the ways media deploy a sustainability outlook in their reporting.
In this article, I investigate Danish alternative media users’ trust in mainstream news at the outlet-specific level. Drawing on an online survey representative of the adult Danish population (N = 1,518), the study distinguishes between users of left-wing and right-wing alternative media and reveals a remarkable difference: The former only have lower trust in (purportedly) right-leaning mainstream media whereas the latter have lower trust in mainstream media regardless of their ideological leanings, indicating more all-encompassing lower trust. While the users have relatively lower news trust than the rest of the population, their trust is still fairly high in absolute terms. I conclude with a discussion of potential explanations for the left/right difference and of the democratic implications of the findings in and beyond the Danish media context.
The formation of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in the European Union (EU), aiming to regulate platform power, provided a unique policy window to secure media-specific interests vis-à-vis platforms. This study investigates how Norwegian news media actors utilised the policy window. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 20 elite informants in Norway and the EU, the analysis shows how the Norwegian actors strategised to protect editorial independence and autonomy by lobbying to exempt editorial content from platform moderation. Unable to build a broad coalition and facing substantial resistance from an alliance of platforms, fact-checkers, and civil society groups, the attempt failed. The study contributes with insight into how news actors from a small, non-EU member state lobbied to gain influence in a policy process at the EU level. It also illustrates how the blurring boundaries of journalism and the multifaceted European media landscape make supranational news media lobbying particularly demanding for small, outsider actors.
The scholarly debate about a Nordic media system received a major impetus with the publication of the The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Age by Trine Syvertsen, Gunn Enli, Ole J. Mjøs, and Hallvard Moe in 2014. Ten years later in 2024, discussions continued in The Future of the Nordic Media Model: A Digital Media Welfare State? edited by Peter Jakobsson, Johan Lindell, and Fredrik Stiernstedt. A key concern across these debates has been whether and to what extent the media systems in the Nordic countries actually do form a common “Nordic media system”, and whether this media system is somehow better than other media systems at equipping Nordic citizens with democratic prerequisites. My article outlines the key positions in these debates about the continued role and relevance of the Nordic media welfare state, mainly in the area of news provision, based in part on recent research that explores this issue from an audience perspective (Schrøder et al., 2020, 2024). In the article, I tentatively explore how Nordic news media are presenting climate challenges and thereby equipping us as Nordic citizens for imagining livable futures.
Digital platforms have become ubiquitous arenas of public debate, changing the relationship between citizens and democratic institutions. On the one hand, digital technologies offer enhanced possibilities for citizens' participation in public debate, but on the other, they destabilise democratic institutions. In this conceptually informed literature review, we take stock of what we know about digital public debate. To do so, we posit technological affordances - that is, technologies' latent action possibilities - as a lens through which to study digital public debate. We establish a typology based on human-centric, issue-centric, and technology-centric forms of participation, each of which can be engaged bottom-up by citizens or top-down by democratic institutions. We illustrate the resulting six types of participation through a review of empirical studies based in the Nordic context. We summarise what we currently know about digital public debate in a key democratic dilemma: increasing digital participation goes hand in hand with decreasing institutional trust.
The emergence of right-wing alternative media has raised concerns about the diffusion of radical ideas among citizens and growing distrust in the media and public institutions. Based on representative surveys in Denmark (n = 1,958), Norway (n = 2,009), and Sweden (n = 1,991), we examine what characterises right-wing alternative media users in terms of political attitudes and political, media, and social trust. The analysis reveals that right-wing alternative media users in Scandinavia tend to affiliate with far-right parties, support far-right ideas, and express lower levels of trust in political institutions, traditional media, and unknown others. Among these, support for far-right ideas and a lack of trust in traditional media are the most important characteristics. While support for far-right ideas characterises right-wing alternative media users in all three countries, low trust in traditional media is a more important characteristic in Norway and Sweden than in Denmark. The study advances knowledge of the role of ideology vis-à-vis various forms of (dis)trust among right-wing alternative media users, showing that while alternative media use across the Scandinavian countries displays a set of similarities, such use is also formed by national context.
In this article, I examine how the use of audience feedback in film production shapes creative decision-making. While existing scholarship often views audience data as a rationalising tool that reduces risk and economic uncertainty, little research has explored how such practices function within creative processes. Drawing on an empirical case study from the Danish film production culture, where a novel audience research initiative institutionalises interfacing with proxy audiences at the early stage of script development, I analyse how filmmakers negotiate the integration of audience insights. The analysis finds that audience research does not dissolve uncertainty, as the creative uncertainty of translating feedback into concrete creative action persists. This is underlined by the negotiated nature of the process, where filmmakers selectively filter and resist audience input, often privileging their creative vision over audience sentiment. These insights nuance prevailing claims about the predictive capacity of data-driven production and demonstrate that the negotiation between creativity and audience data is a contested feature of contemporary media production.
This article addresses the lack of critical empirical research into the power relations of those involved as hybrid media events unfold. Specifically, I address a gap in the research on how political scandals are (co-)constructed by different contributors in the hybrid media environment. By recreating the sequence of events over the course of eleven days, I map and analyse the hybrid media scandal that triggered a Swedish Liberal Party leader’s sudden resignation following statements made in a party YouTube video. The analysis adds insights into temporal complexities of contemporary scandal in hybrid media and displays the power of opinion leaders and the continued significance of legacy media in ensuring tangible political consequences for scandal narratives. The analysis further illustrates the importance of going beyond news end-products when attempting to gain a comprehensive understanding of how and why scandals unfold and highlights the relevance of social, cultural, and political contexts to grasp hybrid media scandals.
A so-called green transition is ongoing in the Swedish North, primarily driven by investments in making basic industries fossil-free. The societal impact in the region is widespread and complex, and the ecological gain is sometimes disputed. In this study, we identify topics, themes, and evolving discourses about the “green” transition in a dataset (N = 9,755 texts) comprising published texts in Swedish news media between 2015 and 2023. Discourse analysis and topic modelling are combined, and the analysis shows two intersecting dominant discourses. The Green Growth discourse included articulations of beneficial, although challenging, green growth and energy transitions. The Swedish North discourse revealed continued tensions in the understanding of the region as a centre and a periphery. Even if marginal, contestations were identified, for example, questioning the “greenness” in green growth. Taken together, the dominance of industrial and political perspectives in the news media coverage and debate limits possibilities for alternatives.
