Information, Communication & Society

Critical interdisciplinary cybersecurity: thinking through securing, thinking through fixing Insecure systems are systems that call for a fix. Vulnerabilities attract attention, motivate a response, and evoke futures of risk and repair. But determining what exactly is wrong with a system a...

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In the introduction to this Special Issue on Critical Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity, Spencer argues that thinking through fixing offers common ground for rethinking how insecurity is understood and addressed.

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The cybersecurity dilemma game: moving cybersecurity beyond solutionism Faced with ubiquitous cyber-attacks, the field of cybersecurity is scrambling to develop both technical solutions as indicated by incessant streams of updates, and social solutions as indicated by ...

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Cybersecurity work is not about finding fixes. Jensen, Kocksch and Wagenknecht argue for moving beyond solutionism by experimenting with tools that help practitioners think through dilemmas, compromises, and care.

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Theorizing multidimensional interventions to mitigate cyberchondria: the roles of ehealth literacy, online patient-provider communication, and social support Cyberchondria, marked by excessive online health searches that intensify anxiety and stress, has become a pressing concern in the digital age. This study examines the impact of cyberchondria on dep...

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This article argues that tackling Cyberchondria requires more than individual self-control. Drawing on national survey data, it highlights the combined roles of literacy, care, and social support in protecting mental health.

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From demystifying to domesticating. Studying JournalismAI training, this article shows how courses shape journalists’ relationships with AI and naturalise particular visions of its use in the newsroom.

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Man holding a piece of paper while teaching in a classroom.

Generative AI is moving fast. Governance is lagging behind.

Duke Sanford professor Phil Napoli and alumna Suher Adi MPP'24 examine what social media’s regulatory failures can teach us about governing AI.

@icsjournal.bsky.social article: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Resisting climate imaginaries: future compass memes as combinatory mechanisms for imagining otherwise The climate crisis is simultaneously a crisis of the imagination, signaling a cultural failure to comprehend and contest unfolding ecological destruction. Conventional media representations of clim...

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How do memes help imagine climate futures otherwise?

Musih, Trillò and Hallinan analyse future compass memes as visual tools that disrupt dominant climate imaginaries and expand political imagination.

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Understanding support for TikTok/Douyin regulation: the role of platform experiences, perceived influence, and algorithmic awareness in China and the United States Given growing concerns about TikTok/Douyin’s algorithmic distribution of harmful content, public debates have emerged worldwide about its regulation. Past research on public opinion of platform reg...

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How do people form views on regulating TikTok and Douyin?
Comparing China and the US, this article shows how perceived influence, platform experiences and algorithmic awareness shape support for regulation.

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Organizing privacy: cultural and structural constraints on activist use of privacy enhancing technologies The digital revolution has reshaped activism over the last thirty years and yet we know little about how social movement groups weigh the benefits and risks of new digital technologies. With an inc...

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From surveillance fears to signalling moderation.

This article examines how activist organisations make choices about privacy technologies and why many deliberately live with digital insecurity.

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Online and offline practices of ‘Everyday Feminism’: concrete substantive representation of women’s interests by municipal councilwomen This study advances political representation theory by distinguishing between General and Concrete Substantive Representation, extending Pitkin's framework to capture specificity levels in represen...

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How do councilwomen practice Everyday Feminism?
This article shows how women’s interests take different forms on Facebook and in council meetings, reshaping local political representation.

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A new digital divide? Coder worldviews, the ‘Slop economy,’ and democracy in the age of AI Digital technologies are transforming democratic life in conflicting ways. This article bridges two perspectives to unpack these tensions. First, we present an original survey of software developer...

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Who shapes democracy in the age of AI?
Miklian and Hoelscher study Silicon Valley coders and the rise of a new digital divide built around information quality.

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Using large-scale survey data, Henry et al show how public attitudes towards AI-generated sexual images depend on consent, relationships and how images are used, showing strong condemnation but uneven awareness,

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Is social media really to blame? Young adults primary news source and their political and civic engagement Social scientists find that many young adults get their news and political information from algorithmically curated platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Despite this important insight,...

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Is social media really to blame?

Bailey et al. show how young adults’ primary news source shapes political and civic engagement in the US.

Refugee, tourist, or colonizer: scrutinizing the dramaturgical performance of ‘TikTok refugee’ on RedNote The U.S. government’s January 2025 TikTok ban drove many American users to the Chinese social media RedNote, energizing the ‘TikTok Refugee’ trend. Unlike traditional, affordance-driven online migr...

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What does it mean to call yourself a “TikTok refugee”?
This article examines how US users perform resistance, tourism and colonial tropes after migrating to RedNote.

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Who benefits from remote internships?

Drawing on interviews with students, this article links boundary management to inequality in early-career opportunities.

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From connective to disconnective action: how safety shapes political participation repertoires in instant messaging groups Safety is a fundamental yet increasingly precarious condition for political participation in an era of democratic backsliding and a hyper-visible digital environment. Often overlooked in political ...

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From reading and sharing to curating and disconnecting, this paper explains how safety structures political participation inside everyday messaging groups.

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Platform governance under NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act: cybersecurity by design as social practice Platform governance is increasingly shaped by regulatory mandates that embed cybersecurity principles into the design and operation of digital services. This study examines how the European Union’s...

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This article examines how the EU’s NIS2 and Cyber Resilience Act turn cybersecurity by design into a socio-technical practice shaping platform governance.

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Content moderation as worker management: digital labour on erotic webcam platforms This paper examines how content moderation operates as de facto labour management on digital platforms. Through a case study of webcam platforms, where the service provided and monetized constitute...

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Franco and Stegeman investigate how content moderation works as labour management on erotic webcam platforms, governing behaviour, income, and risk while sidestepping worker accountability.
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I'm co-chairing the Society for Social Studies of Science @4sweb.bsky.social Conference in Toronto, Oct 2026. #STS #scipol #innovation

Theme: "TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures".

Open panel submissions portal is open! ls!

Deadline: 2nd February 2026

www.4sonline.org/about_the_co...

Thrilled to see @ktmac.bsky.social and my paper on robots.txt and infrastructural consent published here!!

Migration and Digital Media Explore the article collection: Migration and Digital Media. Published in Information, Communication & Society.

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Migration and Digital Media brings together 18 articles examining how digital media shape migration, borders, intimacy, and inequality, and how migration shapes technologies.
Edited by Bartlett, Leurs, and Mena Montes.
www.tandfonline.com/journals/ric...

Beyond algorithms: how folk theories of information homogeneity differ from academic theories across the contexts of the US and China While previous studies have examined online homogenous information experiences as theorized by various concepts (e.g., echo chambers and filter bubbles), we know less about how the general public m...

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Echo chambers look different when seen through folk theories. This comparative study shows that users in the US and China explain information homogeneity in ways that diverge sharply from academic, algorithm-focused accounts.

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Personalization and social closeness buffer negative reactions to AI-generated birthday wishes on social media: evidence from two experiments Generative AI is reshaping how friendships are maintained, yet the implications of this technology for such social bonds in online contexts remain unclear. We conducted two 2 × 2 factorial between-...

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Do AI-written birthday messages harm friendships?
Experiments show they usually feel less sincere, but personalisation and close ties make a real difference. When context and effort are visible, AI messages land better.

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Automating remix: generative AI, creative labor, and the decay of aura The widespread adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence Technology (GenAI) is prompting researchers to re-evaluate the relationship between technology and human creativity. While the pervadin...

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What happens to Benjamin’s “aura” in the age of generative AI?
This article argues that GenAI intensifies distantiation and automates remix at scale, deepening the precariousness of creative labour under platform capitalism.
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What are teens doing with social media? Mapping everyday practices and uses Over the past decades, social media has reshaped how individuals, especially younger generations, communicate, express identity, and engage with the world around them. In this context, our research...

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What do teens actually do with social media? Drawing on ethnographic work with 1teens in Barcelona, this article maps everyday practices across 13 platforms and shows how they use them strategically rather than as a single “online world.”

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Just the tip of the iceberg? State of the art of coordinated social media manipulation research Social media environments are increasingly exploited by manipulative actors through coordinated social media manipulation (CSMM) campaigns: the intentional and deceptive orchestration of social med...

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This review maps what we know about social media manipulation across 83 studies and shows how the field still overemphasises elections, state actors, and Twitter/X, while missing cross-platform and multimodal tactics.

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Wang, Zhang and Liang argue that privacy is central to whether people see AI public services as legitimate. Their vignette study shows that AI is often judged as riskier without additional privacy benefits, while human-AI collaboration can ease concerns.

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Infrastructural consent: robots.txt as a protocol for automated data extraction For the past 30 years, the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP, or robots.txt) has functioned underneath the surface of the web as the most efficient and widely used mechanism stopping web crawlers inde...

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“Infrastructural consent” is when consent becomes a protocol. This article shows how robots.txt flattens ethical debate into technical parameters, and why the AI scraping “consent crisis” exposes problems in web architecture.

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Our (@yidon.bsky.social, @foucaultwelles.bsky.social) new paper about "TikTok refuge" is out on @icsjournal.bsky.social. We argued that American TikTokers' self-labeling as refugees is a stylish roleplay, trivializing refugee exigency and diluting refugee discourses. doi.org/10.1080/1369...

Navigating uncertainty in cyber conflict: incorporating false flags in the attribution process of offensive cyber operations This paper examines false flag operations in cyberspace and their implications for attribution. While these operations are key to understanding cyber conflict, they are mostly understudied outside ...

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Baram and Lin show how false-flag cyber operations manipulate identity and intent, creating uncertainty that can destabilise crisis management and heighten escalation risks between states.

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Between AI fear and digital agency: technological familiarity and risk perception of generative AI’s epistemic power This study examines public perceptions of the risks associated with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), focusing on its potential ‘epistemic power’ – i.e., its capacity to redefine knowledg...

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This article argues that generative AI risk perception depends on digital agency as much as fear. Survey evidence shows tech-savvy users may underestimate GenAI’s societal risks, while less familiar users may overestimate them.

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