This commentary offers some reflections on the ‘power of the fix' in cybersecurity and its wider implications for technological democracy. I begin with a discussion of the discrepancy between the d...

Recently, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been positioning artificial intelligence as a utility that should be accessible to everyone. At the same time, they promote their cloud platforms as a m...

Published in Information, Communication & Society (Vol. 29, No. 13, 2026)

This article systematically reviews recent empirical research on the role of emotions in populist politics. Following PRISMA guidelines, we review 51 peer-reviewed studies published between 2017 an...

Today, social media users can access various social media platforms with different characteristics that offer distinct opportunity structures for the spread of hate speech. Yet little is known abou...

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...

Dating apps enjoy some popularity among those looking for relationships, love, casual sexual encounters, and more. While platforms’ infrastructures provide affordances to mitigate safety concerns, ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

As AI-generated political disinformation proliferates, warning labels have emerged as a defining regulatory intervention. Drawing on Third-Person Effect (TPE) theory, this study investigates how ex...

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into digital information environments, understanding how individuals seek risk information through AI-powered chatbots remains undere...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Published in Information, Communication & Society (Ahead of Print, 2026)

The pursuit of audiences is a key driver of the mediatization of politics, yet it remains unclear how parliamentarians carry out this task. Drawing on interviews with members of Brazil’s Congress, ...

As text-to-image generative artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes visual communication, concerns are growing about its role in reproducing social stereotypes. While recent algorithm audi...

This article presents findings from a national-scale research project that worked with disadvantaged communities across Australia to examine digital inclusion in low-income families and the role of...

The datafication of research has immensely expanded the possibilities for creating more metadata regarding research practice and performance. This has supported the growth of research information p...

Generational differences in responses to disinformation have attracted considerable attention, yet are rarely comprehensively theorised and are often examined with the help of surveys or behavioura...

Advances in artificial intelligence have generated renewed interest in using computational systems to facilitate democratic deliberation at scale. While recent efforts, exemplified by the ‘Habermas...

This study examines how true versus false messages shape trust in cancer-vaccine information on social media, alongside skepticism and worry, and tests the moderating roles of source credibility an...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as the most prominent technological disruption in work and social life in recent years. But to what extent do men and women believe AI is biased and inclusi...

This paper investigates how two groups of activists – ‘professional’ (civil society members) and ‘independent’ activists (using primarily social media for activism) – construct the political power ...

This article analyses the interaction between broader political, economic and cultural changes and the local experiences of citizens using the Amazon Ring doorbell. The concept ‘luxury surveillance...

Disability-related new media practices have increasingly attracted scholarly attention. However, existing research often frames user agency in these practices through a binary lens of either ‘empow...

This study investigates how digital competencies and environmental awareness interact to shape eco-friendly digital practices, contributing to the field of digital sustainability. Drawing on a repr...

Despite growing concerns about the role of political elites in producing and amplifying conspiracy theories, little is known about which politicians engage in this behavior, how prevalent it is acr...

Drawing on 238 speeches delivered by European Commission (EC) presidents, vice-presidents, and commissioners (2016–mid-2024), this paper examines how the EC narrates ‘disinformation’. Using topic m...

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...

The digital revolution has reshaped activism over the last thirty years and yet we know little about how social movement groups weigh the benefits and risks of new digital technologies. With an inc...

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...

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...

There are growing concerns about AI-generated image-based sexual abuse (AI-IBSA), also known as nonconsensual sexualized ′deepfakes.′ Empirical research on AI-IBSA, however, remains very limited. T...

Social scientists find that many young adults get their news and political information from algorithmically curated platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Despite this important insight,...

While previous studies have examined online homogenous information experiences as theorized by various concepts (e.g., echo chambers and filter bubbles), we know less about how the general public m...

Over the past decades, social media has reshaped how individuals, especially younger generations, communicate, express identity, and engage with the world around them. In this context, our research...

Platform governance is increasingly shaped by regulatory mandates that embed cybersecurity principles into the design and operation of digital services. This study examines how the European Union’s...

The widespread adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence Technology (GenAI) is prompting researchers to re-evaluate the relationship between technology and human creativity. While the pervadin...

The U.S. government’s January 2025 TikTok ban drove many American users to the Chinese social media RedNote, energizing the ‘TikTok Refugee’ trend. Unlike traditional, affordance-driven online migr...

Privacy is a critical concern in the AI era, yet its impact remains underexplored in public service delivery. This study develops a moderated mediation model, where privacy utility mediates the rel...