We checked 11 communication studies journals on Friday, December 06, 2024 using the Crossref API. For the period November 29 to December 05, we retrieved 13 new paper(s) in 6 journal(s).

Digital Journalism

Mitigating Hostility in Digital Journalism: Digital Hostility as Ossifier of Field Boundaries
Gregory P. Perreault
Full text

Information, Communication & Society

The better bandit: decentralised infrastructure, crypto-States, and the rematerialisation of virtual worlds
Kelsie Nabben, Ellie Rennie
Full text
The role of data integration and analysis platforms in contemporary society: an introduction
Simon Egbert, Vasilis Galis, Helene Oppen Ingebrigtsen Gundhus
Full text
Revolution by other memes: on the playful subcultures of r/PoliticalCompassMemes
Marc Tuters, Gavin Mueller
Full text
On measuring change in networked publics: a case study of United States election publics on Twitter from 2020 to 2022
Anna Beers
Full text

Media, Culture & Society

Bringing #LinaBell to life online: A case study in the creative and collaborative dynamics of Chinese online fandom
Ariel Saiyinjiya, Yuejie Gu, Yuruo Lei, Xingyuan Meng, Ioana Literat
Full text
This article delves into the dynamics of online fandom in China through the lens of LinaBell, a pink fox character introduced as a mascot by Shanghai Disneyland in September 2021. Unlike traditional Disney characters, LinaBell lacks an official backstory or media presence. Yet she has rapidly gained immense popularity among Chinese Disney fans, largely through social media platforms like Weibo. Our study centers on the LinaBell Super Topic Community on Weibo, consisting of over 543,000 members known as “LinaBell’s moms.” Employing qualitative content analysis of posts and comments, this research examines fans’ creative work, including videos, fanfiction, and memes around LinaBell, in order to understand the collective dynamics of Chinese online fandom. Our findings revealed two main themes: the collective personification of LinaBell through fan work, and the formation of a parakin bond with the character. The findings highlight the transformative role of social media in contemporary Chinese fandom as well as unveil a diverse landscape of participation, creativity, and community in Chinese culture through the prism of platforms like Weibo.

Political Communication

The Effects of Foreign Elite Cues from a Dominant Neighboring Country: The Case of the United States and Mexico
David J. Ciuk, Lia Tavarez
Full text

Social Media + Society

Encountering “the Other” in Religious Social Media: A Cross-Cultural Analysis
Shoaib Ul Haq, Ray Yiu-keung Kwok
Full text
This study examines how social media platforms shape encounters with religious “others” across diverse cultural contexts, focusing on Muslim users in Pakistan and Buddhist/Christian users in Hong Kong. Through qualitative interviews and reflexive thematic analysis, we identify key patterns in how these platforms both facilitate and constrain meaningful interreligious dialogue. We find that while religious social media can expand exposure to diverse perspectives, it often reinforces in-group boundaries and amplifies polarization through echo chamber effects. Our findings further reveal that users engage in selective exposure, primarily interacting with like-minded believers, while also developing new competencies as “religious bridge-builders” in some cases who cultivate new competencies for interreligious communication. We develop a theoretical framework of “digital othering” to explain how believers navigate religious identity, knowledge, and community in online spaces. By adopting a cross-cultural comparative approach, the study contributes to our understanding of religion in the digital age, offering insights into the culturally specific manifestations of digital othering while also identifying broader patterns that transcend particular contexts. This research advances the field of digital religion studies, providing a nuanced understanding of how social media reshapes religious expression, authority, and interreligious relations in an increasingly digitized global society.
Attitudes on Data Use for Public Benefit: Investigating Context-Specific Differences Across Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom With a Longitudinal Survey Experiment
Frederic Gerdon
Full text
With technological advances, governments and companies gain opportunities to collect data to provide public benefits. However, such data collections and uses need to fulfill ethical standards and comply with citizens’ privacy preferences, which may vary across several dimensions. The Comparative Privacy Research Framework suggests specific comparative dimensions that may shape such privacy-related perceptions. I propose how to integrate into this framework a specific meso-level perspective for concisely operationalizing data uses context-specifically: the privacy theory of contextual integrity, developed by Helen Nissenbaum. This article presents an empirical application of this approach by investigating specific data use scenarios across countries, while simultaneously considering temporal, international, and individual-level variation. To this end, an online survey experiment was conducted in three countries (Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom) in December 2022 and May 2023. In this experiment, respondents rated the appropriateness of fictitious data use scenarios. The scenarios varied by data type, data recipients, and conditions of data use. The results show that the effects of contextual parameters vary across countries to different degrees. Respondents react particularly sensitively to changes in data types, with health data being overall most accepted to be used. The relative acceptance of the data recipients clearly varies across countries. Country-level individualism is not consistently related to the desired level of control over data. These findings highlight the usefulness of contextual integrity to unmask meso-level, context-specific variations in privacy attitudes across countries. A meso-level perspective that operationalizes data uses according to contextual integrity can therefore inform comparative privacy research and privacy-related policymaking.
A Triple-Layered Comparative Approach to Understanding New Privacy Policy Practices of Digital Platforms and Users in China After Implementation of the PIPL
Liming Liu, Yiming Chen
Full text
China enacted its first Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) on 1 November 2021. However, there is a dearth of systematic research examining the implementation of new privacy policies exercised by digital platforms and user engagement with these policies. This study establishes a triple-layered comparative approach to explore the complexities and particularities of privacy policy practices in Chinese digital platforms. The methodology encompasses the analysis of privacy policies from representative platforms—WeChat, Taobao, and Douyin—alongside user experience garnered through a walkthrough method and insights from 28 interviews with platform users. Through critical discourse analysis, the research revealed that state-dominant policy discourses were ingrained in the formulation of platform privacy regulations to legitimize their authority over user data ownership. The users perceived a strong sense of passive protection, characterized by the rigid “agreement” discourse practices that underscore their vulnerability in everyday digital platform usage. The findings shed light on intricate power dynamics at play between platforms, their privacy policies, and users, which leads to polarized reactions from users toward privacy concerns. By examining the articulation of digital privacy policies as instruments of statecraft, we offer a nuanced view of describing non-Western experiences of privacy values and regulatory practices in the digital age.
Online and Abused: Girls of Color Facing Racialized Sexual Harassment
Pallavi Guha, Paromita Pain
Full text
This study, based on 841 surveys with 18-to-19-year-old teenage girls who live, work, or attend school in the Greater Baltimore area, investigated their social media use and the kind of harassment they are subjected to on different platforms. Racialized sexual harassment was rampant, with girls of color being inundated with requests for nudes and sexual comments, especially on Facebook. Participants said that they faced harassment on Instagram irrespective of race, which, as prior studies have shown, has a distinct bias against users of color. Harassment toward girls of color promoted harmful racial stereotypes. American Indians were also deeply impacted. Unrelenting online harassment made participants feel uncomfortable and uneasy (45%), racially discriminated against (40%), and hated (12%) on platforms they chose to socialize and seek information of interest on.
The Impact of Social Norms on Adolescents’ Self-Presentation Practices on Social Media
Arne Freya Zillich, Annika Wunderlich
Full text
Social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat offer adolescents many opportunities to control how other users see and perceive them. By observing their peers’ self-presentations and receiving feedback on their own self-presentations from them, adolescents learn what is typical (descriptive norms) and appropriate (injunctive norms) on different social media platforms. Based on computer-assisted face-to-face surveys with German Instagram and/or Snapchat users aged between 14 and 16 years ( N = 1,002), we examined the impact of descriptive and injunctive norms on adolescents’ self-presentation practices on social media. Drawing on the theory of normative social behavior and the affordances approach, we also considered the norm-moderating factors of outcome expectations, group identity, platform differences, and perceived content persistence. We provide evidence that both descriptive and injunctive peer norms influence adolescents’ staged self-presentations, authentic self-presentations, and presentations of everyday life, although none of the moderating factors reached practical significance.

Telecommunications Policy

Electronic toll collection (ETC) on highways: Global trends, Vietnam's experience, and policy lessons
Khuong Vu
Full text