TikTok has become a space where playfulness is the dominant lingo for engaging with serious subjects. On the platform, the Holocaust is mediated through meme-based performances like the #POVHolocaustChallenge, a trend that invited users to re-enact fictionalized memories of Holocaust victims. Our analysis of 250 videos identifies 3 types of Holocaust-related memetic narratives—mem(e)ories: (1) Testimonial Mem(e)ory, where “victims” testify from “heaven” as confessional storytelling; (2) Punitive Mem(e)ory, where “victims” choose to be sent back to the Holocaust as punishment; and (3) Escapist Mem(e)ory, where “victims” time travel from the 1940s to the present for a brief escape. Drawing on interviews with 15 creators and 7 Holocaust institution representatives, we argue that #POV challenges re-mediate past events, transform into education, and serve as a means for forging personal connections to the Holocaust. We introduce TikTok’s affordance of playability as a structural condition that governs participation, with users merging performative storytelling with remix culture and inscribing Holocaust (post)memory into their platformed experiences.

How is a factual claim made credible? We propose the novel task of Epistemic Appeal Identification, which identifies whether and how factual statements have been anchored by external sources or evidence. To advance research on this task, we present FactAppeal, a manually annotated dataset of 3,226 English-language news sentences. Unlike prior resources that focus solely on claim detection and verification, FactAppeal identifies the nuanced epistemic structures and evidentiary basis underlying these claims and used to support them. FactAppeal contains span-level annotations which identify factual statements and mentions of sources on which they rely. Moreover, the annotations include fine-grained characteristics of factual appeals such as the type of source (e.g. Active Participant, Witness, Expert, Direct Evidence), whether it is mentioned by name, mentions of the source's role and epistemic credentials, attribution to the source via direct or indirect quotation, and other features. We model the task with a range of encoder models and generative decoder models in the 2B-9B parameter range. Our best performing model, based on Gemma 2 9B, achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.73.

While media bias is widely studied, the epistemic strategies behind factual reporting remain computationally underexplored. This paper analyzes these strategies through a large-scale comparison of CNN and Fox News. To isolate reporting style from topic selection, we employ an article matching strategy to compare reports on the same events and apply the FactAppeal framework to a corpus of over 470K articles covering two highly politicized periods: the COVID-19 pandemic and the Israel-Hamas war. We find that CNN's reporting contains more factual statements and is more likely to ground them in external sources. The outlets also exhibit sharply divergent sourcing patterns: CNN builds credibility by citing Experts} and Expert Documents, constructing an appeal to formal authority, whereas Fox News favors News Reports and direct quotations. This work quantifies how partisan outlets use systematically different epistemic strategies to construct reality, adding a new dimension to the study of media bias.

This article examines the journalistic production of mediated political projections – media narratives about uncertain political futures, such as anticipated election outcomes and their implications. Despite the significance of prospective coverage in political journalism and its influence on political decision-making, there is limited understanding of journalists’ perceptions and textual expressions of political forecasting. Drawing on interviews with Israeli journalists and a computational text analysis of election coverage in France, Israel, and the U.S., this study aims to understand how journalists perceive, negotiate, and textually navigate political forecasting in their work – whether through their own projections or by mediating forecasts made by others. The findings reveal journalists’ deep ambivalence toward political forecasting and the resulting textual practices. We show how journalists attribute their engagement in forecasting to external pressures, while their reluctance stems from the inherent risks and challenges associated with political forecasting and its tension with their journalistic identity and professional values. To navigate this tension, they incorporate projections into conventional factual reporting or use non-committal language. Except in data journalism, assessing the likelihood of political scenarios is uncommon. Although these patterns are observed across countries and media types, prospective coverage is more prevalent in interventionist and accommodative journalistic cultures, with the rhetoric of facticity and certitude more common in broadcast news. We suggest that journalists’ reluctance to fully engage with the inherent uncertainties of political futures limits their ability to contribute effectively to public decision-making processes as societies navigate political futures.

This book presents a communications approach to the biblical story of Esther and the ritual that it anchors, the Jewish carnival of Purim. Esther, the second-most written about book of the Bible, is thought to be based on a tale that circulated around 400 BC, and was later transcribed and brought before the Jewish Sages with the request that it be canonized. It was, though God is not mentioned in it, with its focus instead on glamour, drinking, sex, violence, and genocidal plots. Despite the reservations of many at its inclusion in the canon, Esther formed the basis for an extremely popular Jewish ritual: the holiday of Purim. This book discusses how story and holiday combine all of the elements of a communication process – production of content, choice of medium, seal of approval, diffusion over time and space, and promotion of various forms of reception and reaction. It is a case study of "how culture works" and how the text itself is about communicating. It will appeal to all researchers of communication and religion, communication and the Bible, and communication and Judaism, and more generally to readers who are interested in communication or fascinated by culture.

Digital media constitute a key space for the negotiation of public opinion. Despite long-standing research on public opinion climates on digital media, little theory exists that considers their emergence and discursive dynamics. In this article, we conceptualize public opinion negotiations in a digital media ecosystem as a discursive process aimed at delimiting the latitude of normatively acceptable opinions. Building upon theoretical work on predigital media, we distill five enduring aspects to characterize digitally mediated public opinion negotiations as (a) the public expression of (b) normative opinions upon public issues by (c) positioned speakers, resulting in (d) the public negotiation of acceptable stances (e) within digitally mediated public arenas governed by institutional and sociotechnical media logics. Discussing how digital media shape this discursive process, we propose a theory of public opinion negotiations in a digital media ecosystem, flagging operational implications for the empirical study of public opinion processes on digital media.

While North American Olim continue to arrive in Israel, many of them face challenges in adjusting to life in Israel and finding their place in Israeli society. Previous research has examined the challenges Olim face in adjusting to a new culture and has indicated that being far from the familiarities of home often leads to lifestyle changes and the development of multiple identities. Female immigrants may find it particularly challenging to find a sense of social belonging, while those from ultra-Orthodox communities are faced with unique challenges of their own as they are exposed to different sociocultural expectations in their newly expanded social circles. This study explores, through qualitative research methods and in-depth interviews, the challenges, experiences, dilemmas, and conflicts faced by ultra-Orthodox women as they journey through finding their identity both culturally and religiously following their move to Israel. The findings shed light on the motivations of these women for making aliyah, and the development of new social, cultural, and religious identities that follows.

Political language is deeply intertwined with social identities. While social identities are often shaped by specific cultural contexts and expressed through particular uses of language, existing datasets for group and identity detection are predominantly English-centric, single-label and focus on coarse identity categories. We introduce HebID, the first multilabel Hebrew corpus for social identity detection: 5,536 sentences from Israeli politicians' Facebook posts (Dec 2018-Apr 2021), manually annotated for twelve nuanced social identities (e.g. Rightist, Ultra-Orthodox, Socially-oriented) grounded by survey data. We benchmark multilabel and single-label encoders alongside 2B-9B-parameter generative LLMs, finding that Hebrew-tuned LLMs provide the best results (macro-$F_1$ = 0.74). We apply our classifier to politicians' Facebook posts and parliamentary speeches, evaluating differences in popularity, temporal trends, clustering patterns, and gender-related variations in identity expression. We utilize identity choices from a national public survey, enabling a comparison between identities portrayed in elite discourse and the public's identity priorities. HebID provides a comprehensive foundation for studying social identities in Hebrew and can serve as a model for similar research in other non-English political contexts.

While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents.

This study examines the discourse surrounding shame in Israeli-Hebrew online peer-advice forums. Employing a discursive psychology approach, we analyze how shame is mobilized in advice requests and addressed by commentators in these sites characterized by increased emotional exposure and disinhibited communication. Drawing on a corpus of posts from a leading Israeli advice forum containing explicit expressions of shame, our findings reveal distinct peer support patterns that often challenge the poster’s emotional experience and perspective, frequently using blunt, face-threatening language. This approach aligns with ‘dugri empathy’, a care discourse style rooted in the direct, action-oriented Israeli communication ethos. Peer responses typically aim to reframe shame-inducing situations, normalize experiences, or dismiss the relevance of shame, reflecting cultural norms of directness in emotional support. In contrast, responses from trained NGO volunteers adhere to Western therapeutic practices, emphasizing validation and exploration of emotions. This disparity highlights a tension between cultural support norms and professional approaches to mental health in online spaces. Our study contributes to understanding how cultural communication styles shape emotional discourse and support strategies in anonymous online communities, offering insights into the complex interplay between emotion, cultural norms, and digital communication.