This study examines how seven right-leaning media organizations utilize cross-platformization strategies to reach audiences across multiple platforms; in this case, Twitter and Truth Social. Focusing on both content volume and story packaging, we collect right-leaning media organizations’ social media posts and content from the 2022 U.S. midterm election. Combining computational and qualitative methods, we find that outlets posted only a small share of total stories across the two platforms and were selective in their content, often posting only on Twitter or Truth Social. For content posted on both platforms, the outlets posted content that ideologically aligned with the users of that platform. More specifically, right-leaning outlets on Truth Social tailored their posts to ideologically aligned users.
Social media is an important tool used by supporters of modern social movements to persuade others to participate. However, people who engage in online collective action often face speculation about their motives and may be perceived as acting for self-serving reasons. How do these perceptions impact the effectiveness of collective action? In three experiments ( N = 916), participants viewed posts (Study 1) or an immersive social media feed (Studies 2–3) where a user encouraged them to take action for a political cause. They stated that they acted out of genuine concern (autonomous motivation), to avoid guilt and social disapproval (controlled motivation), or did not specify (baseline). Participants who viewed controlled-motivated posts perceived the user as less autonomously motivated and were therefore less likely to socially identify as supporters or take collective action. Thus, movements will be more effective at mobilising (online) support when they are seen to arise from autonomous motives.
This article examines the contemporary digital audiobook through the lens of platformization and develops a conceptual framework for understanding platformized audiobook culture. Drawing on an integrative review of interdisciplinary scholarship, supplemented by market reports, industry statistics, and audience studies, it uses the German audiobook market as an analytically illuminating example through which broader processes of platformization can be explored. The article situates audiobooks within wider transformations of everyday digital media practices, highlighting the shift from physical formats toward downloads and subscription-based streaming services. Conceptually, it distinguishes platformized audiobook culture from digital audiobook culture through two complementary analytical perspectives adapted from book studies, digital publishing, and media and communication studies: an integrative platform model and a data-environment model of streaming services. Building on this synthesis, the article proposes an ecosystem model of platformized audiobook culture to support future theoretical and empirical research.
Little research has examined the role of specific technologies in relationships characterised by unequal power, such as those which underpin post-separation domestic and family violence. Drawing on the mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances and the methods of feature analysis, this study analyses 32 post-separation parenting apps along with in-depth interviews with 18 Australian victim–survivors who used these platforms with a perpetrator. We identify intended outcomes embedded in app design and contrast them with unintended outcomes emerging in practice. Analysis revealed that the design and promotional materials of the apps influence their use as a reinforcer of litigious mindsets and actions. This combination appears to change user behaviours, leading to communication becoming anticipatory and strategic with mixed outcomes.
While social media has become an indispensable tool for politicians’ communication with citizens and other stakeholders, emerging qualitative evidence suggests that its use may be associated with diminished well-being and reduced performance within the parliamentary arena – potentially undermining democratic processes. Combining insights from a representative survey study of politicians in Denmark ( n = 1233) with data on their observed social media usage (Facebook: 24,625 posts; Instagram: 13,019 posts), this study is the first to test the generalizability of this emerging evidence and advance our theoretical understanding of the conditions under which politicians’ social media usage is connected to stress. The study demonstrates a significant, positive correlation between politicians’ social media usage and self-reported stress symptoms and points to excessive usage as the primary explanation behind the association. Furthermore, exposure to online harassment is a crucial mediating factor in the association.
This article explores the connection between structurally induced precarity and the material practice of digital scrolling in the global north. It argues in favour of an expanded definition of precarity and that precarity, as a generalised affective condition, results in a state of totalising fear (fear which relates, at once, to discrete objects as well as the world itself). In that context, this article advances the claim that scrolling can be understood as an affective attachment (of the kind outlined by Lauren Berlant), developed in response to totalising fear, and which enables the subject to suspend time and to escape from conscious experience of precarity. In establishing this conclusion, the article also explores how the form of scrolling engenders an absorbing, passive and essentially ‘blank’ experience of the world, and how the attainment of this state is an expression of a limited, precarious mode of agency.
Algorithmic systems play an increasingly central role across a variety of social domains. Over the last few years, various concepts have been developed in the interdisciplinary field of algorithm studies to understand how people make sense of these systems and interact with them – including mental models of algorithms, folk theories of algorithms, or algorithmic imaginaries. This theoretical article engages with the concept of the algorithmic imaginary in particular. It argues that the concept of the algorithmic imaginary occupies a unique position in literature, foregrounding questions of affect and emotion in human-algorithm interaction, and theorising the dynamics of sense-making about algorithms in such terms. Critically examining work that has explicitly applied and developed the concept, we synthesise the scholarship, offer an updated definition, and pose critical questions for future research, including on emergent artificial intelligence phenomena.
Interaction with social media constitutes a significant part of children’s online experiences, with the potential for both positive and negative experiences. Social media platforms provide parental “supervision tools” as a mechanism for balancing children’s autonomy with safeguards, promoting this function to parents to ensure safer digital practices for their children. This research adopts a constructivist framework to investigate the evolution and operationalisation of parental supervision across Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Utilising qualitative methodology, this study combines archival data from an ethnographic walkthrough conducted in 2024, simulating a child’s and parent’s account for each platform. The cross-platform comparison reveals how platforms construct parental responsibility through their discursive and interface supervision mechanisms, expressed through macro-narratives, meso-contexts, and micro-practices. In doing so, platforms shift responsibility for regulation to parents as the accountable supervisory actors, while ultimately also controlling the supervision practices of these parents through the affordances and constraints offered through supervision tools.
Workers who plan, curate, and promote content fuel platforms’ traffic success, yet frequently experience their labor as leaving no meaningful trace. While critical scholarship links this estrangement to algorithmic management, how it reshapes the quality of workers’ relationship with their own labor remains underexplored. Drawing on Rosa’s Resonance Theory and 27 interviews with platform content operators at China’s leading internet companies, this study reveals how algorithmic management obstructs resonance across content production, distribution, and feedback. Quantification hollows out labor’s normative worth; black-boxing forecloses self-efficacy through the (un)controllability paradox; amplification and acceleration suspend the possibility of self-transformation, even amid measurable success. We conceptualize ‘algorithmic muteness’, which captures a relational state—workers maintain high-intensity, data-mediated contact with their labor, yet this contact rarely yields genuine responsiveness. Algorithmic muteness moves beyond documenting the static, structural consequences of algorithmic management (e.g. alienation, meaninglessness) to tracing the relational process producing them, while critically revealing algorithms’ deep entanglement with platform capital.
This study investigates how explanations in AI-driven news recommender systems (RS) influence user understanding, trust, and attitudes toward the RS, and whether these effects depend on individual differences in AI competence. An online experiment ( N = 754) was conducted in the Netherlands with a no-explanation condition as baseline. Results show that joint explanations significantly improved users’ objective understanding of the RS but had no consistent direct effects on perceived understanding, trust, or attitudes toward the RS. Exploratory structural equation modeling revealed an indirect pathway in which explanations enhanced objective understanding, which increased perceived understanding, subsequently fostering greater trust and more positive attitudes. Moderation analyses showed limited evidence for AI competence conditioning explanation effects, with small benefits concentrated among users with higher AI knowledge. Together, these findings suggest that explanations in news RS are not universally effective: their effects appear to operate primarily through cognitive mechanisms, while competence-related differences remain limited and selective.
In an era of digital ubiquity, organizations increasingly face challenges of capturing, managing, and channeling the limited attention of workers. This study examines interdependent patterns of attention allocation on a social technology platform. We collected digital traces and personnel records from a European aviation company and analyzed 56,502 time-stamped communicative events of 3346 workers using bipartite relational event models. The findings show that structural and temporal mechanisms of attention dynamics collectively shape worker engagement on the platform: popular threads are more likely to attract additional attention; workers tend to engage in threads where their colleagues are active; workers revisit threads they have previously participated in; and highly active workers are inclined to contribute to less popular threads. This study offers a conceptual and analytic frame that demonstrates the value of viewing social technology platforms as an interdependent network of workers making decisions as to how to allocate limited attention resources.
Digital platforms are increasingly offering new employment and social participation opportunities for people with disabilities (PWDs). This study examines the intersections of digital platforms, disability, and masculinity in China. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnography with 12 disabled male food delivery riders, it explores how platform-based delivery work serves as a site to negotiate masculinity and social recognition. The findings indicate that platforms not only offer relatively accessible and flexible income opportunities, enabling participants to engage in socially valued work and gendered responsibility, but also mobilize aspirational discourses that promise future inclusion and moral recognition while demanding intensified temporal discipline, bodily endurance, and the willingness to “eat bitterness.” Thus, digital platforms constitute an ambivalent space where inclusion and constraint coexist, enabling gendered self-formation while introducing new forms of discipline. Ultimately, this study calls for greater attention to the challenges faced by PWDs in digital labor.
Content creators invest extensive effort in “learning the algorithm” to secure visibility and growth. While existing research documents the proliferation of folk theories and optimization strategies, less attention has been paid to the structural conditions under which such learning unfolds. Drawing on a computational analysis of 179 YouTube videos discussing the platform’s algorithm, this article identifies recurring interpretive patterns that frame visibility as optimizable through metrics, strategic adjustment, and disciplined self-management. This paper argues that attempts at algorithmic learning are sustained by an asymmetry between epistemic agency – the capacity to interpret metrics and hypothesize about system behavior, and effective agency – the capacity to reliably influence outcomes. Because large-scale machine-learning systems are probabilistic, multi-objective, and continuously recalibrated, effective control remains systemically indeterminate. This asymmetry produces governance through responsibilization: creators internalize responsibility for unstable outcomes, sustaining engagement because the system appears responsive while remaining structurally uncontrollable.
Digital platforms have become central infrastructures of contemporary populism, shaping how actors communicate, mobilise supporters and contest democratic norms. This article offers a systematic, cross-disciplinary review of empirical research on digital populism published between 2015 and early 2025. Analysing 188 studies from political communication, media studies and political science, we map how platform affordances structure populist communication, how digital populism is conceptualised and how it is studied. The literature portrays digital populism as the communicative enactment of populist ideology in environments that privilege personalisation, affective intensity and direct leader–follower engagement. Methods span qualitative, computational and experimental designs, with research concentrated on Twitter/X and Facebook. Most studies examine exclusionary, right-wing cases in European and Western contexts and associate them with polarisation, misinformation and declining institutional trust. Evidence remains largely correlational, and inclusionary or participatory variants are underexplored. We identify key gaps and call for greater analytical precision in assessing democratic consequences.
To explore the strengthening role of influencer marketing agencies, this study turns its focus away from creators to the ‘backstage’ of feminised social media work. Using an algorithmic ethnographic approach informed by critical feminist inquiry, this study investigates how influencer marketing agencies’ data practices shape content creation. Through observation and content analysis of creator events, staff meetings, briefings, webinars and other educational material, as well as interviews with staff members, three distinct categories connected with data practices were recognised: anticipation, adaptation and negotiation. It is argued that while influencer agencies negotiate between creation and platform control, they only rarely resist the algorithmic logics of platforms or negotiate practices to fit their ideals instead of adapting to platforms and their business models. Situating agencies’ daily work within the larger historical tradition of advertising, commodification of audiences and feminised labour, this study offers pathways for understanding how influencer marketing shapes social media today.
Social exclusion threatens fundamental needs (i.e. belonging, self-esteem, meaningful existence, and control) and impairs emotional well-being. Previous research on media as a tool to mitigate these detrimental effects has predominantly focused on traditional devices, leaving the role of immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), underexplored. Our preregistered laboratory experiment ( N = 114) investigates whether VR-based coping facilitates need restoration and emotion regulation compared to conventional 2D media. After inducing ostracism via Cyberball, participants watched a short video of a social interaction on either a VR headset or a 2D screen. Whereas both coping conditions yielded comparable increases in emotional well-being, VR exposure led to significantly higher need restoration than the same video presented in 2D. Mediation analyses indicated indirect effects of VR exposure on both need restoration and emotion regulation via spatial presence, but not via social presence or self-presence. These findings underscore VR’s potential as an effective coping tool following social exclusion.
This article examines the viral TikTok trend #NationalityOfMen—a seemingly trivial Effect that invites users to rank men from 10 “nationalities.” Extending scholarship on racialized beauty standards and digital media, we systematically scrutinize the cyber ecosystem that reproduces hierarchical racialized masculinity in this trend: the Effect’s interface and design, the user’s instantiation of the Effect, and TikTok’s platform affordances. Employing Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, we identify the artifacts, practices, and beliefs embedded in these interlocking components. We argue that the Effect operates as a neoliberal racial project by encoding racial misrepresentation, enshrining racialized sorting, and enshrouding racialized desirability. Under the illusion of choice, users become “unwitting constituents” reproducing color lines of racialized masculinity, although some mobilize strategic essentialism for racial empowerment. TikTok’s architecture shields accountability and engenders “cybertypes” unchecked. We propose the notion of “entertainment laundering” to describe how online entertainment activities insidiously whitewash racist content playfully, performatively, and publicly.
Digital platforms increasingly structure how workers communicate, construct identity, and express dissent under algorithmic governance. While gig work research has emphasized precarity and control, less attention has been paid to how identity and voice are negotiated within workers’ online communities. Drawing on Communication Theory of Identity (CTI), this study examines how Gojek drivers in Indonesia construct personal, relational, and communal identities in Facebook-based communities. Combining social network and computational content analysis, the findings show that expression is unevenly distributed and shaped by network position and community norms. Central actors exhibit greater discursive flexibility, while peripheral members experience constrained and conditional voice. These findings demonstrate that algorithmic power operates through communicative and relational structures, producing identity gaps and mediated inequality in platform-based work.
Personalized digital mourning platforms are gaining increasing acceptance among the Chinese public. This study employs a mixed-methods approach combining virtual ethnography and in-depth interviews to explore how digital mourning, as a novel form of mourning, influences death memory established upon traditional Chinese death rituals. The study finds that digital mourning platforms drive the digital transformation of traditional Chinese death rituals through three mechanisms: creating digital tombs, quantifying mourning rituals, and visualizing mourning emotions. However, this process blurs the boundaries between death-related mourning activities and daily life. The erosion of mourning sentiments by capitalist logic and the dissolution of death-mourning culture through performative rituals are gradually undermining the social foundations upon which traditional Chinese death memory is built. Currently, digital mourning is only gradually accepted by the Chinese public as a new form of traditional death commemoration. It has not fundamentally driven the modernization of traditional Chinese death rituals nor profoundly impacted traditional death-mourning ceremonies and death memories. Nevertheless, examining the digital transformation of death mourning reveals both its value in advancing the transformation of traditional Chinese death memory and the endogenous crises it triggers. This holds significant practical implications for China, a society undergoing deep aging, in promoting modern funeral reforms and implementing cultural transformation.
