The book is free to download until March 11 🔓🔓:
www.cambridge.org/core/element...
26.02.2026 15:46
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The book is free to download until March 11 🔓🔓:
www.cambridge.org/core/element...
I’m very grateful for the collaboration with @pvanaelst.bsky.social, @luisagehle.bsky.social, Christian Schemer, and @jesperstromback.bsky.social! And also many thanks to @snsoroka.bsky.social for the support and encouragement!
From a comparative perspective, we find that press freedom matters: greater press freedom strengthens the relationship between traditional media use and knowledge. Interestingly, in more restricted environments, social media can sometimes provide complementary knowledge.
We find that not everyone benefits equally from news. For instance, public broadcasting is particularly helpful for less educated citizens in gaining political knowledge.
What about newer media? News use via social media and messaging apps is associated with lower levels of political knowledge, and messaging apps in particular are related to substantially more misperceptions.
We find that traditional media still play an important informational role in contemporary media environments. Higher use of traditional news sources (e.g., TV, newspapers) is associated with higher political knowledge.
In other words, citizens may remain uninformed about political affairs (due to lower use of traditional media & information overload) or become misinformed (due to the spread of false information).
New publication alert! 📘🚨
Our new book on news use, political knowledge, and misperceptions is out! (currently open access – link below🔓)
We examine across 18 countries (N = 26K) what we call the "twin challenge of increased media choice."
Social media users adopt the toxic behaviors of ingroup members
An analysis of 7 million tweets from over 700,000 accounts finds that exposures to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity online academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...
📖🔓 Read the full open-access paper here:
doi.org/10.1093/jcmc...
These findings are based on Twitter (X) data from Israel during 2023. We analyzed over 1M tweets by 12k users and 6M tweets by 700K accounts they follow. We tracked over time how exposure to toxic posts from ingroup versus outgroup members predicts users’ own toxic expressions.
Even "milder" forms of toxicity from the ingroup, such as impolite style (disrespectful tone), increase intolerant substance (humiliating the outgroup).
This shows that toxic behaviors often seen as merely “heated” may in fact contribute to more exclusionary and harmful discourse.
Our findings show that exposure to ingroup toxicity is the strongest and most consistent driver of contagious toxic behavior. In contrast, outgroup toxicity shows much weaker and less consistent effects on users' own toxic behavior.
New publication alert🔓🚨
Toxic speech is widespread on social media – but do users mirror the toxic behavior of their ingroup or react defensively to outgroup toxicity?
Our new paper in JCMC examines how ingroup and outgroup behavior shape the spread of toxicity on social media.
Great team work led by @alonzoizner.bsky.social with Matthes, Corbu, @esserfrank.bsky.social, Koc Michalska, Schemer, @yannistheocharis.bsky.social @janzilinsky.bsky.social and 🙋
#commsky