• Catarina Feio University of Aveiro,
• Lídia Oliveira University of Aveiro

University of Aveiro

 Social media have become the primary gateway through which young people access news and information, primarily via personal digital devices (Antunovic et al., 2018; Klopfenstein Frei et al., 2022; Yanardağoğlu, 2021). News exposure occurs both intentionally and incidentally (Silveira & Amaral, 2018), positioning social media as the foundational infrastructure of youth news consumption. Young people who do not access news through social media also tend to disengage from other media (Dvir-Gvirsman, 2022). Unlike previous generations, youth are less likely to establish stable relationships with specific news brands, resulting in fragmented and personalised news repertoires (Russmann & Hess, 2020; Wunderlich et al., 2022). Algorithmically curated feeds prioritise content aligned with user behaviour and interests (Klopfenstein Frei et al., 2022), reflecting broader transformations in how news is defined, circulated, and valued within a complex media ecosystem (Bengtsson & Johansson, 2024). Understanding youth news consumption is therefore essential given its implications for public opinion formation and civic participation (Klopfenstein Frei et al., 2022).

This study examines news consumption across different stages of youth, analysing individuals aged 15–29, divided into adolescents (15–19), emerging adults (20–24) adapted from Arnett (2000), and young adults (25–29). A quantitative methodology was employed using an online questionnaire administered between September 2024 and January 2025. The survey collected responses from 1547 participants, ensuring representativeness of young people residing in Portugal.

Findings confirm that social media are the dominant source of news consumption, with 53.1% reporting daily access and only 4.4% reporting never consuming news on these platforms. Content produced by news organisations coexists with amateur content, potentially obscuring distinctions between factual reporting and opinion. In contrast, only 25.7% report daily television news consumption and 17.7% access newspapers. This is particularly significant given that participants attribute greater credibility to traditional media, yet do not prioritise them in practice. Multiplatform consumption patterns were identified, with frequent social media users also engaging more regularly with traditional news sources. Instagram emerges as the preferred platform, reflecting a preference for short-form visual content. Participants follow news organisation accounts (71%), influencers (53%), and amateur profiles (49.8%), reinforcing the coexistence of professional and non-professional information sources.

These findings highlight critical shifts within contemporary digital information environments, where algorithmically mediated platforms increasingly shape how news is encountered, evaluated, and integrated into everyday life. From a Digital Humanities perspective, this reflects a transition from institutional gatekeeping to hybrid, platform-driven information ecologies, where visibility, engagement metrics, and algorithmic curation influence news exposure. This raises important questions regarding epistemic authority, the stability of journalistic norms, and the capacity of younger generations to navigate complex and often ambiguous information landscapes. While traditional media retain symbolic credibility, their diminished centrality suggests that trust alone no longer determines consumption practices. Instead, accessibility, format, and platform logics play decisive roles. These dynamics underscore the need to critically examine how technological infrastructures reshape knowledge acquisition, media literacy, and civic engagement, positioning social media not merely as distribution channels but as active agents in structuring contemporary informational realities.

 

References: 

 

Antunovic, D., Parsons, P., & Cooke, T. R. (2018). ‘Checking’ and googling: Stages of news consumption among young adults. Journalism, 19(5), 632–648. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916663625

Arnett, J. J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist, 55(5), 469–480. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.5.469

Bengtsson, S., & Johansson, S. (2024). Navigating the News: Young People, Digital Culture and Everyday Life. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111340654

Dvir-Gvirsman, S. (2022). Understanding news engagement on social media: A media repertoire approach. New Media and Society, 24(8), 1791–1812. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820961349

Klopfenstein Frei, N., Wyss, V., Gnach, A., & Weber, W. (2022). “It’s a matter of age”: Four dimensions of youths’ news consumption. Journalism, 25(1), 100–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849221123385

Russmann, U., & Hess, A. (2020). News Consumption and Trust in Online and Social Media: An In-depth Qualitative Study of Young Adults in Austria. International Journal of Communication, 14, 3184–3201.

Silveira, P., & Amaral, I. (2018). Jovens e práticas de acesso e de consumo de notícias nos media sociais. Estudos Em Comunicacao, (26), 261–280. https://doi.org/10.20287/ec.n26.v1.a15

Wunderlich, L., Hölig, S., & Hasebrink, U. (2022). Does Journalism Still Matter? The Role of Journalistic and non-Journalistic Sources in Young Peoples’ News Related Practices. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 27(3), 69–588.

Yanardağoğlu, E. (2021). ‘Just the way my generation reads the news’: News consumption habits of youth in Turkey and the UK. Global Media and Communication, 17(2), 149–166. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742766520979729 

• Anastasiia Vestel Saarland University,
• Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb Saarland University

Saarland University

 The Russo-Ukrainian War has intensified the need to understand disinformation and its societal impacts. This study investigates language variation in Russia’s propagandistic narratives about the war, focusing on how language is manipulated to serve ideological goals. We apply computational methods to detect linguistic shifts and propaganda strategies across diverse media types and Wikipedia versions.

Previous work showed that state and social media used different propaganda frames (Alyukov et al., 2025; Vestel & Degaetano-Ortlieb, 2025). While normalization (understating the war’s impact on everyday life in Russia) was prevalent in state media, which aims to demobilize the population, disinformation (portraying news from Ukraine and the West as fake), a mobilizational approach, was more characteristic of social media. Wikipedia can also enable knowledge manipulation, as in the Russian Wikipedia Fork (RWFork; Trokhymovych et al., 2025), created in June 2023 by revising the Russian Wikipedia (RW) to comply with Russia’s legislation (Cohen, 2023).

 

We use Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD; Kullback & Leibler, 1951) as our method, which provides an interpretable approach to quantifying divergence between two probability distributions, highlighting distinctive linguistic features (e.g., words). We apply KLD on two datasets: the Wartime Media Monitor corpus (Alyukov et al., 2023) to compare the state and social media, and a collection of edits in RWFork (Trokhymovych et al., 2025) to contrast RW with RWFork. Some examples of the most distinctive words for each media type and Wikipedia version can be viewed in Table 1.

 

 

Table 1. Examples of the most distinctive words across media types and Wikipedia versions (higher KLD values indicate higher distinctiveness).

Our media analysis reveals that Russia-occupied Ukrainian territories (such as DPR and LPR, which stand for the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic”) and references to the sham referendums on joining Russia conducted in these territories (e.g., referendum and voting) are more distinctive for state media, reflecting a territorial control narrative consistent with a normalization frame. Social media shows a higher contribution of direct war-related terminology (war, soldier, to fight, etc.), indicative of a mobilizational approach. In contrast, euphemisms for war (such as special military operation) are more distinctive for state media, aligning with efforts to downplay the invasion. Additionally, words like propaganda and truth exhibit high KLD values on social media, pointing to the disinformation frame. Therefore, our study shows a clear distinction between mobilization on social media and demobilization on state media, confirming previous research (Alyukov et al., 2025; Vestel & Degaetano-Ortlieb, 2025).

The KLD study on Wikipedia shows that divergences between RW and RWFork resemble those between social and state media. In particular, direct war-related terminology, such as invasion and war, is distinctive for RW and substituted with vague expressions in RWFork. Similarly, words like occupation and annexation are replaced with euphemisms such as inclusion and entry. Moreover, the recognition of Ukraine’s statehood in RW is absent from RWFork, with words like independence and sovereignty being removed. Finally, RWFork clearly recognizes the so-called DPR and LPR, since their names are among the most distinctive words for this version.

References

Alyukov, M., Kunilovskaya, M., & Semenov, A. (2023). Wartime Media Monitor (WarMM-2022): A Study of Information Manipulation on Russian Social Media during the Russia-Ukraine War. In S. Degaetano-Ortlieb, A. Kazantseva, N. Reiter, & S. Szpakowicz (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (pp. 152–161). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.latechclfl-1.17

Alyukov, M., Kunilovskaya, M., & Semenov, A. (2025). Confuse and Normalise: Authoritarian Propaganda in a High-Choice Media Environment and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. In P. Goode (Ed.), Russian propaganda today: Challenges, effectiveness, and resistance (p. in print). University of Michigan press, University of Manchester Press.

Cohen, N. (2023, July 12). Russian Wikipedia’s Top Editor Leaves to Launch a Putin-Friendly Clone. Bloomberg.Com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-12/russian-wikipedia-editor-leaves-to-launch-a-putin-friendly-clone

Kullback, S., & Leibler, R. A. (1951). On Information and Sufficiency. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 22(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1214/aoms/1177729694

Trokhymovych, M., Kosovan, O., Forrester, N., Aragón, P., Saez-Trumper, D., & Baeza-Yates, R. (2025). Characterizing Knowledge Manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia Fork. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 19, 1924–1936. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v19i1.35910

Vestel, A., & Degaetano-Ortlieb, S. (2025). From War to Special Military Operation: Interpretable Detection of Linguistic Propaganda Framing in Russian Media. Workshop Proceedings of the 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2025, 50. https://doi.org/10.36190/2025.50 

• Penelope Gia Bao Huu Nguyen University of Sheffield

University of Sheffield

 Zeitgeist, or the “spirit of the time,” is a concept commonly used in historical and sociological research. However, its definition remains vague, domain-dependent, and its substance lacks bottom-up empirical evidence, especially from large-scale datasets. This lack of empirical grounding is a significant issue, as humanities scholars are often criticized for biases and a "cherry-picking" of evidence. Furthermore, the Zeitgeist, as a significant yet abstract force, is likely to both influence and be reflected by important semantic phenomena over time.

In this study, Zeitgeist is redefined as the cultural, political, moral, and intellectual climate of a time period, realized by a certain group of language users by means of discourse. The Zeitgeist, in this case, will be determined through proxies, which are lists of keywords and key semantic domains. This mixed-methods study draws upon recent advancements in corpus linguistics. The process begins with the determination of keywords and key semantic categories using a keyness analysis. In quantitative corpus linguistics, a keyword is a word that is statistically “characteristic of a text or a group of texts” (Culpeper & Demmen, 2015, p. 90). Following Gries (2024), this keyness will be treated as a weighted, three-dimensional measure rather than a monodimensional one, using the versatile Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) (Kullback & Leibler, 1951) as the core statistical measure. Additionally, as a diachronic study, the data from the previous period is treated as the reference corpus of the past, whereas that of the period right after is the target corpus of the new time. A key innovation of this project is the incorporation of semantic tags into the pipeline, providing another dimension of information. Further scrutiny of the concordance lines, enhanced by encyclopedic knowledge, is conducted if necessary to shed light on areas that the quantitative approach fails to illuminate. The expected outcome is a list of keywords with key semantic categories for each time slice, and together, they provide the basis for tracking the changing Zeitgeist in British parliamentary debates.

The data comes from the Semantic Hansard corpus, the largest publicly available corpus which contains nearly all speeches given in the UK Parliament spanning from 1803 to 2005 and is annotated by the USAS tagger (Rayson, 2008) with semantic tags. This unique source is particularly suited for capturing Zeitgeists as it represents the significant concerns within a national legislative body, which in turn aims to represent broader public concerns. In contrast, more specialized or domain-dependent datasets often lack the longitudinal scale and broad representative scope required to provide the bottom-up empirical grounding necessary for a macroscopic cultural analysis. The preliminary analysis focuses on debates occurring during Thatcher’s, Callaghan’s, and Blair’s governments.

The study’s contributions are theoretical, methodological, and empirical. Theoretically, it refines the abstract concept of Zeitgeist into a data-backed, empirically verifiable construct, informing both conceptual history and corpus linguistics. Methodologically, the study evaluates the KLD as a versatile, bottom-up statistical tool, especially when used in conjunction with rich semantic annotation. Empirically, this research will deliver concrete, data-driven accounts of macroscopic British political Zeitgeists across governments.

References 

Culpeper, J., & Demmen, J. (2015). Keywords. In D. Biber & R. Reppen (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (1st ed., pp. 90–105). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139764377.006

Gries, S. T. (2024). Frequency, dispersion, association, and keyness: Revising and tupleizing corpus-linguistic measures. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Kullback, S. & Richard A. L. (1951). On information and sufficiency. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 22(1). 79–86.

Rayson, P. (2008). From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 13(4). 519-549. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.13.4.06ray