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This research examines whether and to what extent journalists are harassed online and the effects of online harassment on their professional roles. The study classifies online harassment against journalists into five types: insults, threats, privacy intrusion, sexual assault, and cyber-hacking. The findings reveal a positive correlation between online harassment and various adverse outcomes for journalists, including increased self-censorship, reduced public engagement, and heightened skepticism toward journalism. With regard to a specific type of online harassment, journalists' gender plays a role as a moderator: The relationship between insults and self-censorship, disengagement with the public, and skepticism toward journalism was found to be stronger for women journalists than men journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether or to what extent partisan online media use is positively associated with people's obtaining partisan misinformation and forming partisanship-consistent attitudes toward political issues. This study examines whether people are more likely to obtain attitude-consistent misinformation that undercuts their partisan beliefs. Also examined is the role that misinformation plays in the relationship between partisan online media use and attitudes towards partisan issues. A nation-wide online survey of 1,032 respondents in South Korea showed that people were more likely to accept misinformation if it was supportive of their partisanship. Findings further suggest that political misinformation mediated the relationship between partisan online media use and attitudes toward partisan issues. Partisan online media use appears to guide people in their learning party-consistent misinformation that leads them to have greater partisanship-consistent attitudes toward political issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study carves out a promising theoretical space to investigate how general and specific Internet use may facilitate various returns of social capital by separating the structural embeddedness of social capital from the returns of social capital. Drawing on a randomly sampled survey of adult residents in a major US city, we examine how general Internet use, interacted with network diversity, contributes to various returns of social capital: bonding and bridging, online and offline. We further unpack general Internet use to specific Internet use and explore their relations with the returns of social capital. The results show that general Internet use is positively related to all the online bonding, online bridging, and offline social capital returns, whereas specific Internet use (i.e., informational, participatory, and recreational) is only positively related to online but not offline returns of social capital. Network diversity moderates the relationship between general Internet use and offline returns of social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]