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.

Despite cultural associations with lighthearted social media interactions and humor, the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) now appears in serious contexts as a legitimate form of online news, serving as a tool for documenting disasters, violence, and tragedies. The GIF’s repetitive, silent nature diverges from traditional visual news formats, offering narrative potentials different from the “decisive moment” of still photographs or the linear duration of videos. This article investigates the GIF’s unique storytelling format in tragic news coverage, leveraging insights from photojournalism and visual storytelling literature. Through visual analysis and in-depth interviews with Israeli news editors, this article explores the GIF’s centrality in Israeli news organizations’ adaptation to social media and the attention economy. Furthermore, the Israeli digital media ecosystem—characterized as a news-saturated environment of continuous negative news and high online news consumption—reveals the GIF as an emerging storytelling format with distinctive narrative strengths and constraints. Taken together, this context illuminates the ways in which GIFs’ production surfaces critical ethical considerations in contemporary visual journalism.

Interpersonal diplomatic incidents play a significant role in generating negative interpersonal relations between statespersons. Yet despite the obvious impact on international relations, thus far scholars have not systematically studied interpersonal interactions that have gone astray. In this paper, we discuss such incidents, identifying their causes and consequences. To this end, we collected stories about such incidents from interviews with fifty statespersons, fifteen autobiographies, and high-profile reports in the news media. We then applied the conceptual framework of politeness theory, an approach focusing on the management of social relations, to classify six types of offenses that lead to interpersonal diplomatic incidents: degradation, minimization, marginalization, unfriendliness, uncollegiality, and alienness. We further highlight the potential and actual consequences of these incidents and the factors that can curb their negative impact. In the conclusion we discuss the contribution of our findings to current IR theory, specifically the relational approach and the micro foundations of IR.

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.

Citizens’ political behavior is shaped within a social context. In the course of their everyday lives, people interact with others and talk to them about politics, and these discussions are among the most common forms of political engagement (Pew Research Center, 2018). According to decades of research, political conversations between citizens are not only prevalent but also influential: they shape people’s political preferences, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors (Carlson, 2019; Eveland, 2004; Huckfeldt & Sprague, 1995; Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Lazarsfeld et al., 1948; Sinclair, 2012). When using the term interpersonal communication, researchers typically describe conversations about politics – broadly defined – between ordinary citizens. The discussion can take place face-to-face, but it may also be technically mediated through telephone, video chat, social media, and the like. The participants are two or more individuals whose relationship prior to the conversation can vary in strength: they can be closely related (e.g., Mutz & Mondak, 2006), mere acquaintances (e.g., Eveland & Kleinman, 2013), or even strangers who have just met for the first time (e.g., Levendusky et al., 2016).

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.

This paper investigates how English-centric developments of computational text analysis methods (CTAM) shape the experiences and practices of social science researchers working with English, non-English, and multilingual texts. Drawing on a survey of 433 scholars who published text-based research in top social science journals between 2016 and 2020, we examine concerns about CTAM’s validity and availability, use of validation strategies, and barriers to working with multilingual corpora. Our survey findings indicate that researchers working with text in multiple languages express greater concern about CTAM’s validity, but do not report using more validation strategies. Furthermore, researchers whose native language is not English are more likely to rely on English-language texts when using CTAM than when not. These findings illustrate a structural bias in tool development and resource availability that pushes computational research toward English-language data. We conclude by outlining practical steps toward a more inclusive and linguistically diverse computational social science.

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.