Alarmed by the oversimplifications related to the ‘fake news’ buzzword, researchers have started to unpack the concept, defining diverse types and forms of misleading news. Most of the existing works in the area consider crucial the intent of the content creator in order to differentiate among different types of problematic information. This article argues for a change of perspective that, by leveraging the conceptual framework of sociocybernetics, shifts from exclusive attention to creators of misleading information to a broader approach that focuses on propagators and, as a result, on the dynamics of the propagation processes. The analytical implications of this perspective are discussed at a micro level (criteria to judge the falsehood of news and to decide to spread it), at a meso level (four possible relations between individual judgements and decisions), and at a macro level (global circulation cascades). The authors apply this theoretical gaze to analyse ‘fake news’ stories that challenge existing models.

This article analyses the relationship between mediated politics and participation, adopting a hybrid approach that stresses the connections between older and newer media. The study adopts a practice-based approach, considering the ways TV audiences, politicians, and journalists used Twitter in order to participate in the discourses activated around Italian political talk shows, during the ‘permanent’ campaign for the 2013 general elections (from September 2012 to June 2013; 11 shows; 1076 episodes). We analysed these communication practices referring, at first, to the complete collection of tweets, including\ud the official hashtags of Italian political talk shows (2,489,669 tweets). The analysis pointed out that a narrow audience had access to these practices, and that the potential for media\ud and politicians to interact with audiences/citizens and to manage their ‘interpretive engagement’ in the construction of agendas has not been actualized. Furthermore, focusing on a sample of tweets produced around the three main parties (15,737) and the relative TV scene (23), the analysis showed that connected audiences were engaged especially in two forms of participation ‘through’ Twitter during talk shows (opinions/comments and requests for interaction with the TV hosts and guests). The article suggests a newer way to work on big data in order to gather a first-hand narrative of participation, left online by networked publics, without forgetting the contribution older techniques could make to the understanding of hybrid practices of political communication and participation

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication and Society is an invitation to recover conceptual instruments-such as the ecological trope-that have fallen out of fashion in media and communication studies. We account for their fall from grace and explicate the rationale for seeking to reinsert them into the empirical terrain of interlocking media, communication practices and protest which we aim to both capture with theory and adopt as a starting point for further analytical innovation.Key words: protest, communication, media, ecology, social media, social movement Protest communication ecologies is an attempt to pin down a conceptual meeting point for areas of social enquiry addressing increasingly interconnected phenomena. Ecology is a longstanding trope denoting variability. It encapsulates multiple and layered interconnections among component parts and of the latter with their surrounding environment. In information sciences, ecology has been defined as a 'system of people, technologies, practices and values in a local setting ' (O'Day, 2000:36). The term 'system' signifies complexity of organisation where technologies imprint on human action which in turn adjusts technologies to local circumstances. Protest, on the other hand, has become a 1 Corresponding author. Email: dan.mercea.1@city.ac.uk 2 staple albeit non-institutional form of political participation (van Deth, 2014), which is coextensive with a heightened mediation of socio-political intercourse (Keane, 2013).In this special issue, we contemplate the local variability of protest, its expression, appeal, and ramifications. All the while, we keep sight of the participatory cultures that bridge or separate disparate instances of protest. This opening article provides an outline of these conceptual considerations and relates them to methodological conundrums and apposite reflections instigated by the keynote speakers at the international iCS Symposium Media ecologiesThe chief merit of the concept of 'ecology' is that it underscores the need to emplace interconnectedness as its origins, forms, implications and valorisations are pondered. Put differently, an ecology is by definition bounded. Therefore, it is coextensive with many other systems, which stand apart from it in one or more respects. It is this insight that has prompted Olsson (2010) to distinguish between three contemporary media ecologies: the broadcasting, the interactive and the participatory ecology. Retracing his classification back to McLuhan (1964) and the proposition that broadcasti...

Survey-based studies are increasingly experimenting with strategies that employ digital footprints left by users on social media as entry points for recruiting participants and complementary data sources. In this perspective, the Facebook advertising platform provides unique opportunities and challenges through its marketing tools that target advertisements based on users’ demographics, behaviors, and interests. This article presents a procedure that employed the most recent developments in Facebook marketing tools to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of an innovative method for recruiting niche and traditionally hard-to-reach respondents. Although the multiple innovations introduced in the method hinder a proper comparison with previous studies, the survey provides evidence concerning the efficacy of the procedure and offers scholars a set of implementations to design future comparable Facebook ad–based surveys. Challenges, opportunities, and results for effectiveness are discussed in light of a previous survey on Italian adults carried out with a panel-based computer-assisted web interviewing method.

In 2016 the Italian health ministry launched the 'Fertility Day' campaign, aimed at tackling Italy's low birth rate. Under the accusation of delivering sexist and racist messages, the campaign became a trending topic on Twitter, and a protest was launched to be held during Fertility Day. By applying a combination of digital methods and visual content analysis to the #fertilityday Twitter stream, this paper contributes to existing research on the deliberative strength of political hashtag publics, with a particular focus on their power structures, communication patterns and visual content use. Findings on gatekeeping dynamics downsize optimistic views on the democratizing potential of Twitter's socio-technical infrastructure as they point to the emergence of online satirical media and 'tweetstars'-along with mainstream news media-as main producers of spreadable content, with ordinary users only surfacing when traditional media elites and new satirical actors lack or lose interest in the debate. Results confirm that political hashtag publics follow acute event communication patterns, with users highly engaged in retweeting and referencing external material and visual content playing a key role in these gatewatching practices. The transient counter-visualityor critical stanceof tweets with user-manipulated images, however, also suggests that the 2 deliberative potential of these publics is not easily sustainable over time.

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