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Now showing 1 - 10 of 26
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    Just the tip of the iceberg? State of the art of coordinated social media manipulation research
    (2025-12-26) Milzner, Miriam; Thiele, Daniel; Gong, Baoning
    Social media environments are increasingly exploited by manipulative actors through coordinated social media manipulation (CSMM) campaigns: the intentional and deceptive orchestration of social media networks to manipulate content visibility and public opinion formation. In recent years, research on CSMM has grown rapidly, and the field lacks a systematic synthesis of empirical findings on observed campaigns. This study addresses that gap through a systematic review of 83 studies sourced from Web of Science and EBSCOHost, each analyzing observed digital traces of CSMM. We introduce a conceptual model that frames CSMM as a three-step process: covert operation, implementation, and influence. Using this model, we map the existing research findings, identify critical gaps, and outline future research directions. The review shows that research disproportionately focuses on election periods, state-backed actors, and text-based content on Twitter/X while overlooking multimodal forms, platform-specific manipulation strategies, and broader geopolitical contexts. Linking online campaigns to offline actors, as well as assessing the impact of CSMM, also remain challenges. Overall, we call for integrative analytical frameworks that incorporate comparative designs, cross-platform and multilingual analyses, and greater attention to the dynamics of audience interaction.
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    Updating Public Value: How Journalists Understand Their Societal Role in the Context of Digital Platforms
    (2025-11-19) Mayer, Anna-Theresa
    Journalism’s role transformation from gatekeeper to one of many communicating actors on digital platforms increasingly necessitates the profession to reflect on the societal value it can provide on digital platforms. Applying the concepts of ‘public value’ and ‘platformization,’ this case study examines funk, a unique content network from German public service media that produces content mainly for a young audience using social media platforms for distribution. Building on a newsroom observation that informed subsequent qualitative interviews with nine members of funk, the findings reveal that, while public value perceptions align with traditional understandings of public value, they are adapted to the digital environment. Furthermore, the funk members reflect on reaching the target group, interactivity, and technical features of digital platforms to enhance public value, while also stressing the boundaries mainly stemming from the commercially-oriented logic of digital platforms.
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    Pandemic Populism? How Covid-19 Triggered Populist Facebook User Comments in Germany and Austria
    (2022-02-17) Thiele, Daniel
    Covid-19 and the government measures taken to combat the pandemic have fueled populist protests in Germany and Austria. Social media played a key role in the emergence of these protests. This study argues that the topic of Covid-19 has triggered populist user comments on Facebook pages of German and Austrian mass media. Drawing on media psychology, this article theorizes populist comments as an expression of “reactance,” sparked by repeated “fear appeals” in posts about Covid-19. Several hypotheses are derived from this claim and tested on a dataset of N = 25,121 Facebook posts, posted between January 2020 and May 2021 on nine pages of German and Austrian mass media, and 1.4 million corresponding user comments. To measure content-based variables automatically, this study develops, validates, and applies dictionaries. The study finds that the topic of Covid-19 did trigger populist user comments and that this effect grew over time. Surprisingly, neither the stringency of government measures nor mentions of elitist actors were found to have the expected amplifying effect. The study discusses the findings against the background of governing the ongoing crisis and worrisome developments in the online public sphere.
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    Platform governance under the Digital Services Act: a perspective on disinformation
    (2025-11-24) Gsenger, Rita
    Online platforms have become essential infrastructures for communication and commerce, playing a central role in content governance and shaping public discourse. While their accessibility fosters communication, it also facilitates the spread of harmful information, including disinformation. To address these risks and enhance transparency and accountability, the European Union (EU) introduced the Digital Services Act (DSA), which mandates specific content moderation obligations for platforms operating within its jurisdiction. This study examines how 27 online platforms govern disinformation, employing a mixed-methods analysis of their Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. The analysis shows that ‘misleading’ content is the most frequently regulated category, with very large online platforms (VLOPs) and social media platforms exhibiting the highest levels of regulation. Although a range of sanctions exists, platforms primarily rely on content and account removal, with limited mechanisms for user participation. The study identifies four main clusters of disinformation addressed by platforms: misleading content, imposter content, pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, and manipulation. These categories illustrate specific regulatory challenges, such as health-related disinformation and identity misrepresentation. The paper situates these findings within the context of regulatory frameworks like the Digital Services Act (DSA), emphasizing the need for further research on enforcement practices and the impact of content governance.
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    Attributing Coordinated Social Media Manipulation: A Theoretical Model and Typology.
    (2025) Thiele, Daniel; Milzner, Miriam; Gong, Baoning; Pfetsch, Barbara; Heft, Annett
    Social media are key arenas for public opinion formation, but are susceptible to coordinated social media manipulation (CSMM), that is, the orchestrated activity of multiple accounts to increase content visibility and deceive audiences. Despite advances in detecting and characterizing CSMM, the attribution problem—identifying the principals behind CSMM campaigns—has received little scholarly attention. In this article, we address this gap by synthesizing existing research and developing a theoretical model for understanding CSMM. We propose a consolidated definition of CSMM, identify its key observable and hidden characteristics, and present a rational choice model for inferring principals’ strategic decisions from campaign features. In addition, we present a typology of CSMM campaigns, linking variations in scale, elaborateness, and disguise to principals’ resources, stakes, and influence strategies. Our contribution provides researchers with conceptual and heuristic tools for attribution and invites interdisciplinary and comparative research on CSMM campaigns.
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    Who reports witnessing and performing corrections on social media in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and France?
    (2024) Tang, Rongwei; Vraga, Emily K.; Bode, Leticia; Boulianne, Shelley
    Observed corrections of misinformation on social media can encourage more accurate beliefs, but for these benefits to occur, corrections must happen. By exploring people’s perceptions of witnessing and performing corrections on social media, we find that many people say they observe and perform corrections across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France. We find higher levels of self-reported correction experiences
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    Comparative Digital Political Communication: Comparisons Across Countries, Platforms, and Time
    (2024) Boulianne, Shelley; Larsson, Anders O.
    Comparative communication research needs to catch up to other disciplines. In this special issue and the associated International Communication Association preconference, we focus on comparative work related to digital political communication. This introduction argues that comparative digital political communication needs to consider comparisons across various dimensions, including countries, platforms, and time, whereas existing comparative communication research focuses on country or territorial comparison. We highlight the six submissions’ approaches to comparative work. Each submission provides at least one of these three dimensions of contrast. We conclude with a discussion of enduring gaps in this field of research, such as the lack of studies using time as a dimension of comparison. Time is crucial for understanding ever-changing digital media platforms. We also conclude by discussing some ongoing challenges in political communication research.
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    How journalism adapted the Internet in Germany: Results of six newsroom surveys (1997–2014)
    (2024) Neuberger, Christoph
    Based on six newsroom surveys, this article analyzes the history of digital German journalism. The surveys cover a period of 17 years (1997–2014). Periodizing the history of digital journalism into three phases, this article considers the interplay between journalism and journalism research. The results show how journalistic digital media define their role in the relationships between old media and the Internet, digital media and other outlets, and digital media and their audiences. Furthermore, the results substantiate how digital editorial staff define their journalistic identities regarding tasks, rules, and skills. During the first period (surveys conducted in 1997 and 2000), the view from old mass media to the Internet dominated, also in scholarship where the mass media paradigm was extended to the Internet. The second period (surveys conducted in 2006 and 2007) was characterized by clarifying the relationships between journalism and newly emerged outlets. These studies focused on how participative formats (such as Wikipedia and blogs) and search engines could be used for journalistic purposes without compromising quality. These new outlets were not regarded then as much of a threat. This attitude did not change during the third period (surveys conducted in 2010 and 2014). In this phase, too, the studies focused on how editorial staff utilized the ever-increasing number of social media. The six surveys’ different research interests reveal that the reviewed journalism research primarily addressed changing demands in journalistic practice. Therefore, exogenous factors (“the sector”) had a greater impact than endogenous factors (the “scholarship”) on research interests.
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    Challenges of and approaches to data collection across platforms and time: Conspiracy-related digital traces as examples of political contention
    (2024) Heft, Annett; Bühling, Kilian; Zhang, Xixuan; Schindler, Dominik; Milzner, Miriam
    Taking the example of conspiracy-related communication online as one form of contentious politics, this study examines the data collection challenges for multidimensional comparative research across platforms, time, and cultural embeddings. It compares the architectures and features relevant to data collection, access regimes, and use cultures for a set of digital platforms and communication venues. Differentiating between actor- and content-based strategies, this study discusses the potentials and limitations of these approaches, considering differences in platforms, temporal dynamics, and cultural embeddings as well as several layers of equivalence. The discussion highlights crucial insights into designing data collection strategies in multidimensional comparative studies.
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    Clickbait or conspiracy? How Twitter users address the epistemic uncertainty of a controversial preprint
    (2023) Bauer, Mareike; Heimstädt, Maximilian; Franzreb, Carlos; Schimmler, Sonja
    Many scientists share preprints on social media platforms to gain attention from academic peers, policy-makers, and journalists. In this study we shed light on an unintended but highly consequential effect of sharing preprints: Their contribution to conspiracy theories. Although the scientific community might quickly dismiss a preprint as insubstantial and ‘clickbaity’, its uncertain epistemic status nevertheless allows conspiracy theorists to mobilize the text as scientific support for their own narratives. To better understand the epistemic politics of preprints on social media platforms, we studied the case of a biomedical preprint, which was shared widely and discussed controversially on Twitter in the wake of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Using a combination of social network analysis and qualitative content analysis, we compared the structures of engagement with the preprint and the discursive practices of scientists and conspiracy theorists. We found that despite substantial engagement, scientists were unable to dampen the conspiracy theorists’ enthusiasm for the preprint. We further found that members from both groups not only tried to reduce the preprint's epistemic uncertainty but sometimes deliberately maintained it. The maintenance of epistemic uncertainty helped conspiracy theorists to reinforce their group's identity as skeptics and allowed scientists to express concerns with the state of their profession. Our study contributes to research on the intricate relations between scientific knowledge and conspiracy theories online, as well as the role of social media platforms for new genres of scholarly communication.