Nili Steinfeld

Ariel University · School of Communication

In recent years, the ‘digital resurrection’ of the deceased through Deepfake technology has become a reality accessible to the general public and has raised profound ethical discussions in society. While the academic literature focuses primarily on regulatory and political implications, the public reception of digital resurrection remains largely u...

Exploring the nexus between digital media and citizens' exposure to diverse political views is imperative for understanding contemporary democratic engagement. This study builds upon Mutz and Martin's (2001) seminal research, integrating digital communication channels previously unexamined. Our findings suggest that the interpersonal character of m...

In many civic domains we witness “video exchanges” between citizens and the establishment; for example, when citizens upload documentation of police violence, and the police uploads documentation from body cameras providing different takes of the incident. Can such videos influence public opinion? We studied if viewing visual content (of a murder r...

Purpose This study presents an innovative approach to analyzing user behavior when performing digital tasks by integrating eye-tracking technology. Through the measurement of user scan patterns, gaze and attention during task completion, the authors gain valuable insights into users' approaches and execution of these tasks. Design/methodology/appr...

Although previous studies examined the role of digital literacy in successful identification of misinformation, scant scholarly attention has been given to users’ attention to metadata as informative areas that attest to message credibility. This study introduces a novel approach and methodology to contribute to our understanding of how users evalu...

This research investigated the effects of a single exposure to media content of a distinct valence and mass‐mediated contact with a distant minority outgroup on feelings/attitudes toward a local outgroup. Experimental Study 1 was conducted among 314 Israeli Jews. The findings of Study 1 showed the effects of a single exposure to positive and negati...

Purpose Social media have become the main channel of direct communication between members of parliament and constituents. The study analyzes the content in all Israeli MPs' Facebook channels throughout an entire term of parliament and asks if the results are consistent with the equalization or the normalization hypotheses. Design/methodology/appro...

Many government-sponsored policies and programs have been implemented in recent years to reduce digital inequality, but research on the effectiveness of such programs is severely lacking. We examine the short-term effects of participation in Lehava, the largest such program in Israel. Participants in our study completed a survey before and after ta...

MPs' social media channels have become key means for contact with the public. We used automated tools to extract all of the posts published on all Israeli MPs pages through an entire session of the parliament, and then sampled and manually coded the most popular posts. This enabled us to study the characteristics of the posts that stand out in term...

המחקר מאפיין את המשתתפים הערבים בתוכניות לצמצום אי־השוויון הדיגיטלי, ובודק את השפעות ההשתתפות בהכשרות מעין אלה לטווח הקצר ולטווח הארוך

Municipality Facebook pages are significant social media arenas for maintaining contact between representatives and their constituencies. The authors use digital tools to collect and analyze some 24,000 posts from the Facebook pages of all Israeli municipalities in a six-month period. Following a purely automatic linguistic analysis of the texts of...

Purpose The study aims to investigate the predictors of engaging in combat against the spread of misinformation and disinformation online, and of actively sharing disinformation by users. The study advances an understanding of user active engagement with disinformation as political participation, especially linked to violent activism, in alignment...

“Fake news” is a growing concern among scholars, policymakers and the public. The phenomenon has gained much scholarly attention in recent years, however, most research has been occupied with its manifestation in the United States. To complement on the global nature of the phenomenon, the study evaluates how Israelis perceive its sources and the re...

The vast literature about adolescents’ online uses mentions a variety of gender differences regarding online habits, activities, and risks. But often these differences are not consistent, and result in contradicting trends in reported gender differences. This study adopts an information flux approach for distinguishing between perceptions of gender...

Media panics research is concerned with widespread social anxiety formed around a new technology or medium. This study adds to existing research by characterizing a new form of media panic around augmented reality applications, and specifically that which erupted concerning Pokémon GO, a popular augmented reality game. Based on a content analysis o...

We investigate how consumption of media content leads to change in perception of an outgroup, and how is such change affected when the content is presented as false. 403 Israeli participants filled out a questionnaire measuring realistic and symbolic threat towards EU asylum seekers (EUAS). after 10-14 days, participants read an article about EUAS....

This study addresses questions of access and agency as they come into play in intergroup contact. In such a context, access to information about the outgroup and conflict, as well as active agency in the form of engagement in intergroup discussions about the conflict, group identity, goals and compromises, are often a function of the intensity and...

The study examines parental mediation strategies of adolescent Internet use and their relation to adolescent age, concerns of online risks, online activities and risky behavior. Prior research on parental mediation is inconclusive about the effectiveness or superiority of any mediation strategy. Additionally, concerns and awareness of risks were no...

Purpose This study aims to examine the long-term effects of an Israeli digital literacy government program for disadvantaged populations, as they are perceived by participants of the program one year after completing the course. Design/methodology/approach Participants in the program were interviewed about the effects of participating in the progr...

Social media platforms are today the main spheres in which politicians make political and personal statements, confront other public figures, and interact with the public. In the current study, the Facebook pages of all Israeli Members of Parliament (MPs) were scraped and analyzed for the entire period of the 19th Israeli parliament service (betwee...

The study examines the use of immersive journalism, journalistic storytelling using Virtual Reality, as a tool to promote knowledge, empathy, and change in views and opinions on the phenomenon of sexual harassment among men and women. Testimonies of employees reporting workplace harassment were adapted into a screenplay. The screenplay presented on...

Privacy literature in recent years has emphasized the role of context and situation in individuals' privacy regulation. While most research is focused on understanding situational effects on self-disclosure, the role of situational factors in users’ decision to consent for third-party access to information, a common practice with significant privac...

Alongside its many advantages, the Internet presents a variety of challenges and risks to adolescents. From a perspective focusing on information flow processes, this study distinguishes between risks resulting from _exposure to information_, i.e. exposure of adolescents to inappropriate content: Harmful, sexual or violent, and risks resulting from...

Municipality Facebook pages are significant social media arenas for maintaining contact between representatives and their constituencies. The authors use digital tools to collect and analyze some 24,000 posts from the Facebook pages of all Israeli municipalities in a six-month period. Following a purely automatic linguistic analysis of the texts of...

This study investigates traditional radio station use of social media, focusing on the analysis of content published on Israeli radio station Facebook pages and the differences between public and commercial stations’ pages. The findings suggest that public and commercial radio station posts differ in a number of factors: Public station posts proved...

Social media are relatively new channels of communication between members of parliament and constituents. This study uses automatic analysis to produce a birds-eye-view of the content uploaded to Facebook pages of all MPs during an entire term of parliament. The findings demonstrate that the MP-Facebook sphere is non-egalitarian, in that it follows...

Members of parliament’s (MPs) social media channels are significant arenas for communication between the public and national leaders. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to explore how these channels function during emergencies. We present findings from a mixed-method study of automatic and manual content analysis of a unique data...

Social Media platforms are today the main spheres in which politicians make political and personal statements, confront other public figures and interact with the public. In the current study, the Facebook pages of all Israeli MPs were scraped and analyzed for the entire period of the 19th Israeli parliament service (between 2013-2015), in order to...

Social media constitute useful and effective platforms for miscarriage of justice campaigners to challenge state authorities and decisions taken by the criminal justice system. To characterize such endeavors, this study analyzes the activity in such a major group dedicated to the murder case of Tair Rada and the trial of Roman Zadorov, one of the m...

The article explores Israeli radio stations’ activity on Facebook and analyses the most popular content in terms of various engagement indexes. It finds that the format of a post, its language and content, all affect the level and nature of user engagement with the post. Moreover, it appears that both stations and users turn to Facebook primarily f...

The current study examines consent to surveillance and identifies links between support for state surveillance and consent to surveillance by private entities. Contrary to a tendency in academic literature and public debates to consider private and state surveillance as a single phenomenon in terms of methods, magnitude, and practice, findings show...

In the 2015 Israeli national elections, social media and especially Facebook were used as primary campaign platforms, where politicians of all parties and orientations expressed their agendas, made policy statements and communicated with potential voters. The present article employs a new methodology, discourse network analysis, to explore the rela...

This study examines whether interactions between members of communities of practice typically have cognitive or social character. Content analysis of more than 7000 posts, automatic words frequencies analyses as well as interviews with community members demonstrate that the interactions between members of the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs’ com...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how users in an anonymous virtual environment react to an offer to trade in access to their social network profile. Design/methodology/approach – The experiment was conducted in Second Life (SL). Participants were offered varied sums of money in exchange for access to their Facebook profile, effect...

The increasing use of social networks has given rise to a new kind of relations between residents and authorities at the municipal level, where residents can speak directly to administrators and representatives, can take part in open discussions, and may have more direct involvement and influence on local affairs. The more direct democracy facilita...

What characterizes the discourse that takes place on social media platforms involving municipal pages and their fans? Does the character of the activities on these social media platforms differ in periods preceding or following municipal elections, compared to non-election periods? The article examines the scope and character of Facebook activities...

המאמר ממפה את נוכחות העיריות בפייסבוק, ובוחן את הקורלציות של נוכחות זו עם גודל הרשות ופרמטרים סוציו-דמוגרפיים וגאוגרפיים של הרשויות. בהמשך נסקרים מדדי מעורבות שונים של פעילות העיריות בפייסבוק (מספר מעריצים לדף העירייה, ממוצעי הלייקים, התגובות והשיתופים של פוסטים שפורסמו על גבי הדפים) ונבדקות קורלציות של מדדי המעורבות עם גודל הרשות ופרמטרים סוציו-דמ...

קהילות מקצועיות מקוונות הופכות לזירות שיח חשובות בארגונים רבים. הספרות על אודות קהילות מקוונות מגדירה אותן לרוב כסביבות המבוססות על תוכן גולשים, כאשר לחברי הקהילה מקום מרכזי בייזום דיונים ובפתיחתם. המחקר הנוכחי מסיט את הדגש מחברי הקהילה אל מנהליה, בוחן את תפקידם בפתיחת דיונים בקהילות מקצועיות ובודק אם ישנם הבדלים בין דיונים שנפתחים על ידי מנהלים וב...

This research aims to contribute to the theory and practice of e-participation, looking specifically at ways to enhance the deliberative quality of political discussions in online forums. Building on theories of information processing and social norms, we suggest that particular visual banners may be integrated in an online forum, and serve as cues...

Online communities of practice are becoming significant discursive arenas in many organizations. Much literature about online communities depicts them as peer-based environments based on user-generated content, where community members take a central role in starting conversations. The current study shifts the focus from community members into manag...

Online communities of practice are becoming important organizational arenas. Much literature about online communities describes them as environments based on user-generated content. This article shifts the focus from community members to the managers, demonstrates their central role in creating content and promoting discussions, and distinguishes b...

The increasing use of social networks has given rise to a new kind of relations between residents and authorities at the municipal level, where residents can speak directly to administrators and representatives, can take part in open discussions, and may have more direct involvement and influence on local affairs. The more direct democracy facilita...

This research examines the willingness of users in an anonymous virtual environment to sell access to their Facebook profile. The experiment was held in Second Life, a virtual world that requires and stresses the importance of anonymity of its users. Participants were faced with an offer to connect to their Facebook accounts and allow access to the...

Virtual Worlds are not “dead and gone” – far from it. If the 3rd Global Conference in Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds taught its delegates anything, it was that virtual worlds are on the cusp of an exciting, resurging and impending upswing. A large variety of industries are captured within this eBook—architecture, computer programming, ethi...