Cornelius Puschmann, Helena Rauxloh, Lisa Merten, Sebastian Stier, Katrin Weller, Juhi Kulshrestha
{"title":"How affect shapes online information seeking about political actors","authors":"Cornelius Puschmann, Helena Rauxloh, Lisa Merten, Sebastian Stier, Katrin Weller, Juhi Kulshrestha","doi":"10.1177/14614448251346199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251346199","url":null,"abstract":"Search engines are both frequently used and widely trusted sources of current political information. While research has examined the different stages of information seeking via search, the question of how political preferences and sociodemographic factors impact political online search has received less attention. In particular, the way in which attitudinal factors, such as sentiment toward a politician or interest in their personal life motivate information seeking have not been widely studied. We present findings from a panel study that combines browser tracking data with survey results for 1863 German participants. Our results suggest that both sympathy and antipathy toward a selection of popular politicians is predictive of searching for them. Queries also vary in their composition, with searches for female politicians highlighting their personal lives and physical attributes somewhat more often than for males. We conclude that the role of “soft” factors in motivating information seeking on political actors remains underexplored.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144479183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To let content be or not be: Understanding the decision-making process of content moderators on social media platforms","authors":"Tania Chatterjee, Agam Gupta, Pradip Ninan Thomas","doi":"10.1177/14614448251348900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251348900","url":null,"abstract":"Content moderation plays a pivotal role in structuring online speech, but the human labour and the everyday decision-making process in content moderation remain underexamined. Informed by in-depth interviews with 16 content moderators in India, in this research, we analyse the decision-making process of commercial content moderators through the concept of sensemaking. We argue that moderation decisions are made in the context of the industry’s plural policies and efficiency requirements. An interplay of four cognitive processes of pattern identification, subjective perceptions, shared knowledge, and process optimization influences the final judgement. Once sense is enacted in the decision-making process, the sensibilities are retained by the adept moderator for future moderation decisions. Visibilizing the labour process behind commercial content moderation, we argue that everyday moderation decisions unfold in a socio-technical and economic assemblage wherein decisions are decontextualised and plausibility driven rather than consistency driven.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anonymous dissent: Protest, privacy, and photographic surveillance in digital media","authors":"Gino Canella, Mary Angela Bock","doi":"10.1177/14614448251349830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251349830","url":null,"abstract":"Protesters in recent years have been making a somewhat novel demand: they are asking journalists to blur their faces in news coverage of public demonstrations. This article investigates this demand to explore how new surveillance technologies and the political economy of media are complicating the ethics of visual journalism. Reviewing 26 articles from news outlets, trade publications, and blogs published between May 2020 and October 2024 that discussed protesters’ demand, the study considers three themes: visibility and surveillance in digital media; the ethical contradictions that visual journalists navigate while documenting dissent; and the relationships among journalists, movements, and political-economic power structures. The article contrasts Enlightenment ideals with an ethic of care to understand journalists’ views on transparency and truth, concluding that the uneven power dynamics among protesters, journalists and the state raise important questions about the documentation, preservation and circulation of dissent.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"628 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144479299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decoding revision mechanisms in Wikipedia: Collaboration, moderation, and collectivities","authors":"Xixuan Zhang","doi":"10.1177/14614448251336418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251336418","url":null,"abstract":"Research on knowledge collaboration in Wikipedia has predominately focused on metadata at the article level or editor-centric analyses, often overlooking the complexities of knowledge collaboration and its contextual dependencies. This study takes a novel, fine-grained approach to investigating revision mechanisms in Wikipedia’s knowledge collaboration. By considering modified sentences as carriers of collective knowledge and spaces in which epistemic power is negotiated, it reconstructs their revision sequences and examines how editorial, contextual, content, and temporal factors shape Wikipedia’s revision dynamics. A total of 140,593 revisions (by 48,643 editors) of 76,525 sentences in 537 Wikipedia articles related to climate change were analyzed using text mining, natural language processing, survival analysis, and meta-analysis. The findings expand our understanding of how epistemic power is negotiated through collective endeavors underlying bureaucratic rules and community moderation in Wikipedia.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144371279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
W P Malecki, Tanja V Messingschlager, Markus Appel
{"title":"The impact of exposure to generative AI art on aesthetic appreciation, perceptions of AI mind, and evaluations of AI and of art careers","authors":"W P Malecki, Tanja V Messingschlager, Markus Appel","doi":"10.1177/14614448251344590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251344590","url":null,"abstract":"Visual art is increasingly created by generative artificial intelligence (generative AI). This study, conducted online with 470 US participants, investigated whether exposure to art attributed to AI may influence aesthetic appreciation, perceptions of AI mind, and evaluations of AI (acceptance of AI as an artist, evaluation of AI as an identity and realistic threat) and of art careers. Exposure to art introduced as generated by AI (vs a human artist) reduced appreciation. No significant impact was observed on the other dependent variables. For ostensibly AI-generated art, higher appreciation was associated with more acceptance toward AI as an artist and lower levels of AI realistic threat. This suggests that mere exposure to art attributed to AI may not be sufficient to induce a change in perceptions of AI mind, evaluations of AI and of art careers, but these effects might occur if AI-attributed art is appreciated aesthetically.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"248 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144371276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"r/23andMe and my pictures: Platform racial spectacles as collective racial identity formation","authors":"Yukun Yang","doi":"10.1177/14614448251344291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251344291","url":null,"abstract":"This essay expatiates on the collective practices of image sharing of “direct-to-consumer” (DTC) genetic ancestry tests (GAT) results on social media, specifically the strategic, selective, and structural coupling of DNA charts, ancestry maps, and selfies. Building upon Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle, I propose the concept of “platformed racial spectacle” to theorize such online phenomena: an aggregate of images voluntarily shared online, facilitated by the social media platform affordances and its sociality culture, fabricating the mythical connections between race, DNA, bodily traits, and geographies. Indicative of the racial structure and racial formations insidiously reified through such practices, the mobilization of racialization, semantics, and somatics can be found through the platformed racial spectacle and the collective practices of conjuring such a racial project. Contextualized in the subreddit r/23andme, I further explicate the emergence and existence of platformed racial spectacle, unfurl its texture and format, and expound its spectacular functionality of unification and alteration.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144371278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Playlisting the periphery: Platform intermediaries and East-Central European music visibility in Spotify’s geography","authors":"Miloš Hroch, Petr Szczepanik","doi":"10.1177/14614448251346200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251346200","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Spotify’s engagement with East-Central European (ECE) music markets, exploring how platformization intersects with peripherality. Using insights from the political economy of global media and platform studies, it situates Spotify within the asymmetrical geographies of platform capitalism, where peripheral regions are more consumption markets than cultural centers. While Spotify emphasizes egalitarian access through playlisting and algorithmic tools, the findings reveal persistent inequalities shaped by “spatial gatekeeping.” Focusing on how regional actors, mediating between artists and the platform, experience these inequalities, the article draws on interviews and “scavenging” ethnography to develop a typology of “platform intermediaries,” including regional playlist editors, digital distributors, major label representatives, and music creators. These intermediaries internalize spatial gatekeeping in their practices and platform imaginaries, which reflect perceived distance from geographic and algorithmic centers and aspirations to transcend peripherality. The article offers a nuanced account of platform geography’s asymmetries as experienced from the periphery.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144371277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Guarding against deception through news literacy interventions: Impact of issue involvement and participation on young French adults’ fake news vulnerability","authors":"Ambre Gambin, Andreas Munzel","doi":"10.1177/14614448251342796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251342796","url":null,"abstract":"In the so-called <jats:italic>post-truth</jats:italic> age and the rise of social media, news circulates widely and quickly, leading to information overload. In this context, individuals experiencing high issue involvement tend to engage more with information. Literature has recently focused on news literacy interventions to protect people from fake news. However, few have addressed these initiatives’ immediate and differential effects simultaneously on young adults’ vulnerability to deception. Through three experiments involving undergraduate university students in France, we demonstrate that intervention-based educational methods can mitigate the impact of issue involvement on belief in fake news. Yet, they do not enable individuals to protect themselves in the long run and may even prove counterproductive by triggering information overload. Our study contributes to the research investigating preventive practices to help users arm themselves against fake news in media communication, social media, and social marketing.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144334902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Uses and effects of AR- and VR-based animal embodiment: A field study at a beach music festival","authors":"Daniel Pimentel","doi":"10.1177/14614448251346153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251346153","url":null,"abstract":"Amid growing ecological threats to wildlife, organizations are increasingly exploring multimedia solutions to spur action. One such strategy involves enabling audiences to embody threatened wildlife (animal embodiment) via augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). Despite AR/VR’s capacity to visualize threats onto one’s virtual body, little is understood about how these platforms differ in their uses and effects. Thus, A field study was conducted at a music festival where attendees ( <jats:italic>N</jats:italic> = 99) evaluated custom-designed AR and VR games enabling animal embodiment. Results showed clear modality preferences for the AR game, though both AR and VR elicited high levels of connection, or body transfer (BT), with the animal body. BT also predicted pro-environmental behavior intentions, though this effect was strongest for direct (donations, volunteering) rather than indirect actions (social media advocacy). Results yield insight into the requirements for BT with animal bodies and establish support for animal embodiment as a viable environmental communications strategy.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144328664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sydney Nicolla, Allison J Lazard, Deen Freelon, Lucinda L Austin, Heathe Luz McNaughton Reyes, Kathryn E Moracco
{"title":"Communicating about sexual violence on TikTok: A content analysis","authors":"Sydney Nicolla, Allison J Lazard, Deen Freelon, Lucinda L Austin, Heathe Luz McNaughton Reyes, Kathryn E Moracco","doi":"10.1177/14614448251341484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251341484","url":null,"abstract":"TikTok presents an opportunity for strategic and health communicators. There are more than 300 million views associated with the hashtags #sexualassaultawareness and #sexualassaultsurvivors on TikTok. Using quantitative content analysis, we analyzed 150 TikTok videos about “sexual assault” for trends in self-disclosures (RQ1), message framing (RQ2), types of sexual violence (RQ3), emotions (RQ4), creator characteristics (RQ5–7), and engagement (RQ8). We found that millions of people are seeing and engaging with this content. Coded videos were often (68%) framed from the perspective of educating or creating awareness. Video creators often engaged in displays of authenticity like showing their face on camera (84%). Coded videos often (60%) framed information in a way that “calls out” perpetrators or social norms surrounding sexual violence. This study sets the stage for future explorations of strategic communication on TikTok, including but not limited to projects related to sexual violence resistance and prevention.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144328665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}