Articles

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    From permanent campaign to permanent communication: parliamentarians’ cross-media practices in routine and election times
    (2025-04-14) Severin-Nielsen, Majbritt Kappelgaard; Kruikemeier, Sanne; Ohme, Jakob; Gade Kjelmann, Kristian
    With the advent of social media, politicians must navigate an increasingly complex and fast-paced political communication landscape. Scholars have argued that the development pushes politicians to be in permanent campaign mode and that this, in turn, weakens their engagement in other policy-making tasks. In this study, we examine parliamentarians’ cross-media behaviors and strategies in a hybrid media environment in light of the theory of permanent campaigning. Through cluster analyses of parliamentarians’ media behaviors and interviews with them about their media strategies during a routine and election period in the most likely case, Denmark, we contribute to the conceptual development of the permanent campaign in a hybrid media context.
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    Attenuating the crisis: the relationship between media use, prosocial political participation, and holding misinformation beliefs during the COVID-19 pandemic
    (2021-06-15) Ohme, Jakob; Hameleers, Michael; Brosius, Anna; Van der Meer, Toni
    In a global crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world are dependent on voluntary support of their citizens. Based on a four-wave panel survey conducted in the Netherlands between April and July 2020 (n = 1742), this study investigates the development of citizens’ engagement in prosocial political activities and what motivates such acts of political participation. With previous research indicating strong relationships between news as well as social media use and political participation, we test whether these types of information consumption drive participation over time. The spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 crisis, however, was described as an “infodemic”. The study therefore explores how holding misinformation beliefs directly and indirectly affects participation in COVID-19 related activities.
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    Algorithmic social media use and its relationship to attitude reinforcement and issue-specific political participation – The case of the 2015 European immigration movements
    (2020-09-02) Ohme, Jakob
    Selective exposure to likeminded political viewpoints on algorithmic social media platforms is considered a potential source of polarization of public opinion. We still know little about the proposed mechanism or how potential reinforcement of specific attitudes affects citizens’ political behavior, especially in a nonelectoral context. Focusing on the issue of immigration during the refugee influx to Europe in autumn 2015, this study investigates the effects of social media usage on attitude reinforcement, connecting it to political participation in refugee-related activities. A panel study conducted among Danish citizens (n = 847) reveals that frequent social media usage reinforces existing attitudes and mobilizes political participation. However, citizens who become more extreme in their attitude toward immigration over time are found to be less likely to become politically active regarding this specific issue.
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    Beyond the Buzz: Investigating the Effects of a Notification-Disabling Intervention on Smartphone Behavior and Digital Well-Being
    (2024-03-28) Dekker, Cynthia A.; Baumgartner, Susanne E.; Sumter, Sindy R.; Ohme, Jakob
    Turning off push notifications is a common recommendation to reduce smartphone screen time and to improve daily experiences of digital well-being. As only little empirical evidence exists, this study aims to test the effectiveness of this strategy. Based on a preregistered randomized controlled trial (N = 205), including objectively logged smartphone behavior data and daily mobile diary assessments of subjective experiences, we found that a one-week notification-disabling intervention did not affect smartphone behavior (i.e. checking frequency and screen time). This pattern was not dependent on people’s trait fear of missing out. In addition, we found no effects on perceived control, overuse, smartphone vigilance, productivity, and smartphone-related distraction. The intervention did, however, result in a decrease in perceived checking habit strength, indicating that users experienced their smartphone use to be more intentional. The absence of notifications also led to increased fear of missing out, suggesting that disabling notifications results in drawbacks rather than improvements in digital well-being. Together, these findings challenge the assumption that notifications play a prominent role in driving smartphone use and influencing user experiences. Findings are discussed in light of the complex interplay between device features and digital well-being.
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    Partisan Selective Exposure in Times of Political and Technological Upheaval: A Social Media Field Experiment
    (2019-06-30) Mothes, Cornelia; Ohme, Jakob
    Contemporary democracies are increasingly shaped by a surge of populism, posing serious threats to the idea of liberal democracy. Particularly in the run-up to elections, knowledge of such threats is essential for citizens to cast an informed vote. Against this background, the present study examined the likelihood of media users to engage with political news providing critical perspectives on populist movements in a 24-hour social media field experiment during the 2017 federal election campaign in Germany (N = 210). Based on two selective exposure measures, findings suggest that exposure to critical news is contingent upon the conceptualization of populist partisanship as a political orientation of either high commitment (i.e., voting intention) or high affinity (i.e., sympathy for a party). While high commitment triggered a rather classic confirmation bias, especially regarding click decisions, high affinity caused selection patterns to be more strongly guided by informational utility, particularly during newsfeed browsing, with counter-attitudinal information receiving more attention. When public sentiment cues were present, however, attitudinal patterns disappeared. These findings imply that partisan news use in times of political upheaval is best gauged by taking a closer look at the particular type of partisanship that guides selective exposure, as both types of partisanship caused contrary exposure patterns, and that today’s news environments potentially override attitudinal influences by providing additional social monitoring cues.
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    Staying Informed and Bridging “Social Distance”: Smartphone News Use and Mobile Messaging Behaviors of Flemish Adults during the First Weeks of the COVID-19 Pandemic
    (2020-01) Ohme, Jakob; Vanden Abeele, Mariek M. P.; Van Gaeveren, Kyle; Durnez, Wouter; De Marez, Lieven
    The authors explore patterns of smartphone use during the first weeks following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in Belgium, focusing on citizens’ use of smartphones to consume news and to communicate and interact with others. Unique smartphone tracking data from 2,778 Flemish adults reveal that at the height of the outbreak, people used their smartphone on average 45 minutes (28 percent) more than before the outbreak. The number of smartphone pickups remained fairly stable over this period. This means that on average, users did not turn to their smartphones more frequently but used them longer to access news (54 percent increase), social media apps (72 percent increase), messaging apps (64 percent increase), and the voice call feature (44 percent increase). These smartphone use patterns suggest that smartphones are key instruments that help citizens stay informed, in sync, and in touch with society during times of crisis.
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    Mobile data donations: Assessing self-report accuracy and sample biases with the iOS Screen Time function
    (2021-05) Ohme, Jakob; Araujo, Theo; de Vreese, Claes H.; Piotrowski, Jessica Taylor
    With digital communication increasingly shifting to mobile devices, communication research needs to explore ways to retrieve, process, and analyze digital trace data on people’s most personal devices. This study presents a new methodological approach, mobile data donations, in which smartphone usage data is collected unobtrusively with the help of mobile log data. The iOS Screen Time function is used as a test case for gathering log data with the help of screenshots. The study investigates the feasibility of the method, sample biases, and accuracy of smartphone usage self-reports on a general population sample of Dutch citizens (n=404). Importantly, it explores how mobile data donations can be used as add-ons or substitutes for conventional media exposure measures. Results indicate that (a) users’ privacy concerns and technical skills are crucial factors for the willingness to donate mobile log data and (b) there is a strong tendency for underreporting of smartphone usage duration and frequency.
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    Dynamics of scale shift: Contentious places and hybrid activism on social media
    (2025-09) Baran, Zozan; Stoltenberg, Daniela
    This article investigates the role of social media in scale shift of contention. Contentious politics research grapples with questions of scale shift, while digital activism explores connective potential of social media. Yet, the potential of social media is not fully explored in the scale shift processes. We conduct an explorative semantic network analysis to understand how activists create connections between contentious places to facilitate spatial and substantive scale shift. We define contentious places as places bearing demands and grievances on themselves, expressed with hashtags and connected via co-hashtagging practices. We employ the notion of hybridity to understand the role of online and offline dynamics in this process. Our results show that social media enables connections within and across borders, and across issues, hence expanding contention spatially and substantively.
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    The Telegram COVID-19 Protest Dataset 2020-2022
    (2025-01-01) Heidi Schulze,; Kilian Buehling,; Maximilian Zehring,
    Telegram, known for its hybrid architecture combining features of instant messaging and social networking sites, offers various communication modes and a high degree of anonymity. This has made it a key platform for contentious political movements and extremist actors and the most important platform for COVID-19-related protest communication. This paper presents a novel, manually curated dataset, capturing the German-language COVID-19 protest mobilization on Telegram from 2020 to 2022. The dataset includes public messages from 715 broadcast channels and 229 public group chats N= 5,641,026 messages. Unlike other datasets, this collection was manually classified and processed, providing a detailed longitudinal overview of this movement and its network. Data were collected at multiple points during the observation period, minimizing data loss due to deletions and enhancing the historical value of the dataset. Additional variables, including network data and geolocations, are available for further research. Ethical considerations were addressed through consultation with data protection officers and an ethics review board, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations. The dataset adheres to the FAIR principles, making it accessible and useful for future scholarly research on digital mobilization.
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    Russian disinformation hijacking gender cleavages: anti-gender frames on RT as a gateway for illiberal propaganda
    (2025-12-30) Stolze, Martha
    Efforts by authoritarian regimes like Russia to influence public opinion in democracies through disinformation have gained scholarly attention. However, the gendered dimensions of these efforts and their role in illiberal discourse remain underexplored. This article’s aim is twofold. First, examining all articles of Russia’s state-owned international outlet RT Deutsch using topic modelling and frame analysis, it offers an analysis of the meaning transported via Russian gender- and sexuality-related messaging over time in German. Findings show that RT Deutsch articles contain antifeminist and LGBT-phobic anti-gender frames, while conveying the master frame of a deceiving, immoral, values-imposing, divided and weak west. It is argued that gender functions as a gateway: Tapping into gender cleavages makes it possible for Russian propaganda to reach broad conservative audiences with illiberal claims. Second, it theorizes the role of gendered disinformation in the rise of illiberal discourse: It is argued that the dominant anti-western master frame in gender- and sexuality-related content suggests a strategic use of anti-gender messaging not only to attract conservative audiences by tapping gender cleavages, but to foster illiberal, anti-democratic attitudes among its audience. The strategic use of false or misleading anti-gender messaging for illiberal political communication is coined gendered disinformation.