In the U.S. the availability of news information has grown exponentially while trust in traditional sources of news and information has declined. Amid this high-information, low-trust environment, many now advocate for doing your own research (DYOR) to discern accurate claims from false, misleading, or biased information. The perception that it is better to do one's own research has important implications for information seeking and attitudes toward mainstream news and journalism. In this study, we use a panel survey to investigate DYOR perceptions in the context of the 2020 U.S. election. We find that DYOR perceptions are associated with decreased nonpartisan news use, decreased belief accuracy, and more negative attitudes toward media, highlighting how information skepticism may be contributing to adversarial views toward mainstream media and expertise. Results suggest that such perceptions encourage negative views of news media and may contribute to distrust of public institutions.
Existing research shows that voters in established democracies often fail to penalize politicians who violate democratic norms, as many are willing to trade democratic principles for partisan interests in polarized environments. Yet such partisan double standards remain underexplored in East Asia, where countries share authoritarian legacies, face ongoing risks of democratic backsliding, and operate under the geopolitical shadow of powerful authoritarian neighbors. Using a large-scale vignette experiment conducted in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States (N = 10,194), this study examines whether voters sanction politicians who engage in democratic norm violations. We focus on reactions to three types of undemocratic statements: election denial, protest suppression, and attacks on the judiciary. The results show that voters in East Asian democracies impose stronger penalties than their American counterparts, though the degree and pattern of accountability differ across cases. Election denial consistently generates the strongest sanctions, while Japan and Taiwan show robust reactions across all scenarios. South Korea displays comparatively modest responses to protest suppression, and the United States shows the weakest effects overall. These findings highlight both the resilience and the heterogeneity of democratic accountability in East Asia and underscore the need to understand regional variation when assessing the prospects for democratic stability.
This paper explores how the discourse surrounding a racially marginalized community becomes politicized via culture war narratives across platforms. Drawing from identity politics and political polarization research, we discuss how racial justice discourse can be hijacked by partisan opinion leaders and their followers over time and explain how this process plays out through both differentiated and coordinated social media platform use. Situating our discussion in the "woke" discourse as originated within the Black Twitter community, we collect data from 2012 through 2022 on Twitter and YouTube and apply user- and content-level computational analyses. Results show that the term "woke" has been increasingly amplified in culture war conversations on both platforms over time. However, the two platforms exhibited differences: culture war topics dominated on Twitter, while conservative news and commentary channels were most prevalent on YouTube. These two platforms were also interrelated in the politicization process. YouTube was a top domain within external links embedded in tweets, and Twitter was also a top destination within the external links embedded in YouTube video descriptions. Conservatives were especially keen on sharing right-wing content across platforms, from YouTube to Twitter, suggesting the success of cross-platform coordination in amplifying culture wars. Both theoretical and political implications for polarization on social media are discussed.
Televised debates between political candidates have become dynamic, interactive events on live-streaming platforms where audiences form affective publics through real-time interactions and emotional expressions in live chat. In this study, we focused on real-time emotional contagion on a right-wing YouTube channel during the live-streamed 2024 U.S. presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Examining how multimodal emotional expressions from candidates influence audience responses in live chats (N = 53,095), this study introduces a novel, multi-dimensional approach combining computational techniques, including face emotion recognition, speech emotion analysis, text emotion classification, and time series analysis, to analyze multimodal emotional cues across audio, video, and chat data. Results revealed that Harris' vocal fear Granger-caused an increase in joy in the live chat, and that emotional contagion patterns varied by user engagement level and political leaning: low-engagement users were primarily influenced by the candidates, whereas higher-engagement users were more influenced by peer emotions. Pro-Trump audiences' joy was amplified by Harris's vocal sadness; among pro-Harris audiences, anger increased in response to Harris's vocal sadness and the moderators' facial sadness, while joy increased in response to Trump's facial sadness. Negative public emotions including sadness and anger also reinforced joy in the live chat. These findings offer new insights into the role of emotional contagion in mobilizing online affective publics during live-streamed political events.
Political influencers are an emerging epistemic authority in politics. Yet, existing scholarship risks conceptually misspecifying them by focusing on their political nature and neglecting their communicative practices established in broader social media influencer literature. This article advances a theoretical intervention to reintegrate influencer studies into the study of political influencers in political communication. Drawing on the media logic tradition, we discuss "influencer media logic" as communication principles that distinguish political influencers from other political media actors and that underpin their persuasiveness. We discuss three principles of influencer media logic, authenticity, intimacy, and platform expertise, and their contribution to restructuring visibility, credibility, and trust in politics. By foregrounding these communicative practices, we address the limitations of existing conceptualizations and clarify mechanisms of influence beyond the political aspect of their content. We discuss research directions to systematically study political influencers and examine their implications for political communication and democratic engagement.
