Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries have faced significant political, economic, social, and technological transformations over the last four decades. Democratic processes, after relative stabilisation, have begun to tremble again around polarizing values, populist leaders, or nationalistic ideologies. Online communication, especially social media platforms, play a vital role in shaping how citizens interact with the state, political actors, media, and other citizens.This book focuses on some of the challenges democratic institutions in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries face in transforming and sustaining civil society and captures how the digital media environments mitigate or exacerbate those challenges. The chapters in this book focus on the role that online platforms play in shaping satisfaction with democracy in the CEE region, the interactions between journalists and political actors, the strategic media coverage of elections, affective polarisation and political antagonism, and discursive attempts to discourage young people from civic engagement. The first section of the book looks at CEE countries from a comparative perspective, and the second section examines specific case studies within different CEE countries such as Albania and Kosovo, Czechia and Hungary, Poland and Ukraine.This volume will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of Communication Studies, Politics, Media Studies, Sociology and Central and Eastern European studies. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Information, Technology & Politics.

The second edition of this handbook offers a thoroughly updated overview of the different approaches and perspectives in communication ethics today.Extending the path paved by its predecessor, this handbook includes new issues and concerns that have emerged in the interim—from environmentalism to artificial intelligence, from disability studies to fake news. It also features a new structure, comprised of three sections representing a wide array of communication ethics: traditions, contexts, and debates. Rather than focusing exclusively on a subset of ethics (such as interpersonal communication, rhetoric, or journalism, as do other handbooks of ethics in communication), this collection provides a valuable resource for those who seek a broader basis on which to study communication ethics.This handbook is a must-read for faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in all areas of communication studies, as well as in neighboring disciplines such as rhetoric, media studies, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and science and technology studies.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been an ongoing source of violence in the Middle East, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of people. As of late violence has escalated, with this year being one of the deadliest years in the conflict in decades. Therefore, now more than ever finding ways to bridge divides is essential to reduce the human suffering associated with the conflict. In this study we evaluated the impact of an important element of communication: accent. We demonstrate that the accent through which trust-building initiatives are communicated can inadvertently sway public opinion regarding their benefits. Jewish-Israelis listened to the same trust-building proposal communicated by a Palestinian delegate with varying degrees of Palestinian Arabic-accented Hebrew. When the same proposal came from a Palestinian delegate with a heavier accent, Jewish-Israelis thought this proposal was significantly worse for Israel than when it was offered by a Palestinian delegate who spoke Hebrew with no detectable, non-native accent. This effect was explained by differences in how the Palestinian delegate was judged depending on his accent. When the delegate spoke with heavier, Arabic-accented Hebrew, he was judged more harshly than when he spoke Hebrew with no such accent, which in turn reduced how favorably Jewish-Israelis evaluated the proposed measures. Our findings show that the way in which trust-building measures are communicated can shape how they are received and thus has direct implications for diplomatic efforts.

In information environments characterized by institutional distrust, fragmentation and the widespread dissemination of conspiracies and disinformation, citizens perceive misinformation as a salient and threatening issue. Especially amidst disruptive events and crises, news users are likely to believe that information is inaccurate or deceptive. Using an original 19-country comparative survey study across diverse regions in the world (N = 19,037), we find that news users are likely to regard information on the Russian war in Ukraine as false. They are more likely to attribute false information to deliberative deception than to a lack of access to the war area or inaccurate expert knowledge. Russian sources are substantially more likely to be blamed for falsehoods than Ukrainian or Western sources – but these attribution biases depend on a country's position on the war. Our findings reveal that people mostly believe that falsehoods are intended to deceive them, and selectively associate misinformation with the opposed camp.

Previous studies demonstrate that politicians’ issue positions and rhetorical style have grown increasingly extreme. It remains unclear, however, whether extremity pays off electorally. Using two preregistered conjoint experiments conducted in the United States (N = 2,006) and Israel (N = 1,999), we investigate whether citizens reward or penalize candidates for taking extreme positions (i.e., proposing radical solutions to societal problems) and using an extreme rhetorical style (i.e., communicating in a way that signals rigidity and dogmatism). The results are consistent in showing that extremity is costly for candidates. Across countries, citizens penalize both in-party and out-party candidates for both extreme positions and an extreme rhetorical style, and the average penalty for being extreme is a 16-percentage-point decrease in candidate support. Our results are in line with scholarship demonstrating that citizens disapprove of elite extremity. They also indicate that citizens react independently to elites’ substantive policy positions and their communication style.

Social media has become a key space for young people to experiment with their political voice and to hone it through interaction with others. However, authors Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and Ioana Literat argue that in order to seriously consider social media as a space for youth political expression, we need to put aside conventional expectations about the forms that political expression should take. This empirical and theoretically-based investigation sets the stage for a normative discussion, asking how the forms of expressive citizenship identified throughout the book might bolster-or hinder-democratic engagement. Ultimately, the book considers what it means to take youth political expression on social media seriously, and what the stakes are for political socialization and democratic participation.

This article presents for the first time a classification of, and lexicon for, features for dissolving interpersonal ties in digital environments: blocking, unfriending, unfollowing, muting, withholding, and ejecting. There are two main motivations and two main contributions. The first motivation is that analyses of social media features have not included treatment of features for interpersonal disconnectivity; the second is that analyses of interpersonal disconnectivity have not included reference to the features that enable it. The two main contributions are the disambiguation of a confusing terminological field, thus making it possible to analytically distinguish between types of feature, and an intervention in the question of whether the features described in the article concern filtering information or avoiding people. Data were collected from 37 social media platforms and other services that enable digitally-mediated communication. Features for interpersonal disconnectivity were documented and then the features were grouped based on five questions about their use, where A is the person using the feature, and B is the target of A’s use of the feature: (a) Does it affect A’s feed?; (b) does it affect B’s feed?; (c) is A still connected to B?; (d) is B still connected to A?; (e) can A and B see each other’s profile?

Journalists and experts play a pivotal role in communicating risks and helping the public navigate uncertain futures. This study examines the co-construction of projections by journalists and experts across news and social media during the Covid-19 pandemic. Unlike traditional news production, where journalists exercise agency by transforming expert knowledge into news narratives, hybrid media environments involve multi-platform, multi-directional, and non-linear processes of knowledge production. In light of these characteristics, we introduce and develop the concept of “predictive agency,” referring to an actor’s active participation in predictive knowledge-making and encompassing journalistic, civic, and epistemic forms of agency in shaping and navigating future-oriented knowledge. We analyse the trajectories of 400 projections in Israel and the US, tracing the interactional and informational dynamics between journalists and experts. Through qualitative textual analysis of the various iterations of each projection, four types of co-constructed projection systems emerge: Amplify, Distill, Elaborate, and Contest. We explore the complexities of predictive agency and accountability in these systems, shedding light on how collective futures are contested and co-constructed in hybrid media environments.

This article presents a conceptual and methodological framework that focuses on the interactivity, creativity, and variability of Holocaust images in digital media. Our argument unfolds in three stages. First, we introduce the concept of playful images: historical images that undergo recontextualisation, serving memetic, personal, and interactive engagements in and by digital media. Secondly, drawing on pivotal scholarship in digital methods, anthropology, sociology, and visual analysis, we identify a lacuna in contemporary methodologies and provide a rationale for an innovative approach to visual memory analysis in digital media that considers both digital media affordances and the appropriation of visual and historical materials in digital media. For that purpose, we thirdly outline a visual walkthrough method (VWM), a pragmatic performance of our approach tailored for analysing interactive digital experiences featuring playful images. By examining the playful appropriation of historical images in the video game Call of Duty: WWII (2017), we demonstrate how the interactive experience of playful images can be analysed with the help of the VWM. We conclude by discussing the position of our proposed conceptual and methodological framework within media and memory studies in the digital age.

The COVID-19 pandemic raised interest in the question of digital participation and expression during crises. Our study contributes to this debate through a deep dive into differential effects the pandemic had on the social and political expression of Twitter users. We report results from a mobile experience sampling method survey of intense users from Jerusalem, Israel. As the study was in the field when lockdown measures were implemented, it can trace changes in expressive behaviors as the crisis emerged. Our data demonstrate differential patterns in use intensity and communication about the pandemic. Many people intensified their Twitter use, but some turned away. Compared with younger users, older people used Twitter less and communicated about the pandemic less. More educated users intensified their use, compared with less educated users. Rather than causing complete realignments of expression, the pandemic intensified existing differential patterns. Our study demonstrates how, in a moment of uncertainty, a situation-specific information elite formed within a set of intense Twitter users, one that could gain disproportionate power in shaping public understanding of the pandemic.