Digital border infrastructures are commonly criticized for violating migrants' rights through intrusive surveillance and automated decision-making. This essay argues that such critiques remain fundamentally limited. The problem is not that border technologies are misused, but that the inherently violent and exclusionary logic of borders has become fused with techno-solutionist promises and transformed into a profitable business model. Rather than merely governing migration, digital border infrastructures produce the very conditions that legitimize their continuous expansion. Bringing together critical migration studies, science and technology studies, media and communication studies, and reflections from migrant solidarity activism, the essay conceptualizes digital border infrastructure as simultaneously material, discursive, and economic. It argues that infrastructures not only reorganize practices of bordering but also shape the production of visibility, knowledge, and political subjectivities. Securitized representations of migration are therefore not external narratives about the border; they are embedded in the infrastructures through which migration is governed and become part of a self-reinforcing cycle of border militarization. Building on this critique, the essay questions political strategies centered on human rights, counter-surveillance, or the production of visibility. Instead, it proposes shifting attention toward the digital border infrastructure itself and its material entanglements with policing and warfare. Such a perspective opens possibilities for reformulating border abolitionist politics beyond migration and toward broader struggles against militarization and surveillance.
Toponyms (territorial names) can mobilize people by shaping captivating nationalist narratives. They can thus be a source of controversial policies that could erode democratic values. Drawing on the study of the Macedonian Name Dispute (MND) over the past six years, the paper argues that journalism must rethink its coverage of these conflicts, as media often amplify domestic nationalist narratives and escalate tensions between nation-states, with measurable effects on bilateral relations and regional diplomacy. I focus here on public communication, as its practices have imposed a dogmatic view that shapes online communication, including social media content, especially in the case of the MND. Crucially, in symbolic name disputes over territories, the media do not merely mirror a pre‑existing national interest; they are active agents, since the dispute’s political reality is constructed and amplified through communication and cultural practices. In a globalized world, when the media uncritically rally behind national flags, they not only reinforce inequality and restrict people’s rights domestically but also harden interstate positions, complicate diplomacy, and undermine multilateral conflict‑resolution mechanisms. This essay argues for a normative approach to media coverage, focusing on facts, pluralism, and more inclusive perspectives in coverage of territorial name disputes. This normative approach draws on Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory to encourage reporting that recognizes overlapping memories and comparative claims rather than treating histories as exclusive competitions.
Against the backdrop of political backlashes, the essay poses the question of why progressive global visions of cosmopolitan realities have not wielded discursive power and even seem to have lost their cultural appeal. The discussion conceptualizes cosmopolitanism from a communication analysis and scrutinizes the fragility of cosmopolitan communication in everyday life experiences and the mediating discourses of mass media. The arguments reflect several communicative challenges of connecting existing cosmopolitan symbolic resources at a grassroots level based primarily on theoretical considerations. Additional preliminary empirical insights derived from a qualitative interview study aiming to understand the communication patterns of lived cosmopolitan experiences will further inform the discussion about challenges of translating these experiences to wider publics. The essay will end with implications for the responsibility of the mass media to help ensure that cosmopolitan realities are taken for granted.
Global journalism covers the complexity of global connections as manifested in countless topics: global water supplies, extractive industries, labor conditions, climate crisis, migration routes and lives, health and disease, humanitarian crisis, conflicts and wars, social inequalities, and the political economy of global commodities (from fast fashion to food). It eschews the national pull that historically tethers journalism to the politics of cultural-geographical spaces. It offers de-centered perspectives that elude customary binary options of west-east, north-south and the rest. By revealing “how the global works,” it refuses to approach the world as fragmented territories. Global journalism is part of the disjointed knowledge institutions that help to “know the global” and interlocking global crises. It exists in a range of news media - mainstream news organizations, citizen journalism, alternative news, specialized news (science, health, environment, humanitarian), and non-profit journalism. It is not tied to breaking news or the tyranny of conventional news values – events, personalities, sensationalism, “the now;” instead, it brings up underlying structural factors, flows, and dynamics. By setting its reporting horizons on global developments, challenges, and risks, it is unmistakable form of advocacy – it is a call to thinking globally. Although it may not make big headlines on a regular basis, global journalism is particularly significant at a time of anti-globalism and turbo-charged nationalism, the persecution of critical and dissident journalism, science denialism, and the crisis of post-war global institutional architecture. Amid the noise of news and information in the attention economy, it stands for the kind of consciousness-raising news that are necessary in a world with and without borders.
Scholarship on migration and media in Latin America and the Caribbean has long emphasised how transnational connectivity sustains postnational imaginaries that unsettle the nation-state as the primary container of identity and belonging. This article argues that such frameworks now require significant revision. Contemporary migration across Latin America and the Caribbean increasingly connects South America, Central America, the Caribbean and North America through multidirectional corridors of transit, settlement and displacement. These developments are mediated through hybrid media environments that amplify xenophobic discourse, emotionally charged nationalism and the securitisation of borders. Drawing on recent empirical research, the article examines how states, commercial actors, migrant communities, and civil society organisations compete within these communicative landscapes. It shows that while solidaristic counter-narratives and practical support networks exist, digital connectivity increasingly operates alongside entrenched exclusionary mechanisms. Postnational imaginaries subsequently persist as contested possibilities within communicative environments shaped by national boundaries and struggles over belonging.
This article presents a quality assessment of Web3 coverage in mainstream media across four European countries—Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom—as a starting point for discussing the standards of technology journalism that can meaningfully support an informed public. It begins with an overview of existing research on technology journalism and its role in fostering informed citizenry. This is followed by a mixed-methods content analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, to examine how the complex topic of Web3 is reported in the four European countries. Insights from journalists and editors contextualize the analysis. The findings highlight three key challenges across all countries: an event-driven rather than process-oriented focus, a narrow thematic scope on the financial applications of Web3 technology (cryptocurrencies), and a relatively limited diversity of sources. The article concludes by exploring how these challenges—and the broader trends in Web3 reporting—shed light on the potential and pitfalls of technology journalism in contemporary societies.
Contra-flows of communication mediated by diaspora groups are often viewed as anti-hegemonic, and diaspora media spheres have long been considered integral to Western democracies. However, the asymmetrical, multidirectional, and deregulated nature of today’s internet-based communication requires a more critical approach to diaspora mediascapes. Social media platforms have transformed diasporic media networks into transnational political actors capable of influencing policies and public opinion in host countries. These flows can transmit polarising ideologies from homelands and mobilise diaspora communities through affect. Situated within scholarship on transnational communication networks, affective polarisation, and ethnic nationalism, the paper examines the role of Indian media in fostering transnational alignment between White and Hindu nationalist projects based on anti-Muslim sentiment. It argues that this partnership is intended to mobilise the Hindu diaspora and shape their perceptions of and connections with far-right movements across the Atlantic. Through a reflective thematic analysis of British far-right activist Tommy Robinson’s interviews with Indian media outlets, the paper investigates the performance of victimhood and outrage intended to influence and incite the Hindu community and to cultivate support for Robinson’s far-right project within the Indian diaspora in the UK. It also explores how India’s hyper-nationalist media, through the enactment of reciprocal legitimacy with the far-right, contribute to and have the potential to affect intercommunal relations within the UK.
This essay examines the structural barriers to cosmopolitan journalism in South Asia, arguing that the region’s journalism must contend with three overlapping geographies: colonial cartographies, post-Partition sovereignties, and civilizational continuities. Rather than translating these layered realities, journalism has become a site where borders are rhetorically hardened by political, commercial, and platform logics. Within the sub-continent, Indian journalism occupies a dual position: simultaneously subject to structural pressures yet disproportionately influential due to scale and platform dominance. By treating ultra-nationalism as a structural feature rather than episodic distortion, the essay reveals how media organizations align editorial agendas with state narratives for survival. It shifts attention from “headline wars” to the quieter erosion of journalism's humanistic function, offering an accounting of what has been lost: journalism as a tool for translation, restraint, and moral imagination across contested borders.
In November 2025, Shahriar Khonsari was one of the scholars who responded to the call for abstracts for this journal’s special issue. His abstract was accepted, but because he lives in Tehran, Iran, following through was more complicated for him than for most contributors. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched massive strikes against his city and country. The Iranian government’s internet shutdowns temporarily cut off our communication with him. He nevertheless managed to submit a manuscript in March. Given the extraordinary circumstances, the editors decided that the standard review and revision process would be unreasonable. Furthermore, we knew that he would have valuable perspectives to offer that could not be captured in a standard academic article. Therefore, what follows is an edited interview with him by guest editor Cherian George. It is based on an email interview followed by a Zoom conversation conducted in mid-May 2026. It incorporates ideas from his submitted paper but also goes beyond, to discuss the challenges of critical scholarship in the midst of war.
This guest editor’s introduction to the special section “Essays on Nationalism, Conflict and Media” describes the current global context as one where old assumptions about the world lack credibility. The idea of the nation state as the building block of a less violent and more sustainable global order is strained to breaking point. But even as the need for cooperation across borders becomes more obvious, an anti-global, xenophobic nationalism seems only to have strengthened its ideological hold. The essays in this special section explore various dimensions of nationalism and conflict as they pertain to the media. Normatively, they are grounded in the universal humanist or cosmopolitan ideal of world citizenship. This introductory essay argues that not just media but also media scholarship should challenge the hegemony of the nation state, resisting the methodological nationalism that characterises most of the work in the field.
Despite laws, ownership structures and intimidation of media practitioners in Arab countries that render independent reporting extremely risky, digital media initiatives have sprung up across the region aimed at providing crucial insights into matters of public interest that are suppressed by state-controlled media. Blocked online and harassed offline by government forces, these initiatives survive against the odds, often working with cross-border support networks. Reflecting a range of innovative transnational interactions, such solidarity networks emerge when media practitioners pursue national concerns through regional and global alliances. This essay reviews noteworthy features of these interactions in light of an existing tradition of intra-regional cross-border exchange facilitated through shared language and history. It compares the pan-Arabism of independent public interest media with that of the mainstream in terms of its driving values and compatibility with a sense of pride in inclusive and pluralistic nationhood that rejects the sectarianism fuelling civil conflict. By reviewing examples of a multiplicity of different types of cross-border collaboration within the region and beyond, the essay concludes that the diversity of these connections and relationships strengthens a public interest media ecosystem that is otherwise quite fragile.
This article examines content moderation (CM) from a systems theoretical perspective as a form of communication control. Rather than pursuing normative or legal classifications, CM is understood as a practical problem within communicative systems. Three historical social figures – “chaperone”, “referee”, and “censor” – serve as heuristic reference points to illustrate different modes and problems of communication control: from interactive monitoring to organizational rule enforcement to societal regulation of what may be said. It becomes apparent that communication control always encounters conflicts of interest that mirror the frequently observed problems of content moderation: between visibility and invisibility, norm setting and norm enforcement, and inclusion and exclusion. The logic of digital communication (asynchrony, anonymity, and range) further intensifies these conflicts. The study concludes that CM must be understood as a practice whose conflicting goals cannot be conclusively resolved, but whose management itself becomes a persistent societal task.
This paper examines the Hungarian legislation, colloquially referred to as the “pedophile law,” and its implications for media regulation and LGBTQ rights. The law, which restricts the promotion of homosexuality and gender reassignment to minors, has sparked considerable controversy and prompted an infringement procedure by the European Commission. Through a critical analysis of this legislation and its enforcement mechanisms, this study discusses the tension between national sovereignty in media regulation and EU principles of human rights and non-discrimination. It also explores how the ambiguity of certain EU legal frameworks can be exploited by member states to justify and enact discriminatory measures under the pretext of child protection, with broader implications for democratic governance in Central and Eastern Europe.
This discussion engages with the collective volume Cosmopolitan Communication Studies: Toward Deep Internationalization. The editors and contributors call for a cosmopolitan reorientation of communication studies that transcends enduring Eurocentric biases. The proposed cosmopolitan approach advocates for inclusivity, context sensitivity, and the recognition of non-Western knowledge production as intellectually generative rather than derivative. By foregrounding comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, the volume seeks to make deep internationalization a practical and ethical academic endeavor. The dialogue with scholars from around the world underscores cosmopolitanism not merely as methodology but as a mindset—aiming to reduce epistemic violence, resist authoritarian instrumentalization, and foster genuine global interconnectedness in the production of communication scholarship.
Digital debates often seem to be characterized by hate, violence (and its glorification), and fake news, which is why we need to consider regulatory mechanisms as formal structures for political public spheres. Depending on our ideas of an ideal digital public sphere, we need to negotiate a balance between—and the conflict of—different positions and identities, broad participation by citizens, and, all in all, appropriate forms of interaction. Our contribution looks, from a democracy theory perspective, at suitable strategies for regulating debate in the public digital space and, as a first step, identifies the principles of deplatforming and transparency. Deplatforming makes it possible to deny access and a platform to radical, inhuman actors and positions. Transparency aims to represent a broad range of different positions and the associated counterarguments. Both approaches structure the public sphere and may be guided by different ideals of the public sphere. In our article, we explain both principles and classify them in terms of democratic theory. By embedding them in deliberative and radical democratic perspectives on the public sphere and its digital transformation, we ask: Do the two strategies tend to promote conflict or consensus? What is the significance of the two strategies in terms of democratic theory?
This introduction to the Global Media Journal – German Edition’s Special Section on content moderation critically examines the governance challenges of regulating online content in the digital age. It argues that the removal of content deemed illicit, detrimental or otherwise unacceptable by established standards is often framed as neutral gatekeeping even though it operates within contested power dynamics that lack rigorous and sound frameworks to assess its real-world impacts on freedom of expression, safety, and social justice. The authors highlight historical parallels to pre-modern censorship struggles following the invention of the printing press, emphasising that digital public spheres require forms of robust civility, not mere technical fixes. Current practices of content moderation reveal deep tensions: platforms increasingly employ automated systems for this endeavour, yet this risks amplifying harmful content and creating ethical dilemmas, while low-wage, high-stress labour conditions for human moderators (“clickworkers”) expose systemic exploitation. The Special Section addresses these gaps through four case studies.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is an open data space on the Internet. The number of websites accessible on the WWW is so vast that web search engines are essential as structuring and orientation tools for its use. However, content moderation does not occur only within social media; it has also long been practised in the context of web search engines, above all by Google as the dominant provider. This article analyses the process behind the creation of web search engine results pages—from the crawling of the WWW to the presentation of search results to the user—and identifies where automatic-algorithmic and manual content moderation are employed to improve the user experience. It emphasises that this not only creates technical biases but also deliberately influences the results of web searches from a political and corporate perspectives. Web search engines also play a special role due to their gatekeeping function with respect to the WWW, as they represent key nodes in the infosphere.
