Journalism and Media

This article develops a middle-range theory of audience appropriation of journalistic messages in multi-screen, platform-mediated environments through a theory-building systematic review of the literature. This study draws upon a corpus of peer-reviewed research in mass communication, journalism studies, platform studies, and digital media (2000–2025) in order to apply an abductive analytical strategy. This strategy is intended to identify recurring empirical regularities and integrate them into a coherent explanatory framework. The review systematically examines how audiences engage with media across platforms, focusing on processes of content selection, interpretation, and circulation under algorithmically structured conditions. Through iterative comparison and conceptual synthesis, the article identifies three fundamental mechanisms that structure audience appropriation: algorithmic selection, interactive modulation, and social circulation. Rather than conceptualising audience activity as isolated practices, the proposed framework explains appropriation as a socio-technical process shaped by platform architectures, cultural contexts, and levels of media literacy. The study proposes a series of theoretical propositions that are intended to provide a framework for future empirical research. The integration of fragmented empirical findings into a mechanism-based framework is a significant contribution to cumulative theory-building in mass communication, thereby advancing the understanding of audience–platform dynamics in contemporary journalism ecosystems.

The paper examines the impact of fake news on how individuals perceive information and make decisions. The research is based on an online questionnaire administered to a sample of respondents (N = 275) from the Republic of Moldova (Transnistria), comprising young people and adults active on social networks (77.5% females, 21.1% males and 1.5% not declaring gender). The period of data collection was from 18 February to 2 April 2026. The results highlight that frequent exposure to platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Telegram is associated with more frequent exposure to fake news, especially in areas such as politics, the war in Ukraine and social issues. The model used explains 36.5% of the variance in the perceived impact on individual decisions, 35.3% of the variance in the level of information verification and protection, and 15.3% of the variance in the level of emotional impact. On an emotional level, fake news mainly generates confusion, anger and stress, especially in crisis contexts. These reactions affect the capacity for critical analysis and can lead to uncertainty, information avoidance or lack of verification of sources. On a broader level, disinformation contributes to a decrease in trust in authorities and the media, accentuating social divisions and influencing group decisions through fear, panic and information manipulation. The study highlights the need to develop media literacy, critical thinking and effective fact-checking mechanisms, as well as the important role of online platforms in limiting the spread of fake news. The study provides exploratory empirical evidence on the perceived effects of fake news in the Transnistrian region, an under-researched context characterized by multiple informational influences and specific geopolitical vulnerabilities. The findings provide a contextualized perspective on the relationships between exposure to disinformation, emotional reactions, verification behaviors, and individual decision-making.

Media control under contemporary autocratization extends beyond overt censorship, operating through legal regulation, economic dependence, and digital infrastructures. Yet, critical political economy, media-systems research, media-capture scholarship, and work on digital repression have largely theorized these forms within separate analytical domains. This article develops a structured conceptual synthesis rather than a primary-data comparative study, taking the mechanism, not the country, as its unit of analysis: twenty-three country-period illustrations across fourteen contexts show how mechanisms operate, not how often they occur. The mapping compares legal, economic, and digital mechanisms across three positions on the autocratization spectrum—democratic backsliding, competitive authoritarianism, and hegemonic electoral authoritarianism—in terms of instruments, targets, proximate effects, and institutional form. The ordering is ideal-typical and directional, not a historical sequence: legal control from deterrent uncertainty to institutionalized exclusion; economic control from discretionary dependence to closed resource architectures; and digital control from visibility manipulation to pre-emptive governance. Because the three families operate through shared dependencies linking the executive, state apparatus, capital fractions, and media ownership, they are relationally connected rather than independent. The mapping offers journalism and media scholarship a comparative framework for analyzing how media actors’ resources, autonomy, and visibility are reorganized within formally plural media markets.