“Wolf Warrior Diplomacy,” characterized by its assertive and confrontational tone, marks a significant shift in China’s international communication strategy. While it has attracted global attention, emerging evidence suggests that its aggressive rhetoric may be counterproductive, alienating democratic publics. This study investigates the impact of “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—three East Asian democracies with complex relationships with China that have been underexplored as targets of this strategy. In a preregistered online experiment conducted in each country, participants were randomly assigned to view either neutral content or posts that aggressively emphasized China’s superiority over the United States. The results indicate that exposure to “Wolf Warrior” messaging produces modest but statistically detectable declines in several China-directed evaluations across the three countries, with the largest and most consistent attitudinal shifts in South Korea. Although some negative effects on perceptions of the United States were observed, these were sporadic and inconsistent. Support for democratic values remained largely unchanged, and participants exhibited a low willingness to share “Wolf Warrior” messages on social media, limiting the strategy’s potential for broader dissemination. Overall, China’s combative diplomatic messaging appears not only ineffective but also potentially counterproductive in shaping public opinion in East Asian democracies, offering important implications for political communication and the limits of authoritarian soft power.

Many individuals do not seek news, believing instead that “news will find me” (NFM), implying that they trust their social networks to keep them informed, saving them the trouble of proactively seeking news from journalistic outlets. Does this mean that they trust social media algorithms to accurately filter and recommend content that is relevant to them? Do they trust their friends to keep them informed, just like they would journalists? To answer these questions, we conducted a pre-registered between-subjects experiment ( N = 244) in which users with varying levels of NFM were randomly assigned to receive news recommended by either their social media friends, news editors, or an algorithm. We discovered that while users tend to act on news recommended by an algorithm mindlessly before reading it first, the type of cognitive heuristic triggered by a news source plays an important role in shaping their trust. Specifically, individuals high on NFM tend to trust algorithms because they trigger the “machine heuristic.” They also consider social media friends and algorithms to be as authoritative as news journalists and editors (“authority heuristic”). Our results advance theoretical knowledge about why high levels of NFM predict higher trust in social media friends and algorithms.

The way a problem is framed shapes its solutions. This article reframes the problem of misinformation and examines the implications of this shift for interventions against misinformation. It advances five arguments that challenge common narratives about misinformation and invite us to rethink both the problem and its solutions. For instance, exposure to misinformation is lower than often believed, people are less gullible than commonly assumed, and misinformation often reflects, rather than causes, underlying sociopolitical issues. These insights point toward strategies that address the root causes of the problem rather than surface symptoms. Key shifts include focusing on the demand for misinformation, fostering trust in reliable sources, and strengthening democratic institutions. Combating misinformation effectively requires a clear understanding of the problem and a break with popular misconceptions about it.

The Black Wife Effect (BWE) trend took TikTok by storm around May 2024, when predominantly white men showcased makeovers attributed to their Black wives. We used a multimodal critical discourse analysis of BWE posts to evaluate how these media construct Black womanhood and their intimate labor in the context of interracial relationships. The findings show that, through digital racework, the BWE trend constitutes a set of replicable controlling images that commodify Black women’s intimate labor while rendering it invisible. Although Black women’s influence on their husbands is celebrated, most social media users constructed the BWE as a “natural” outcome of healthy interracial love, a non-market activity expected from Black women. These findings reflect the contradictions at the foundation of racial heteropatriarchal capitalist systems in the information age, wherein white men and others seek after, symbolically celebrate, and monetize the labor of racialized women while denying its economic value.

The rise of digital Islam has opened organic spaces in which Muslims learn, debate, and live their faith online, reshaping how religious influence and credibility emerge. While professional influencers often dominate digital religious spaces, everyday influencers, lacking formal religious authority yet embedded in close peer networks, play a crucial role in shaping religious practice. Drawing on 40 in‑depth semi‑structured interviews conducted between November 2024 and February 2025 in Egypt, Morocco, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, this article engages Campbell’s framework of networked religion as a point of dialogue rather than a fixed model. We propose the concept of liquid authority to explain how religious credibility emerges through trust, relational proximity, and algorithmic visibility in digital contexts. Findings show that social media complements rather than replaces traditional religious practice. While formal scholars remain central to institutional authority, algorithmically mediated and peer‑embedded forms of authority increasingly shape lived religious practice.

This study examines the intersection of political social media use, online harassment resulting from political expression, and the perceived physical, social, and emotional costs of political engagement and how these dynamics differ across religion and gender. Using survey data in India, we find that frequent political use of social media is associated with online harassment, especially among religious minorities and most intensely among minority women. Although political social media use alone does not heighten perceived political costs, these costs increase indirectly through experiences of harassment. Further probing reveals that this indirect effect is more substantial for religious minorities, with no significant gender differences. These results highlight how online political engagement is not experienced equally, as identity-based vulnerabilities amplify the emotional and psychological burdens of political engagement. Ultimately, rather than serving as inclusive public spheres, social media platforms reproduce existing offline hierarchies, placing the heaviest burdens of visibility on marginalized groups.

Although social media platforms provide affirming information and interactions, they might also serve as venues to (re)traumatize individuals through exposure to sensitive content, especially related to mental illness (e.g. suicide, self-harm). Applying the trauma-informed design framework, we employ a two-pronged methodological approach to evaluate (1) what potentially sensitive or traumatizing content relate to mental illness individuals report consuming on social media (i.e. seeking content out voluntarily or via algorithmic exposure); (2) perceptions of the role of the user and social media platforms, respectively, in integrating trauma-informed approaches; and (3) suggestions for how social media moderation policies could be (more) trauma-informed. We identified a spectrum among participants of perceived responsibility of individuals using social media and social media platforms for moderating sensitive and/or traumatic mental illness-related content.

This study extends uncertainty reduction theory beyond dyadic interaction by introducing communal uncertainty reduction strategies in human-AI socio-emotional communication, wherein users navigate AI-related uncertainty by engaging with both AI chatbots and online communities. Through the content analysis of 1772 posts and 3021 comments extracted from 35,579 conversation episodes in the Replika subreddit, we identify five community practices (e.g. anchoring, help-seeking), five peer response types (e.g. collaborative interpretation, group identification), and four uncertainty reduction outcomes (e.g. behavioral pattern recognition, predictive understanding), demonstrating that uncertainty reduction is a triadic process involving users, AI, and communities. The findings illustrate how communal uncertainty reduction transforms AI opacity into shared knowledge and solidarity, offering a new framework for understanding uncertainty in human-AI relationships.

Organizations pursuing multiple, often competing goals typically struggle to build the resilience needed to sustain such hybridity. Drawing on the hybrid organizing literature, this study examines how organizations’ symbolic emphasis on dual social-business logics (i.e., high logic centrality) in their social media communication predicts their representational ties on social media and the subsequent communication of resilience enactment. Employing a multi-sourced research design, this study analyzed data from an online survey of 260 social enterprises (SEs) in Taiwan, alongside 3 years of their Facebook data during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings showed that the display of high logic centrality on social media predicted the communication of resilience enactment both directly and indirectly through greater engagement in representational ties with other organizations. Moreover, the strength of the indirect relationship varied based on SEs’ perceived logic centrality in their overall operations. The researchers drew theoretical and methodological implications from the key findings.

The reciprocal associations between social media use, political expression, and political participation are central to communication scholars. The cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) represents a common and widely advocated analytic approach to test these relationships. However, it fails to separate within- from between-person effects. In this paper, we propose a random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) disaggregating within-person and between-person effects. Using three-wave panel data, we demonstrate positive associations between social media use, political expression and online as well as offline participation consistently across waves using the CLPM. However, these relations could not be observed at the within-person effects level with the RI-CLPM. This suggests that the associations between social media use, political expression and political participation are mainly driven by trait-like differences and not by individual changes over time, fundamentally challenging some of the key conclusions of previous research. Implications for communication scholarship are discussed.

In an increasingly challenging workplace, help from colleagues is essential for employees’ performance and development. Yet, individuals often hesitate to seek help at work, fearing that they may appear incompetent. The current research examined how verbal strategies used to seek help at work would affect helpers’ perceptions of the help seekers’ competence. Guided by the sensitive interaction systems theory, we focused on the directness and indirectness of help seeking communication. Through two studies employing complementary methodologies, we found that helpers judged the competence of help seekers based on their inferred causes for the help requests. Specifically, helpers evaluated seekers as more competent when they attributed the help seeking to a high motivation to succeed rather than a lack of ability. Additionally, direct help seeking was associated with higher perceived competence of the help seeker, which was mediated by the helpers’ inferences of a high motivation to succeed as the cause of help seeking.