As a burgeoning industry, artificial intelligence (AI) companion platforms capitalize on shifting societal attitudes toward tech-mediated relationships to introduce novel ways of connecting with nonhuman entities. But how are these platforms constituted, and how do they “sell” consumers the idea of human-AI relationships? By analyzing four prominent multimodal companions (AvatarOne, Digi, Paradot, and Replika), we argue that despite differences in architecture and style, state-of-the-art platforms converge on the following sociotechnical qualities: human-likeness, accessibility, customizability, and relationship progression. By creating technical affordances to augment these qualities, companion platforms ultimately project what we call a future of on-demand intimacy – intimacy that can be acquired in a truly frictionless manner. Beyond examining how commercial entities mobilize the grammar of human intimacy in tandem with on-demand culture to create new markets, this study offers a conceptual framework for future research into how platform dynamics shape not only the availability but also the meaning of intimacy in human–AI interactions.

Ambiguous loss, a profound sense of grief unrelated to death, is often overlooked in the context of incarceration, particularly among marginalized communities. Families of incarcerated individuals experience profound loss while also feeling disconnected due to systemic barriers and social stigma. This qualitative study explores how Black gang-affiliated youth in Chicago use multimodal posts, combined text, images, and emojis posts, to navigate incarceration-related ambiguous loss. Using Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) and a Strength-based Approach, we analyzed 65 multimodal posts to examine digital memorialization and advocacy. Findings reveal two key themes: Collective Advocacy and Ambiguous Loss and Commemorating Absence , highlighting social solidarity in coping and exploring digital memorialization. Results suggest that social media serves as a critical space for expressing grief, maintaining relationships, advocating for systemic change, and fostering community support. This study contributes to digital mourning and ambiguous loss research, emphasizing how youth use online spaces to process grief and build resilience.

Amid journalism’s business model crisis and the rise of creator economies, this article examines how legacy journalism and social media converge under neoliberal platform capitalism, reshaping industry structures, labor conditions, and journalism’s democratic role. Drawing on a thematic analysis of 19 in-depth interviews with US-based journalists, social media editors, and independent news creators, it integrates critical political economy of media approaches with journalism and creator studies to analyze how workers navigate unstable revenue models, platform governance, and technological disruption. The findings reveal intersecting business- and labor-oriented crises characterized by algorithmic control, low pay, unpaid work, and varying degrees of autonomy and collective protection. While newsroom workers experience structural rigidity, independent creators—akin to freelance journalists—face intensified self-exploitation and financial risk through individualized branding and visibility pressures. Neoliberal platform capitalism reconfigures journalism labor around precarity, entrepreneurialism, and self-management, underscoring the need for sustainable public interventions to safeguard journalism’s democratic role.

Current theories and measures of social media literacy are politically neutral, which poses a problem as far-right influences permeate mainstream social media platforms. The theory of Anti-Oppressive Social Media Literacy describes three orientations social media users may display toward far-right content: endorsement of far-right content, ambivalence toward far-right content, or rejection of far-right content. Based on this theory, we created a survey measure in which participants were asked to rate their likelihood of responding in various ways to hypothetical social media posts that included far-right dog whistles. Our sample of 14 young adults aged 18–24 consisted of 57% Black participants, 71% full-time students, and 71% people who worked at least part-time. We conducted cognitive interviews to examine how participants interpreted these scenarios and their response items. Findings revealed the measure’s overall effectiveness and identified actionable revisions. This study can inform future measure development based on Anti-Oppressive Social Media Literacy.

This article examines the mediation of sexual misconduct in the Netherlands, focusing on the role of public television broadcasting and Twitter. Conceptually, the article draws on key feminist perspectives, which have, over the past decades, been vital for turning sexual misconduct into a central issue of public concern. Our analysis of Dutch public broadcasting (1984–2019) and Twitter (2011–2019) reveals that Dutch television consistently advocated feminist perspectives and framed sexual misconduct as a national problem rooted in ‘internal’ structural failures. By contrast, Twitter discourse, particularly since 2015, was dominated by far-right rhetoric, framing the issue as an ‘external’ cultural threat linked to Islam and immigration. #MeToo was not visible in the dominant Twitter discourse on sexual misconduct but did appear on public television. Nevertheless, Dutch public broadcasters’ feminist agenda remained limited, failing to debunk the hypervisible racist and Islamophobic perpetrator myths circulating on Dutch social media.

On social media, posting positive content should generate positive emotions via emotional contagion. Yet, emerging discussions regarding toxic positivity (TP) suggest that positivity can backfire, showing the limits of emotional contagion. Through the perspective of neoliberal self-help ideology, this research investigated how people understand and perceive TP. Study 1 found, via focus groups, that social media posts containing TP involve two message characteristics—overgeneralization and commanding words—and two psychological processes—ignoring negativity and perceived poster privilege. Additionally, post ephemerality mitigates the negative effects of TP. Study 2 experimentally tested these findings. It found that the effect of post positivity (low positivity / high positivity / toxic positivity message characteristics) on post liking was mediated by ignoring negativity and perceived privilege . However, ephemerality did not moderate the aforementioned mediation relationships. Therefore, the concepts associated with TP—overgeneralization, commanding words, ignoring negativity, and perceived privilege—can be understood as boundary conditions for online emotional contagion.

Internet studies researchers have shown that Black participants on social media platforms often drive the development and culture of these platforms through dynamic production, analysis, and critique of race-related digital media. However, little education research has been done on how adolescents in general – including Black adolescents – learn the skills involved in these activities. Through analyzing data from the nationally representative National Survey of Critical Digital Literacy, this 7-day daily diary study found that Black and Latinx youth reported significantly higher daily frequencies of practicing critical race digital literacy skills than their White counterparts. Enactment of these skills also varied by day of the week and was reported more on weekdays than on weekends. These findings show that Black adolescents have practices of critical digital literacy skills they can build upon, and suggest White adolescents need additional support in developing these skills.

This study explored competing predictions about how social interactions among social media hate posters affect the sequential level of hatefulness as toxicity. Analyses involve a thousand original hateful posts and the subsequent posts by the same posters ( N = 1,227,756 posts) on Gab—a platform particularly hospitable to hate messaging—and Likes, Dislikes, and written replies from other users that affirmed or negated the initial hate posts. Likes and affirming replies were commonplace, whereas Dislikes and negation replies were rare. Getting Likes and affirming replies decreased subsequent toxicity in the short term, as did getting no responses whatsoever. Getting Dislikes increased the hatefulness of users’ next original post and their posts over the next 3 months. Results challenge both the social approval theory of online hate and the need-threat approach to effects of responses to social media hate posting.

This article theorizes how platform infrastructures produce epistemic churn—a condition in which publics remain caught in unresolved cycles of interpretation. Unlike models centered on belief accuracy or convergence, epistemic churn explains how infrastructures govern not what is believed, but whether belief stabilizes at all. We argue that churn emerges from engineered turbulence—systemic interventions that modulate epistemic friction (the difficulty of reaching interpretive closure), delaying stabilization while sustaining engagement. To render churn empirically tractable, we propose a family of methods that can both test the theory and provide qualitative nuance on its mechanics. Situating churn within a broader theory of communicative governance, the article reframes communication theory by showing how infrastructures sustain engagement by prolonging interpretive labor. Normatively, it shows how platforms govern not by silencing expression but by deferring belief formation, a subtle form of power with profound consequences for democratic life and collective agency.

The relationship between children’s digital play and well-being remains under-researched, with debates often polarised and limited by a lack of holistic studies in diverse global contexts. This article draws on empirical data from an ecoculturally informed study of children’s (6–12) digital play in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and Cyprus to examine how individual and contextual circumstances influence children’s self-led digital play choices and practices. To do so, we theorise ‘contextualised digital play drivers’, understood as children’s own accounts, or adults’ interpretations, of the deep interests, needs and desires their play appears to fulfil. This approach moves beyond dominant lenses focused on individual autonomy, offering a more situated reading acknowledging the individual and contextual circumstances shaping digital play. Eleven contextualised digital play drivers are identified and discussed in relation to children’s well-being. The article concludes with implications for game designers, educators, families, policy and research methodology.

Although AI-driven fact-checking has been extensively applied on social media, it is unclear whether presenting AI rather than humans (e.g. social media platform administrators) as a fact-checker will affect people’s credibility perceptions of misinformation. Furthermore, most studies on machine heuristics have mainly focused on the positive machine heuristic and neglected the negative machine heuristic. In this study, a between-subjects online experiment was conducted to address these gaps in knowledge. The results show that presenting AI rather than platform administrators as fact-checkers indirectly led participants to perceive false short-form health videos as more credible via the mediation of the negative machine heuristic rather than the positive machine heuristic. In addition, among participants who initially held a stronger belief in misinformation, the fact-checking provided by AI (vs administrator) generated even more negative machine heuristic, which further led them to perceive the false videos as more credible.

This study examines thematic and engagement dynamics within r/PurplePillDebate, a Reddit community for deliberation between supporters and critics of anti-feminist “red pill” ideology. We utilize the Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN) and Content Engagement Capacity (CEC) frameworks to analyze 330,008 posts and comments, identifying 37 topics grouped into themes— Gender Dynamics and Socioeconomic Issues, Relationships and Gender Norms , and Attraction: An Exact Science Versus a Social Construct. We examine themes’ ability to sustain engagement, showing that sexual behavior and market-value topics generate the most replies, while attraction-focused content and deliberative topics generate the fewest. Gender- and norm-related discussions tend to self-reinforce, whereas attraction-related threads diffuse into broader debates. Findings inform the potential and limits of deliberative online spaces to foster cross-cutting engagement, with theoretical and practical implications for facilitating digital conversations and interventions aimed at countering extremist narratives and selective exposure.

This study examines how newspapers socially construct the topics of digital exclusion and inclusion in Flanders (Belgium) against a backdrop of substantial governmental investments in digitalization. Using critical discourse analysis, we examined how Flemish newspaper media (March 2020–March 2023) represented digital exclusion as a social problem, the proposed solutions of digital inclusion, and the actors portrayed as responsible for implementing these solutions. Our findings reveal that newspaper coverage predominantly frames digital inclusion through a neoliberal and techno-solutionist lens, emphasizing a “strong digital society” and attributing responsibility to “digitally unskilled” individuals to adapt. However, we also identified a counter-discourse which focuses on structural inequalities, digital access barriers, and the notion of responsible and sustainable digitalization. We argue that the prevailing neoliberal framing risks reinforcing exclusion rather than fostering inclusivity. Implications for research, policy, and practice are discussed.

Authenticity is simultaneously part of the appeal and anxiety surrounding GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) technologies, which are often evaluated in terms of whether their speech and interactions can “pass” as authentically human. This study explores collective negotiations of authenticity in AI–human interaction by looking at AI virtual livestreams, focusing particularly on the performer Neuro-sama. Drawing on non-participant observation and textual analysis, we identify three key components in the performative evolution of authenticity: transparency, emotion, and potentiality. Our analysis offers a nuanced perspective on the relational and performative construction of authenticity, advancing discussions of how human–machine interactions reshape our understanding of a sociotechnical landscape increasingly reshaped by AI.

Autocomplete is a popular search feature that automatically generates query suggestions for any keywords entered in the search bar. In this research, I examine regular end-users’ folk theories of how general-purpose search engines produce such suggestions. Drawing on interviews with 20 search engine users, I found that users conceptualize Autocomplete as an automated agent that is influenced by three main factors: (1) searcher’s personal search history and profile, (2) aggregate population-wide queries, and (3) commercial advertising. Users’ assumption of these influences raises for them critical concerns about privacy, transparency, information insularity, targeted data manipulation, and the reproduction of societal biases in Autocomplete’s outputs. My analysis also shows that users view explanations as a promising mechanism to enhance accountability in Autocomplete systems. I highlight the factors that shape users’ mental models of Autocomplete and discuss how their algorithmic imaginaries stabilize platforms’ revenue models.

In 2022, the Chinese government implemented a policy requiring social media platforms to display approximate user location (province/municipality in China or country if abroad) on their posts, thus making location a visible cue. How does this cue affect readers’ perceptions of the source and content of the post? To investigate this, we conducted a four-condition (user location: Beijing vs. Guizhou vs. the United States vs. no location) between-subjects online experiment ( N = 240) that examined how the displayed location of a social media user influenced viewers’ psychological responses to online self-disclosure messages. We also tested for two psychological mediators: perceived homophily and perceived spatial distance. We found that the displayed location of the poster (i.e., the individual who makes the social media post) affected readers’ perceived homophily and in turn their responses (empathy, source liking, perceived social distance) to support-seeking self-disclosure messages on social media. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

This study examines two decades of user blocking on the English Wikipedia to understand how a volunteer-run, non-profit platform has adapted its content moderation practices in response to increasing visibility amid declining participation. Analyzing more than 20 million block log entries from 2004 to 2024, the study identifies shifts in block frequency, duration, and stated rationales. A significant increase in preemptive, automated blocking of open proxies since 2020 accounts for most block activity, but excluding these reveals a broader trend toward longer blocks and vaguer rationales such as “disruption.” These patterns suggest that volunteers are scaling labor through automation and normative adjustment, trading openness for efficiency and stability. Wikipedia’s blocking trends help to contextualize governance pressures on volunteer-run knowledge platforms.