The implementation of warning labels has been shown to slow the spread of harmful content on social media, but the mechanisms by which these interventions affect individuals' sharing decisions are not yet known. This study sought to establish the efficacy of these interventions and to explore the mechanisms of their influence using two parallel studies conducted within the United States: an online

Fact checkers have low reach, and their limited efficacy is often attributed to perceived partisanship. Yet little research exists investigating the reach of or engagement with fact checkers among their intended audiences. We argue that given their small audience size, fact checkers’ usage is likely driven by heavy media users regardless of their partisan leanings. We examined a slice of Twitter (X)

Discussions of risk in qualitative research tend to focus on risks to research participants. However, qualitative researchers also face risks—or uncertainties with potential for harm—because they serve as the research instrument. Communication researchers are uniquely suited to problematize the meaning of risk and extend theory about what risk is by noting that risk is subjective and communicatively

Psychological reactance theory is an important theoretical framework that explains resistance to persuasive messages. However, research has shown inconsistencies regarding the effects of reactance on persuasion, the operational treatment of reactance, and the manipulation of threatening language. This meta-analysis (k = 35, combined N = 10,658) consolidates findings from research on psychological reactance

Whether perceived message effectiveness (PME) can be diagnostic for the differences of actual message effect (AME) in campaign message pretesting and how the diagnosticity of PME should be tested have been controversial. To address these issues, we conducted a survey involving 19 campaign messages (N = 760) and statistically analyzed the multilevel relationships among the between-message, within-message

In recent years, the scholarly critique of tech power as a form of digital colonialism has gained prominence. Scholars from various disciplines—including communication, law, computer science, anthropology, and sociology—have turned to this idea (or related ones such as tech colonialism, data colonialism, and algorithmic colonization) to conceptualize the harmful impact of digital technologies globally

Media effects research has observed significant diversity in the effects of social media on adolescent well-being, with outcomes ranging from positive to negative and, in some cases, neutral effects. In an effort to comprehend and elucidate this diversity, we have formulated The Swiss Cheese Model of Social Cues, a theoretical framework that systematically categorizes potential sources contributing

News organizations have been under financial pressure to streamline their activities for decades. Critics argue that this pressure undermines the quality of news, posing a severe threat to democracy. However, the effects of media consolidation on news quality are theoretically ambiguous and empirical evidence is scarce. To address this gap, we study the case of the Swedish newspaper industry between

The “queer vanguard” theorizes how Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and other television streaming platforms articulated intersectional lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and nonbinary (LGBTQ+) representations with attributes of narrative complexity, hipness, prestige, and authenticity in pursuit of subscribers. Streamers reworked branding strategies innovated in the 1980s and 1990s by cable and

Many families in the United States hold divergent political beliefs, which may cause relational issues between parents and affect the political socialization of their child(ren). Through a mixed-methods approach, we first assess data from in-depth interviews (N = 30) with parents in cross-cutting romantic relationships, or relationships where partners hold different political beliefs, to inductively

Drawing from theory about rumination, we examine the impact of verbal rumination over time and in conjunction with co-rumination in online health communities. Our analyses show that when users verbally ruminated in a message starting a thread (compared to when they did not), they were more likely to again verbally ruminate and to report a negative mood in the next thread they started. These relationships

This article conducts a discourse analysis of continuously collected screenshot data capturing responses from US mobile users and their broader ecosystems to a series of Daesh (ISIS) terrorist attacks in Europe and North Africa in 2017. It identifies four genres of mediatized rituals in observed responses. Three micro-ritual genres focus on individual reparative action detached from systemic analysis

This article analyses the global dominance of three U.S.-based platforms (Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Netflix) on the streaming market. It investigates their reconfiguring of the TV industry around a global value chain, akin to other highly globalized industries, and characterized by the presence of a few lead firms operating in multiple markets and leveraging hundreds of suppliers worldwide.

People are frequently exposed to different extents of affective and cognitive appeals, but it remains unclear whether appeals targeting emotions or beliefs are differentially effective across cultures. Hence, this meta-analysis investigates the relative influence of affective versus cognitive appeals for persuasion outcomes as a function of individualism-collectivism. Using 133 samples across 22 countries

Despite the potential of visual disinformation to deceive people on pressing socio-political issues, we currently lack an understanding of how online visual disinformation (de)legitimizes partisan truth claims at times of war. As an important next step in disinformation theory and research, this article inductively mapped a wide variety of global visual disinformation narratives on armed conflicts

Changing levels of public trust in the news are of deep concern to both researchers and practitioners. We use data from 2015 to 2023 in 46 countries to explore how trust in news has changed, while also exploring the links with sociodemographic variables, differences by media system, and changing patterns of news use. We find that (a) there has been a small overall decline in trust in news since 2015

Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, Turkey, this article explores the affective attachments circulating around urban spaces of journalism in Istanbul, with particular attention to how experiences of urban life shape journalists’ imaginaries of their relationship to each other, the city, their audience, and the broader “public” of Turkey. This article considers how journalistic

This study investigates how U.S. Fortune 500 corporate social advocacy (CSA) discourse on multiple contentious issues is associated with public attention on Twitter/X. Our theoretical framework elucidates three discourse types and conceptualizes the diversity, structure, and stability of discourse coalition networks. Utilizing computational methods and dynamic network analysis of 43,791 corporate tweets

This study examines racial diversity in co-authorship in articles published in communication journals and its association with citations accrued over time. We analyzed 76,217 publications from 73 communication journals, spanning from 1990 to 2023, with a focus on racial diversity in authorship as an indicator of collaboration diversity. Our results reveal that diversity is positively associated with

Collaborative work represents a communicative context in which organizational actors navigate the blurring of knowledge and authority boundaries as they address complex problems. This article theorizes about expertise tension that arises when individuals with valuable insights lack corresponding authority to act, or vice versa. Using observations and interviews, we studied how physicians and nurses

Political satire is often believed to enrich the public sphere in ways distinct from traditional journalism. This study examines whether deliberative qualities of online political talk in response to satire differ from those in response to regular news or partisan news. The analysis focuses on four normative standards: interactivity, diversity, rationality, and civility. A manual content analysis of

While numerous studies have documented an association between mainstream media trust and mainstream media use, only little is known about potential causal mechanisms underlying the association. We theorize that selective exposure, social influence, and the reinforcing spirals model offer three possible mechanisms that may underlie the association. These possibilities were studied using random intercept

In this article, we review Alice Marwick’s book, The Private is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media, published by Yale University Press in 2023. In the book, Marwick argues that the digital nature of the social media landscape fundamentally changes contemporary notions of privacy. We trace three specific elements of her argument, namely: (1) the design of networked technologies to connect

This research evaluates news during the first year of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in order to examine how European publics made sense of the Roma, the largest and most marginalized ethnic community on the continent. Based on the analysis of news in English, French, Italian, and Romanian, the study finds that much of the coverage across national and cultural boundaries translated marginalization

Communicating statistics is challenging and fraught with mis-contextualization and causal misattributions. Can we train the public against statistical misrepresentations? Pre-emptive interventions against misinformation primarily include literacy tips/training and inoculation. In theory, inoculation has an additional motivational component (forewarning). However, forewarning has not been directly tested

Relational turbulence theory (RTT) suggests that people perceive their romantic relationships as turbulent when they experience interactions that manifest the deleterious effects of relational uncertainty and altered patterns of interdependence. RTT also positions communication in these episodes as associated with subsequent relational uncertainty and qualities of interdependence. Using three-wave

Has there been an inflation in crisis coverage in newspapers over the last centuries, and if so, what structural factors drive this change? We utilize computational text analyses along with our own signal detection algorithm to measure the presence of crisis keywords and the emergence of crisis news waves. An analysis of crisis coverage in The Times (U.K., 1785–2020, 183,239 news stories) shows that

Social media transform and complicate nonprofit organizations’ (NPOs) traditional communication to engage and lead stakeholders for collective action. Stakeholders can self-organize for connective action on social media and form stakeholder networks of varied potential and structures that NPOs may leverage for collective goals. Facing such networks, NPOs may communicate in diverse ways to accommodate

Storytelling is a human universal. The ubiquity of stories and the rapid development in Artificial Intelligence (AI) pose important questions: can AI like ChatGPT tell engaging and persuasive stories? If so, what makes a narrative engaging and persuasive? Three pre-registered experiments comparing human-generated narratives from existing research and the ChatGPT-generated versions using descriptions

Given the potential for media portrayals to affect adolescents’ cognitions regarding risk behaviors and the importance of message interpretation processes, this study investigates how adolescents give meaning to media portrayals of risk behavior (e.g., alcohol, smoking, drugs, sex, and reckless behavior) and which factors play a role within this process through 7 focus groups followed by 50 individual

Researchers often use attribution theory to understand how people make sense of messages. Unlike the ephemeral actions typically investigated using attribution frameworks, messages can persist. Our study observed how persistence influences the harmfulness of messages and how people levy blame upon harmful posters and those ostensibly obligated and capable of intervening. Grounded in the path model

Consuming media entertainment often challenges recipients’ self-control. While past research related self-control almost exclusively to whether individuals engage in media use, it might be equally relevant for the disengagement from media use. Testing core assumptions of the Appraisal of Media Use, Self-Control, and Entertainment (AMUSE) model, the present study investigates the situational interplay

Rapid innovations in media technologies have ushered in diverse entertainment avenues, including politically oriented content, presenting both novel opportunities and societal challenges. This study delves into the implications of the burgeoning deepfake phenomenon, particularly focusing on audience interpretation and engagement with deepfake parodies, a quintessential example of “misinfotainment.”

The persisting legacies of colonialism have called for scholars to be more active in their efforts to dismantle and decenter the normative foundations of Whiteness in scholarly practices. This article examines the intersectional structures of authorship and collaboration patterns among scholarly teams within five flagship Communication journals. We used a bibliometric analysis to examine the race,

This qualitative research draws on language and social interaction (LSI) approaches to consider how speech culture shapes the practice of deliberation in a country presumed to be a challenging environment for deliberative practices: Israel. Our analysis examines structured deliberative forums conducted by communication students in Israel, to demonstrate how participants reference, use, and orient to

Social entities are linked and interdependent through shared members, a phenomenon described as niche overlap. Using archival data on yearly affiliations of International Communication Association (ICA) members with divisions and interest groups over a 9-year period, this study conducts a longitudinal network analysis to examine the formation mechanisms of intra-organizational niche overlap among organizational

This study extends the communication theory of resilience (CTR) by examining social networks that facilitate resilience for refugee-oriented humanitarian organizations (ROHOs). This study draws on a network survey and interviews from ROHOs in the United States and South Korea during the height of coronavirus disease 2019. Results illuminate how refugees, generally seen as the subject of concern, become

The representation of the LGBTIQ+ community in TV series has received major attention from academia, mostly from textual and reception perspectives. However, the creative and industrial processes behind the production of media content, including the writers’ views and experiences, remain under-explored, especially outside of the United States and Northern Europe. Drawing on Queer Production Studies

Contemporary activism media research, largely focused on digital media's technological and discursive aspects, often lacks comparative studies and tends to overlook institutional or cultural factors in communication for social change (CSC). This study addresses these gaps by examining advocates’ sensemaking and communication praxis in contexts shaped by different advocacy traditions and sociocultural

Fairytales may represent a unique genre of media well-suited to depict feminine traits as valuable to characters of all genders by positioning traditionally feminine-coded traits as sources of strength and power to characters in fairytale plots. To examine this theoretical supposition, this study examines the association between indices of female empowerment (United States), modern audience ratings

Using national probability data from the 2022 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, the present study evaluated whether moderators of the association between frequency of pornography exposure and condomless sex are consistent with the sexual script acquisition, activation, application model’s (3AM) suppositions about the facilitating effects of wishful identification and decreased self-regulation

This study examines how diverse US-based journalists—both Black, Indigenous, and people of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer [or sometimes questioning] and others—perform their diversity within newsrooms. Applying Goffman’s theory of dramaturgy, the study illustrates the nuanced differences in terms of how journalists perform their diverse identities differently on both the frontstage

How can we empower social media users to better discern the veracity of news and share less false news? This survey experiment (N = 636) assessed the effectiveness of two interventions—signing a Pro-Truth Pledge and utilizing a Fact-Checking Guide. Results showed that utilizing the Fact-Checking Guide increased skepticism of news posts, likelihood to verify news posts, verification engagement, and

Using dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM; Asparouhov et al., 2018), this study tests how partner disruptions of daily routines create a chaotic relational state through intensified emotions directed at partners, as posited by relational turbulence theory (RTT; Solomon et al., 2016). To test this affective process, individuals in dating relationships (N = 130) completed daily surveys for 30

Studies point to a significantly higher prevalence of mental health issues among academics compared to most other working populations. However, we know relatively little about the situation within the field of media and communication studies. Based on an international survey of 1028 researchers within this field, we found mental health issues to be widespread. Early career researchers, women, and those

Managing parental substance use disorder (SUD) within the family context is a collaborative effort. For families with multiple children, the sibling relationship might be one source of support for dealing with this stressor. Findings from a sample of adult siblings with parents with SUD highlighted that they (a) experience five resilience triggers, (b) utilize self and other communicative resilience

In recent decades, disruptive media events, such as major terrorist attacks, have gained increasing relevance in news coverage around the world. Despite the growing importance of such globally broadcast media events, little research to date has examined cross-national variation in event coverage or the predictors of this variation. This study examines news coverage about the 9/11 terror attacks in

The wide use of virtual communication has raised a need to understand its effect on communication effectiveness and the ways its different forms influence users’ information processing. To that end, this study proposes the Dynamical Interpersonal Communication Systems Model and posits that the amount of information directly perceived affects individual and dyadic information processing. This proposition

Nature documentaries are an entertaining and informative genre that appears well-suited to environmental communication. However, producers of nature documentaries face a dilemma: Although they aim to inspire their audiences to act pro-environmentally, they fear ruining viewers’ entertainment experience if they address environmental destruction. Hence, conventional nature documentaries solely portray

Framing, a prominent communication theory, is often lamented as a fractured paradigm, leading some to offer radical changes to its conceptualization, operationalization, and application. Using a meta-theoretical and computational approach, we analyze three decades of framing research to examine academic silos, specializations, the canon’s formation, gender inequalities, authors’ origins, countries

In this essay, we set forth the theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement (TCD). The TCD is useful for exploring the ramifications of the hegemonic ideologies which constrain and afford our everyday lives, and which are constructed and reflected in disenfranchising talk (DT). The TCD also asks what communication mechanisms work to reify and resist these hegemonic ideologies. We first introduce the

Exemplars are central in news reporting. However, extreme negative exemplars can bias citizens’ factual perceptions and attributions of political responsibility. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the factors shaping journalistic preferences for including exemplars in news stories is limited. We investigate the extent to which educational socialization, psychological biases, and editorial policy shape journalistic

Communication research has been one of the fastest-growing disciplines across the social sciences over the last two decades in terms of the numbers of Social Science Citation Indexed journals and articles. However, whether Communication is an independent discipline remains debated. Of various criticisms, one extreme considers Communication too dependent on other disciplines, whereas the other regards

Characters play an integral role in animated narratives, but their visual racial presentation has received limited attention. A diverse group of U.S. children watched a 15-min physical activity-promoting animated Sci-Fi narrative. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, which varied the lead characters' racial presentation: realistic racially unambiguous (Original: White children, Black

Digital innovation is the future of work. The ongoing and interlinked transformation of digital technologies, work, communication, and organizing raises important theoretical questions. Integrating recombination-based innovation theory and institutional theory of communication, this article contributes a novel framework that specifies the theoretical linkages between macro-level institutions and digital

How do terrorists persuade otherwise decent citizens to join their violent causes? Guided by early mass communication research investigating propaganda’s efficacy and the model of intuitive morality and exemplars, we investigated the persuasive moral appeals employed by terrorist organizations known to be successful at recruiting others to their causes. We compiled a database of N = 873 propaganda

This article considers the Turing test as a problem of communication, particularly by asking how the language of artificial intelligence (AI) appears to human experience in comparison to the language of the Other. This question is approached through Levinas’ philosophy, by considering the possibility of AI as an absolute alterity, rather than reducing its alterity to the Same. This perspective diverges

This study offers a critical test of two competing theoretical accounts of message repetition effects—processing fluency and message fatigue—which have yet to be examined together under a coherent framework. Furthermore, integrating research on metacognition and motivated processing, we propose audience favorability toward message advocacy as a crucial moderator in this dynamic. A repeated-exposure

Social media users often push back against harmful rhetoric with satirical and aggressive counterspeech. How do the interconnected race and gender identities of the person posting counterspeech and the person viewing it impact evaluations of the comment? Across two online experiments, we manipulate the race (Black or White) and gender (man or woman) of an individual whose tweet opposes ignorance about

The rapid deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled AI agents to take on various roles as communicators, such as virtual assistants, robot journalists, and AI doctors. This study meta-analyzed 121 randomized experimental studies (N = 53,977) that compared the effects of AI and human agency on persuasion outcomes, including perceptions, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. The