Social Media communication practices at war: A tactics comparative analysis between the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Russo-Ukrainian War

From Café Culture to Tweets

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

The proliferation of fake news on social media platforms has become a significant concern, influencing public opinion, political decisions, and societal trust. While much research has focused on the technological and algorithmic factors behind the spread of misinformation, less attention has been given to the psychological drivers that contribute to the creation and dissemination of fake news. Cognitive biases, emotional appeals, and social identity motivations are believed to play a crucial role in shaping user behaviour on social media, yet there is limited systematic understanding of how these psychological factors intersect with online information sharing. Existing studies tend to focus on individual aspects of fake news consumption, such as susceptibility to misinformation or partisan biases, leaving a gap in understanding the broader psychological mechanisms behind both the creation and dissemination of fake news. This systematic review aims to fill this gap by synthesizing current research on the psychological factors that influence social media users’ involvement in dissemination and creation of fake news. Twenty-three studies were identified from 2014 to 2024 following the PRISMA guidelines. We have identified five themes through critical review and synthesis of the literature which are personal factors, ignorance, social factors, biological process, and cognitive process. These themes help to explain the psychological factors contributing to the creation and dissemination of fake news among social media users. Based on the findings, it is evident that diverse psychological factors influence the dissemination and creation of fake news, which must be studied to design better strategies to minimize this issue.

The Big Question: Have social media and/or smartphones disrupted life in your part of the world?

Using Digital Media to Promote Kidney Disease Education

Government Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media: The Case of Iran (2009)

Guidance for Professional Use of Social Media in Nutrition and Dietetics Practice

This article attempts to explore the influence of social media on building political culture at the international level, the role of major social media platforms, and the key stages where social media contributes to political culture formation. Based on a qualitative framework, the article utilizes purposive sampling methods to collect necessary information and statistics from various websites. With the onset of the 21st century and the expansion of the internet, the development and growth of various social media platforms have also surged. Social media has been playing a significant role in shaping global political culture and public opinion. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, WeChat, Reddit, and Telegram have brought millions of people together on a single stage, the factual details of which are presented in this article. Algorithms designed to enhance the effectiveness of social media play a vital role in political culture formation by repeatedly showing content based on people's preferences and thoughts. Similarly, boosting mechanisms for content have also contributed to building political opinions. Social media serves as a crucial tool for informing people about various programs and campaigns, increasing public participation, and effectively presenting demands to generate the necessary public opinion for their implementation by relevant authorities .Political culture formation involves specific stages where social media plays a supportive role. The article concludes that the expansion and rapid usage of social media in the present time have significantly influenced global politics. The number of social media platform users is increasing daily, and social media is playing a supportive role in the process of political culture and opinion formation.

Beware: Patients increasingly purchasing medications via social media

This paper explores the use of neural networks for determining public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In today's world, where numerous user opinions on various topics are posted daily on social media platforms, it is important to be able to analyze this public sentiment. The method of sentiment analysis and weighting of votes in comments is proposed, allowing for the identification of overall audience moods and assessment of their reactions to different events or content. The research results indicate the potential usefulness of these methods for marketing strategies, reputation management, and decision-making in various fields. However, there are challenges associated with data verification and consideration of manipulative interventions in public opinion. This work aims to review the current state of research in this area and identify prospects for further development. In today's digital world, analyzing public opinion on social media is becoming increasingly important. Understanding how users react to various topics and events is crucial for various fields, from marketing to politics. This paper discusses methods of sentiment analysis and vote weighting in comments using the example of analyzing public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Reddit social network. The use of natural language processing tools, machine learning, and data visualization allows for valuable insights into users' emotional attitudes toward discussed topics and trends in public opinion. However, to achieve the best results, it is necessary to consider not only textual content but also social interaction and user status. The development of effective social media analysis tools opens the way to a deeper understanding of public opinion and making informed decisions in various areas of social life.

Background. Social media platforms have become primary channels of media consumption and key battlegrounds for information warfare. Their socio-technical affordances democratize cultural production–fueling new forms of expression, political mobilization, and even participation in military operations-while also enabling large-scale propaganda, cultural influence, and historical documentation on both sides of the Russo-Ukrainian frontline. Operating beyond state control, these platforms serve not only tactical communication needs but also broader processes of identity-building, cultural resistance, and the preservation of collective memory. Intensified by the protracted conflict and ongoing mediatization trends, this unique digital landscape demands urgent socio-humanitarian analysis. Methods. This study employs a multi-method design to explore cultural production and discursive practices during the Russo-Ukrainian War. We mapped social media affordances via media-studies frameworks; harvested public posts, metadata, hashtags, and profiles using OSINT; and conducted informal content analysis. Narrative and critical discourse analyses revealed story arcs and ideological strategies, while memory and spatial analyses examined commemorative posts and symbolic redefinitions of urban spaces. Results. The Russo-Ukrainian war is highly mediatized, with smartphones and social media turning civilians into active participants. These platforms enable content creation, OSINT, propaganda, and resistance, reshaping cultural practices and information flows. In occupied areas, competing media narratives emerge-occupation channels seek to legitimize control, while grassroots resistance documents realities and reinforces Ukrainian identity. Social media becomes both a battlefield and an archive of war. Conclusions. Social media platforms shape the digital image of the city through the production of everyday content. Media content is used for cultural influence and to establish control over the newly formed digital public sphere. The publication of digital content is, in essence, a process of cultural production in social media. Therefore, social media constitute a valuable source for research, as they allow us to study the transformations that occur during the occupation, as well as to predict the development of reintegration policies.

Lists and Social MediaLists have long been an ordering mechanism for computer-mediated social interaction. While far from being the first such mechanism, blogrolls offered an opportunity for bloggers to provide a list of their peers; the present generation of social media environments similarly provide lists of friends and followers. Where blogrolls and other earlier lists may have been user-generated, the social media lists of today are more likely to have been produced by the platforms themselves, and are of intrinsic value to the platform providers at least as much as to the users themselves; both Facebook and Twitter have highlighted the importance of their respective “social graphs” (their databases of user connections) as fundamental elements of their fledgling business models. This represents what Mejias describes as “nodocentrism,” which “renders all human interaction in terms of network dynamics (not just any network, but a digital network with a profit-driven infrastructure).”The communicative content of social media spaces is also frequently rendered in the form of lists. Famously, blogs are defined in the first place by their reverse-chronological listing of posts (Walker Rettberg), but the same is true for current social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are inherently centred around an infinite, constantly updated and extended list of posts made by individual users and their connections.The concept of the list implies a certain degree of order, and the orderliness of content lists as provided through the latest generation of centralised social media platforms has also led to the development of more comprehensive and powerful, commercial as well as scholarly, research approaches to the study of social media. Using the example of Twitter, this article discusses the challenges of such “big data” research as it draws on the content lists provided by proprietary social media platforms.Twitter Archives for ResearchTwitter is a particularly useful source of social media data: using the Twitter API (the Application Programming Interface, which provides structured access to communication data in standardised formats) it is possible, with a little effort and sufficient technical resources, for researchers to gather very large archives of public tweets concerned with a particular topic, theme or event. Essentially, the API delivers very long lists of hundreds, thousands, or millions of tweets, and metadata about those tweets; such data can then be sliced, diced and visualised in a wide range of ways, in order to understand the dynamics of social media communication. Such research is frequently oriented around pre-existing research questions, but is typically conducted at unprecedented scale. The projects of media and communication researchers such as Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, Wood and Baughman, or Lotan, et al.—to name just a handful of recent examples—rely fundamentally on Twitter datasets which now routinely comprise millions of tweets and associated metadata, collected according to a wide range of criteria. What is common to all such cases, however, is the need to make new methodological choices in the processing and analysis of such large datasets on mediated social interaction.Our own work is broadly concerned with understanding the role of social media in the contemporary media ecology, with a focus on the formation and dynamics of interest- and issues-based publics. We have mined and analysed large archives of Twitter data to understand contemporary crisis communication (Bruns et al), the role of social media in elections (Burgess and Bruns), and the nature of contemporary audience engagement with television entertainment and news media (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns). Using a custom installation of the open source Twitter archiving tool yourTwapperkeeper, we capture and archive all the available tweets (and their associated metadata) containing a specified keyword (like “Olympics” or “dubstep”), name (Gillard, Bieber, Obama) or hashtag (#ausvotes, #royalwedding, #qldfloods). In their simplest form, such Twitter archives are commonly stored as delimited (e.g. comma- or tab-separated) text files, with each of the following values in a separate column: text: contents of the tweet itself, in 140 characters or less to_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet recipient (for @replies) from_user: screen name of the tweet sender id: numerical ID of the tweet itself from_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet sender iso_language_code: code (e.g. en, de, fr, ...) of the sender’s default language source: client software used to tweet (e.g. Web, Tweetdeck, ...) profile_image_url: URL of the tweet sender’s profile picture geo_type: format of the sender’s geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_0: first element of the geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_1: second element of the geographical coordinates created_at: tweet timestamp in human-readable format time: tweet timestamp as a numerical Unix timestampIn order to process the data, we typically run a number of our own scripts (written in the programming language Gawk) which manipulate or filter the records in various ways, and apply a series of temporal, qualitative and categorical metrics to the data, enabling us to discern patterns of activity over time, as well as to identify topics and themes, key actors, and the relations among them; in some circumstances we may also undertake further processes of filtering and close textual analysis of the content of the tweets. Network analysis (of the relationships among actors in a discussion; or among key themes) is undertaken using the open source application Gephi. While a detailed methodological discussion is beyond the scope of this article, further details and examples of our methods and tools for data analysis and visualisation, including copies of our Gawk scripts, are available on our comprehensive project website, Mapping Online Publics.In this article, we reflect on the technical, epistemological and political challenges of such uses of large-scale Twitter archives within media and communication studies research, positioning this work in the context of the phenomenon that Lev Manovich has called “big social data.” In doing so, we recognise that our empirical work on Twitter is concerned with a complex research site that is itself shaped by a complex range of human and non-human actors, within a dynamic, indeed volatile media ecology (Fuller), and using data collection and analysis methods that are in themselves deeply embedded in this ecology. “Big Social Data”As Manovich’s term implies, the Big Data paradigm has recently arrived in media, communication and cultural studies—significantly later than it did in the hard sciences, in more traditionally computational branches of social science, and perhaps even in the first wave of digital humanities research (which largely applied computational methods to pre-existing, historical “big data” corpora)—and this shift has been provoked in large part by the dramatic quantitative growth and apparently increased cultural importance of social media—hence, “big social data.” As Manovich puts it: For the first time, we can follow [the] imaginations, opinions, ideas, and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. We can see the images and the videos they create and comment on, monitor the conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists, and follow their trajectories in physical space. (Manovich 461) This moment has arrived in media, communication and cultural studies because of the increased scale of social media participation and the textual traces that this participation leaves behind—allowing researchers, equipped with digital tools and methods, to “study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways” (Manovich 461). However, and crucially for our purposes in this article, many of these scholarly possibilities would remain latent if it were not for the widespread availability of Open APIs for social software (including social media) platforms. APIs are technical specifications of how one software application should access another, thereby allowing the embedding or cross-publishing of social content across Websites (so that your tweets can appear in your Facebook timeline, for example), or allowing third-party developers to build additional applications on social media platforms (like the Twitter user ranking service Klout), while also allowing platform owners to impose de facto regulation on such third-party uses via the same code. While platform providers do not necessarily have scholarship in mind, the data access affordances of APIs are also available for research purposes. As Manovich notes, until very recently almost all truly “big data” approaches to social media research had been undertaken by computer scientists (464). But as part of a broader “computational turn” in the digital humanities (Berry), and because of the increased availability to non-specialists of data access and analysis tools, media, communication and cultural studies scholars are beginning to catch up. Many of the new, large-scale research projects examining the societal uses and impacts of social media—including our own—which have been initiated by various media, communication, and cultural studies research leaders around the world have begun their work by taking stock of, and often substantially extending through new development, the range of available tools and methods for data analysis. The research infrastructure developed by such projects, therefore, now reflects their own disciplinary backgrounds at least as much as it does the fundamental principles of computer science. In turn, such new and often experimental tools and methods necessarily also provoke new epistemological and methodological challenges. The Twitter API and Twitter ArchivesThe Open

Purpose Social media usage is becoming ubiquitous across the world and communicators, either corporate, independent or activist are increasingly adopting the new medium. This chapter focuses on the uses of social media for marketing communications, in particular for public relations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) by Pfizer’s European offices. In doing so it evaluates the relationship between public relations and CSR as well as reviews some of the uses of social media for healthcare communications and CSR. Methodology/approach Using a deductive approach and a methodology that combines qualitative content analysis aimed at identifying communication themes and social media audits on brand integration and communication coherence, this chapter aims to identify how Pfizer’s European offices use social media to communicate online. To establish the corporate line and branding general guidelines for Pfizer, we have recorded from the company’s official website (www.pfizer.com) its corporate overview and corporate responsibility information, embedded into the ‘About us’ section of the website. From the home page, social media links were then sought. To ensure all links were recorded the researchers used two gateways, one using the social media links on the website and one through each country’s website and their social media links on their home page. The Pfizer official accounts were excluded from this analysis, the interest being on the country uses of social media and not Pfizer’s official general channels. General traffic and engagement data automatically reported by each social media platforms such as number of tweets, followers, fans, and number of views were recorded manually. For more insight into Twitter activity FollerMe was then used to capture and record each account’s most recent activity as it enabled the discovery of each account’s creation date and the most frequently used words and hashtags in its tweets. It also helped assess the levels of performance of each country on Twitter by looking at the reported ratios of replies, mentions, tweets with links, hashtags or media to the last 100 tweets sent from the each account. For Facebook and YouTube data, only the publicly reported data was recorded. The text in the Twitter bios and about sections was also recorded and compared with the company’s corporate and CSR descriptions included on the main website. Findings Out of the 20 countries that do have a Pfizer country office, only 10 of them have a social media presence. Turkey and Spain have four social media channels each and Belgium has three. All the other countries are present on only one social media platform. They show an overall integration and coordination of messages with themes mirrored from one platform to another. The channels also show an overall compliance and consistency with the brand, most of them displaying bespoke backgrounds, bios and links to the country website. When it comes to social media integration, the accounts are poorly integrated and interlinked. Moreover, although social media provides a platform for dialogue, two out of the three platforms analysed have very little user interaction. This high concern for message control can be indicative of a variety of elements: a lack of certainty/security in handling social media, a risk-averse attitude towards social media, a lack of training of staff about how to handle social media or perhaps a lack of resources. The platforms used have all different functions and address different target audiences. YouTube proves to excel as a public information/CSR medium for the general public, the most popular content fitting into those categories. Twitter is a corporate communications environment by excellence, a true mouth-piece of the organization. Finally, Facebook is Pfizer’s user engagement environment but within Pfizer’s own comfort and rules, the presence of a policy document making the boundaries of communication very clear. Research limitations/implications Although looking only at one company and its social media communication practices and although it uses only publicly reported data, this chapter raises a variety of questions about the use of social media by big, multinational corporations, the resources they allocate and the amount to which they perceive these channels as anything more than just another company mouth-piece. It also raises questions about how companies choose to portray themselves on social media in comparison to joining conversations, commenting on current trends and celebrating their partners and employees. Perhaps future research could explore these aspects in more depth. Practical implications and originality/value Pfizer who declares itself the ‘world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company’ is currently among the most influential companies in the world, occupying currently the 148th position in the Global Fortune 500 list. Due to its position within the industry, Pfizer has been the subject of previous research materials including marketing and health communications; however, no study yet has analysed Pfizer’s uses of social media. By analysing the social media communications of Pfizer in Europe and by pointing to the inconsistencies between country accounts, this chapter raises further questions about social media strategy and its implementation by corporations.

Rationale of Study - Social media has experienced unprecedented growth, enabling billions of users to communicate, exchange knowledge, and build relationships for both personal and professional purposes. Additionally, these platforms serve as dynamic hubs for staying informed about global events, trends, and significant news developments. However, the rise in the use of this medium has been accompanied by a troubling surge in the dissemination of fake news. Methodology - This study employs a qualitative content analysis approach to examine the patterns, warning mechanisms, and implications of fake news on social media platforms in Tanzania. The research focuses on analysing a series of social media posts, statements, and warnings issued between January 2022 and May 2025. Findings – Impersonation and account hacking are the dominant forms of fake news on social media in Tanzania. Despite the warnings on social media, the production and spread of fake news in Tanzania persist. Besides, fake news is reported to instil fear, anxiety, and panic, and mislead the general public. This further diminishes the trust and confidence among users of these platforms. Implications – This study emphasises how fake news spreads on social media. To reduce the prevalence of this type of news on social media, there is a need to provide widespread public education, strengthen and utilise the latest Artificial Intelligence tools, and coordinate efforts across social media platforms, responsible government authorities, and cybersecurity communities. Such efforts will foster digital resilience and reinforce the institutional credibility of news. Originality – The study highlights that although warnings and public accusations are part of the efforts to enforce the Tanzania Cyber Law, the achievement of legal accountability remains unclear in Tanzania. Additionally, despite using initiatives such as forwarding restrictions, fact-checking, and artificial intelligence tools, the effectiveness of social media platforms and government interventions in curbing fake news has been inconsistent. This has been noted to undermine public trust, media credibility, and social cohesion, further emphasising the need for comprehensive strategies to address the issue.

Purpose: Overwhelmed by the huge rise in the number of social media (SM) platforms, B to B firms have been increasingly using multiple social media (SM) platforms to enhance their relationships with their customers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the competitive pressure to use SM on B to B firms use of multiple SM platforms, organization and individual SM competences and on relationship sales performance. Method: An online survey is implemented to collect data from B to B firms from different industries in an emerging market, i.e. Kuwait, to produce 152 usable questionnaires. Structural equation modeling is carried out using Smart PLS 3. Findings: The main findings show that competitive pressure to use SM fully influences relationship sales performance through individual social media competence. It also influences relationship sales performance through two mediations (1) organizational SM competence, (2) on a less important level, through the use of multiple SM platforms and organizational SM competence. Additionally, both organization and individual SM competence are found to significantly influence relationship sales performance. Implications: This study uncovers the complex mechanism through which competitive pressures to use social media influence both individual and organization social media competence and their relationship with their customers. It demonstrates that the use of multiple SM platforms significantly increases relationship sales performance, but this influence is weak. Therefore, top managers must choose the right number of SM platforms and design clear SM strategies. Originality: This study sheds light on the influence of competitive pressure to use SM on B to B firms’ relationships with their customers i.e. relationship sales performance. This coercive pressure could potentially spread B to B firms’ resources over a large number of SM and lead to poor SM presence. The study also emphasizes the role of top management in choosing the optimal combination of SM platforms and developing their organization SM competence.