Communities of international legal discourse have been increasingly favouring tweets and blogs over traditional media of academic expression. Legal practice communities have likewise been abandoning press releases in favour of tweets and digital newsletters. For discourse communities, this trend can broaden the scope of eligible participants, while encouraging progress through contestation and legal pluralism. At the same time, it may encourage over-contentiousness, sensationalism, “celebritism”, and “click-hunting”, at the expense of genuine dialogue and problem-solving. For communities of practice, the spatial particularities of social media platforms prompt rapid exchanges and reposts with minimal prior reflection, while offering no tangible benefits compared to traditional means of law shaping. The trend, in any event, appears irreversible. We should thus shift to capitalizing on this trend’s benefits while mitigating its various side effects through an organic process of increased awareness.

This study explores the role of influencers in shaping public opinion about feminism in Spain, a country where gender equality and feminist discourse have gained relevant public prominence. Although the figure of the influencer may appear novel, the process of opinion formation mirrors that which has historically prevailed for celebrities in traditional media. However, the inherent characteristics of social media endow influencers with even greater tools of persuasion. We test this argument by collecting a representative survey of the Spanish population and analyzing posts and videos from influencers’ profiles, employing manual content analysis. Our findings reveal that audiences of incidental feminist influencers exhibit stronger pro-feminist attitudes, while those of incidental anti-feminist influencers lean toward anti-feminist views. Additional analysis using propensity score matching offers further evidence of the persuasive power of influencers, even after adjusting for potential selection biases in their audiences.

We apply moral foundations theory (MFT) to explore how the public conceptualizes the first eight months of the conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation (Russia). Our analysis includes over 1.1 million English tweets related to the conflict over the first 36 weeks. We used linguistic inquiry word count (LIWC) and a moral foundations dictionary to identify tweets’ moral components (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity) from the United States, pre- and post-Cold War NATO countries, Ukraine, and Russia. Following an initial spike at the beginning of the conflict, tweet volume declined and stabilized by week 10. The level of moral content varied significantly across the five regions and the five moral components. Tweets from the different regions included significantly different moral foundations to conceptualize the conflict. Across all regions, tweets were dominated by loyalty content, while fairness content was infrequent. Moral content over time was relatively stable, and variations were linked to reported conflict events.

Dubbed “the world’s first and oldest academic social network” by a grant reviewer at the National Science Foundation, HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory or “Haystack”) built its first interactive website in 2002. Now, 22 years later, HASTAC has some 18,000 network members, over 400 institutional members, and a thriving graduate-student-led HASTAC Scholars program that selects 100 new student members each year. Co-Director Cathy N. Davidson co-founded HASTAC with David Theo Goldberg and numerous other scholars in the humanities and social sciences working in tandem with computer scientists and programmers. Before Wikipedia, Facebook, or Twitter (now X), HASTAC created an open-access, public network with the purpose of making full use of evolving affordances of technology while also critiquing and seeking to improve issues of access, ethics, gender and racial bias, and social and environmental impact. This essay details what it takes to lead and sustain a dues-free, participatory social network with community standards and collaborative decision-making, and where any network member is invited to blog, post, start dialogues, and lead research initiatives, across institutional and other boundaries.

Illegal hunting of migratory birds across the Mediterranean region is a serious international conservation issue with population-level impacts. We analysed photographs posted on social media platforms to assess the bird species illegally targeted in Lebanon. During 2011–2023 we reviewed 1,844 photographs publicly posted by poachers on Facebook and Instagram. In these images we identified 212 bird species, of which 94% are legally protected. Many are species of conservation concern, with 19 listed as threatened or Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List and 33% experiencing population declines in Europe. The five bird species with the most individuals illegally killed were the barn swallow Hirundo rustica, blackcap Sylvia atricapilla, European bee-eater Merops apiaster, Eurasian golden oriole Oriolus oriolus and ortolan bunting Emberiza hortulana. Raptors and other large soaring birds were particularly prevalent, with 35 species of raptor (particularly the European honey-buzzard Pernis apivorus, Eurasian sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus, common kestrel Falco tinnunculus, short-toed snake-eagle Circaetus gallicus and Levant sparrowhawk Accipiter brevipes) as well as storks, pelicans and cranes. Protected mammals were also posted as trophies, including the Near Threatened striped hyaena Hyaena hyaena. Poachers were present in 44% of photographs and were clearly identifiable 89% of the time, showing little concern about posting illegal activities on publicly accessible social media platforms. Our study is the first to use social media as a tool for assessing illegal hunting activities in Lebanon. We discuss both the use and limitations of this approach, as well as the ways in which social media can be utilized by law enforcement, to promote legal hunting or hunting alternatives and improve conservation education.

A partir de 2014, a política brasileira foi sacudida pela operação Lava Jato (LJ), uma iniciativa anticorrupção centrada no direito. A LJ expôs um grande esquema de corrupção na empresa nacional de petróleo, a Petrobras, envolvendo seus diretores, dirigentes de partidos políticos e grandes empreiteiras. Para alguns, a LJ representou um marco, um novo capítulo na história do Brasil, promovendo o “estado de direito” e um desejo coletivo de “acabar com a impunidade” na política e nos negócios. Para outros, a operação enfraqueceu a democracia e o estado de direito, abrindo caminho para uma liderança autocrática sob o ex-presidente Jair Bolsonaro. Este artigo contribui para esses debates ao analisar a LJ como um espaço de produção de “consciência jurídica.” Empiricamente, examina conversas lideradas por procuradores da LJ no Facebook entre 2017 e 2019. A questão central abordada é: “Quando os procuradores e o público falavam sobre a LJ, sobre o que falavam?” Os resultados se alinham às visões céticas sobre a operação, sugerindo que as interações entre os procuradores da LJ e seus seguidores no Facebook ajudaram a co-criar um quadro cultural que conflita com o “estado de direito.” Essas percepções oferecem implicações para estudos sobre consciência jurídica e esforços anticorrupção.

Social media content creation is hugely popular with second-generation Arab immigrants to the UAE who lack a path to naturalized citizenship, particularly as a space to perform their belonging in the nation. This essay analyzes the work of two Arabophone content creators on Instagram and YouTube who use comedy to perform as quintessential “Dubai kids.” While they align with the state mission of presenting the UAE positively on social media, these creators produce ironic content that makes visible practices of belonging by second-generation youth who distance themselves from inherited politics of national and gender identity. The affective communities that form around these satirical content creators offer a model of belonging in which binaries of citizen and noncitizen can be elided, staging performances of immigrant identity uniquely local to the UAE.

This is a reply to Komárek’s criticism of our article “Europe’s political constitution”. We address the issues raised by our critic one by one. The topics range from the definition of the public sphere to the role that law blogs and social media play in it. The reply concludes by examining what it means to pursue truth in legal scholarship based on contrasting the views of Hans Kelsen und Stanley Fish.

This article explores the language of social media by analyzing a selection of linguistic features in four corpora of Swedish social media available at Språkbanken Text: Blog mix, Familjeliv, Flashback, and Twitter. Previous research describes the language of these corpora as informal, spoken-like, unedited, non-standard, and innovative. Our corpus analysis confirms the informal and spoken-like nature of social media, while also showing that these traits are unevenly distributed across the various social media corpora and that they are also present in other traditional written corpora, such as novels. Our findings also reveal that the social media corpora show traits of involved and interactional language.