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While it is often assumed that authoritarian regimes inevitably fear and restrict media independence, permitting watchdog journalism can actually help such regimes maintain power by improving governance. Yet such a strategy risks facilitating a coordinated uprising if discontent is revealed to be widespread. A formal model shows that under some conditions, a regime optimally permits investigative reporting on lower-level officialdom, adjusting how much reporting is allowed depending on the level of underlying social tensions. This strategy yields many of the benefits of free media without risking overthrow. An extension shows why an increase in uncontrollable information, such as from the Internet, may result in a reduction in media freedom. The model sheds light on important aspects of China's media policy and its evolution and on authoritarian media control more broadly.

As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, we discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. We show how engaging in \"hashtag activism\" can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, we examine how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Our analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in \"hashtag ethnography.\"

The recent increase in partisan media has generated interest in whether such outlets polarize viewers. I draw on theories of motivated reasoning to explain why partisan media polarize viewers, why these programs affect some viewers much more strongly than others, and how long these effects endure. Using a series of original experiments, I find strong support for my theoretical expectations, including the argument that these effects can still be detected several days postexposure. My results demonstrate that partisan media polarize the electorate by taking relatively extreme citizens and making them even more extreme. Though only a narrow segment of the public watches partisan media programs, partisan media's effects extend much more broadly throughout the political arena.

Metadata and data have become a regular currency for citizens to pay for their communication services and security—a trade-off that has nestled into the comfort zone of most people. This article deconstructs the ideological grounds of datafication. Datafication is rooted in problematic ontological and epistemological claims. As part of a larger social media logic, it shows characteristics of a widespread secular belief. Dataism, as this conviction is called, is so successful because masses of people — naively or unwittingly — trust their personal information to corporate platforms. The notion of trust becomes more problematic because people’s faith is extended to other public institutions (e.g. academic research and law enforcement) that handle their (meta)data. The interlocking of government, business, and academia in the adaptation of this ideology makes us want to look more critically at the entire ecosystem of connective media.

Social media use has become increasingly popular among police forces. The literature suggests that social media use can increase perceived police legitimacy by enabling transparency and participation. Employing data from a large and representative survey of Dutch citizens (N = 4,492), this article tests whether and how social media use affects perceived legitimacy for a major social media platform, Twitter. A negligible number of citizens engage online with the police, and thus the findings reveal no positive relationship between participation and perceived legitimacy. The article shows that by enhancing transparency, Twitter does increase perceived police legitimacy, albeit to a limited extent. Subsequent analysis of the mechanism shows both an affective and a cognitive path from social media use to legitimacy. Overall, the findings suggest that establishing a direct channel with citizens and using it to communicate successes does help the police strengthen their legitimacy, but only slightly and for a small group of interested citizens.

We adopt an interactionist logic to study the determinants of risk taking by chief executive officers (CEOs). We introduce the concept of \"capability cues\"— contextual signals that decision makers might reasonably interpret as indicators of their current level of overall ability— arguing that positive cues will induce boldness, while negative cues will induce timidity. Then, drawing from prior theory about how narcissists react to stimuli, we hypothesize that highly narcissistic CEOs will be relatively unresponsive to objective indicators of their performance; in contrast, highly narcissistic CEOs will be exceptionally emboldened by social praise (in the forms of media praise and media awards). We test our theory in two distinct studies, one of risky outlays by CEOs of publicly owned U.S. companies from 1992 to 2006, and a second of acquisition premiums paid by CEOs of a sample of U.S. acquiring firms, 2001-2008. Our analyses show that capability cues generally influence executive risk taking, but highly narcissistic CEOs are much less responsive to recent objective performance than their less narcissistic peers; in contrast, highly narcissistic CEOs are especially bolstered by social praise.

We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens’ endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric. We validate the ideological estimates that result from the scaling process by showing they correlate highly with existing measures of ideology from Congress, and with individual-level self-reported political views. Finally, we use these measures to study the relationship between ideology and age, social relationships and ideology, and the relationship between friend ideology and turnout.

Elites face a daunting coordination problem when contemplating a coup. Citizens, who desire political reform, face a similar coordination problem when contemplating protest. Since elites and citizens interact with the same leadership, these coordination problems are invariably linked. We develop a model which exploits this link to isolate an informational mechanism connecting popular protests and coups. Protests aggregate citizen information and provide elites with a public signal which helps them coordinate in a coup. We show that elites “overreact” to protest as a consequence of its publicity, and we provide a microfounded explanation as to why elites use protests to facilitate coordination. Our model also suggests that protests in countries with media freedom better facilitate elite coordination. To test this, we examine how media freedom affects the relationship between protests and coups. The empirical analysis shows the effect of protests on coups is exacerbated in countries where media is free.

This study used a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design at one-week intervals to determine the extent to which written, audio, and audiovisual L2 input contributed to incidental vocabulary learning. Seventy-six university students learning EFL in China were randomly assigned to four groups. Each group was presented with the input from the same television documentary in different modes: reading the printed transcript, listening to the documentary, viewing the documentary, and a nontreatment control condition. Checklist and multiple-choice tests were designed to measure knowledge of target words. The results showed that L2 incidental vocabulary learning occurred through reading, listening, and viewing, and that the gain was retained in all modes of input one week after encountering the input. However, no significant differences were found between the three modes on the posttests indicating that each mode of input yielded similar amounts of vocabulary gain and retention. A significant relationship was found between prior vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary learning, but not between frequency of occurrence and vocabulary learning. The study provides further support for the use of L2 television programs for language learning.

This article focuses on the discursive underpinnings of the legitimacy crisis that the Eurozone as a transnational institution is facing. By adopting a critical discourse analysis (CDA) perspective, the empirical analysis focuses on the media discussion in Finland. The analysis shows how discourses of financial capitalism, humanism, nationalism and Europeanism played a central role in legitimation, delegitimation and relegitimation. Furthermore, the analysis elaborates on the legitimation strategies that were often used in the media texts: position-based authorizations involving institutionalized authorities and 'voices of the common man', knowledge-based authorizations focusing on economic expertise, rationalizations concentrating on economic arguments, moral evaluations based on unfairness used especially for delegitimation, mythopoiesis involving alternative future scenarios and cosmology used to construct inevitability. By so doing, this study adds to our understanding of the discursive and ideological underpinnings of the social, political and financial crisis in Greece and other European countries and contributes to research on discursive legitimation more generally.