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International Journal of Communication

Publisher:
—
ISSN:
1932-8036
Category:
COMMUNICATION
Impact factor:
1.9
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211 parsed articles

Last update: 2026-10-23

Latest articles

Everyday Scrolling: Algorithmic Awareness and Audience Tactics

2026-10-14 · Articles

Brenda Focas, Eugenia Mitchelstein

In the contemporary digital ecosystem, algorithms play a central role in the selection, ranking, and circulation of news and entertainment. Using Michel de Certeau’s theory of everyday tactics alongside Roger Silverstone’s domestication framework, this article builds on recent scholarship that views algorithmic awareness as differentiated, processual, or scalar. Specifically, we conceptualize algorithmic awareness as a continuum of situated understandings through which users recognize, interpret, and respond to algorithmic curation. Drawing from 56 in-depth interviews conducted in Argentina, we propose that analyzing awareness as a continuum helps explain why users deploy varied repertoires of tactics when engaging with these systems. Findings show that higher levels of awareness do not inherently cultivate user empowerment. Instead, heightened recognition frequently yields deeply ambivalent experiences characterized by cognitive saturation, forced personalization, and strategic platform withdrawal, thereby providing an empirically grounded communication research perspective from the Global South.

Riding the Waves of Media Attention: Agenda Building Under Scarcity

2026-10-14 · Articles

Ester Cohen Rinski, Motti Neiger, Clila Magen

How do non-elite actors sustain public visibility when attention is scarce, volatile, and largely driven by external events? This article examines how the families of Israeli soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul sought to maintain media visibility and political salience while their remains were held in Gaza between 2014 and 2025. Drawing on a mixed-methods design that combines a longitudinal analysis of 6,370 news items with in-depth interviews with 10 participants, the study identifies four phases of agenda building: strategic silence, strategic agenda building, agenda displacement, and contextual reconfiguration. The findings show that the families used symbolic action, narrative framing, and strategic media engagement to sustain a baseline level of visibility, while major attention waves were triggered mainly by external political developments. This article reconceptualizes agenda building as a temporal process of navigating and riding waves of media attention, contributing to research on agenda building, media attention, and mediated visibility in prolonged crises.

Climate Change Disinformation| Climate Denialism as a Discursive Dynamic: Truth (and Politics) Beyond Facts

2026-10-08 · Special Sections

Stephen Hutchings

Applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methods to the online output of climate change contesters, this article examines how their discursive strategies are accommodated within counter-disinformation frameworks. Critiquing the reductive epistemology shaping such frameworks, it challenges the notion that, by endorsing “depoliticized understandings” based on unassailable scientific authority, they build democratic consensus from a factually validated decarbonization imperative. It argues that unless facts generated within the scientific paradigm are incorporated into an agonistic process within which their articulation with truth remains contingent, they cannot effectively combat climate contestation.

Climate Change Disinformation| Seeking the Truth Among Dead Crops: Carbon Footprint Victimhood, Platformed Conspiracism, and Climate Countermovement in Turkey

2026-10-08 · Special Sections

Ilker Kafali, Cem Çaliskan

After years of climate inaction, Turkey’s ratification of the Paris Agreement in 2021 prompted the Justice and Development Party’s discursive shift from high-carbon hegemonic agenda to green developmentalist rhetoric. This policy change provoked a backlash among conspiratorial climate-denial networks on social media. When the country’s worst-ever wildfires in 2021 were followed by wheat field fires in 2022, far-right and nationalist coalitions on X disseminated the conspiracy theory that foreign actors deliberately set these fires to undermine Turkey’s food sovereignty and engineer demographic decline under the cover of the climate agenda. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we examine tweets from 2 major hashtag campaigns linking these fires to climate conspiracy theories. Our analysis identifies 3 interconnected motivational themes: environmental nationalism, economic injustice, and population control, each framed through a rhetoric of moral decay that sustains nationalist resentment and a discourse of victimhood.

Climate Change Disinformation| Greenwashing and Deceptive Energy Transitions: Unmasking Socioenvironmental Disinformation and Technosolutionism in LinkedIn Ads

2026-10-08 · Special Sections

Marina Loureiro, Julia Dias, Bianca Melo, Nicole Sanchotene, Débora Salles, Marie Santini, Fernando Ferreira

This article analyzes 4,068 advertisements from 917 companies promoted on LinkedIn with the aim of identifying greenwashing on the energy transition. Recognizing greenwashing as a form of socioenvironmental disinformation, we demonstrate how it misleads audiences about the sustainability of corporate practices. Furthermore, by drawing on the concept of technosolutionism, we discuss how the uncritical emphasis on technologies in favor of sustainability can obscure structural problems. We combined computational methods with a qualitative content analysis to map the sectors of companies and their greenwashing strategies. The results indicate that 52.7% of the ads contained signs of greenwashing, mainly characterized by the use of technical terms and vague promises. LinkedIn Ads, a business-oriented social medium, have been widely used by companies to disseminate an environmentally responsible image, often through misleading information and an emphasis on technological innovations that hide real socioenvironmental impacts.

Climate Change Disinformation| Harvesting Denial: Mapping Primary and Secondary Climate Obstruction in Brazil

2026-10-08 · Special Sections

Julia Dias, Liz-Rejane Issberner

This study conducts a qualitative, exploratory investigation of climate obstruction in Brazil. Based on a literature review and an exploratory analysis of gray literature, the study maps the key players, narratives, tactics, and institutional linkages that shape climate obstruction in Brazil. By examining how obstruction spreads across political, economic, and media spheres, the study identifies patterns that mirror and diverge from those in the Global North, particularly the United States, where obstruction has longer-established roots. The analysis also discusses the recent evolution of the phenomenon into new forms of climate obstruction. Findings show that Brazilian obstruction operates as an orchestrated ecosystem primarily sponsored by agribusiness, with practical consequences for public policy. This ecosystem gained greater prominence and institutional legitimacy during the Bolsonaro administration (2019–2022), establishing obstruction as a political force rather than a discursive norm.

Climate Change Disinformation| Unraveling Debunked Climate Change Disinformation and Responses to Fact-Checks: Evidence From the United States, Netherlands, and Philippines

2026-10-08 · Special Sections

Michael Hameleers

Although climate change skepticism and denialism have been considered influential narratives in the contemporary digital information landscape, we know little about how such narratives are legitimized in climate change disinformation across different national settings. Against this background, this study relies on an in-depth qualitative content analysis of fact-checked disinformation in the Netherlands, the United States, and the Philippines as contrasting global cases. In addition, to explore the level of resistance to fact-checks, social media comments in response to fact-checking information were analyzed inductively. Our main findings indicate that climate skepticism was often constructed by deceptively re-interpreting, de-contextualizing, delegitimizing, or altering expert knowledge and scientific evidence. Disinformation claims and responses often used a populist logic, for which common sense and direct observations were juxtaposed to the alleged dishonesty of scientists. Responses to fact-checks mostly reinforced disinformation or challenged the fact-checker, which offers limited support for the real-life effectiveness of climate change debunks.

Climate Change Disinformation| Climate Change Disinformation—Introduction

2026-10-08 · Special Sections

Anton Shekhovtsov, Ilya Yablokov, Dani Madrid-Morales, Alexander Etkind

In the Special Section “Climate Change Disinformation,” we examine climate-related disinformation at a transition point: It is increasingly less about denying climate science than it is about arguing against climate policy. Across six studies, the collection finds that denial of the science persists among those whose public case centers on cost and fairness. It also finds that disinformation succeeds where an audience is already disposed to accept it. In this introduction, we argue that this ongoing shift is outpacing the instruments built to address it, since arguments about policy are difficult to disprove and they largely remain beyond the reach of fact-checking or news literacy. The contributions offer researchers, practitioners, and policy makers a basis for responses that engage the politics of climate action rather than only factual claims of disinformation.

Climate Change Disinformation| “Everybody Wants Clean Air”: Grievances and Misperceptions in the Backlash Against Net Zero in the United Kingdom

2026-10-08 · Special Sections

Lluis de Nadal, Marija Verner, Christopher Shaw

Social media groups opposing net-zero policies have drawn attention for coordinating disruptive protests and employing post-truth tactics, yet the motivations behind this opposition, and the role misinformation plays in it, remain largely unexamined. To address this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods study of UK Facebook groups opposing low-emissions transport schemes. We show that the backlash is rooted in substantive policy concerns and political disaffection, which organized denial campaigns exploit through misinformation. Misinformation did not autonomously drive the backlash, but, we argue, hardened existing views, diverted attention from productive critique, and helped escalate disagreement into existential conflict, making consensus more difficult. These findings can help counter misinformation and address the underlying conditions that make it appealing.

Gabriel Tarde’s Crowded Publics: Rediscovering the Work of a Forgotten Media Theorist

2026-09-29 · Articles

Samuel Earle

Despite a revival of interest in the work of Gabriel Tarde, he remains an underappreciated, patchily translated, and often misrepresented thinker. When he is invoked, it is typically as the “forefather” of actor–network theory, as claimed by Bruno Latour; as the advocate of the power of conversation in media influence, as promoted by Elihu Katz; or as a useful, but inaccurate, citation for comparing rational publics with irrational crowds. This study aims to correct certain misconceptions and broaden knowledge of Tarde’s work as a media and communications scholar by focusing on two texts, “The Public and the Crowd” (where anglophone readers have typically relied on incomplete translations) and Les Transformations du Pouvoir (which remains untranslated). Tarde teaches us that the media was always social and that the line between physical crowds and mediated audiences was always blurry.

From Words to Harm: Hate Speech and Societal Violence in U.S. Presidential Campaigns

2026-09-29 · Articles

Zhengyi Liang, Joel Sandoval-Valdez, Jaeho Cho, Xinya Jiang, Zhicong Chen

Political speeches are typically viewed as mobilizing democratic participation, yet research shows elite political rhetoric—particularly when it contains hate speech—may contribute to societal harm. Our study extends this line of research by investigating the association between hate speech and societal violence from a temporal perspective in the context of U.S. presidential campaigns. We examined the extent to which hate speech was associated with crime incidents across the 2 weeks following a campaign address, spanning multiple crime categories. We found that hate speech was positively and significantly associated with hate crime, property crime, crimes against society, and overall crime, but not with violent crime. These patterns suggest spillover effects of hate speech beyond hate-motivated violence. The association with hate crime emerged after a short delay, whereas associations with other crime categories were more persistent over time. Our study advances understanding of the societal impact of harmful political rhetoric and has practical implications for designing interventions to counter hate speech.

One-Dimensional Algorithm: Rereading Marcuse’s Critical Theory Through Platform Culture

2026-09-14 · Articles

Dursun Can Şimşek

This article rereads Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory through algorithmic curation on commercial social media platforms, pursuing a dialectical argument in two directions: first, that platform capitalism structurally reproduces Marcuse’s diagnoses of false needs, incorporation, and one-dimensional thought; second, that platform dynamics exceed his framework—in its passive-subject assumptions, its vagueness about resistance, and its inability to account for the simultaneous production of homogeneity and fragmentation. From this tension, the article develops the concept of algorithmic incorporation: the process by which oppositional thought, practice, and identity enter a platform-mediated cycle of visibility, normalization, commodification, and domestication. Drawing on #BlackLivesMatter as a sustained analytical case, it shows how the four phases operate and specifies observable indicators through which each could be empirically tested. The concept is distinguished from Marcuse’s incorporation, Gramsci’s transformism, and Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, and corrects accounts—including Bennett and Segerberg’s connective action—that foreground platform infrastructure’s enabling dimensions without reckoning with its costs to movements. Because incorporation operates without a deciding agent, the article concludes, tactical evasion cannot substitute for infrastructural change.

News Media, Narrative Authority, and the Global Ordering of Artificial Intelligence

2026-09-14 · Articles

Massimo Ragnedda, Maria Laura Ruiu, Muhammad Awais

This article examines how mainstream Western news media structure global hierarchies of technological legitimacy in coverage of artificial intelligence (AI). Although AI circulates worldwide, its public meaning is shaped within a restricted geopolitical and linguistic sphere. Conceptualizing news discourse as a narrative infrastructure that organizes visibility, authority, and technological futurity, we analyze 43,027 English-language newspaper articles from the United States and Europe using computational text analysis combined with interpretive examination. The findings reveal differences in thematic emphasis and actor representation: U.S. coverage frames AI through innovation and economic leadership, European coverage emphasizes regulation and governance, and China appears as a hyper-visible but ambivalent rival associated with surveillance, geopolitical competition, and strategic threat. Actors from Africa and Latin America are largely absent or positioned as sites of implementation, risk, or developmental need. We conceptualize this exclusion as discursive stratification: a hierarchy of narrative inequality in which some actors are positioned as authors of technological futures while others appear as objects, recipients, or peripheral contexts. News discourse thus contributes to the global ordering of technological authority.

Surveying Gatekeepers: Journal Editors’ Perceptions, Responses, and Attitudes Toward De-Westernizing Communication and Media Studies

2026-08-28 · Articles

Francisco Paulo Jamil Marques, Sujatha Sosale, Brian Ekdale, Bingbing Zhang

This study surveys 110 editors from first- and second-quartile journals indexed in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports to examine how they evaluate and respond to calls to de-westernize and diversify communication and media scholarship through the inclusion of Global South perspectives and scholars. The findings show that editors concerned with geographic imbalances in academic knowledge production identify persistent challenges, such as unconvincing or poorly structured response letters, that contribute to lower acceptance rates for manuscripts by Global South–based scholars. Beyond constraints related to English-language proficiency, limited research funding, and underresourced institutional infrastructures, respondents further point to reviewers’ epistemological biases as a significant barrier—one that requires active editorial oversight, but has become difficult to address amid expanding editorial responsibilities. At the same time, a minority of respondents argue that prioritizing geographic diversity may undermine journal standards, emphasizing peer review as a strictly quality-based process independent of authors’ geographic location.

Blaming News Media for Fake News: The Role of Elite Media Discourse and Partisans’ Media Perception in Perceived Fake News Exposure and Attribution

2026-08-28 · Articles

Mihye Seo, Ki Deuk Hyun, Gunho Lee

This study examines how political and media perceptions shape perceived exposure to fake news in news media and the attribution of fake news to news media in South Korea, where progressive elites more often criticize news media bias and raise fake news concerns. Survey analyses demonstrate two routes linking elite discourse to blaming the news media. A cue-taking route from elites’ recent fake news discourse shows that greater news consumption among progressives is associated with higher perceived exposure to fake news in news media, which in turn is positively associated with stronger attribution of fake news problems to news media. A news media perception route indicates progressive voters hold stronger hostile media perceptions, which reduce trust in the news media and, subsequently, increase perceived exposure to fake news and the attributions of fake news to the news media. The findings imply elites’ power in shaping public fake news perceptions.