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The outdoors offers widely understood health and wellbeing benefits and provides an unparalleled resource for the realization and projection of identity, from the personal to the national. Yet access to the outdoors in the countries of the global North is manifestly unequal, with BIPOC communities typically much less likely than their white counterparts to participate in outdoor leisure activities such as hiking, trail running, cycling, climbing, etc. This study revisits the hypothesis that outdoors media plays a central role in perpetuating what Martin (Citation2004) terms “apartheid in the Great Outdoors” by performing a content analysis of the Instagram posts of the top 10 outdoor brands in the US, Scandinavia and UK between the spring and summer seasons of 2020 – a period when the global pandemic restricted access to the outdoors at the same time as the Black Lives Matter movement raised awareness of systemic racial inequalities. The analysis reveals that whilst there is a purposeful response to calls to diversify the outdoors in the representational strategies of US outdoor brands, this is not the case in the UK and Scandinavia. In these locations the digital outdoors and its associated leisure identities remain overwhelmingly white, young, straight, and able-bodied.

This study explores the role of humour in shaping digital death discourses on TikTok. examining how users engage with mortality, the afterlife, and dying in playful yet profound ways. Through an analysis of three content strands--#celebritydeathprank, Heaven Receptionist skits, and mourning-dedicated accounts--it investigates how TikTok's participatory culture enables users to navigate and reframe death through creative and often comedic means. Rather than centering grief, this study highlights how humour serves as a mechanism for engaging with existential themes, fostering communal rememberence, and reimagining collective imaginaries of death. By leveraging TikTok's affordances--such as remixing, commenting, and algorithmic visibility--users produce content that blurs the boundaries between adversity and the absurd, intimacy and spectacle. This study contributes to research on digital death by demonstrating how social media platforms cultivate new vernaculars and ephemeralities of death discourse, where humour becomes the central mode of engagement with mortality.

A so-called green transition is ongoing in the Swedish North, primarily driven by investments in making basic industries fossil-free. The societal impact in the region is widespread and complex, and the ecological gain is sometimes disputed. In this study, we identify topics, themes, and evolving discourses about the “green” transition in a dataset (N = 9,755 texts) comprising published texts in Swedish news media between 2015 and 2023. Discourse analysis and topic modelling are combined, and the analysis shows two intersecting dominant discourses. The Green Growth discourse included articulations of beneficial, although challenging, green growth and energy transitions. The Swedish North discourse revealed continued tensions in the understanding of the region as a centre and a periphery. Even if marginal, contestations were identified, for example, questioning the “greenness” in green growth. Taken together, the dominance of industrial and political perspectives in the news media coverage and debate limits possibilities for alternatives.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments discouraged citizens from travelling both within and outside the nation in an effort to mitigate the spread of the virus. Still, some Scandinavian influencers, whose livelihood often depends on producing aesthetic travel content, chose to go abroad, which led to criticism from both followers and others. While ethical debates over air travel have taken place in social media for a long time, the specific conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions, combined with the centrality of travel within influencer culture, created new controversies and discussions on several influencers’ Instagram accounts in Norway and Sweden. In this article, we use digital ethnography and multimodal discourse analysis to examine discursive negotiations of different moral positions in regards to long-haul travel, the political role and responsibility of influencers, as well as how appeals to solidarity and individualised responsibility were performed and contested in socially mediated spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The rise of visual mis/disinformation presents a significant challenge to democratic societies, as misleading visual content increasingly influences public opinion and decision-making. This study aims to comprehensively map the current state of research on visual mis/disinformation, providing insights into its key trends, disciplinary focus, methodologies and topical priorities. Using a computational literature review approach, this study identifies and synthesizes findings from a broad corpus of scholarly publications (N = 286) examining trends over time in visual disinformation research, highlighting the growing prominence of the field and its interdisciplinary nature. We explore the specific contributions of disciplines such as political science, communication studies and computer science. The review identifies a diverse array of research methods used to investigate visual disinformation, ranging from traditional content analysis and surveys to cutting-edge computational techniques such as machine learning and visual network analysis. It also delves into the thematic priorities of recent studies, including ‘media literacy’, ‘verification strategies of visual misinformation’, ‘visual literacy in misinformation’, ‘correction strategies and engagement’, ‘health-related disinformation’, ‘disinformation detection using machine learning’, and ‘misinformation and memory’. By integrating these perspectives, the study provides a comprehensive overview of the visual mis/disinformation field, offering valuable insights for future research. It emphasizes the need for multidisciplinary collaboration and methodological innovation to address the complexities of this pressing issue. This work contributes to the broader understanding of visual mis/disinformation’s impact and the strategies needed to mitigate its harmful effects.

As AI-driven language models transform communication, minority languages like Meänkieli—a national minority language in northern Sweden—face new forms of digital marginalization. Historically suppressed by the Swedish state, Meänkieli now risks exclusion from rapidly evolving AI ecosystems. This article examines how current AI platforms shape language inclusion, combining semi-structured interviews with language technologists, conservators, and promoters, and a platform analysis of AI translation and language tools. Drawing on these materials, we develop the concept of “technolinguistic suspension” to describe the state in which Meänkieli currently exists: symbolically recognized yet excluded from the technological infrastructures that increasingly define linguistic legitimacy. We identify four interrelated aspects—two conditions (non-representative technologies and low-resource status) and two responses (active work-arounds and AI skepticism)—that illuminate how institutional neglect and platform-level dynamics jointly constrain digital revitalization. The study argues that overcoming technolinguistic suspension requires both structural reforms in platform design and sustained institutional commitment to minority language futures.

Content creators in war zones are critical in shaping global perceptions of conflict. Through social media, they document real-time events and reach audiences beyond the traditional news frameworks. Based on an ethnographic study of Czech and Ukrainian TikTok creators sharing war-related content from Ukraine, we introduce the concept of ambivalent visibility – a condition shaped by the conflicting demands creators face in balancing algorithmic amplification, audience engagement and ethical responsibility. In conflict zones, ambivalent visibility emerges as creators integrate war-related content into platform vernaculars, such as native templates and viral formats, while negotiating the risks of trivialization and misinterpretation. We identify three forms of ambivalence: (1) tension between raw immediacy and platform-friendly visibility, where creators balance the urgency of documenting war with the need to remain legible to the algorithm; (2) blurred boundaries between digital storytelling and journalism, as creators navigate dual roles as informal correspondents and narrative influencers; and (3) a virality paradox, in which tragedy becomes a driver of engagement, propelling content not despite its emotional gravity, but because of it. We conclude by positioning these creators as contemporary war communicators, bridging journalism and personal stories to reframe how conflicts are witnessed and understood in the platform age.

Since February 2022, the war in Ukraine has ushered in a new era of war documentation, with TikTok emerging as a central platform for showcasing daily life in conflict zones. This shift has given rise to “war influencers,” a distinct group of content creators who transform war zones into consumable units of content by using platform-specific vernaculars to convey their lived experiences. We present a typology of war influencers: (1) Celebrity-War Influencers, who leverage their well-established mechanisms of fame to transition into wartime advocacy; (2) User-War Influencers, who harness the powerful dissemination capabilities of platforms to spotlight their sites of trauma, thus rising from anonymity to online fame. Utilizing digital ethnography, we analyze 97 videos from Ukrainian TikTok creators, examining User-War Influencers from the onset of the war. We identify three primary styles employed by these influencers: (1) POV storytelling, using point-of-view templates to connect audiences with personal war testimonies; (2) memetic content, juxtaposing war sights with trending memes to enhance engagement and shareability; and (3) playful politainment, combining entertainment and political commentary through features like LIVE to fundraise and mobilize global audiences. Bridging war photography, citizen journalism, and influencer culture, we argue that war influencers leverage platform affordances and user interactions to amplify war zone visibility, foster civic engagement, and shape global perceptions of conflicts. In doing so, they contribute to the construction of social epistemology, redefining the collective processes through which knowledge about war zones is mediated and understood online.