Research on digital protest often treats visibility and engagement as temporally uniform by aggregating social media activity across extended periods. This approach obscures how political moments shape which messages become widely amplified. Addressing this event-contingent visibility problem, this study examines how event context structures patterns of visibility in protest communication on Twitter within a semi-authoritarian media environment. Using a high-visibility corpus of the most-retweeted tweets from 21 major political protest events in Thailand during 2021, the study combines thematic content analysis with a four-way ANOVA to analyze how event context, content themes, media formats, and posting time interact to shape retweet visibility. Visibility is conceptualized not as a stable behavioral tendency but as a contingent outcome shaped by political salience, affective alignment, and platform affordances. The findings show that event context accounts for the largest share of variance in retweet visibility, while the effects of content themes and media formats are conditional and event-dependent. These results indicate that visible connective action is episodic and that affective amplification operates in context-sensitive ways. The study refines theories of digital protest by conceptualizing visibility as an event-contingent process and highlights the analytical value and limits of high-visibility sampling.

Online misinformation has grown significantly with the widespread use of the internet and the ease of sharing content through social media, often without rigorous fact-checking or scientific validation. In this context, we examined the effect of trust in scientists and conspiracy beliefs on online misinformation susceptibility and fake news detection. A cross-sectional study was carried out. We used valid questionnaires to collect our data. Trust in scientists was assessed using the Trust in Scientists Scale. Conspiracy beliefs were measured using the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire. Participants’ susceptibility to online misinformation was evaluated using the Online Misinformation Susceptibility Scale. Our multivariable analysis identified that lower trust in scientists is associated with higher online misinformation susceptibility. Participants who believed in conspiracy behaviors showed also higher levels of misinformation susceptibility. Our multivariable model showed that participants who believe in conspiracy beliefs had a lower ability to detect fake news. We found a positive association between trust in sciences and fake news detection. We identified a negative association between interest in politics and fake news detection. Our findings showed associations between trust in scientists, conspiracy beliefs, online misinformation susceptibility and fake news detection. Identification of predictors of these outcomes is crucial to define high-risk groups and develop appropriate interventions to confront these issues.

This study is grounded in the premise that local media should be understood beyond a market-oriented framework, with their social role theoretically redefined through the concept of symbolic capital. The central thesis is that the survival of local media must be regarded primarily as a matter of public interest and as a prerequisite for strengthening the democratic capacity of communities in contemporary socio-communicative contexts. Representative examples of both active and defunct local media in Serbia were analyzed to assess how, across different historical periods, they contributed to the formation and transformation of symbolic capital in local communities. The theoretical framework draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital and Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere. The analysis indicates that local media functioned as institutional carriers of legitimacy during the socialist period, as spaces of resistance during the transitional period, and as sources of moral and professional capital in the contemporary era. Nevertheless, current project-based funding models and precarious working conditions undermine their autonomy and long-term sustainability. It is therefore concluded that the disappearance of local media represents not merely an economic problem but also a profound symbolic and democratic loss, as communities lose spaces of trust, dialogue, and public representation.

The disruptive effect of digital platforms is forcing media companies to rethink their business models, particularly when it comes to increasing revenues from the audience as a share of their total revenues. Audience engagement has become a key issue for media companies since, without it, there is no basis for the introduction of subscription fees, paywalls of any kind, or schemes for soliciting donations/support. Hungary is no exception in this regard; but Hungarian media companies must also contend with other challenges. In a captured media environment, independent media are struggling to survive and have essentially been relegated to the digital space. However, in the last decade, several projects have been launched in the digital market, and many of these projects have become financially sustainable. This sustainability owes largely to the fact that these media companies have been able to monetise their popularity: the awareness of Hungarian media consumers has increased, and more people are willing to pay for quality content. The present study examines the extent to which news media have been able to build communities around their organisations, as well as the special place these communities occupy for many consumers in Hungary’s illiberal democracy. The paper presents the various forms of community-building used by independent media, and it draws on in-depth interviews to examine how media company managers view the importance of these communities.

The article examines how framing and actor identity structure attention in short-video politics using a country-level corpus from Ecuador. It assembles 4612 public TikTok videos from official accounts and politically salient hashtags, extracts multimodal text via automatic speech recognition and on-screen OCR, and constructs two continuous indices: a quality index (programmatic, efficacy-oriented content) and a populism index (antagonistic, people-versus-elite cues). Engagement is modeled as a fractional response (binomial GLM with logit link), with robustness checks using OLS on logit(ER) and Poisson counts with an offset for log(plays + 1). Models include affect (positive sentiment and anger), hour/day controls, and actor fixed effects (leader, creator, institution, party, and media). The indices display construct validity: quality aligns with positive/joyful tone and populism with anger. Net of controls, populism is positively and consistently associated with engagement across estimators; quality is small and often null or negative. Effects are heterogeneous: leaders gain under both frames, creators primarily under populism, and media modestly under populism, while institutions face penalties under both, and parties show limited returns. Monthly series reveal event-linked intensification of populism, and hashtag networks are modular, mapping onto institutional, partisan, and creator ecosystems. A design analysis identifies a non-populist pathway—benefit-first micro-explanations, concise captions, targeted hashtags, and joyful/efficacy affect—that raises engagement without antagonism. The study contributes a reproducible, open-source pipeline for survey-free, multimodal framing measurement and clarifies how persona × frame interactions and meso-level discursive structure jointly organize attention in short-video politics.

Social media platforms have become central arenas for political communication, electoral mobilization, and institutional contestation. This study examines how TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram were used during and after the 2025 Romanian presidential elections to circulate populist, sovereignist, and anti-institutional narratives. Drawing on a mixed-method content analysis of 764 public posts and over 2000 associated comments collected between 1 April and 30 June 2025, the study identifies dominant themes, discursive frames, and forms of user participation across platforms. The findings reveal marked platform-specific differences. TikTok emerges as the primary space for emotionally charged, visually oriented political communication and post-electoral contestation, while Facebook facilitates more argumentative and institution-focused discourse. Instagram plays a marginal role in political communication within the analyzed context. The results further indicate that content challenging the legitimacy of electoral institutions persists beyond the electoral moment and is amplified through coordinated dissemination patterns and interactive forms of participation, including AI-modified visual materials. By integrating thematic, discursive, and participatory analysis in a comparative platform framework, this study contributes to the literature on digital political communication and online populism. It highlights the role of social media platforms as amplifiers of symbolic conflict in democracies undergoing processes of institutional consolidation.

This study positions the podcast Question Everything as an innovative case of metanarrative podcast journalism amid the growing crisis of distrust in news media. Through in-depth interviews with host Brian Reed and producer Zach St. Louis, along with textual analysis of all 27 episodes of the first season, this study examines how self-reflexive narrative storytelling both critiques and reimagines journalism. The dual-method approach explores not only what the podcast says about journalism, but also how the performance of podcasting becomes a mode of journalistic epistemology. Grounded in Metajournalistic Discourse Theory, findings demonstrate how Question Everything challenges traditional definitions of journalism, enacting metajournalistic discourse through four mechanisms: (1) inviting and exploring criticism, (2) performing transparency in the editing process, (3) experimenting with epistemology, and (4) embracing uncertainty and ambiguity. This paper argues that podcasts like Question Everything enact a performative mode of journalism that reconfigures how audiences make sense of truth, credibility, and authority.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the preservation and research of historical newspapers by providing powerful tools that overcome longstanding challenges in terms of digitization, analysis, and access. This study offers a comprehensive global analysis of AI-driven innovations—including advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Large Language Models (LLMs) for post-correction, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques—that significantly enhance text extraction, image restoration, metadata generation, and semantic enrichment. Through qualitative case studies and comparative examinations of projects worldwide, this research demonstrates how AI not only improves the accuracy and efficiency of preservation workflows but also enables novel forms of computational inquiry such as cross-lingual analysis, sentiment detection, and discourse tracking. This study further explores emerging ethical and practical challenges and outlines future directions like multimodal analysis and collaborative digital infrastructures. The findings underscore AI’s transformative role in unlocking historical newspaper archives for both scholarly and public use, thereby fostering a deeper understanding of cultural heritage and historical narratives on a global scale.

Conservative media have been shown to exert disproportionate levels of influence over other mainstream media agendas. This study explores the outsized influence of Australia’s conservative media during the 2023 Australian Voice to Parliament referendum on other news agendas and, in turn, the impact on public and political agendas. Combining conservative advocacy, agenda-setting, and frame-building theories, this study uses content analysis of news frames included in Australian news reports about the Marcia Langton “racism” controversy. The influence of conservative media frames on other news media reporting and political and public responses to the controversy is conceptualised as a self-propelling agenda feedback wheel, fuelled by deliberate media advocacy. By having an outsized influence on the rest of the Australian media’s reporting of the racism controversy, News Corp also influenced the public and political referendum debate. These findings add new insights into how conservative media power is used to influence other media and, in turn, democracy.

In an era of global health crises, rising misinformation, and increasing scrutiny of expert sources, journalists face a critical challenge: producing health coverage that is accurate and socially relevant. Yet despite their central role in healthcare and their consistently high public trust, nurses remain significantly underrepresented in media coverage worldwide. This paper examines the structural, cultural, and professional reasons behind this absence and explores the journalistic opportunity in changing it. Drawing from international literature, media studies, and trust metrics, the article situates nurses within journalism’s responsibility to reflect diverse, credible, and frontline voices. It outlines the unique value nurses bring to reporting—translational expertise, on-the-ground insights, and community-based perspectives—and the barriers that have historically kept them out of the news cycle, including newsroom routines, institutional hierarchies, and gendered assumptions. As nurses increasingly receive media training and prepare to engage publicly, journalists have an opportunity—and a responsibility—to reimagine their sourcing strategies. Including nurses not only deepens the quality of health stories but also reinforces journalism’s public service mission. This paper offers a framework for integrating nurses into health coverage and encourages a global shift in sourcing norms.