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 Sara BentivegnaSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This research uses artificial intelligence and manual content-analysis to examine the diffusion of incivility against political leaders on Twitter during the 2022 Italian election campaign. Using a mixed approach (artificial intelligence and manual content analysis), we examined 22,465 uncivil tweets posted in the 4 weeks before the vote. Results show that hostility toward leaders increases as voting approaches and as candidates’ public visibility grows, and that it affects frontrunner leaders the most. Furthermore, the analysis of the different forms of incivility showed that it changes depending on the target it hits, […]
- by Delia Cristina BalabanSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Smartphones have become daily companions and store many personal information, including contact lists, photos, and videos. Even though users download smartphone apps for various purposes, they are also data collection instruments. Within the Protection Motivation Theory research streamline, the present research focuses from a comparative perspective on young adults’ concerns and engagement with privacy protection behaviors while setting up smartphone apps. Aiming to assess how threat and coping appraisals relate to privacy protection behavior from a comparative perspective, we conducted an online survey (N = 931) in Germany (n = 479) and Romania (n = 452) […]
- by Chelsea A. AllenSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Evidence suggests that the conception of “mental health,” as well as Western health care models, needs to be reimagined to better reflect the unique care needs of Black people. Within these systems, Black people are more likely to experience secondary victimization and retraumatization. Despite these systemic failings, Black people often find ways to manage self-care, wellness, and healing. Within the context of dueling pandemics (COVID-19 and racial injustice), Black people turned to social media applications to develop community-led, culturally-congruent care models. This study aims to explore the ways Black people […]
- by Annika PinchSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Despite the growing body of research on people disclosing sensitive details about their identities or experiences online, few studies have focused on how individuals with intersecting stigmas manage these disclosures. Those facing multiple, overlapping sources of discrimination may encounter compounded challenges, which can complicate their assessment of the perceived benefits and risks of disclosure. This study seeks to understand disclosure among individuals with intersecting stigmas by examining how queer-identifying individuals in Mumbai, India, navigate the intersection of queerness and mental health disclosures on social media. Based on qualitative findings from […]
- by Rys FarthingSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Children and young people’s online privacy is increasingly challenged by the datafication of the digital world, and this is an increasingly important area of policy concern. Understanding what young people understand online privacy to be, and what they want done to protect it, is key to creating effective and rights-realizing policy responses. This article explores young people’s perceptions across four countries and finds they have nuanced understandings about online privacy and clear, robust ideas about how to improve it. Context mattered, and their online privacy concerns and ideal protections were […]
- by Bibo LinSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. How is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as machine learning (ML) algorithms and Large Language Models (LLMs), in social chatbots transforming friendship and love? This study investigates Replika, an app offering AI friends and/or lovers to users. Unlike most AI companion research grounded in Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) and interpersonal communication theories, this study employs the sociological concept of McDonaldization to interrogate broader social and cultural implications of Replika. I argue that McDonaldization offers a systematic framework to understand the fast friendship and fast love provided by social […]
- by Erika Ningxin WangSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This article explores the cultural complexities of participatory censorship among young Chinese netizens, particularly within and beyond fan communities, through a digital ethnographic lens. By examining the interplay between social media practices and state governance, the study introduces the concepts of algorithmic folklore and interpretive labor to elucidate how fans engage in censorship as both a routine task and a form of ideological negotiation. Through immersive participant observations and in-depth interviews with 25 informants involved in fan conflicts, the findings highlight that while fans perceive their participation in reporting as […]
- by Sukhmani KhoranaSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This article reports on and analyses data from a situated and in-depth project on the experiences of six cisgender South Asian-Australian women/people who gave birth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, negatively racialized women experienced barriers to health care and a lack of social support, which were further exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. International border closures in Australia combined with local mitigation strategies inhibited social and cultural support from families, impacting many migrant mothers/birthing people who gave birth for the first time in Australia. Many hospitals in the […]
- The Power of Images: How Multimodal Hate Speech Shapes Prejudice and Prosocial Behavioral Intentionsby Sai WangSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. While online hate speech has become a serious problem in multimedia environments, most studies in this area have examined text-based hateful content, with less attention paid to its other visual aspects. From a multimodal perspective, we conducted an online experiment (N = 799) to investigate how multimodal hate speech (i.e., text and images presented together to convey hateful meanings) on social media affected users’ prejudicial attitudes and prosocial behavioral intentions. The results showed that participants in the text-plus-image (vs. text-only) condition felt more sympathy, which led to less implicit prejudice […]
- by Sunny YoonSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Webtoons optimize interactivity and participation of media users in the world of digital media by consolidating a unique digital culture. This article examines the role of users in interactive media by exploring the case of webtoons in the context of a changing global political economy and cultural dominance. Korean platform monopolies have established a new business model for webtoons and developed it as a center of Korean creative power. While webtoons have increasingly expanded and attracted the global market and the global audience, some persistent social issues remain, including the […]
- by Serena ArmstrongSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Social media offer opportunities for companies to promote their image, but companies online also risk being denounced if their actions do not align with their words. The rise of social media bots amplifies this risk, as it becomes possible to automate such efforts to highlight corporate hypocrisy. Our experimental survey demonstrated that bots and human actors who confront a corporation touting their commitment to equality by calling out organizational pay gaps damage perceptions of the corporation, heighten anger toward them, and ultimately can elicit boycott intentions. These hypocrisy challenges are […]
- by Ignacio SilesSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This article develops a phenomenological approach to examine the intersection of global migration and rising concerns about disinformation. Drawing on interviews with Venezuelans en route to the United States-Mexico border through Central America, the article analyzes how undocumented migrants live amid information precarity, how they relate to disinformation, and how disinformation affects their decisions. We demonstrate the centrality of information and communication practices in managing (dis)information during the migration experience. This includes distrusting traditional media, using various platforms like social media and messaging apps, and exchanging both information and disinformation […]
- by Sarah WhitmarshSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This study sought to investigate the prominence of U.S. birth control pioneer and eugenicist Margaret Sanger in social media discourse through a critical disinformation studies lens. Using computational and qualitative analysis techniques, 60 months of public Facebook posts and Google search data were analyzed to explore the scope, reach, and engagement with messages that reference Sanger and examine how injustice frames utilizing Sanger’s historical ties to eugenics are being used today to misinform and disinform on abortion and other issues. Injustice frames featuring Sanger were deployed to portray abortion as a […]
- by Christian Pieter HoffmannSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Political expression is a focal point for understanding how digital media have transformed political engagement. Privacy concerns tend to impede online political expression, but this relationship is still poorly understood. Based on the theory of reasoned action, this study focuses on the role of social influence and institutional privacy concerns in political expression on Facebook. We draw on research on the privacy calculus to examine how observing the behavior of Facebook friends moderates the relationship between privacy concerns and online political expression. We use survey data gathered in 2023 from […]
- by Cheng ZhouSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Rumors spread on social media overshadow the truth and trigger public panic. One effective countermeasure to address this issue is online rumor-combating. However, its effectiveness on social media has not been fully verified. In this study, drawing on construal level theory, we use temporal distance—the time interval between a rumor-combating post being released and receiving responses from social media users—to measure the effectiveness of rumor-combating. We also adopt elaboration likelihood model to explore the factors that could enhance this effectiveness. The empirical results show that perceptible (central route) factors, including […]
- by Claire M. SegijnSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. People report receiving ads on their mobile device that are seemingly related to previous offline conversations (i.e., conversation-related advertising). They may think that this is because their electronic devices are eavesdropping (i.e., e-eavesdropping). To gain insights into the scope and characteristics of conversation-related advertising and e-eavesdropping beliefs, we conducted a survey in the United States (n = 300), the Netherlands (n = 293), and Poland (n = 293). These countries were chosen based on their differences in privacy regulations and history with state surveillance. We find that belief in conversation-related advertising is a widespread cross-country phenomenon, […]
- by Renwen ZhangSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. The proliferation of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as chatbots, has sparked widespread privacy concerns. Previous research suggests that privacy perceptions and practices vary across sociocultural contexts. This study examines public and institutional discourses on conversational AI privacy in the United States and China. Semantic network and discourse analyses of privacy-related discussions on Twitter and Weibo reveal divergent patterns. On Twitter, public discourse emphasizes privacy risks and concerns and advocates for systemic changes, while institutional discourse promotes individualistic approaches to privacy protection. Conversely, on Weibo, public discourse is less […]
- by Liane RothenbergerSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. Social media are an important source of news during crises such as terrorist attacks. However, how news media and their audiences make sense of terrorism on social media is subject to bias, for example, given their differential treatment of terrorism by right-wing versus Islamist extremist perpetrators. In this study, we analyze how incident- and perpetrator-related characteristics of terrorist attacks are associated with bias in public debates about terrorism on YouTube. We focus on selectiveness in which attacks are covered (gatekeeping bias), how attacks are covered (presentation bias), and how audiences […]
- by Tanvir AhammadSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. The Rohingya refugee crisis, a humanitarian tribulation involving the persecution of the Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority group in Myanmar, has led to a massive exodus of refugees, primarily women and children, to neighboring Bangladesh. Analyzing public opinion toward the Rohingya crisis poses a challenge due to the time complexity of manually assessing individual expressions from the vast amount of text on online platforms. This research focuses on identifying hidden patterns in online discussions surrounding the Rohingya refugee crisis, employing topic modeling and a thematic sentiment analysis-based approach. It represents the […]
- by Lassi RikkonenSocial Media + Society, Volume 10, Issue 4, October-December 2024. This exploratory study focuses on the public as a listening ensemble that takes part in public diplomacy on Twitter. Here, listening is considered as the receiving component of communication, and responsive behavior as its visible product. The focus is on public communication that followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. A total of 4,392 quote tweets (citing the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky’s tweets mentioning Ukraine’s possible membership in the European Union) were analyzed using the taxonomy of verbal response modes. Two major modes were identified: responses to the situation by […]