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.

Traditional agenda-setting research often focuses on the most urgent problems that dominate present public agendas. Challenging the prevalent conflation of importance with urgency in agenda-setting research, this article proposes a shift from a singular to a layered temporal conceptualization of public agendas. The suggested framework distinguishes between the immediate agenda, which addresses problems perceived as most urgent, and the delayed agenda, which focuses on issues deemed most important for the future. Enriching agenda-setting theory with insights from construal level theory, the study examines the psychological and media-related factors shaping the placement of topics on these agendas. Drawing upon original survey data and a large-scale news content analysis from the French 2022 Presidential Elections, as well as survey data from the 2023 to 2024 war in Israel and Gaza, the findings provide empirical support for the proposed framework. The results indicate that participants prioritize psychologically proximate issues on the immediate agenda, whereas psychologically distant issues gain importance on the delayed agenda. Additionally, we identify media agenda-setting effects that extend beyond the immediate temporal layer. Specifically, both studies provide evidence for a media priming effect, where news exposure increases issue salience without affecting temporal layering. The Israeli case reveals additional initial evidence for an urgency effect, where news exposure boosts issue salience of some issues primarily on the immediate agenda. Overall, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of public agendas and news media effects, introducing a temporally nuanced perspective that enriches classical approaches to agenda-setting research.

Politicians' personality is believed to play a central role in their electoral success. It is unclear, however, how important different traits are to voters and how the impact of personality compares to that of other well-studied individual characteristics of politicians, such as gender, age, and political experience. Drawing on evidence from three studies—an observational study (N = 4543), a survey experiment (N = 1031), and a preregistered conjoint experiment (N = 4313)—conducted in Belgium, Canada, and Israel, we demonstrate that citizens value some traits (e.g., conscientiousness) more than others (e.g., extraversion) when choosing candidates. We also show that the relative effect of politicians' personality is greater than that of other individual characteristics. These results highlight the central role of elite personality in our understanding of voting behavior.

While authenticity has been identified as pivotal on social media, it has not been studied as part of a broader value ecology shaping content evaluation. Addressing this gap, we investigated users’ evaluations of prominent Instagram genres in relation to perceptions of authenticity. A survey of 1,000 users from the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea revealed transnational similarities in value-related interpretations of genres, alongside local variation. Participants described the most liked genres as expressing happiness, togetherness, and peacefulness, and authenticity was positively correlated with favorable evaluation of content across countries and genres. Ultimately, evaluation on Instagram is shaped by the intersection of perceived authenticity and pleasure derived from peaceful solitude or close social bonds. We conclude by reflecting on the utility of our multi-method approach and the importance of situating authenticity vis-à-vis other values in social media research.

Many studies claim that Instagram users like authentic images. However, authenticity has many aspects (e.g., telling the truth, being ordinary, being relatable, being true to oneself). Each aspect may play a different role in shaping what people like. Furthermore, there may be other relevant values that people like besides authenticity. This paper studies the values expressed by 15 popular types of Instagram images and the relationship between liking and authenticity. Our results are based on 1,000 responses to a survey distributed in Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. We found that people across countries like the same types of images, associate these images with similar values and tend to like images that they think are authentic, no matter which aspect of authenticity we focus on. We also found that the types of images people liked the most were associated with happiness, togetherness, and peacefulness. We conclude that people like Instagram images that combine authenticity with the pleasure of “me time” or close social relationships.

This editorial introduces the Social Media + Society special issue “Comparative Approaches To Studying Privacy.” Recognizing the importance of privacy in today’s digital societies and volatile political and regulatory environments, the editorial highlights the pressing need for comparative research on the topic and describes the articles in this special issue. The special issue addresses the theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges and opportunities of researching privacy across cultural, social, political, economic, and technological units of comparison. The articles in the special issue explore diverse privacy understandings, attitudes, and practices across contexts, challenging decontextualized and mono-cultural understandings in relation to social media and adjacent technologies. The special issue articles also illustrate fruitful ways privacy can be studied across different units of comparison with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. Several contributions in the special issue, including this editorial, not only broaden the scope of privacy research but also encourage engagement with multi-stakeholder perspectives in the context of social media, considering the role of policy, industry, and civil society. In the editorial, we briefly relate the special issue and its contributions to the comparative privacy research framework (CPRF), which serves as a useful starting point and a solid conceptual foundation for comparative privacy research. Finally, we develop a research agenda for future comparative privacy research, which critically examines position of power and epistemological biases, evaluates the comparability of the subject of study, determining and justifying relevant units of comparison, and helps to analyze how these units interact in shaping the concept of privacy.

Does spontaneous contact between individuals from different ethnonational groups affect their social resilience, specifically their ability to avoid escalation and radicalization following eruptions of ethnic violence? To address this question, we conducted a series of studies in mixed Jewish–Palestinian cities and academic settings. Study 1, based on data collected through large-scale online surveys of residents in both mixed and non-mixed cities in Israel (n = 944), reveals that Jewish and Palestinian residents living in mixed cities exhibit higher social resilience than residents of homogeneous cities. This heightened resilience is manifested through more favorable attitudes toward the outgroup and reduced feelings of tension during and following episodes of intercommunal violence. We propose that the underlying mechanism explaining this resilience to the disruptive effects of violence is the higher prevalence of spontaneous intergroup contact enabled in mixed settings compared to more homogeneous ones. This explanation is supported by Study 2, which involved two rounds of surveys completed by Jewish and Palestinian students (n = 6467) at a heterogeneous campus in a mixed city in Israel. The findings demonstrate that positive attitudes toward the outgroup following incidents of intercommunal violence were more durable among students exposed to spontaneous intergroup contact. We discuss the implications of our findings for deepening our understanding of conflict and conflict management in ethnically mixed and conflicted settings.

Intermingling new and old media, this article introduces the concept of phonographic theatricality to explore the performativity of human-machine vocality. It jointly discusses the theatricality of historical and new sound media: media principles that characterized the phonograph in its emergence are still evident in the speech of contemporary AI-voice agents. Phonographic theatricality is a cross-media concept describing the conditions, playfulness, contingencies, and implications of the actualization of pre-recorded voices. It covers a broad range of cases in which a machine injects a human sounding voice into a situation, usually acousmatic in its detachment from a human body, yet performing as a theatrical agent. The analysis demonstrates how sound media theatricalize truthfulness, fidelity, illusion, and trickery as part of their mediation of voices, and how humans and machines mingle in producing phonographic theatricality. Three historical dramas, as well as contemporaneous newspaper articles, caricatures and ads, unveil the rise of phonographic theatricality as a media principle, inviting and affording a discussion on the performativity of AI voices. When machines speak and laugh in human voices, they become actors, vocally reshaping the space in which they operate, charging it with theatricality.

This study focuses on a major sector in the Jewish–Israeli society that has a significant and growing influence on Israeli political and policy decisions: the ultra-Orthodox society. It investigates, within the context of the 2023–2025 Israel–Hamas war, factors explaining ultra-Orthodox Israeli–Jews support for a regional agreement that includes Israel, the Palestinians and Arab and Muslim states. Our analysis is based on a representative sample of ultra-Orthodox Israeli–Jews (N = 202) obtained through public opinion polling. In line with our expectation, empathy toward Palestinians and consumption of mainstream news each made a significant contribution to explaining ultra-Orthodox support for a regional agreement. In addition, as anticipated, hawkishness provided an added significant contribution to the overall explanatory power of the model. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Using data from the 2012–2020 European Social Survey and Schwartz’s theory of basic values, this article maps the values of tech-workers, in order to assess and understand their uniqueness and homogeneity. Consistent with prior, mostly US-focused research, we find that European tech-workers hold a liberal worldview, which values openness to change, individualism, and universalism and devalues conservatism. However, our findings challenge the notion of tech-workers as being a completely distinct or a homogeneous group in terms of their values. While developers appear to be substantively different from other occupations and non-developers working in tech, non-developers hold values similar to those of other occupational elites, such as professionals and managers. The study offers takeaways for research, policy, and education.

This deprivation study leverages the smartphone’s absence to understand its presence, exploring a one-week smartphone deprivation experience of 80 Israeli adolescents aged 13-18. The data was primarily qualitative, derived from field journals, interviews, and focus groups. However, the most important and least expected finding was quantitative: all participants but one completed the week. This could be due to gratifications from nonuse that kicked-in. Analysis of the meaning of the abstention, and hence of the smartphone, focused on the cellular’s 3Ps: portable, personal, and prosthetic. The portability aspect showed that the device, with its user’s social world collapsed into it, stands as a meta-social entity, providing security and embeddedness. The personal aspect highlighted the significance of smartphone-enabled: (a) hyperconnectivity, (b) rituals, emphasizing its liminality and role as a Winnicottian transitional object, (c) existential significance of the user-smartphone amalgam. The prosthetic aspect pointed to the importance of the device’s physical and psychological “presence,” interpreted through the concepts of McLuhan’s “extension,” Aaron and Aaron’s “expansion,” and Schweiker’ “enhancement” of self. The relatively benign nature of the withdrawal experience suggests that re-balancing space and time orientations and an altered media-ecology equilibrium was experienced as gratifying.