Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media

Podcasts are central to media ecosystems, yet no research program engages them systematically as digital trace data. We address this deficiency by demonstrating how podcasts’ RSS-based distribution infrastructure enables podcast data collection and analysis at scale. With a dataset of 6,055 unique Canadian podcasts comprising 655,123 episodes, we provide an initial description of the Canadian pod…

We study how streaming service fragmentation (SSF) can create media access friction (MAF), making illicit channels comparatively more attractive for some audiences. This friction is fueled by the current exclusivity model employed by the large streaming platforms. Decentralized, peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols like BitTorrent, through its trackerless DHT, present a robust illicit distribution channe…

Community Notes (formerly known as Birdwatch) is the first large-scale crowdsourced content moderation initiative launched by X (formerly Twitter) in January 2021. As the Community Notes model gains momentum across other social media platforms, there is a growing need to assess its underlying dynamics and effectiveness. This paper provides a descriptive investigation of Community Notes during its…

Online sharing strongly guides which news people encounter on a daily basis. Yet, especially in a multiparty political context, we lack a holistic framework to capture which news is circulated by which groups or partisans, to what extent circulation of news is fragmented and to what degree it is intermediated. We provide such a general political cartography of news sharing on German Twitter (Marc…

Exposure is the core construct of media effects research, but it is neither sufficiently measured nor well-understood in a multi-platform media system. We bring together data on Fox News consumption across television, foxnews.com, and four social media platforms in April 2022, supplemented by individual-level survey and web-tracking data from the American Media Exposure Survey (AMES). Direct enga…

How does Google Search direct people to information about their elected offcials? To answer this, we conducted daily searches for members of the US House of Representatives from all 435 US congressional districts and DC between September 1 and December 31, 2020, resulting in 20.1 million search engine results pages (SERPs) and 302 million search results. We find that these search results are domi…

This article explores the role of unrecognised labour in corporate innovation systems via an analysis of researcher coding and discursive contributions to R, one of the largest statistical software ecosystems. Studies of online platforms typically focus on how platform affordances constrain participants’ actions, and profit from their labour. We innovate by connecting the labour performed inside …

Exposure to wildfire smoke has serious health implications, highlighted by public and media attention each fire season. This study combines datasets from newspaper archives, social media, and a national survey to assess how hazards, impacts, and protective actions are discussed across different types of media. We found protective actions are underdiscussed in traditional and social media, especia…

Election campaigns increasingly pursue their strategic goals online, using digital advertising not only to persuade voters but also to raise funds, mobilize supporters, and collect data. These varied objectives reflect how campaigns operate within broader networks of candidates, parties, and outside groups. The extended party network forms the strategic backbone of modern U.S. campaigns, yet its …

We investigate the issue of stance representation at the platform level, and differences in experience at the individual level, in the context of two controversial, mostly two-sided issues: the legality of abortion in the U.S., and the Israel/Hamas conflict; we do so on TikTok. In manually annotated representative samples containing over 3.8k videos and spanning a combined 37 weeks, we measure th…

State supervision of ideas and information circulated among the public has a longstanding history. While there is a substantial body of literature examining the government’s motives for censorship, scholarly assessments of evolving censorship strategies in the new era of artificial intelligence (AI) remain relatively scarce. This paper analyzes an automated censorship system, developed and commer…

We study petition-related mobilization on Social Media across issues and ideologies. Using calls to sign petitions on X in the seven most spoken EU languages, we build the first multi-platform, multi-language map of the e-petitioning ecosystem. To ensure cross-language and cross-ideology comparability, we infer call for signatures’ issues using ManifestoBERTa and users' ideological orientation vi…

Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper describes how U.S. social media use has shifted across platforms, demographics, and politics. Overall platform reach declined, driven by growth in the share of Americans — especially the youngest and oldest cohorts — who report using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on T…

City council meetings are vital sites for civic participation where the public can speak directly to their local government. By addressing city officials and calling on them to take action, public commenters can potentially influence policy decisions spanning a broad range of concerns, from housing, to sustainability, to social justice. Yet studies of these meetings have often been limited by the…

TikTok is now a massive platform, and has a deep impact on global events. Despite preliminary studies, issues remain in determining fundamental characteristics of the platform. We develop a method to extract a representative sample of >99% of posts from a given time range on TikTok, and use it to collect all posts from a full hour on the platform, alongside all posts from a single minute from eac…

Social media plays a central role in shaping interpersonal connections, yet its association with socioemotional well-being remains widely debated. This study examines the relationship between social media use, loneliness, emotional connection, and perceived social support across seven diverse countries using data from the 2022 Gallup/Meta State of Social Connections Survey. To address inconsisten…

Election betting platforms, which combine real money trading with public political discussion and social feedback, have seen explosive growth worldwide. Prediction market research emphasizes aggregate accuracy and price dynamics, while computational political communication research examines discourse in digital forums; however, these literatures remain analytically separate. Here, we provide a qu…

Computational social science has expanded the capacity of scientists to study connected human behavior at previously unprecedented scales. Yet from its beginning, scientists expressed concern that its reliance on private companies might produce a body of work that cannot be critiqued or replicated. Such commercial determinants of science have been observed in other fields including public health …

The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar was as much a political event as a sporting one, marked by controversies over the death of construction workers, concerns over LGBTQ+ rights, and allegations of corruption. Drawing on 573,927 tweets from UK-based accounts and 15,812 excerpts from 66 UK newspapers, we examine how political and apolitical attention to the competition was distributed across mainstrea…

In a rapidly evolving digital media landscape, understanding how exposure to untrustworthy news changes over time is essential for evaluating its potential effects on public attitudes and behavior. However, there is limited evidence on how demand for untrustworthy news develops across longer time frames. Linking web data with surveys, we compare exposure to untrustworthy news sources across demog…