Flexible work arrangements (FWAs) create practical and interpretive questions that formal workplace information may not adequately address, particularly around how flexibility is experienced and negotiated in everyday working life. As workers share and encounter FWA-related posts on TikTok, the platform can provide supplementary access to experiential knowledge. However, circulation alone does not explain how such knowledge becomes a durable and usable resource for workers. Drawing on infrastructure theory, we conceptualise TikTok as a supplementary information infrastructure (SII) and use a feminist perspective to examine the gendered conditions under which women contribute to and sustain it. Based on semi-structured interviews with 14 women who post about FWAs on TikTok, we analyse their relational information practices. Participants responded to misleading information with situated knowledge and interpretive resources that made workplace norms more visible and contestable. Sustaining this infrastructure came at a cost: credibility and continued participation were shaped by gendered conditions of recognition and unequal access to time and energy, while trust was challenged by shifting audiences, limited contextualisation and technological risks. Participation also exposed women creators to workplace-facing surveillance. We contribute an infrastructural account of digital workplace knowledge exchange by showing how creators’ repair and maintenance labour helps sustain TikTok as an SII. This extends research on digital workplace knowledge exchange by showing that supplementary workplace knowledge can also matter for workers who remain connected to formal workplace information. The SII’s possibilities for information justice nevertheless remain uneven because they depend on creator labour undertaken under gendered and platformed conditions.
When an external shock draws heterogeneous actors into a single platform arena before any collective aim emerges, participation persists at movement-like intensity. Existing theories have not specified the cohering mechanism through which this formation sustains. This study conceptualizes this mode as reactive collective participation and specifies how affective publics cohere and persist under reactive conditions at the practice level. A mixed-methods design integrates in-depth interviews with 13 heterogeneously positioned participants (fans, anti-fans, bystanders) and computational analysis of Weibo discourse surrounding the 2023 Cai Xukun scandal (139,795 posts; 205,001 comments). Four affective practices recur across the event: Positioning, Storying, Attunement, and Calibration. These practices shift in relative weight across the event’s life cycle and distribute unevenly across actor positions, producing a stratified ecology in which insulated defense and exposed antagonism sustain each other. The study advances affective publics theory by specifying how affective publics cohere and persist under reactive conditions at practice level, and collective participation theory by conceptualizing reactive collective participation as a mode that reconnects the movement society and fan activism frameworks through a reactive pathway.
This study examines how Norwegian political parties used negative, positive or neutral sentiment on Facebook over a 10-year period (2016–2025) and how such sentiment affected the sharing of their posts. Drawing on a full population of posts from all major parliamentary parties, the study investigates (a) whether negative sentiment increases over time, (b) how sentiment varies with party ideology and incumbency status, and (c) how positive and negative sentiment relate to sharing overall and at the party level. Demonstrating an approach using large language models in combination with human annotation for sentiment analysis, the study finds that while positive sentiment remains dominant, negative sentiment has increased over time, especially among challenger and left-wing parties. Extremist parties on both the far-left and far-right post more negative content, but this does not consistently translate into higher sharing. Overall, negative posts tend to receive more shares, but this advantage appears to weaken over time, suggesting strategic adaptation and possible audience fatigue.
Perceptions of how algorithms curate content are integral to how people use social media and its effects. Building on the algorithm responsiveness process, we explore whether perceived algorithm responsiveness (PAR) was associated with the message cues of algorithmically curated content. We coupled longitudinal data from a 7-day, twice-daily diary survey with computational digital traces from Twitter (now X) to operationalize algorithmic message characteristics and to understand the antecedents and outcomes of PAR ( N = 10,337 tweets). Results suggested that message cues from algorithmic content in social feeds (i.e., closeness, popularity, valence, and format) were associated with perceived message personalization, but message personalization was the only message characteristic associated with PAR. PAR predicted feeling more connected to others on Twitter, along with message-level factors: closeness to the poster and message personalization. This work contributes to the algorithm responsiveness process, demonstrating that characteristics of algorithmically curated messages predict how individuals experience algorithms.
How much do experts on the information environment agree about the scale, spread, and effects of misinformation? We drew on three annual waves of the International Panel on the Information Environment expert survey to examine agreement with seven popular claims about misinformation (2023: N = 262; 2024: N = 413; 2025: N = 442; spanning 76 countries). Agreement varied widely across statements and was stable across waves. About 60% of experts agreed that falsehoods spread faster than the truth and that misinformation is widespread. About half agreed that misinformation has a substantial influence on behavior and that people readily believe what they see online; about 40% agreed that more people have become misinformed over time; and only 25% agreed that misinformation is primarily a social media problem. The surveys also revealed a persistent divide between experts who saw misinformation as widespread and consequential and those more skeptical, with sharpest disagreement on its behavioral impact and increase over time. In 2025, some experts distinguished between misperception prevalence and misinformation severity. Overall agreement varied by respondent background: agreement was higher among experts on developing countries than those on developed countries, higher among STEM researchers than social scientists, and lower among political scientists than communication scholars. Expert consensus on misinformation is partial, varies across claims and experts, and is shaped by geography and discipline.
