Journal Description
- Indexed in: Google Scholar, DOAJ, Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus
- Launched in 2015
- A broad selection of published Special Collections
Social Media + Society (SM+S) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that focuses on advancing the understanding of social media and its impact on societies past, present and future. Please see the Aims and Scope tab for further information.
This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Open access article processing charge (APC) information
The APC for this journal is currently 1000 USD.
The article processing charge (APC) is payable when a manuscript is accepted after peer review, before it is published. The APC is subject to taxes where applicable. Please see further details here.
Submission information
Submit your manuscript today at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/smas
Please see the Submission Guidelines tab for more information on how to submit your article to the journal.
Contact
Please direct any queries to sms@sagepub.com
Journal Feed
- by Jamie A. TheophilosSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. In early 2023, Meta announced that its new microblogging platform, Threads, would join the Fediverse, a network of free, open-source social media platforms. This decision created a rift within the Fediverse, with some users supporting Meta’s integration while others strongly opposing it. This research explores the practices and discourses of the latter group—users, developers, and server administrators—who aim to build a safer and more autonomous “free Fediverse.” By framing the Free Fediverse as a digital counterpublic, this article introduces the concept of “strategic closure” to illustrate how these actors resist […]
- by Roy Aulie JacobsenSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (now X), play a crucial role in facilitating connections between politicians and citizens, particularly during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. This article examines the characteristics of viral social media posts in Norway and Sweden during the initial wave of the pandemic. Despite their geographical proximity and cultural similarities, Norway and Sweden adopted different approaches to the pandemic, providing a compelling basis for comparative analysis. Employing a visual computational approach, this study maps viral posts by analyzing engagement metrics such as […]
- by Michael DezuanniSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This article extends the idea of media pedagogies to consider how TikTok provides a site of social learning about books and reading. It uses the concept of “peer pedagogies” to identify how the #BookTok hashtag is used to invite book and reading enthusiasts to take up learning positions. The article uses an exploratory approach to identify contrasting videos in which learning about books and reading is made available, and it undertakes an in-depth content and semiotic analysis of three videos to consider how learning is framed in different ways. The […]
- by Robin K. CriglerSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Gender and humor have always been intimately related. In many societies, comedy is traditionally understood as a masculine pursuit, and women’s existence in comedic spaces has been subject to intense scrutiny by male commentators. Africa’s burgeoning stand-up comedy scene is an important site of contestation in this regard, but in recent years social media has afforded opportunities for African women to bypass traditional industry gatekeepers. In online spaces like Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), African women creators have built massive audiences that cross national and continental boundaries. In this project, […]
- by Shuning LuSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This study examines how perceived news feed performance (i.e., perceived news feed quality and valence) shapes consumptive news feed curation, defined as a type of social media consumption behavior by which users inform algorithms about what they want to see in their news feeds. Results from a survey in the United States (N = 1,525) show that both perceived quality and valence of news feed were associated with consumptive news feed curation on Facebook. However, an asymmetric pattern emerged in that perceived news feed performance was only related to boosting behavior but […]
- by Leslie M. CuevasSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This study explores how fashion influencer moms (FIMs) navigate the intersection of motherhood and fashion within the social media landscape. Drawing upon theories of affective labor and self-presentation, we examine the online community these women built as a means of self-care and creating access to fashion for themselves and others. Participants were recruited using a social media hashtag sampling method. Subsequent semi-structured interviews with 16 micro-influencers were analyzed using a thematic approach. Findings revealed that FIMs leverage social media to maintain a sense of self by engaging in affective labor […]
- by Chamil RathnayakeSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This study achieves two objectives: (1) define two specific affordances—affective embedding and rendering—capturing the connection between affect and social media affordances from the perspectives of designers and end-users, and (2) examine the mobilization of affective reactions with an emphasis on the intersection between affective affordances and the networked status quo. A sample of 253,489 Facebook posts that contained key terms related to climate change is analyzed using a series of log-log models to examine the mobilization of affective reactions. We argue that possibilities for rendering affect using the Facebook reaction […]
- by David MurphySocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This article uses a case study of an anti-brand protest that was livestreamed on Twitch to develop a media and cultural studies framework for conceptualizing livestreaming platforms as mechanisms that extract engagement and discoverability value from cultural noise. It begins with a review of several fields of literature: branding, media activism, and culture jamming; livestreaming and affective labor; and social media platforms, affective economies, and noise. Then, it synthesizes this literature into a conceptualization of livestreaming’s cultural product and form, connecting its product to the extraction of engagement metrics from […]
- by Ursula Kristin SchmidSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Despite extensive research on what causes social media users to recognize hate speech and what motivates their reactions to it, little is known about a crucial intermediate step that leads to users’ engagement or non-engagement with hate speech online. In our study, drawing on the uses and gratifications approach, we theoretically derived motives representing affective and entertainment, personal identity and social-integrative as well as cognitive dimensions for social media users to engage or not engage with hate speech. To empirically investigate those motives, we conducted a quota-based online survey of […]
- by Caitlin McGraneSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Pets, companion animals, and “more-than-human” kin play important roles in people’s lives. Animals are familiar and familial—they are often integral family members and can help create communities beyond the family unit. People rely on their pets for emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. More recently, research into the role of animals in the lives of older adults has come into focus, especially through the visibilities and visualities of social media. The significance of animals in the lives of older adults in conjunction with the storification and sharing potential of social media […]
- by Jing NiuSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Information theft and cyberbullying pose significant threats to users’ privacy on social media. This study applies Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) to explore how online information disclosure awareness and privacy concerns influence protective actions, such as regulated social media usage and detoxification, in response to negative experiences like data heist and cyberbullying. Analyzing survey responses from 1,000 social media users in Pakistan, ranging in age from 18 years to over 50, and using the snowball sampling technique, our findings reveal that awareness of online information disclosure mediates the relationship between data theft […]
- by Rita MarchettiSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. While legacy media have received increasing attention in the literature on media and corruption in recent years, the role of digital media and, in particular, social media is still an open question in corruption and anti-corruption studies Through this study, we aim to partially bridge the existing gap in literature by focusing our attention on the study of a corruption scandal, namely the Qatargate scandal. We will demonstrate that the affordances of platforms could exacerbate the instrumentalization of corruption scandals, emphasizing the contrast of positions and creating new (and reiterating […]
- by Sanne PietersSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. The Red Pill adherents believe “feminist doctrines” in society deprive men and women of being their natural selves, disrupting heterosexual relationships in consequence. Research on manosphere groups generally focuses on men’s involvement, but women participate in these movements too. One such form of participation is the RedPillWomen subreddit (“r/RPW” in reddit jargon). Hegemonic femininity remains an understudied component of the manosphere. Using a qualitative critical thematic analysis, 127 texts are analyzed to establish what constitutes hegemonic femininity on the r/RPW according to moderators and how this is enacted and maintained […]
- by Petr OskolkovSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. A significant part of far-right activities worldwide take place within the media ecosystem formed by accounts and communities on social media platforms. Drawing on the media ideology approach, this study investigates how far-right Russian internet users perceive various social media platforms and how their sociopolitical beliefs affect these perceptions. Based on a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews, we argue that far-right users assess social media platforms according to the criteria of security, meaning privacy and non-cooperation with law enforcement agencies; freedom from moderation; and functionality, including informational, communicational, recreational, and […]
- by Yu ZhangSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. WeChat tweets have become an important way to spread knowledge of the importance of personal information security and to enhance older Chinese adults’ awareness of information security. Based on the knowledge adoption model and the elaboration likelihood model, this study identifies two types of tweets’ source features, that is, publisher type (official or unofficial) and author type (expert or non-expert). In addition, based on cognitive fit theory, this study explores the effects of the consistency and inconsistency between the two types of source features on the knowledge adoption intentions of […]
- by Inessa De AngelisSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. The online harassment of female politicians who focus on climate change and environmental policy has become a major problem in Canada and other democratic nations. Despite growing awareness of the problem, there is little agreement among scholars on how to measure these nuanced forms of harassment. This study develops an original seven-point scale to measure the severity of harassment three Canadian female politicians receive when Tweeting about climate change and a six-point schema to categorize the types of accounts behind the replies. My results reveal that 86% of replies contained […]
- by Andreas T. HirblingerSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Social media is increasingly viewed as a venue for organized peacebuilding efforts. However, current research has paid little attention to the vast array of everyday, self-organized social media interactions that could help overcome societal divisions. This article analyses the role of online memes in everyday online reconciliation, using Sri Lanka’s 2022 political crisis as a case study. We argue that memes contribute to a DIY-approach to dealing with the past, helping to renegotiate inter-group boundaries in the aftermath of conflict. Memes articulate grievances, but they also engage with inter-group relations […]
- by Suay M. ÖzkulaSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. The seemingly global nature of English-language hashtags often obscures activism from outside the Global North (GN). This systematic review explores geographic representation in this field (N = 315 articles) through an investigation of case study location, author affiliation, methods of data collection and analysis, and researched social media platforms. The results show a preponderance of GN/Majority cases and non-region-specific social media groupings such as hashtag publics, particularly in research employing digital methods. As such, extant research in the field has disproportionately produced what we term Northern Visibilities—groups and movements based in GN […]
- by Arne Freya ZillichSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat offer adolescents many opportunities to control how other users see and perceive them. By observing their peers’ self-presentations and receiving feedback on their own self-presentations from them, adolescents learn what is typical (descriptive norms) and appropriate (injunctive norms) on different social media platforms. Based on computer-assisted face-to-face surveys with German Instagram and/or Snapchat users aged between 14 and 16 years (N = 1,002), we examined the impact of descriptive and injunctive norms on adolescents’ self-presentation practices on social media. Drawing on the theory of normative […]
- by Frederic GerdonSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. With technological advances, governments and companies gain opportunities to collect data to provide public benefits. However, such data collections and uses need to fulfill ethical standards and comply with citizens’ privacy preferences, which may vary across several dimensions. The Comparative Privacy Research Framework suggests specific comparative dimensions that may shape such privacy-related perceptions. I propose how to integrate into this framework a specific meso-level perspective for concisely operationalizing data uses context-specifically: the privacy theory of contextual integrity, developed by Helen Nissenbaum. This article presents an empirical application of this approach […]