Information, Communication & Society

Problematic social media use and adolescent mental well-being: a cross-national study on socioeconomic inequalities Although the role of social media in youth mental health has been recently examined, how social inequalities structure the relationship between social media use and adolescent well-being across cou...

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With data from 35 countries, this article shows that problematic social media use is associated with poorer adolescent well-being, with stronger effects among socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Developing and testing an AI-based risk information-seeking model (ARISM): A structural equation modeling approach As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into digital information environments, understanding how individuals seek risk information through AI-powered chatbots remains undere...

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This article presents the AI-Based Risk Information-Seeking Model (ARISM), a tool for understanding how users seek risk information in AI environments. Results show that privacy concerns and AI anxiety shape intentions to use chatbots.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

How election management bodies disrupt electoral disinformation: Australia and the UK in comparative perspective Electoral disinformation is widely recognised as a serious threat to public trust and the integrity of electoral systems. While research on fact-checking, platform regulation, and truth-in-politics...

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This article examines how election management bodies in Australia and the UK address electoral disinformation. It identifies institutional constraints and cautious intervention strategies.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Development and validation of FABLE-S: a scale to measure the ludic and pedagogical experience in serious games Serious games have gained recognition as effective tools for active learning, merging educational content with engaging gameplay. However, existing evaluation instruments tend to focus on either lu...

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ABLE-S offers a new tool to assess serious games across both learning and gameplay dimensions. Developed and validated through multiple studies, the scale demonstrates strong reliability and cross-sample stability.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Nudging against judging? Mitigating anti-LGBTQIA + online hostility by raising bystanders’ awareness and behavioral intentions Bystander interventions are a promising tool to counteract the rising instances of anti-LGBTQIA+ hostility online. This experimental study investigates how social nudges influence bystander reactio...

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This study embeds digital nudging within the bystander intervention model to test responses to anti-LGBTQIA+ attacks. It finds that the hostility type shapes intervention more consistently than nudges do.

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Check out Catalina Farías’ fascinating and important work!

How to do things with a keyword: a cross-cultural analysis of the meanings and functions of ‘values’ on Twitter While people regularly employ the term values in mundane interactions and political debates on social media, little is known about its function in public communication. Approaching values as a keyw...

Social media is full of talk of values... but what do we 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 when we talk about 𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒𝑠, and what do we use the term to 𝑑𝑜?
A new @icsjournal.bsky.social #OpenAccess paper from DigitalValues team+co-authors analyzes the meanings and functions of 𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒𝑠 on Twitter
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Everyday encounters with misinformation online: examining sources, topics and modes Misinformation research tends to be topic-driven, focused on a narrow band of sources and media formats, and studied in abstraction from individuals’ everyday lives. In contrast, this study examine...

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Moving beyond topic-driven studies, this research uses digital diaries to map everyday encounters with suspected misinformation and how changing news logics shape perceptions of trust.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

How to do things with a keyword: a cross-cultural analysis of the meanings and functions of ‘values’ on Twitter While people regularly employ the term values in mundane interactions and political debates on social media, little is known about its function in public communication. Approaching values as a keyw...

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Using computational and qualitative analysis of 15 million tweets in five languages, Green et al examine how “values” functions as a keyword that anchors identity and structures political boundary work.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Standing up to hate: users’ responses to offensive content on social media Hate and incivility are prevalent on social media. Our study investigates how individuals responded to insults on social media and what are relevant factors (participatory moral abilities, particip...

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Reporting, commenting, or staying silent? This study examines how users react to offensive illegal content and identifies the moral and relational factors that influence such responses.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Does trending across platforms popularize political topics? A cross-platform spillover framework of public attention Why do certain topics attract more public attention than others on digital platforms? Acknowledging but moving beyond previous intra-platform perspectives, we propose a dynamic cross-platform spill...

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Does trending on one platform boost attention on another? Guo, Lin and Li find that cross-platform trending can suppress, rather than amplify, political topics in a competitive media ecosystem.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The pitfalls of judicial intervention on disinformation: an account of the Brazilian 2022 election This paper provides a case study of Brazilian electoral disinformation and examines the complexities of the court-led response. Through qualitative analysis of empirical research and news coverage,...

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Hartmann analyses the Brazilian 2022 election to examine how courts addressed electoral disinformation and what this reveals about the institutional design of judicial intervention.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Veiling online/offline: familial surveillance and patriarchal control in the social media use of conservative stay-at-home Turkish migrant women This research investigates the adoption, integration, and everyday use of social media by married, stay-at-home, conservative Muslim migrant women who followed their husbands from Turkey to the UK,...

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This article explores the social media use of conservative Turkish migrant women in the UK, showing how digital platforms become part of ongoing negotiations around family, identity, and everyday life.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Algorithmic discrimination: a grounded conceptualization This paper extends the literature on algorithmic discrimination to analyze the racialized harms and outcomes of online targeting. In addition to providing a genealogy, we argue that targeted ads ar...

Out now! "Algorithmic discrimination" at @icsjournal.bsky.social, with @cmcilwain.bsky.social @seyiolojo.bsky.social Herbert HC Chang.

We use targeted ads to establish _algorithmic discrimination_ as an analytic & draw attention to the disparate outcomes of online targeting

bit.ly/3MQEb7v

Filtered Latinidad: ethnoracial abstraction and everyday resistance in TikTok beauty filters On TikTok, ‘Latina makeup’ filters apply stylized features – such as bushy eyebrows, contoured cheekbones, and overdrawn lips – drawn from long-standing, commodified representations of gendered Lat...

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In this article, Catalina Farías analyses TikTok beauty filters as part of platformed racism, tracing how Latinidad is stylised, normalised, and contested in algorithmic environments.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Orchestrating scalability: how patents render cloud imaginaries in CAV innovation This article explores how cloud computing enables and shapes the scaling of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), positioning cloud infrastructure as a technology, strategy, and imaginary centr...

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This article maps how cloud technologies are mobilised in connected and autonomous vehicle (CAVs) patents, showing how technical clusters and imagined futures together orchestrate AI scalability.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

What is a fact in the age of generative AI? Fact-checking as an epistemological lens Generative AI systems produce outputs that are coherent and contextually plausible yet not necessarily anchored in empirical evidence or ground truth. This challenges traditional notions of factual...

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Dierickx et al examine how generative AI challenges established categories of factuality. Using fact-checking as an epistemological lens, they introduce the concept of “emergent facts” to assess AI-generated claims.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Algorithmic reproduction of social inequality: language attitude bias in Chinese and English pre-trained language models Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are used in education, hiring, and moderation, raising the question of whether these models could replicate social hierarchies and symbolic power structures. This...

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AI fairness debates often focus on design, but what about discourse? This article shows how language models in Chinese and English replicate social inequality, calling for a critical examination of training data and governance.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Introduction – towards polycentricity? The quest for legitimacy and trust in digital governance This Special Issue reflects on how polycentric governance impacts trust and legitimacy in the field of digital governance. We do so along four dimensions: governance, actors, values, and tools. Wit...

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In the introduction to our Special Issue on polycentric digital governance, Dylag, Flonk, Lauri and Mannan examine how dispersed governance shapes trust and legitimacy across actors, values, and tools.

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The entangled dynamics leading to the sedimentation of polarisation on political Reddit Motivated by the dearth of research providing a comprehensive assessment of how various aspects of Reddit contribute to political polarisation on the platform, this study examines the dynamics of c...

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Political subreddits rarely connect across ideological lines. Analysing 16 years of Reddit data, this article shows how platform design, moderation and user practices together lock polarisation into place.

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Misinformation exposure per se may not trigger cynicism, but perceived prevalence of misinformation and hostile information does This study critically examines the role of various misinformation perceptions in fostering cynicism, challenging the conventional exposure-effect model that posits direct causality between misinfor...

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Seeing misinformation is not the same as believing the media world is broken. Panel data from the 2020 U.S. election show that perceived prevalence and hostile information, not exposure itself, predict cynicism.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Gaia’s Web: how digital environmentalism can combat climate change, restore biodiversity, cultivate empathy, and regenerate the Earth Published in Information, Communication & Society (Ahead of Print, 2026)

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In her review of Karen Bakker’s Gaia’s Web, Maria K. Alberto reflects on the promises and limits of digital environmentalism, weighing its hopeful vision against questions of rigour, scope, and evidence.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Highlight Publication: Guntrum, Laura/Lasso Mena, Verena (2025): Un­masking digital threats in the pursuit of hu­man rights and environmental de­fense in La Guajira, North Colombia, in: In­formation, Communication & So­ciety, 1–22, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2503444.

Highlight Publication Forms: Change and Continuity of Political Violence: This ar­ticle shows how environ­mental and hu­man rights de­fenders in nor­thern Colom­bia are tar­geted by different forms of tech­nology-facili­tated violence (TFV) that inter­sects with phy­sical threats and struc­tural vio­lence. It ar­gues that ex­cluding TFV from broa­der violence frame­works leads to an incom­plete under­standing of de­fenders’ ex­periences and ex­poses gaps in existing pro­tection mecha­nisms.

Highlight Publication: Read more. All publication highlights can be found on our website.

📣 Explore the TraCe publication highlights: In @icsjournal.bsky.social, Laura Guntrum & Verena Lasso Mena (both @tuda.bsky.social) analyze violence against environmental and human rights defenders in northern Colombia.
🔗 www.trace-center.de/en/publicati...

Critical interdisciplinary cybersecurity: thinking through securing, thinking through fixing Insecure systems are systems that call for a fix. Vulnerabilities attract attention, motivate a response, and evoke futures of risk and repair. But determining what exactly is wrong with a system a...

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In the introduction to this Special Issue on Critical Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity, Spencer argues that thinking through fixing offers common ground for rethinking how insecurity is understood and addressed.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

The cybersecurity dilemma game: moving cybersecurity beyond solutionism Faced with ubiquitous cyber-attacks, the field of cybersecurity is scrambling to develop both technical solutions as indicated by incessant streams of updates, and social solutions as indicated by ...

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Cybersecurity work is not about finding fixes. Jensen, Kocksch and Wagenknecht argue for moving beyond solutionism by experimenting with tools that help practitioners think through dilemmas, compromises, and care.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Theorizing multidimensional interventions to mitigate cyberchondria: the roles of ehealth literacy, online patient-provider communication, and social support Cyberchondria, marked by excessive online health searches that intensify anxiety and stress, has become a pressing concern in the digital age. This study examines the impact of cyberchondria on dep...

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This article argues that tackling Cyberchondria requires more than individual self-control. Drawing on national survey data, it highlights the combined roles of literacy, care, and social support in protecting mental health.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

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From demystifying to domesticating. Studying JournalismAI training, this article shows how courses shape journalists’ relationships with AI and naturalise particular visions of its use in the newsroom.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Man holding a piece of paper while teaching in a classroom.

Generative AI is moving fast. Governance is lagging behind.

Duke Sanford professor Phil Napoli and alumna Suher Adi MPP'24 examine what social media’s regulatory failures can teach us about governing AI.

@icsjournal.bsky.social article: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Resisting climate imaginaries: future compass memes as combinatory mechanisms for imagining otherwise The climate crisis is simultaneously a crisis of the imagination, signaling a cultural failure to comprehend and contest unfolding ecological destruction. Conventional media representations of clim...

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How do memes help imagine climate futures otherwise?

Musih, Trillò and Hallinan analyse future compass memes as visual tools that disrupt dominant climate imaginaries and expand political imagination.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Understanding support for TikTok/Douyin regulation: the role of platform experiences, perceived influence, and algorithmic awareness in China and the United States Given growing concerns about TikTok/Douyin’s algorithmic distribution of harmful content, public debates have emerged worldwide about its regulation. Past research on public opinion of platform reg...

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How do people form views on regulating TikTok and Douyin?
Comparing China and the US, this article shows how perceived influence, platform experiences and algorithmic awareness shape support for regulation.

doi.org/10.1080/1369...