Yannis Theocharis

• PhD
• Professor at Technical University of Munich

Recent regulatory efforts such as the EU's Digital Services Act aim to increase transparency in mostly opaque content moderation practices of social media platforms. They encourage platforms to post information about what content is prohibited on the platform. But what kinds of platforms follow these best practices, and how readable is the informat...

Report on public attitudes on social media, content moderation and freedom of expression. Insights are based on survey data from Greece, Germany, United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Slovakia, South Africa, Australia, Brazil and France.

It has long been assumed that social media would equalize election campaigning by providing cheap means of communication for smaller parties who lack a strong mass media presence. Yet given the increased political importance of social media, parties with more professional staff and resources could also gain the upper hand in online campaigns. So fa...

Research on online political discourse has long been concerned with the pervasiveness of incivility across various digital arenas. However, most of this work has focused on discourse that is rude in tone, but not necessarily harmful in substance. Consequently, there remains a significant gap in understanding the true impact of harmful online speech...

Using data from five experiments, we show that there is a persistent gender gap incontent moderation preferences and indicated reporting behavior, with women beingmore likely to demand moderation. However, we find that the target matters considerablyfor such gender gaps in demanding moderation, ranging from a gap of 12%(target: LGBTQ people) to 1%...

Political entertainment programs have gained worldwide popularity, prompting research on their effects. One area of interest has been whether this media programming has an impact upon political efficacy. However, existing literature has only examined the impact of a limited number of programs, has failed to consider the simultaneous influence of di...

Researchers have long sought to make generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. However, this literature remains deeply conflicted. The “extremity hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of extremism, individuals who identify as extremely left or right wing should display higher levels of...

It can be difficult for citizens to discern factually accurate information from mis- and disinformation. Particularly in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the omnipresence of counterfactual narratives, propaganda, and partisan content may increase the likelihood that citizens select and accept mis -or disinformation. To assess citizen...

Conventional wisdom suggests that social media, especially when used by authoritarian powers with nefarious aims, leaves citizens of democratic countries vulnerable to psychological influence campaigns. But such concerns overlook predispositions among recipients of false claims to reject (or to endorse) conspiratorial narratives. Analyzing response...

Political participation (PP) has been found to be associated with socioeconomic status (SES) indicators, most strongly with educational attainment. At the same time, previous research has been inconclusive regarding potentially biasing effects of personality and cognitive characteristics on this association. In the present study, we investigated th...

Using an original survey covering 17 countries, this paper documents the prevalence of beliefs in conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic and characterizes the informational, demographic, and trust profiles of individuals who believe them. There is considerable variation across countries in the level of conspiracy beliefs, with people...

The recent surge of false information accompanying the Russian invasion of Ukraine has re-emphasized the need for interventions to counteract disinformation. While fact-checking is a widely used intervention, we know little about citizen motivations to read fact-checks. We tested theoretical predictions related to accuracy-motivated goals (i.e., se...

When is speech on social media toxic enough to warrant content moderation? Platforms impose limits on what can be posted online, but also rely on users’ reports of potentially harmful content. Yet we know little about what users consider inadmissible to public discourse and what measures they wish to see implemented. Building on past work, we conce...

In information environments characterized by institutional distrust, fragmentation and the widespread dissemination of conspiracies and disinformation, citizens perceive misinformation as a salient and threatening issue. Especially amidst disruptive events and crises, news users are likely to believe that information is inaccurate or deceptive. Usi...

While the role of social media in the spread of conspiracy theories has received much attention, a key deficit in previous research is the lack of distinction between different types of platforms. This study places the role of social media affordances in facilitating the spread of conspiracy beliefs at the center of its enquiry. We examine the rela...

Data suggests that the majority of citizens in various countries came across ‘fake news’ during the COVID-19 pandemic. We test the relationship between perceived prevalence of misinformation and people’s worries about COVID-19. In Study 1, analyses of a survey across 17 countries indicate a positive association: perceptions of high prevalence of mi...

When is content on social media offensive enough to warrant content moderation? While social media platforms impose limits to what can be posted, we know little about where users draw the line when it comes to offensive language, and what measures they wish to see implemented when content crosses the boundary of what is deemed acceptable. Conductin...

A widely believed claim is that citizens tend to selectively expose themselves to like-minded information. However, when individuals find the information useful, they are more likely to consume cross- cutting sources. While crises such as terror attacks and pandemics can enhance the utility of cross-cutting information, empirical evidence on the ro...

Political participation opportunities have been expanding for years, most recently through digital tools. Social media platforms have become well integrated into civic and political participation. Using a cross-national sample from the United States, United Kingdom and France, this article examines whether acts of participation associated with soci...

Over the last two decades, scholars have investigated norms of citizenship by focussing primarily on ‘dutiful’ and ‘engaged’ norms. In the meantime, contemporary democracies have witnessed growing demands for more sustainable styles of living and increasing public support for authoritarian and populist ideas. These developments point to both a chan...

With YouTube's growing importance as a news platform, its recommendation system came under increased scrutiny. Recognizing YouTube's recommendation system as a broadcaster of media, we explore the applicability of laws that require broadcasters to give important political, ideological, and social groups adequate opportunity to express themselves in...

With YouTube's growing importance as a news platform, its recommendation system came under increased scrutiny. Recognizing YouTube's recommendation system as a broadcaster of media, we explore the applicability of laws that require broadcasters to give important political, ideological, and social groups adequate opportunity to express themselves in...

Exogenous shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic unleashes multiple fundamental questions about society beyond public health. Based on the classical concept of ‘need for orientation’ and the literature on the role of the media in times of crisis, we investigate to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic affected news consumption in comparative perspective. Ba...

The transition from low- to high-choice media environments has had far-reaching implications for citizens’ media use and its relationship with political knowledge. However, there is still a lack of comparative research on how citizens combine the usage of different media and how that is related to political knowledge. To fill this void, we use a un...

Creative participation refers to citizens’ invention of, and engagement in, new action forms that aim to influence, or take responsibility for, the common good in society. By definition, these action forms are constantly evolving and cannot be listed or summarized. Yet some, like guerrilla gardening, have over time become established in political r...

The challenge of disentangling political communication processes and their effects has grown with the complexity of the new political information environment. But so have scientists’ toolsets and capacities to better study and understand them. We map the challenges and opportunities of developing, synthesizing, and applying data collection and anal...

Most studies of online incivility report negative effects on attitudes and behaviors of both the victims and the audiences who are exposed to it. But while we have extensive insights about the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of incivility, less emphasis has been paid on its emotional effects. We conduct a series of survey experiments using...

Online incivility and harassment in political communication have become an important topic of concern among politicians, journalists, and academics. This study provides a descriptive account of uncivil interactions between citizens and politicians on Twitter. We develop a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of incivility at three di...

Why do some issues receive more interest from the public while others do not? This paper develops a theoretical and empirical approach that explains the degree to which issues expand from the elite to the public. We examine how candidates in the 2014 European Parliament elections talked about EU issues, in comparison to other political issues. We r...

New technologies raise fears in public discourse. In terms of digital media use and youth, the advice has been to monitor and limit access to minimize the negative impacts. However, this advice would also limit the positive impacts of digital media. One such positive impact is increased engagement in civic and political life. This article uses meta...

Political participation has seen substantial changes in terms of both its structure and its scope. One of the most prominent venues of citizen engagement today is participation that relies on online means. Several approaches to online participation have attempted to understand its nature as a continuation of offline acts into the online realm, or a...

The 2008 financial and economic crisis, characterized by an economic breakdown unparalleled since the Great Depression, provides a unique opportunity to study the relationships between economic developments and social capital by asking: How does social capital change in times of social and economic hardship? In order to explore the trends of social...

How can one technology-social media-simultaneously give rise to hopes for liberation in authoritarian regimes, be used for repression by these same regimes, and be harnessed by antisystem actors in democracy? We present a simple framework for reconciling these contradictory developments based on two propositions: 1) that social media give voice to...

In the last decades, political participation expanded continuously. This expansion includes activities as diverse as voting, tweeting, signing petitions, changing your social media profile, demonstrating, boycotting products, joining flash mobs, attending meetings, throwing seedbombs, and donating money. But if political participation is so diverse...

Social media play an important role in political mobilization. Voluntary engagement can especially benefit from new opportunities for organizing collective action. Although research has explored the use of Twitter by decentralized individuals for this, there has been little emphasis on its use for community engagement and the provision of public go...

In the last decades, political participation expanded continuously. This expansion includes activities as diverse as voting, tweeting, signing petitions, changing your social media profile, demonstrating, boycotting products, joining flash mobs, attending meetings, throwing seedbombs, and donating money. But if political participation is so diverse...

The continuously growing use of digital services has provided social scientists with an expanding reservoir of data, potentially holding valuable insights into human behavior and social systems. This has often been associated with the terms “big data” and “computational social science.” Using such data, social scientists have argued, will enable us...

The repertoire of political participation in democratic societies is expanding rapidly and covers such different activities as voting, demonstrating, volunteering, boycotting, blogging, and flash mobs. Relying on a new method for conceptualizing forms and modes of participation we show that a large variety of creative, expressive, individualized, a...

Existing studies focusing on politicians' adoption of Twitter have found that they use it primarily as a broadcasting tool. We argue that citizens' impolite and/or uncivil behavior is one possible explanation for such decisions. Social media conversations are rife with harassment and politicians are a prime target. This alters the incentive structu...

Research concerned with a decline of associational involvement has examined whether the use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, may reinvigorate or crowd out involvement in civil society. Yet, previous studies have not systematically investigated possible effects of Facebook use on associational membership. We posit that the effects of Fa...

Over the past decade, Internet and politics scholarship has been concerned with the effects of the Internet on forms of civic and political participation. Recent research has moved on to examine the effects of social networking sites like Facebook. Although past studies have generally found positive – albeit weak or moderate – relationships between...

Social media play an increasingly important part in the communication strategies of political campaigns by reflecting information about the policy preferences and opinions of political actors and their public followers. In addition, the content of the messages provides rich information about the political issues and the framing of those issues duri...

During the last decade, much of political behaviour research has come to be concerned with the impact of the Internet, and more recently social networking sites such as Facebook, on political and civic participation. Although existing research generally finds a modestly positive relationship between social media use and offline and online participa...

The conceptualization and measurement of political participation has been an issue vibrantly debated for more than 50 years. The arrival of digital media came to add important parameters to the debate complicating matters further. Digital media have added inexhaustive creative and nonpolitical ways to engage in social and political life that not on...

The recent emergence of microblogs has had a significant effect on the contemporary political landscape. The platform's potential to enhance information availability and make interactive discussions between politicians and citizens feasible is especially important. Existing studies focusing on politi-cians' adoption of Twitter have found that far f...

The arrival of digital media added important parameters to the debate on the conceptualization and measurement of political participation. They have offered inexhaustible creative and non-political ways to engage in social and political life that, in a plethora of everyday contexts, seem to become embedded into what eventually becomes a politically...

Economic and political developments in Greece have been at the forefront of the international mass media coverage of the European financial and economic crises. Contrary to fashionable interpretations of the malaise, our findings suggest that the main causes of the many ‘crises’ hitting the country are social and political, rather than economic or...

The recent emergence of microblogs has had a significant effect on the contemporary political landscape. The platform’s potential to enhance information availability and make interactive discussions between politicians and citizens feasible is especially important. Existing studies focusing on politicians’ adoption of Twitter have found that far fr...

In this article, we test Putnam’s claim that online interactions are unable to foster social capital by examining the formation of bridging and bonding social capital in online networks. Using Burt’s concepts of closure and brokerage as indicators, we observe networks formed through online interactions and test them against several theoretical mode...

The conceptualisation and measurement of political participation has been an issue vibrantly debated for more than 50 years. Recent social and technological advances, and more specifically the expansion of opportunities for participation and the rise of the internet, have come to add important parameters to the debate, seemingly complicating matter...

The extensive use of social media for protest purposes was a distinctive feature of the recent protest events in Spain, Greece, and the United States. Like the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the United States, the indignant activists of Spain and Greece protested against unjust, unequal, and corrupt political and economic institutions marked by t...

García-Albacete and Theocharis look at Twitter as a new source of information to understand the dynamics, goals, actions and motivations of protest movements and protesters. Using tweets as the unit of analysis, the authors develop a coding scheme to systematically analyze the aims, issues, political actions, and information promoted by social move...

Despite the growing literature on the effects of personality traits on political participation, there is little discussion about the potential effects of such traits on the increasingly popular forms of online political engagement. In a changing media environment where social production and exposure becomes central, people with different personalit...

The core question of this paper is of whether online engagement with a movement actually leads to offline participation. Social media content cannot only reveal users attitudes towards policy problems, politicians, elections, riots, protests and unrest, but also highlight people’s preferences, willingness to participate and mobilise others. We moni...

Economic and political developments in Greece have been at the forefront of the international mass media coverage of the European financial and economic crises. Contrary to fashionable interpretations of the malaise, our findings suggest that the main causes of the many “crises” hitting the country are social and political, rather than economic or...

Can social media facilitate better protest action organization and coordination? This question has been at the forefront of discussion between media pundits and academic scholars. But what networking mechanisms and communication patterns help activists achieve better organization and coordination? This study uses social network analysis to explore...

This paper examines the use of websites and blogs during the 2010 UK anti-cuts protests, where students across the UK occupied more than 35 universities in a symbolic act of opposition to government plans to cut education funding and increase tuition fees. Although social media have largely monopolized the debate on online political activism in rec...

After the UK government announced cuts to higher education and an increase in the tuition fee cap, thousands of students across the country used new media tools to organise peaceful protests at over 35 universities. Although extensive theoretical frameworks about online mobilisation and political action are available, we know very little about how...

According to Inglehart's postmaterialist theory, a process of value change is taking place in Western societies, where people place increasingly more emphasis on self-expression and postmaterialist values rather than economic and physical security. Evidence shows that postmaterialists are young, affluent, well educated and strongly inclined to carr...

According to Inglehart’s postmaterialist theory, young people brought up in periods of high economic and physical security, surrounded by better opportunities for education, are more likely to prioritise postmaterialist values. Postmaterialists are strongly inclined to support new forms of collective action and extra-institutional activity. Interne...