The integration of entertainment and politics has become an increasingly important feature of governance worldwide. Yet we know little about how states institutionally recruit celebrities to serve political purposes. This study provides the first empirical analysis of the political cooptation of entertainment celebrities in China, drawing on an original dataset of 2,898 individuals active from 1993 to 2023. We identify a sequential process of political cooptation through which the state initially offers access to regime-curated performances, which function both as material rewards and as ideological screening devices, and then appoints some of the celebrities to formal political bodies. The determinants of selection vary by institutional affiliation and leadership era. These findings extend theories of elite cooptation by showing how states convert media visibility into political capital and embed political control within popular culture as a strategy of regime resilience.
Social Media + Society
Opposing Yet Still Disseminating Conspiracy Theories: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Motivations Behind the Dissemination of Conspiracy Theories Online
While most research on conspiracy theory dissemination focuses on beliefs in and support for conspiracy theories, limited work has explored why people share conspiracy theories, particularly when they oppose them. Using natural language processing and content analysis, we examined 71,003 retweet comments on 136 conspiracy theory-related tweets across six themes posted between 2018 and 2024. Among other things, findings show that while a majority share conspiracy theories because they support them, a substantial minority shares conspiracy theories they oppose. The underlying reasons are to warn others, correct misinformation, or express emotions such as ridicule or frustration. The prevalence of this behavior varies across different conspiracy theories. These results complicate common assumptions about retweeting and suggest that even opposition can contribute to the amplification of conspiracy theories. Understanding these distinct motivations is crucial for developing more targeted strategies to mitigate the dissemination of conspiracy theories and foster healthier information environments.
Unshareable: Non-Sharing Grief and Grievabilities on Social Media
For death-online scholars, online rituals of loss and death help to challenge and reinforce social and moral order. The digital mediates, remediates and âmediatisesâ both life and death. While grieving is an individual, internal process, mourning is an external practice that can help to connect us with others. Mourning is culturally specific. It is collective. Through posting eulogies online and sharing experiences of loss, we can enhance our grief literacy through grief vernaculars. The role of the digital in connecting us to informal processes of mourning and memorialisation is vast. However, what about the people who choose not to share online? Who decides not to post their tributes, eulogies and memories online? This article seeks to explore this under-researched phenomenon. Much like ânon-useâ, unshareability and non-sharing are crucial parts of contemporary digital culture. In this article, we investigate experiences of unshareability. Drawing from over 57 interviews with participants dealing with all types of loss and grief, we focus on examples of seven participants who spoke about the complications with sharing and choices not to share. We explore those tensions and how this reflects grievabilities â who is digitally mournable and who is not.
This essay reflects on a decade of worsening social media harmsâinequality, algorithmic power, precarious labor, and data extractionâarguing for renewed interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to create just sociotechnical futures.
Amplifying Division: Electoral Misinformation and Political Intolerance in Brazil
This study examines the relationship between misinformation and political intolerance during the 2022 Brazilian Election. Using a three-wave survey, we show that citizens who believe false claims about electoral fraud become more intolerant toward political opponents over time. Beliefs in electoral misinformation consistently predicted increases in intolerance over the course of the election. We find an indirect effect for using messaging apps for news and intolerance, mediated by beliefs in electoral misinformation, suggesting that citizens who rely on messaging apps for news are not only more susceptible to believing misinformation but also to its detrimental effects on democracy. These findings highlight electoral misinformation as a key driver of intolerant attitudes in polarized democracies, operating not only by eroding trust in institutions but also by undermining citizensâ commitment to democratic norms.
Digital Journalism
Convergent Epistemic Practices in Visual Fact-Checking
Efforts for Counterbalancing Platform Power Through Regulation: Online News Bills and Platform Dependency Disentanglement Lawmaking Initiatives in Brazil Between 2019 and 2025
Jonas C. L. Valente, Renata de Oliveira Miranda Gomes, Fernando Oliveira Paulino
Building on first-order and second-order cultivation frameworks, we examine how exposure to news and entertainment media portrayals of artificial intelligence (AI) is associated with public perceptions of quantitative estimates of AI development and future outlooks on artificial general intelligence (AGI). The survey data of 713 respondents in the United States were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. Findings showed that exposure to AI news is associated with higher estimates of AGI development and more hopeful emotional responses, though exposure to negatively framed AI news elicited fear and pessimism. Science fiction content was not associated with quantitative estimations but showed a positive association with emotional optimism. These results suggest that both news and entertainment science fiction media narratives contribute to the ambivalent yet meaningful construction of audience imaginaries of AGI.
The manufacturing of (Un)stability: Possible but improbable stability in long-term content moderation on Chinese social media platforms
This article examines how content moderation, often framed as precarious and invisible labor, has become a relatively stable occupation for many workers in China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and 21 semi-structured interviews, we conceptualize this condition as the manufacturing of (un)stabilit y, a â possible but improbable â stability that is institutionally produced yet conditional and reversible amid technological, organizational, and political volatility. Our findings show that stability is not a linear shift from precarity to formality, but a governed outcome shaped by workersâ adaptive strategies, rapid role formalization and stratification, and the integration of human judgment with automated systems. Embedded in digital governance mandates aligning platform rationalities with political priorities, moderation stabilizes employment for some while deepening laborâs infrastructural role in managing information risk. This study offers a non-Western account that complicates binaries of precarity and formality and reframes stability as a politically and organizationally manufactured condition.
Context matters: Understanding the platformization of violence
This introductory paper outlines the conceptual foundations and research agenda for our special issue Contextual Complexities of Violence on Digital Platforms. We argue that violence on digital platforms cannot be understood as a fixed or self-evident category, but must be situated within the sociotechnical, cultural and political environments that shape its production, circulation and recognition. Drawing on cross-disciplinary scholarship, we develop the framework of contextualized platformized violence , which explains how harm arises through the interaction of platform infrastructures, cultural narratives, governance regimes, and local power dynamics. We identify key challenges that complicate efforts to study violence across digital environments, emphasizing the need for thick, reflexive and contextually grounded approaches. We conclude by introducing the 10 contributions in this special issue, each of which demonstrates how attending to context transforms our understanding of platformized violence and provides conceptual, empirical and methodological pathways for advancing research in this rapidly evolving field.
Communication Research
Radical Right-Wing Political Deepfakes Can Successfully Delegitimize Targeted Political Actors: Evidence From Three-wave Experiments in the US and The Netherlands
Michael Hameleers, Toni G. L. A. van der Meer, Marina Tulin, Tom Dobber
Political deepfakes potentially undermine democracy by amplifying socio-political divides in hyper-realistic manners. As an important next step in understanding the political consequences of deepfakes, this article reports on the longer-term effects of deepfakes across two different political settings: The US and the Netherlands. We conducted three-wave pre-registered experiments spanning a full week in which we exposed participants in the US and the Netherlands to realistic political deepfakes. We found that, in both political settings, exposure to deepfakes lowered support for the targeted political actor. This effect was strongest for people initially supporting the attacked politician. Although deepfakes had a delegitimizing impact, they were rated as substantially less credible than authentic videos. Although fact-checks were able to lower the credibility of deepfakes, the delegitimizing impact of deepfakes was resilient to corrections. These findings highlight the continued influence of corrected deepfakes on political beliefs.
Policy and Internet
Law Enforcement and the Public: Designing Effective Public Safety Crowdsourcing Initiatives
For law enforcement agencies tasked with keeping citizens safe, the decentralized nature of the Internet presents both structural and cultural challenges. At the same time, advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) have expanded the capacity of law enforcement to monitor and respond to criminal activity in both online and physical environments. This paper explores how crowdsourcing initiatives, as a form of online collective intelligence, can support law enforcement. Drawing on a systematic literature review, the paper examines the design elements of these initivates and, using a morphological approach, presents a conceptual framework for designing and assessing such initatives. In doing so, the paper highlights the potential for crowdsourcing law enforcement initiatives to improve public services, foster policy innovation, enhance citizen engagement and strengthen government legitimacy.
Correction to âConceptualizing Digital Democracy: A PolicyâOriented Approach through Computational Text Analysisâ