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This article develops a reputational theory of political falsehoods. Politicians are motivated by the desire to build a positive reputation, therefore, they will be more likely to deliver false statements (incurring the risk of being fact-checked) when the potential benefit outweighs the cost. This happens as new elections come closer, since the electoral benefit of falsehoods increases along with the probability of being checked too late (after the election day). Politicians are less likely to issue falsehoods in detailed statements and in scripted communication, since the reputational cost is higher because such falsehoods would be considered intentional. Conversely, the stronger trust that voters attribute to politicians on issues they own, allows politicians to lie on such topics. Statistical analysis of almost 8000 statements released by politicians and assessed by fact-checkers, in the United States and Italy (2007–2018), supports the hypotheses. The results hold irrespective of party affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across two studies, we test two of Facebook's attempts to fight misinformation: labeling misinformation as disputed or false and including fact checks as related articles. We propose hypotheses based on a two-step model of motivated reasoning, which provides insight into how misinformation is corrected. For study 1 (n = 1,262) and study 2 (n = 1,586), we created a mock Facebook News Feed consisting of five different articles—four were actual news stories and the fifth was misinformation. Both studies tested (a) the effect of misinformation without correction, (b) Facebook's changes to its platform, and (c) an alternative we theorized could be more effective. The findings, in line with the two-step model of motivated reasoning, provide evidence of symmetric party effects for the belief in misinformation. In both studies, we find partisan differences in responses to fact checking. We find modest evidence that our improvements to Facebook's attempts at correcting misinformation reduce misperceptions across partisan divides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News organizations have adapted in various ways to a digital media environment dominated by algorithmic gatekeepers such as search engines and social networks. This article dissects a campaign to actively shape that environment led by professional fact-checking organizations. We trace the development of the Share the Facts "widget," a device designed to give fact-checks greater purchase in algorithmically governed media networks by driving adoption of a new data standard called ClaimReview. We show how "structured journalism" gave journalists a language for the social and technical challenges involved, and how this infrastructural technology mediates between fact-checkers, audiences, and platform companies. We argue that this standard-setting initiative exhibits both promotional and disciplining facets, offering greater distribution and impact to journalists while also defining their work in specific ways. Crucially, in this case, this disciplining influence reflects internal professional-institutional agendas in an emerging subfield of journalism as much as the demands of platform companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New media literacy (NML) is an emerging construct of great value in a digital age in which information overload threatens the well-being of society. Among the scarcity of available research going beyond a theoretical conceptualization of NML and using structural equational modeling, we explored the influence of NML on media trust, perception of fake news, and fact-checking motivation that underlie the dissemination of unverified information during the COVID-19 pandemic. Challenging the assertion of NML's absolute effect on mitigating the problem of fake news communication, the components of NML were shown to contribute to the transmission of unverified information among citizens unless the risk of fake news was well understood. The findings suggest that further research is required to fully understand the scope of NML in designing public education, and that the problem of fake news spread may be a social phenomenon that digitalized society must embrace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scale, volume, and distribution speed of disinformation raise concerns in governments, businesses, and citizens. To respond effectively to this problem, we first need to disambiguate, understand, and clearly define the phenomenon. Our online information landscape is characterized by a variety of different types of false information. There is no commonly agreed typology framework, specific categorization criteria, and explicit definitions as a basis to assist the further investigation of the area. Our work is focused on filling this need. Our contribution is twofold. First, we collect the various implicit and explicit disinformation typologies proposed by scholars. We consolidate the findings following certain design principles to articulate an all-inclusive disinformation typology. Second, we propose three independent dimensions with controlled values per dimension as categorization criteria for all types of disinformation. The taxonomy can promote and support further multidisciplinary research to analyze the special characteristics of the identified disinformation types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the widespread misinformation problem in societies across the globe, scholars aiming to combat misinformation wish to change verification behaviors at the individual level. To map what is known about media users' verification behaviors, this study reviewed 52 articles and analyzed how verification research has progressed so far. The results indicate that verification research has been conducted since 2000 but has increased considerably in recent years. However, a clear definition and a standard measure of verification behaviors were missing. Theories and methodologies from different disciplines have been adopted to investigate verification behaviors. The examined variables are diverse, but the overall understanding of the findings is fragmented. Interestingly, the COVID-19 pandemic boosted the number of studies on media users' verification behaviors and brought changes to the direction of the research. This review calls for a better conceptualization and validated measures of verification behaviors and examinations of verification in more diverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review aims (a) to investigate the motivations to share fake news on Social Media Platforms (SMPs) according to the Self-Determination Theory (SDT); (b) to identify the solutions to fight these motivations and the agents in charge of implementing them; and (c) the user's role in this process. We reviewed 64 journal articles published up to April 2022. Misinformation belief and entertainment stood out as the most cited intrinsic motivations, while self-promotion, conspiracy theory, and political ideology were the most cited extrinsic motivations in the reviewed literature. The main solutions to fight fake news spreading on SMPs are improving users' digital literacy, refining interventions, rating headlines, and sources, and promoting users' engagement to consume content sustainably. These interventions should be adopted by four agents: governments, SMPs, civil society, and private health organizations. However, the role of SMP users themselves is critical in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the agenda-setting power of fake news and fact-checkers who fight them through a computational look at the online mediascape from 2014 to 2016. Although our study confirms that content from fake news websites is increasing, these sites do not exert excessive power. Instead, fake news has an intricately entwined relationship with online partisan media, both responding and setting its issue agenda. In 2016, partisan media appeared to be especially susceptible to the agendas of fake news, perhaps due to the election. Emerging news media are also responsive to the agendas of fake news, but to a lesser degree. Fake news coverage itself is diverging and becoming more autonomous topically. While fact-checkers are autonomous in their selection of issues to cover, they were not influential in determining the agenda of news media overall, and their influence appears to be declining, illustrating the difficulties fact-checkers face in disseminating their corrections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media can be a double-edged sword for political misinformation, either a conduit propagating false rumors through a large population or an effective tool to challenge misinformation. To understand this phenomenon, we tracked a comprehensive collection of political rumors on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election campaign, analyzing a large set of rumor tweets (n = 330,538). We found that Twitter helped rumor spreaders circulate false information within homophilous follower networks, but seldom functioned as a self-correcting marketplace of ideas. Rumor spreaders formed strong partisan structures in which core groups of users selectively transmitted negative rumors about opposing candidates. Yet, rumor rejecters neither formed a sizable community nor exhibited a partisan structure. While in general rumors resisted debunking by professional fact-checking sites (e.g. Snopes), this was less true of rumors originating with satirical sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The all-consuming nature of coronavirus news coverage has made the COVID-19 pandemic a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between audience trust in and engagement with news. This study examines that relationship through 60 Zoom-based qualitative interviews conducted with a diverse sample of US adults during the early phase of the pandemic. We find that how people approach the news stems not only from how they perceive the trustworthiness of individual news outlets, but also from their own self-perceptions. News consumers believe journalism generally suffers from issues of bias, but that they are savvy and independent-minded enough to see through those biases to find the truth. Putting the concept of partisan selective exposure into conversation with folk theories of news consumption, we conclude that people's approach to and trust in news is as dependent on what they bring to the news as it is on what news brings to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through 19 semistructured interviews, we explore why people join and participate in "alternative health" Facebook groups and Reddit subs. Participation in these groups creates an ontological circle where people's feelings of fear, desperation, and distrust in the systems and actors that comprise our government, health, and news systems inspire alternative information and support-seeking in these groups and subs. While participation assuages those feelings and stabilizes people's sense of ontological security, it also destabilizes it, reinforcing and legitimizing feelings of fear, desperation, and distrust. This circle contributes to favorable receptive conditions for spreading unproven and dangerous health misinformation. We argue that it will be difficult to address misinformation (1) without considering and rectifying people's often valid reasons for feelings of fear, desperation, distrust, and their desires for information and (2) without considering the relationships between alternative health social media groups and subs and the (de)stabilization of ontological security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how media users define false information in the daily flow of their lives against a backdrop of sociopolitical contexts. We focus on the vernacular definitions of false information through the concept of folk theories, which are the intuitive explanatory tools users develop to make sense of and act in the world around them. Based on mixed-method research conducted in Turkey during the Covid-19 pandemic, we identify three prevailing folk theories of false information. First, users consider text-based characteristics, such as the presence of evidence as a flag of accuracy/inaccuracy. Second, users assume that people in their social networks distinguish between the accurate and the inaccurate, and thus the information coming from these circles is accurate. Finally, users imagine that people whose worldviews conflict with theirs spread inaccurate information. Despite users' overarching references to textual traits of news, it appears that the latter two folk theories drive users' information processing practices in daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automation is a defining feature of today's societies—not only since ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have accomplished to produce yet another wave of hype. This essay introduces a special issue on automation and communication in the digital society. It aims to study how subjectivity, agency, and empowerment become defined and reconfigured in novel human–machine encounters and, more broadly, in societies which in large parts are kept going and sustained by complex digital infrastructures. The issue includes contributions from a wide array of disciplines and perspectives and engages with conditions, contexts, and consequences of automation in very different settings ranging from journalism to self-service hotels, and from social movements in Hong Kong to the Russian Invasion to the Ukraine. The articles offer critical perspectives on the transition of human activity into machine operations, and back, as well on the social dynamics changing and emerging in increasingly digitized and datafied societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TikTok has emerged as a powerful platform for the dissemination of mis- and disinformation about the war in Ukraine. During the initial three months after the Russian invasion in February 2022, videos under the hashtag #Ukraine garnered 36.9 billion views, with individual videos scaling up to 88 million views. Beyond the traditional methods of spreading misleading information through images and text, the medium of sound has emerged as a novel, platform-specific audiovisual technique. Our analysis distinguishes various war-related sounds utilized by both Ukraine and Russia and classifies them into a mis- and disinformation typology. We use computational propaganda features—automation, scalability, and anonymity—to explore how TikTok's auditory practices are exploited to exacerbate information disorders in the context of ongoing war events. These practices include reusing sounds for coordinated campaigns, creating audio meme templates for rapid amplification and distribution, and deleting the original sounds to conceal the orchestrators' identities. We conclude that TikTok's recommendation system (the "for you" page) acts as a sound space where exposure is strategically navigated through users' intervention, enabling semi-automated "soft" propaganda to thrive by leveraging its audio features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from a conjoint experiment in three countries (Brazil, n = 2038; Germany, n = 2012, and the United States, n = 2005), this study demonstrates that journalistic transparency can cue trust at the level of the entire news outlet—or domain level—using a Google Knowledge Panel that comes up when people search for a news outlet. In Brazil and the United States, two pieces of information in a Knowledge Panel provided the strongest heuristics that a news outlet was trustworthy: a description of the news outlet and a description of other sites accessed by people who frequent that news outlet's website. In Germany, information about journalists and the description of the news outlet were the strongest cues. Results offer insights into how people heuristically process online news and are discussed in relation to the heuristic-systematic model of information processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing online surveys of 729 US and 469 Chinese respondents, this study examines the mediated relationships between age and misinformation via fear of missing out (FoMO) and digital literacy in two different cultures. Results suggest that senior citizens are uniquely vulnerable to misinformation as the victims, in that they are less likely to check on suspicious content and that they are also less motivated to share information online in general. In contrast, youngadults have a greater propensity to be the spreaders of misinformation if not made suspicious of the content due to their stronger motivations to share information online. FoMO and digital literacy significantly mediate the relationship between age and motivations to share information and the one between age and reactions to misinformation, respectively. Sociocultural differences vary the intensity of these mediated relationships. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is exposure to false information necessary for misbelief? In this article, we consider the possibility that certain individuals hold misinformed beliefs without encountering misinformation, thus questioning for whom exposure to "fake news" is most deleterious. Using a pre-registered experiment on a diverse sample of 1079 US respondents, we find that the young, those with low information literacy, and those with high trust in government tend to hold mistaken beliefs, even without exposure to misinformation. Because these groups are already misinformed, eventual exposure to fake news does little to influence their misperceptions. Instead, misinformation exposure affects the elderly, those with high information literacy, and those with low trust in mainstream media the most. These results suggest that research focused on correcting misperceptions should avoid studying how certain characteristics correlate with misbelief only in misinformation's presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing body of literature on hashtag feminism in Western contexts, there is still a significant gap in our knowledge of the ways that feminist hashtag movements are developed in authoritarian societies. Moreover, we do not know much about the mechanisms by which a feminist hashtag movement is disrupted, particularly in non-democratic regimes. Drawing on and contributing to the hashtag feminism literature, we undertook a discursive approach to examine #rape on Persian Twitter to address these gaps. Findings showed that #rape was a space for Iranian users to share abusive experiences, but they went further to discuss barriers of disclosing sexual assault as well. Developing resistive strategies and raising awareness about other muted groups such as LGBTQIA+ were other discursive practices in articulating #rape. This article also pushes forward the existing literature on hashtag feminism by providing empirical analyses of the ways that a feminist movement is disrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global problem of online disinformation has led scholars, educators, and other stakeholders in societies to emphasize the utility of news literacy to engender more critical news audiences. Using a survey among a representative online sample of citizens in Hong Kong (N = 1485), this study examined how dispositional news literacy was related to individuals' ability to discern real and fake COVID-related news on social media and their news authentication behaviors. Results showed that higher news literacy was related to greater ability to discern the veracity of real and fake news headlines; greater likelihood of certain internal acts of authentication when exposed to fake news (e.g. assessing content characteristics of the message); and greater likelihood to search online to verify fake news. The findings demonstrated the normative benefits of high dispositional news literacy among the general populace that can attenuate the effects of online disinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the prevalence of misinformation on social media and accompanying negative externalities, platform regulation has become a highly contested public issue globally. This study investigated (a) what global publics think about platform regulation and (b) the psychological mechanisms underlying such opinions through the lens of the third-person effect. Four national surveys, conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Mexico in April–September 2021, revealed that both presumed media influence on self and others play important but different roles in predicting support for two distinctive forms of platform regulation (i.e. government regulation of social media platforms versus content moderation by social media platforms). Self-efficacy (self-perceived ability to spot misinformation) and other-efficacy (perception of others' ability to spot misinformation) were identified as two crucial antecedents of third-person perception. There were also nuanced but noteworthy differences in public attitudes toward platform regulations across the four countries studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As people access news via digital platforms, existing literature provides foundations for institutional approaches to news organizations' platform dependency. Yet, platform dependency also exists on a spectrum: size, business model, and market position impact how each news organization strategizes its reliance on digital platforms. I draw on in-depth interviews with 22 South Korean news professionals to delve into different survival strategies in dealing with South Korea's biggest search portal and news aggregator, Naver. Findings reveal that contrary to the common belief, journalists in legacy news organizations experience more pressure and compromise journalistic values with clickbait headlines. They deem their relationship with the platform more in hierarchical and inevitable terms while journalists from new, emerging organizations are relatively freer from the competition for clicks and strive for more quality journalism. However, the difference stems from the Naver platform's news organization ranking system and its tiered visibility structure that systematically creates the difference in audience reach and news distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharing is a central activity on social media platforms and a key component in crafting one's self-presentation online. In the context of news, user-driven sharing is seen as vital to the success of digital journalism. While research has examined why people choose to share news online, much less is known about non-sharing—that is, why people may be reluctant to share, and what that determination suggests about the nature of news and self-presentation. We examine qualitative interview responses from a cross-section of US news consumers to investigate this question. We find that non-sharers tend to believe that news is "toxic" and potentially damaging to their reputations as well as their relationships. Not sharing news is a protective mechanism for identity maintenance, even as it brings worries about one's voice being silenced in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As technology chief executive officers have become public figures, their personae operate as loci for journalistic discourse about the intersection of moral responsibilities, regulation, and political-economic power of the tech industry. They possess a power often construed as beyond the reach of politics or civil society to address. This study considers how the ubiquity of tech power has become a kind of common sense in journalistic discourse, specifically looking at news, commentary, and analysis that has circulated around Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg since 2016, arguing that even as critiques of Zuckerberg's moral fitness and leadership capacity proliferate, they construct the epistemic bounds within which tech industry power over American public life is understood as legitimate, even as journalists and commentators question certain executives' ability to wield the tech industry's infrastructural and cultural power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on misinformation has not provided sufficient empirical evidence concerning its political consequences. To amend this trend, this study examines how widespread misinformation on social media elevates political cynicism, which has peaked over the past decade in the United States. Using two-wave survey data collected both before and after the 2020 US presidential election, we present evidence that social media use triggers political cynicism, which is mediated through exposure to misinformation. In addition, the results reveal that the mediating relationship only holds among nonpartisans. Implications for democracy are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of 40,000 tweets that trended after the Tarun Tejpal acquittal in India showed that the nature of the debate around issues of molestation and rape exhibited attributes of deliberation and demonstrated that Twitter in India, in certain cases, has strong potential to emerge as a space for deliberative feminist activism. Discussions gave impetus to advocacy around sexual molestation. While the word "victim" was used in more instances rather than the human rights–based term "survivor," Twitter debates were supportive toward survivors of assault. There was minimum trolling and patriarchy was called out as was a legal system that sided with the influential man of power. Although city-bred English-speaking voices dominated, conversations were intersectional in nature acknowledging how the horror of physical assault was perceived by different women belonging to disparate socio-economic strata and how legal systems exacerbated gender related crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of digital media, conspiracy theories infamous for their emotional manipulation have challenged science epistemology and democratic discourse. Despite extensive literature on misinformation and the role of emotion in persuasion, less is understood about how emotion is used in conspiracy and debunking messages on video platforms and the impact of emotional framing on public engagement with science on social media. Our article fills this gap by analyzing thousands of YouTube videos that propagate or debunk COVID-19 conspiracy theories from March to May 2020. We found that conspiracy and debunking videos used the emotions of trust and fear differently depending on the issue framing of the conspiracy. Our article also reveals a dilemma facing debunking messages—when debunking videos used more trust-related emotions, these videos received more likes yet fewer views. These findings shed new light on the role of emotion on user engagement with misinformation and its correction on digital platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mounting concerns about COVID-19 misinformation and its insidious fallout drive the search for viable solutions. Both scholarly and practical efforts have turned toward raising risk appraisal of misinformation and motivating verification and debunking behaviors. However, individuals remain reluctant to verify and correct misinformation, suggesting a need to develop persuasion strategies to motivate such behaviors. Therefore, with an experiment of 256 participants recruited from Amazon MTurk, this study examines how effectively norm-based messages improve positive behavioral intentions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings suggest that among individuals with high perceived severity of misinformation, exposure to both descriptive and injunctive norms about verification reduced their intention to rectify misinformation. However, both descriptive and injunctive norms about debunking misinformation increased intentions to engage in preventive behaviors. By probing the "self–other" discrepancy and the "trade-off effect" of risk appraisal, the study further reveals that the perceived severity of misinformation merits in-depth exploration in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article establishes a theoretical link between the business model of social media and the resurgence of antiliberal populism. Through a novel set of tactics I term "identity biopolitics," political campaigns and foreign governments alike can identify voters as members of socioculturally differentiated populations, then target them with political messages aimed at cultivating voters' awareness of their particular disadvantage within the prevailing liberal order. Identity biopolitics exploits a positive feedback loop between targeting and content: the sociocultural differentiations liberalism declares politically irrelevant are used to target content that cultivates awareness of subjects' particular depoliticized disadvantage within the prevailing liberal order. The antiliberal populist exploits this condition to drive support for their political program. This article presents case studies of the Internet Research Agency and Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 general election in the United States to demonstrate the symbiosis between social media and antiliberal populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication research is increasingly concerned with the relationship between epistemological fragmentation and polarization. Even so, explanations for why partisans take up fringe beliefs are limited. This article examines the right-wing conspiracy QAnon, which posits that the anonymous poster "Q" is a Trump administration insider who encourages followers ("Bakers") to research hidden truths behind current events. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork on the 8chan imageboard, we position baking as a collective, knowledge-making activity built on the affordances of social media designed to construct specific facts and theories that maintain QAnon's cohesion over time. Bakers demonstrate populist expertise, the rejection of legacy media accounts of current events in favor of the "alternative facts" constructed through their systematic research programs. We emphasize the politically ambivalent nature of participatory culture and argue that baking casts doubt on critical thinking or media literacy as solutions to "post-truth" dilemmas like hyperpartisan media and disinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of disinformation challenges today's democracies. Selective exposure research assumes that psychological biases cause people to turn to attitude-reinforcing disinformation, though studies indicate that this only holds true for small niches of online audiences. However, when online, unbiased users as well may encounter disinformation, which for them appear to be attitude-challenging. How unbiased online users experience and cope with dissonance triggered by this, and whether this affects their pre-existing attitudes, has hardly been explored. This research gap is addressed using the polarized topic of climate change as an example. An experimental research design is applied combining stimulus exposure, survey research, eye tracking, and interviews (n = 50). The findings indicate that unbiased users are not entirely resistant to disinformation influence. However, attitude effects could not be fully explained by selection behavior but instead through different feelings and strategies of coping with dissonance and patterns of performing online information searches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand how individuals navigate the complex, dynamic, and bewildering media information environment, we propose a convergence framework theorizing individuals' acquisition of information from distinct sources on multiple mediums, along with its antecedents and consequences. This study is among the first to test the convergence framework. Using a national sample during the COVID-19 pandemic, our results revealed four convergence patterns and key antecedents and outcomes of these patterns. Individuals' information verification tendency, perceived medium anonymity, and trust in alternative sources were associated with distinct patterns of convergence, which led to different risk perceptions. Future research should explore different forms of convergence and additional antecedents and outcomes of convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how low-income African-American older adults, one of the groups most vulnerable to misinformation online, assess the credibility of online information. In examining this, we conducted both face-to-face interviews and a survey and then analyzed how their digital media use, demographics, self-efficacy, and involvement with particular topics were associated with their credibility assessments of online information. Our results suggest that education and topic involvement are statistically significant factors associated with assessments of message content and source credibility. Moreover, for our respondents, assessments of content credibility, as opposed to those of source credibility, were far more challenging. This research is one of the few studies examining online information credibility assessments made by low-income minority older adults. Theoretical and practical implications of our results are discussed in the context of misinformation, credibility assessment, and the digital divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate user engagement with politicians' migration discourses on social media. In particular, we study the effects of message framing and support base attitudes on interactions on Facebook and Twitter in five European countries. Enriching automated analysis of social media content with survey data in a multilevel negative binomial regression approach, findings show that migration-related messages tend to elicit more interactions than other kinds of messages. Furthermore, the presence of a security frame in a migration-related message positively relates to user engagement. However, additional analyses suggest that the relevance of these frames differ between different political parties. In fact, a message gets an even higher number of interactions, when the dimension of the migration issue included in those framed messages is perceived more negatively by a party's support base. The findings have important implications for communication strategies of political actors and the state of migration discourses on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns over the harmful effects of social media have directed public attention to media literacy as a potential remedy. Current conceptions of media literacy are frequently based on mass media, focusing on the analysis of common content and evaluation of the content using common values. This article initiates a new conceptual framework of social media literacy (SoMeLit). Moving away from the mass media-based assumptions of extant approaches, SoMeLit centers on the user's self in social media that is in dynamic causation with their choices of messages and networks. The foci of analysis in SoMeLit, therefore, are one's selections and values that influence and are influenced by the construction of one's reality on social media; and the evolving characteristics of social media platforms that set the boundaries of one's social media reality construction. Implications of the new components and dimensions of SoMeLit for future research, education, and action are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand news rhythms, scholars have primarily studied how the rituals and routines of news organizations align with the practices and expectations of audiences. The rhythms of today's networked press, though, are set not only by journalists and consumers but also by largely invisible digital infrastructures: software, data, and technologies from outside newsrooms that are increasingly intertwined with journalistic work. Here, we argue that the rhythms of the contemporary, networked press live in the materials, practices, and values of hybrid, time-setting sociotechnical systems, a new concept we call anticipatory news infrastructure. We explicate this concept through a typology of sociotechnical dynamics, showing how the networked press is poised to sense events, structure journalistic work, predict and commodify traffic, architect audience relations, and categorize content. We argue that these infrastructures anticipate possible public life, thus creating anticipation publics through their largely invisible power to shape expectations of journalists and audiences alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalists' epistemological activities—presumed to provide factual and reliable public information—have made journalism one of the most influential knowledge-producing institutions in society. However, changes—both slow and sudden—related to the digitization of news media and the diffusion of misinformation are challenging the social role and authority of journalism. This special issue advances research in two emerging sub-fields: (1) epistemologies of digital journalism and (2) the study of misinformation. This editorial presents an introduction to the sub-fields and a summary of the nine papers included in the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a fast-growing body of research is concerned with the detrimental consequences of disinformation for democracy, the role of visuals in this context has so far only been discussed superficially. Visuals are expected to amplify the impact of disinformation, but it is rarely specified how, and what exactly distinguishes them from text. This article is one of the first to treat visual disinformation as its own type of falsehood, arguing that it differs from textual disinformation in its production, processing and effects. We suggest that visual disinformation is determined by varying levels of modal richness and manipulative sophistication. Because manipulated visuals are processed differently on a psychological level, they have unique effects on citizens' behaviours and attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2020, amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, fringe political activists, conspiracy theorists, and far-right subcultures joined together to protest stay at home orders and social distancing decrees. Largely sharing information and organizing strategies on social media, these protestors adopted the Twitter hashtag #OpenAmericaNow to activate and mobilize supporters across the United States. In this study, we examine the online organizing of #OpenAmericaNow through analysis of 17,965 tweets to understand how fringe and conspiracy subcultures organized through oppositional consciousness raising. Our findings reveal multi-level discourses, which bridge identification on the micro-level with anti-elitist and post-truth logics on the macro-level. Theoretically, our study advances theorizing on postmodern organizing and conceptualizes alt-civic engagement, while also engaging in innovative methodological strategies useful for interrogating paradoxical and multi-level discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]