This study explores how the communication strategies of public institutions have been redefined by digital platforms, with a particular focus on TikTok. Specifically, it examines the extent to which elements of “govtainment”—the “spectacularisation” of government communication through digital media—are present in the communication strategies of public institutions. We analysed how the communication strategies of two Romanian ministries on TikTok are shaped by the platform’s specific characteristics, the impact of these adaptations on their audiences, and what elements of “govtainment” can be identified within their content. We employed a mixed-method approach, combining quantitative and qualitative content analysis of TikTok publications by Romania’s Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Internal Affairs—the only two ministries with a consistent presence on the platform. The findings indicate that both ministries adapt their communication strategies to align with TikTok’s features, incorporating elements that enhance virality, such as tone, viral trends and sounds, content formats, speech acts, and humanisation. Our analysis confirms the presence of govtainment elements in the communication strategies employed by these ministries. However, when correlating spectacularisation elements such as trend participation, tone, and speech acts with audience engagement, we found that their presence does not necessarily result in the highest engagement rates. Nevertheless, the overall figures suggest that both institutions have managed to gain significant engagement on their TikTok accounts.

The erosion of public trust in health information and government communication, particularly during crises like the Covid-19 pandemic, highlights a critical challenge in how health policies are transmitted and received. This study examines the dramatic shift in public sentiment toward Covid-19 vaccination in South Africa during 2021, a period that saw a decline from initial high acceptance to significant hesitancy. We argue that a process of social media selection allowed extreme views to proliferate as official sources retreated. Our findings suggest that sustained or increased mainstream media engagement, particularly from official sources like government and health authorities, could have mitigated the dominance of anti-vaccine narratives and have crucial implications for government communication and public health policies in the digital age. We collected and classified 482,450 original tweets about vaccination. We show that, by the end of 2021, Twitter activity was characterized by a progressive surge in anti-vaccination tweets and a decline in pro-vaccination and factual information, particularly from mainstream media. This shift mirrors the decrease in actual vaccination rates. Employing agent-based modeling, we simulated counterfactual scenarios to assess the impact of media presence on vaccine discourse. The results indicate that sustained or increased media engagement could have mitigated the dominance of anti-vaccine narratives. Conversely, a simulated media downturn led to a steeper decline in pro-vaccination content. The findings suggest that mainstream news media play a crucial role in shaping public perceptions of and support for health policies and that their disengagement creates an informational void exploited by misinformation.

This research explores an underexamined aspect of government communication—the role of journalists as outsourced propaganda content producers in the Chinese context. Based on 15 semi-structured interviews with journalists who have first-hand experience managing outsourced government social media accounts, and grounded in boundary work theory, this study examines how journalists navigate the tension between journalism and propaganda in relation to their role identity, work routines, and professional values. Findings reveal that outsourced journalists, often referred to as <em>Xiaobian</em>, occupy a contested hybrid position. Their identity negotiation is constrained by dual pressures from both government agencies and news organizations, leaving limited room for professional autonomy. In their daily practices, bureaucratic logic takes precedence over journalistic logic, intensifying the tension between serving the state and serving the public. These dynamics highlight journalism’s boundary crossing in the digital era, shaped by changing economic and political conditions within the media landscape.

With the rapid rise of social media usage and its integration into daily life, platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram have emerged as essential tools for political communication. Political actors use these platforms to attract voters, exercise opposition to governmental policies, polarize public opinion, and comment on political agendas. This article focuses on the analysis of populist political communication on Instagram by three far-right political leaders—Italian Prime Minister and President of Fratelli d’Italia Giorgia Meloni (European Conservatives and Reformists), President of Elliniki Lysi and Member of Parliament Kyriakos Velopoulos (European Conservatives and Reformists), and the leader of Groupe Rassemblement National and Member of Parliament Marine Le Pen (Patriots for Europe)—during the 2024 European Parliament elections. The analysis centers on three main aspects of Instagram posts: linguistic strategies, thematic content, and audience engagement. Initially, the study examines the linguistic strategies of these politicians, such as the use of simple, comprehensible phrases combined with emotionally charged images. Their posts primarily emphasize nationalist values, cultural identity, and concerns about economic and social stability. Furthermore, the comparative analysis reveals diverse uses of emotionally charged posts, especially during the 2024 pre-election period, with strategies adapting to each nation’s political reality, thus imparting unique characteristics to each campaign. The findings underscore Instagram’s power in shaping political discourse and electoral behavior, highlighting the need for further study of digital communication in modern democracies.

In the last decade, most EU countries have seen the unstoppable growth of populist parties, especially on the right, but also on the left. Their Euro-critical discourse, sometimes openly Eurosceptic, is helping to erode the legitimacy of the EU. This research aims to analyze the presence of populist discourse among major Spanish political parties during the 2024 European elections on platform X. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, we collected tweets from the official accounts of parties represented in the Spanish parliament, focusing on Unidas Podemos, Sumar, Parido Socialista Obrero Español, Partido Popular, and VOX from May 24 to June 10, 2024. A quantitative analysis with large language models, specifically the Text-Zero-Shot model, BART-Large-MNLI, and a socio-hermeneutic qualitative interpretation facilitated the identification of key populist indicators, including anti-elitism, appeals to the people, the expression of popular will, and the delineation of enemies. Our findings reveal that VOX is the only political party that, in this specific communicative (social network X) and political (European Parliament elections) context, employs a populist discourse characterized by a marked opposition between the people and political elites, both national and European, as well as critical and/or exclusionary rhetoric toward certain immigrant groups, especially from Arab countries. The results underscore the need for further research on how national contexts shape the articulation of populism in political communication strategies through social media.

An established body of research demonstrates that political talk shapes political participation. However, less is known about how an individual’s ease of listening interacts with conversational contexts to influence participation. This study hypothesizes that this listening disposition amplifies the effect of political talk on political participation. Using data from a 2024 US national survey (<em>N</em> = 800), we test this using OLS regression on a composite index of political participation. The model assesses how the frequency of political talk across four contexts (strong/weak ties network, and like-minded/different-minded people) is moderated by self-reported ease of listening (to like- and different-minded people). Results show that while talking and listening to like-minded people is positively associated with participation, the main effect for talking and listening to different-minded people is not significant. However, a significant interaction emerges: The positive effect of talking with different-minded people on participation is amplified by the ease of listening to those same views. This effect is confined to cross-cutting conversations; no comparable interactions were found in strong-tie, weak-tie, or like-minded contexts. These findings indicate that the civic benefit of listening is highly contextual, with the ease of listening to differing views unlocking the participatory potential of talk during cross-cutting discussion.

In this article, I take a constructionist approach to study the strategic use of emotions as a polarizing tool by the current president of the region of Madrid, Isabel Díaz-Ayuso. Most of the existing discourse studies on emotions focus on their categorization (since Damasio, 1994; Nabi, 2002; Scheibenzuber et al., 2023). However, categories by themselves do not explain why emotions work so well in political and polarizing discourses, which are the main interest of the present study. That is why emotions are here understood as object-oriented mental states that are distinguished between two different types of objects: the deep object (the one perceived by the person constructing the emotion as both valuable and vulnerable) and the shallow object (the one perceived as affecting the deep object). The discourse conveys a relation between them that can be positive (an opportunity) or negative (a threat), triggering positive or negative emotions, respectively. This research shows how analysing emotions as evaluative/cognitive constructions helps us to understand their success in the current political landscape. It also shows that messages about different topics can convey the same emotional structure, being therefore part of the same communicative strategy. I use as a case study the speeches by Díaz-Ayuso at the Assembly of Madrid because she is a very polarizing political figure. I approach it under the hypothesis that her discourses employ a strategy of using emotions for political intentions.

This study examines how social media users emotionally respond to Israeli politicians’ messages during crises based on political alignment and crisis type. With Israel’s frequent civic and military crises, the case study in this article aims to offer unique insights to scholars, practitioners, and the public invested in the intersection of online media, emotions, and crisis. To this end, we built a dataset of Facebook posts (<em>N</em> = 25,000) published by all active right, left, and center members of the Israeli parliament and government over a period of one year (November 2022–November 2023). We ensured that the dataset includes both routine and crisis periods, particularly the judicial reform unrest (civic crisis) and the Hamas–Israel war following the October 7 attack (military crisis). Our statistical analysis indicated two major trends in the dataset: (a) during the military crisis, emotional markers that were previously considered to correlate and cluster (sad and angry) are not merely different, as they stand in opposition to one another; (b) crisis periods, especially military, invite use of “edge” reactions, and see a significant increase in negative emotions, whereas routine times prompt more neutral or positive reactions. Reading the findings through the combination of affordances theory, mediatization theory, and the “template for emotions” concept, we suggest that social media may amplify negative reactions beyond politicians’ influence, as the limited emotional spectrum offered on platforms might steer users to certain emotive responses, affecting risk management in crises. These insights call for decision-makers to consider the implications of emotional appeals and incentives on social media, especially during crises, to foster safer democratic public discourse.

Conversations with people who hold opposite partisan attitudes can elicit defensiveness, reinforce extreme attitudes, and undermine relationships with those with opposing views. However, this might not be the case when speakers experience high-quality (attentive, understanding, and non-judgmental) listening from their conversation partners. We hypothesized that high-quality listening would increase speakers’ positive views toward, and their willingness to further interact with, others who hold politically opposed attitudes, and that these effects would be mediated by greater state openness. We conducted three experiments using different modalities to manipulate listening. In Study 1 ( N = 379), participants recalled a conversation with an opposing political party member, with listening quality described as high-quality, low-quality, or control. Study 2 ( N = 269) used imagined interactions, with participants reading vignettes describing either high-quality listening or a control condition. In Study 3 (preregistered; N = 741), participants watched a video of a listener modeling high-quality or moderate-quality listening and imagined themselves engaging in a similar interaction. Across studies, we found that high-quality listening consistently increased speakers’ state openness to politically opposed others but did not change political attitudes. We found inconsistent evidence for speakers’ increased willingness to engage in future interactions (meta-analytic effect: = 0.20, p = 0.015). However, we observed a consistent indirect effect of listening on positive attitudes and willingness for future interactions through increased openness.