As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into journalism, questions about its implications for journalistic practice grow more urgent. Despite the rise of AI systems, news organizations often lack an informed understanding of how these systems operate, potentially undermining journalists’ capacity to exercise agency in AI-assisted news production. This study explores how large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, can reflect journalistic value systems. It does this by prompting the GPT-4o model to respond to survey items from the Worlds of Journalism Study that measure journalistic role perceptions, epistemologies, and ethics. These responses were compared to actual survey data from the US, UK, and Germany. Our findings suggest that GPT-4o’s outputs correspond most strongly to the survey responses of politically centrist, full-time journalists whose employers have a TV background, while showing less alignment with right-leaning, part-time, and non-degree-holding journalists. These propensities were most pronounced in the German dataset. While we do not assert that GPT-4o’s cultural orientation directly translates to its journalistic applications, the results reveal which groups of journalists’ perspectives the LLM is more—or less—likely to reflect. By mapping this alignment, the study offers an empirical point of departure for guiding how journalists can maintain agency in their use of LLMs, and thereby contributes to ongoing discourse about the ethical, epistemological, and institutional dimensions of AI in journalism.

This article presents research on environmental activism on TikTok, focusing on creators on the platform specialized in climate change and sustainability topics. The aim of this research is to understand how eco-influencers navigate the tension between virality and community building, as well as how they understand their audiences. The study draws on an ethnographic approach, based on a sample of 60 accounts of Ibero-American eco-activists on TikTok and an in-depth analysis of 12 TikTok accounts, including interviews with these 12 content creators. Our results show that these creators perceive virality as an intrinsic feature of TikTok and a tool that helps them reach broad audiences. To become viral, they try to engage with ongoing trends on the platform and create videos that are catchy, attractive, and playful. They mainly wish to become viral to reach people who are not familiar with sustainability or climate change issues and change their minds. However, this also means that they feel they are constantly speaking to new audiences and have a harder time building stable and close communities, as opposed to other platforms like Instagram. This research reveals the ongoing negotiation of these eco-activists with TikTok’s affordances and culture, resulting in what we term ‘flat virality’, a circulation logic driven less by shared values and more by algorithmic imperatives, which in turn makes the formation of stable, affective communities more difficult to achieve.

A series of controversies have plunged large social media platforms into a perennial legitimacy crisis, fuelling interest in noncentralised digital spaces. In particular, the Fediverse has come to embody hopes that online speech governance can be more democratic and legitimate. This article examines this possibility by exploring how content moderators on Mastodon, the most prominent Fediverse service, negotiate their political legitimacy. Drawing on political philosophy and in-depth interviews, we demonstrate that this negotiation depends on how these individuals conceptualise their communities (‘instances’) as polities. These perceptions exist on a scale between viewing instances as bottom-up participatory spaces – broadly aligned with a democratic view of legitimacy – and as top-down governable spaces, reminiscent of aspects of an authoritarian understanding of legitimacy. By complicating the assumption that decentralisation necessarily returns social media to ‘the hands of the people’, the article also interrogates the role of technological design in shaping online political culture.

The death of a parent/partner represents a significant and traumatic transition for surviving families. Guided by relational turbulence theory, this longitudinal and dyadic study examines how relationship characteristics in surviving parent-emerging adult child dyads correspond with communal coping and relational turbulence during bereavement. Data were collected from 45 parent-emerging adult child dyads for 6 weeks. Results highlight relational uncertainty and interdependence as factors that shape cognitive, emotional, and communicative features of coping episodes. Communal coping behaviors, when enacted, emerged as a protective mechanism, helping mitigate relational turbulence. Actor-partner effects demonstrated the interdependent nature of coping and relational turbulence. This study extends relational turbulence theory to parent-child relationships and underscores the importance of communal coping during transitions. Practical implications suggest the need to help families enact coping and manage interdependence during bereavement to mitigate relational turbulence and improve relationship outcomes.

One appealing explanation for the dismal state of digital politics in the U.S. is that social media offer abundant threats to users’ political identities. This paper provides a theoretical and empirical foundation for studying political identity threats on social media. A pilot study ( N = 931) established that individuals can recognize both realistic and symbolic threats when they explicitly appear in TikTok videos, but that, (a) threat types are not as discrete as theory suggests and (b) sensitivity to symbolic threat depends on strength of partisan identity. A second, pre-registered experimental study ( N = 1,279) found that the presence of explicit threats to political ingroups/outgroups influenced emotions and willingness to engage politically on social media. These effects were mediated by threat recognition and often larger for those with stronger partisan identities. This research sets an agenda for studying the presence and effects of explicitly identity-threatening social media content.