As social media scholarship pervades the communication discipline, it is time to reflect on the good, bad, and ugly of social media. The theme for this special issue is inspired in part by the 1966 film, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Like its portrayal of the American Civil War, we again face deep divisions. The question is what role is social media helping us to heal those divides versus fragmenting us further? The seven articles in this issue reflect the complexity of the answer. Although we aimed for diversity, this issue focuses on the Global North. This reflects the field and the need to decenter Western epistemology. Nevertheless, the articles help us see that social media is not easily reduced to simplistic framings, but instead enables new connections and collective action, while also risking further fragmentation of our information environment and greater polarization—while technology companies profit.

Online spaces provide opportunities for creating ties with other people, allowing us to communicate and share content with them. Sometimes, though, we wish to break some of these ties; we wish not only to friend and to follow, but to unfriend and unfollow as well. In this paper, we present a history of the many features for online interpersonal disconnectivity, showing how they have developed over time. We present five main findings: the language of tie breaking is consistently bureaucratic; over time, the features for tie breaking tend to operate on the feed rather than on social ties themselves; platforms are more reactive than proactive when it comes to tie breaking features; new ways for preventing interactions are launched over time; and the features for tie breaking sometimes create what we call “impossible social situations.” This approach shines a spotlight on a neglected aspect of social media, and opens up new ways of thinking about how the platforms conceive of–and construct–online sociability.

This article offers an account of the absence of media in general, and social media in particular, from a set of life story narratives. After conducting both unstructured life story interviews and semi-structured interviews with 15 Muslim Palestinian women in Israel, we analyzed the stories presented in each interview and the explanations given by interviewees for excluding items about (social) media from their life stories. Interviewees resolved what they saw as a contradiction—referencing “shallow” media in their “serious” stories about their identity—by sifting out items that could threaten the proper flow of such stories, as they perceived it, despite acknowledging their centrality in identity change. Cultural context and individuals’ beliefs are presented as preventing events related to media, especially new media, from being related in life stories. Moreover, our findings show the significance of life story interviews in interviewees’ identity development. It is argued that identities of both interviewer and interviewee play a role in constructing the story told. Life-storying occurs in a complex context that involves introspection, which itself affects the process of the storyteller’s identity formation. This study contributes to debates about the place of media in everyday life, as well as to our understanding of the relationship between identity and life-storying. The argument proposed here—that the absence of media from life stories might be due to conscious considerations rooted in the cultural specificity of those stories—is one that can be tested in further research.

Social media enable the formation of unprecedented numbers of ties, and allow for communication at an unprecedented scale. Features such as unfriending and muting on the one hand, and favoriting and “close friends” on the other, enable users to manage this abundance, allowing them to silence certain voices and to enhance certain others. These features create situations that sometimes cannot be mapped onto familiar offline scenarios. We argue that these new, sui generis situations instantiate a set of social architectures and imaginaries that we describe collectively using the term, synthetic sociality. We analogize these synthetically social situations with Derrida’s concept of écriture, through which written language is understood not as a derivative reflection of orality, but rather as a self-contained set of communicative capacities that precedes and surrounds oral communication. To exemplify the concept of synthetic sociality, we present three forms of “born digital” social transactions: the “block” feature in Facebook (which can create a situation in which not all parties to a conversation see the entirety of the conversation), the “restrict” feature in Instagram (in which a user can respond to a post though, unbeknownst to them, they have no audience), and “favorite” contacts in address book apps (which allow for their messages to rise to the top of the inbox). In none of these cases are the resulting social architectures easily analogized to those achievable in a physical social environment, crucially because at least one party to these synthetically social situations lacks full knowledge of it.

The social distancing and lockdown measures enacted to address the COVID-19 pandemic entailed an unprecedented shift to digitally-mediated communication. The move to remote learning at schools was one of such important changes. Drawing on privacy and STS literature, we investigate the role of different privacy cultures during the initial moment of turbulence, when schools had to quickly adapt to remote teaching. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers in Israel and Germany. Our interviews carved out three distinct phases: A moment of turbulence, a period of negotiation and a phase of temporary closure, leading to the dominance of Zoom and Google Classroom in Israel, and government-mandated open-source tools for German teachers. These different pathways are shaped by considerations of vertical privacy among German teachers, and the absence of such considerations on the part of Israeli teachers.

This article revisits claims made a decade ago about the importance of the word “sharing” in the context of social network sites (SNSs). Based on an analysis of the home pages of 61 SNSs between the years 2011 and 2020, the findings incontrovertibly show that “sharing” has lost its central place in the terminology employed by social media platforms in their self-presentation. Where in the mid-2000s SNSs relied heavily on a rhetoric of sharing to promote their services, by 2020, this rhetoric had been almost entirely dropped. The research reported here implies that social media platforms no longer feel a need or desire to be associated with these cultural beliefs. Given this, questions are raised as to whether “sharing” remains a keyword for social media.

The COVID-19 crisis is a potential watershed moment for privacy with profound long-term effects on the organization and practices of work, education, and civic engagement. In this study we focus on the profound re-negotiation of mediated personal boundaries in times of mass lockdowns and social distancing. To understand how these new social conditions might be playing out in the field of privacy, we interviewed 90 faculty in higher education in Estonia, France and Israel. Participants were asked about changes in their ICT use for personal and work purposes, with the practice of distance teaching serving as a common experience for the discussion of possible changes in their views and practices of privacy. Our findings point to the precedence of $2 considerations of privacy over $2 considerations. In other words, interviewees had very little to say about the broader forms of data collection by their employers, the state, or commercial companies that are enabled by the adoption of new ICTs. They did, though, have much to say about their mediated relations with students and colleagues, and were very much concerned with self-presentation and impression management as well as with sustaining meaningful teaching situations. In general, the prism of privacy unearths the hidden social structures of teaching and interacting online.

The typical Cart Narcs YouTube video opens with “Agent Sebastian” walking through a grocery store parking lot. Sebastian briefly explains the video's purpose - "We shame people who don't put their carts back" - as he looks for a cart miscreant to confront. When he spots a target, he runs towards them making siren noises, outfitted in a Cart Narcs t-shirt and a police-style utility vest. "Cart Narcs!" he shouts. "That's not where the cart goes!" From here, the videos take one of two routes. In a minority of cases, the target returns the cart. In most cases, though, the interaction escalates and the target ends up yelling and swearing at Sebastian, who calmly insists that he is just promoting considerate behavior.

This study investigates the central dilemmas and changes in social media use among people whose religious identity is in flux, with an emphasis on backstage processes of decision making. Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews with Muslim women in Israel, we found five main themes reflecting the main online changes users experience and effect. We suggest two different logics that the themes show in online decision-making regarding identity and self-presentation. The first is relatively predictable, whereby users reconstruct their social environment to fit their new religious identity. The second logic concerns the management of ties and content in accordance with religious obligations in ways that may not fit the user’s personal welfare, and which are related to complex inner conflicts of the user. While previous literature stresses personal welfare as a main factor behind online tie and content management, in this article we show how users are willing to sacrifice their online welfare for the sake of their new identity.

This article explores the Facebook unfriending of users from a majority group by members of a minority group, focusing on Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. Indeed, this is the first study to focus on power differentials among Facebook users in the context of unfriending. The article thus adds depth to our understanding of unfriending, while also shedding light on the experience of social media use from the perspective of an oppressed minority. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty ’48 Palestinians (Palestinian citizens of Israel), we present various triggers for unfriending (mainly, encounters with racism and surveillance), and show that Palestinians’ stories of unfriending Jewish Israelis are sometimes about punching up and sometimes about stepping away. However, while unfriending is broadly considered an apt response to abuse, it also distances Palestinians from centers of power in Israel. This suggests an important way in which social media reproduce inequality.