The governance of online speech is increasingly a battleground shaped by competing social expectations. This study investigates TikTok’s content moderation in Indonesia and Pakistan, two countries with vast market potential and delicate social and moral stances. Through document analysis and in-depth interviews with government officials, industry representatives, and civil society experts, it examines

Research suggests that social media can cause users, especially young adults, to overestimate their knowledge about climate change. Knowledge overestimation may then lead users to communicate more frequently about climate change with others. We test these hypotheses with a four-wave panel survey of respondents aged 18–29 years. We find that social media exposure is positively associated with respondents’

In this multi-platform, comparative study, we analyze social media messages from political candidates ( N = 1,517) running for Congress during the 2022 U.S. Midterm election. We collect data from seven social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Truth Social, Gettr, Instagram, YouTube, and Rumble over the 4 weeks before and after election day. With this unique dataset of posts, we apply computational

Digital platforms have long been understood as important spaces where identity performance takes place with networks and interpersonal interaction forming the basis of many theoretical approaches to self. Due to TikTok’s distinctive technical structure, scholars have argued that processes of sociality and identity construction have changed, calling into question some of the founding principles of how

Digital activists play a pivotal role in fostering local democracy, civic participation, and social advocacy across sub-Saharan Africa. Using technological, social, and discursive layers of communication, these activists navigate complex socio-political environments to amplify marginalized voices and facilitate local governance dialogues. Platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook enable real-time communication

TikTok has become an important digital space for solidarity among underrepresented groups. However, it is also a space where stereotypes and offensive jokes are proliferated through unique affordances such as “Use This Sound.” For this study, I focused on Black-Asian multiracials known as “Blasians” and how they used TikTok. I analyzed 56 videos, 47 by Blasian creators and nine by non-Blasian creators

This article examines social media’s role in the “online-offline nexus,” focusing on how digital interactions translate into sustained, large-scale, right-wing protests. Using Brazil as a case study, the research combines document analysis with non-participant observation in open right-wing Telegram groups and participant observation at the largest of Brazil’s 100 protest camps. At this camp in Brasília

In the everyday context, the term “hate speech” has become increasingly politicized and emotionally charged, yet these vernacular constructions of hate speech remain under-explored. Used as both a rhetorical weapon and an object of genuine concern, various understandings of hate speech circulate within interactive everyday cultures of digital media, shaped by the digitalised media environment. With

Digital social interactions differ in many ways from face-to-face interactions. This study examines four preregistered hypotheses on the within-person interplay between interaction mode (i.e., digital vs. face-to-face interactions), interaction quality, and momentary well-being. Young adults from Spain ( N 1 = 216) and the Netherlands ( N 2 = 22)—provided 5,116 and 1,386 Ecological Momentary Assessments

Emotionally charged messages can distort truth perception, and recent research highlights the impact of emotional language on news beliefs. While past studies have focused on emotional valence, the role of emotional arousal in shaping beliefs remains underexplored, particularly regarding its long-term effects. This research investigates both immediate and delayed beliefs in response to headlines with

This study revisits the original four research questions of Williams et al.’s “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games” to investigate if mainstream videogame representations have changed over time. In addition, this study expands on the original by including a fifth question examining the intersection of representations within videogames. Using a sample of the top

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

Resilience to disinformation on social media relies on the user’s ability to critically assess disinformation and even counter it. Active users, who, with their actions, can curate the information environment of others, can play a crucial role in stopping the dissemination of disinformation. Their activities, such as correcting or reporting, in the decentralized social media environment may prove more

This article investigates how social media can enable and constrain civil society organizations’ (CSOs) discharge of accountability. Based on a comparative analysis of the Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (X) posts of the Swedish Red Cross during 1 year ( N = 1014), we propose a framework of affordances that illustrate how platform features, practices, norms, and perceptions about audiences jointly

Grassroots activism constitutes the backbone of civil society across political regimes. While many studies explored the role of social media and digital platforms in social movements, we focus on the ways local activists use these social media platforms to organize collectively against unwanted urban development. Localized (place-based) contention differs from large-scale social movements: it is less

In developing and least developed economies, traditional and spatially bound communities play a critical role in bridging the gap when formal social welfare systems fall short in meeting essential needs. While the role of traditional communities in addressing societal issues is well recognized, research on imagined communities as agents of social welfare is a new and rapidly developing area of study

Wayfair, an American furniture and home goods retailer, garnered sudden attention across social media in 2020, particularly Twitter and Reddit, due to a conspiracy theory linking the company to child trafficking. The short-lived, well-delineated nature of this theory, coupled with its simultaneous emergence across multiple platforms, makes it a distinct case for studying the dynamics of online conspiracy

Online hostility poses a growing societal challenge, yet quantitative evidence on how social media users respond to different kinds of hostility targeting different identities is limited, even though insights into bystander perceptions are detrimental to combat the online hate endemic. This online experiment ( N = 461) examines cognitive (perceived acceptability), affective (negative emotions), and

We gain exposure to news across a range of platforms and, within each platform, across a range of sources. How does a multi-platform media environment shape the news choices we make and the gaps that result from those choices? We address this question tracking news exposure across TV, the web, and YouTube for approximately 55,000 unique US panelists over a period of 39 months. We find important variations

Media coverage of political actors and debates is a crucial avenue for voters to learn about political parties and their policies. However, nowadays party-media agenda-setting is increasingly shaped by large-scale transformations and the fragmentation of political communication across various party channels (e.g., press releases, social media, speeches) and media types (e.g., newspapers, television

Journalists’ social media use is a recent example of long-standing gaps between journalistic discourse and journalistic practice. This manuscript applies the sociological concept of rationalization to explain the persistence of this gap, theorizing that the need for rational explanations of one’s work is so powerful for journalists that they offer one description publicly, or to their bosses, while

Using a comprehensive dataset of over 160,000 public TikTok accounts and more than 16 million videos, this study indicates a notable increase in political TikTok video content from 2019 to 2023, with a peak around the 2020 US presidential election. The network analysis reveals distinct clusters of politically homogeneous networks or “political echo chambers” where users were exposed to attitude-consistent

While digital platforms foster a sense of community and identity, they also facilitate harmful exclusionary practices. In this context, toxic and hateful speech are key mechanisms not only for harming others but also marking processes of othering and belonging. In this article, we examine the role of hateful and toxic speech in structuring processes of in- and out-group formation and maintenance by

A few social media platforms have come to play a central role in civil society organizing, often functioning as organizing partners. But on whose terms? As organizing partners, commercial social media platforms shape the conditions under which civil society actors organize, also shaping organizational dynamics, visibility, and collective action. Far from being neutral partners, these platforms become

The author of this article contends that current digital research methodologies tend to extract and commodify knowledge in ways that can replicate social, cultural, racial, economic, and global inequities. This article presents an Indigenous approach to digital methodology, including examples of posts to Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky, as well as algorithmic search results. Finally, the author discusses

This editorial introduces the Social Media + Society special issue “Comparative Approaches To Studying Privacy.” Recognizing the importance of privacy in today’s digital societies and volatile political and regulatory environments, the editorial highlights the pressing need for comparative research on the topic and describes the articles in this special issue. The special issue addresses the theoretical

Situated within the theoretical work of Giddens and others on the role of expertise in contemporary society, this article evaluates the Instagram accounts of six dating-themed influencers. We seek to understand the role and strategies of these “new experts” in presenting, evaluating, and responding to contemporary heterosexual dating harms. Our analysis is informed by the existing literature on digital

Youth perfectionism levels have increased significantly over the last decades. Given the dominance of picture-perfect content, social media are often designated as contributors of this rise. Accordingly, this study examined how exposure to positive social media content might increase adolescents’ perfectionistic dispositions and vice versa. Moreover, it was explored whether upward social comparison

Links between extremism online and personalization algorithms are, by now, widely accepted. However, discussions surrounding sociopolitical radicalization and its relationship to filter bubbles often fail to account for user agency. Based on interview ( N = 29) and survey ( N = 1100) data, our study asks how politically engaged social media users make sense of algorithmic personalization related to

This article examines how Wikipedians embed their sovereign authority within the development of the site’s multilingual policy environment. By drawing on the concepts of cultural techniques, imagined affordances, and online authority, the edits and comments of editors were examined through a discourse analysis of 15 rules across 15 years. With a focus on the English and Spanish-language Wikipedias

How is the cultural made computational? CLIP models are a recent artificial intelligence (AI) innovation which train on massive amounts of Internet data in order to align language and image, deploying this ‘grasp’ of cultural concepts to understand prompts, classify images and carry out tasks. To critically investigate this cultural codification, we explore MetaCLIP, a recent variation developed by

Examining how different forms of climate protest affect social media debates is critical to understanding their role within societal climate policy discourse. This study compares debates surrounding disruptive and non-disruptive movements on Twitter/X, asking to what extent they lead to ideologically and affectively polarized networks. We analyzed debates around two prominent German climate movements—Fridays

Emotional communication, especially through social media platforms, has become a contemporary populist threat. While this phenomenon has been studied in for example news media and social movements, we know less about its influence on civil society organizations, despite their pluralism being a centerpiece in a vibrant democracy. More specifically, we do not know if social media make civil society organizations

Sweden has increasingly come into international far right focus, and digital media sites in the United States have proven especially active in spreading mis- and disinformative narratives about the country. Using social network analysis and descriptive statistics, we trace 776 links over a 27 year-period to understand how U.S. far-right media sites construct the idea of Sweden as ‘the rape capital’

This study examines how young Douyin users navigate algorithm-driven short video platforms, emphasizing their sense of agency (SoA) in shaping engagement strategies. Based on in-depth interviews with 25 users, we identified four engagement statuses—High SoA Use, Low SoA Use, High SoA Nonuse, and Low SoA Nonuse—and two strategic transitions: Disengagement and Reengagement. These transitions illustrate

This study examines the management of affective labor on E-Pal, a US-based gaming freelancer platform where gig workers provide companionship and intimacy to clients during gaming. Based on interviews with 27 workers, the research reveals that E-Pal prioritizes emotional connection over gaming skills. The platform uses authenticity expectations, performance evaluations, and gamification to regulate

Incels (involuntary celibates) base their identity on the inability to form romantic relationships. We conceptualize the ideology promoted by incels as misogynist extremism and explore the impact of the first COVID-19 lockdown on the radicalization of this online community. Based on computational measures, we conducted a multi-perspective exploration, comparing the prevalence of and participation in

All mainstream social media platforms now use algorithms to display recommended content, and some (e.g. Instagram, LinkedIn) have started showing what we call algorithmic transparency cues about why certain posts are recommended. However, little is known about what cues users see on their own feeds and how they experience them. Thus, using an online survey ( N = 515) of adult U.S. social media users

Mobile dating apps (MDA) are popular for intimate encounters, but romantic rejection is common, and can drive surveillance using information from social media. Awareness cues convey digital information about others’ activities, but their link with rejection is underexplored. This study explores the uses of awareness cues in mobile dating applications (MDAs) in relation to rejection, social surveillance

Fake news represents a threat to our society since people can face unverified and sensational information. News media can play a crucial role in disclosing and correcting misinformation. This paper argues that higher media coverage can anticipate an increase in public attention to the issue of fake news. Such relationship can be moderated by the country’s economic conditions and by the type of media

Media entertainment today extends beyond conventional formats like TV shows, music, films, video games, and books to include social media content. This article explores how teens integrate conventional and social media entertainment into their media repertoires, and how they reflect on the interrelations of different media in the context of their daily lives. Using Q-methodology and qualitative interviews

The knowledge gap hypothesis—the assumption that an increasing flow of news on a topic fosters a gap in knowledge between the more and the less educated—has been demonstrated in numerous studies throughout the past 60 years. Knowledge gaps are attributed to individual differences in media selection and information processing capacities. However, it has been difficult to investigate the relative influence

According to selective exposure theory, people tend to select news media that are perceived to provide attitude-consonant information and avoid those that are perceived to provide dissonant information. Despite this, research on selective exposure seldom takes people’s perceptions of media bias into account, while research on perceptions of media bias seldom links such perceptions to subsequent media

This study explores the interplay of imagery and text in online political communication by European party leaders. We examine how visual and textual components combine to convey emotions in Instagram posts published by one hundred twenty-four mainstream and populist leaders of one hundred fourteen parties in twenty-four EU countries, covering 3 months before and after the 2019 European elections. Images

Selfie-editing technologies (including in-phone editing tools, filters, and apps like Facetune) provide the ability digitally edit and “enhance” facial and body features in photos. This article extends a theorization of “the virtual” developing from earlier approaches in feminist sociology and digital media studies, to consider the implications of selfie-editing capacities for how young people navigate

Recently, social media influencers have promoted social campaigns and movements, contributing to heightened interest and concern among the public about social causes. This study explores influencers’ social cause communication to understand message attributes, which may be catalysts in increasing public attention to the message and engagement in social causes. Data from Instagram were collected, and

Democracy festivals are events that aim to strengthen democracy by engaging citizens, politicians and organisations in dialogue and provide a more equal access to the agenda. In recent years, social media have become important arenas for agenda building, supposedly equalising the access to such processes. This article uncovers patterns of activity and visibility in agenda building through an actor-centric

Webcam sex platforms represent an important sector of the creator economy. Yet, there is a great scarcity of research on revenue flows and performer income. To address this, we collected and analyzed a dataset comprising 2 weeks of tips received by performers on Chaturbate, a prominent camming platform. Our findings reveal that income is highly unevenly distributed, with only a small group of mostly