Populism has recently enjoyed success in Europe, the US, and beyond. Populist leaders and their supporters have accused “mainstream” media of being part of a “corrupt” elite that misrepresents the will of the virtuous “people.” Distrust of the media has also prompted the rejection of traditional media sources for political information and given prominence to alternative and hyperpartisan sources such as Breitbart. However, limited research exists concerning who consumes hyperpartisan media, how the websites of hyperpartisan media are interconnected, and what content is presented in hyperpartisan news. By combining cross-national surveys with large-scale digital trace datasets of website visits, this paper demonstrates the link between populist party support and hyperpartisan media visits. It also identifies influential sources of hyperpartisan news by analyzing the audience similarity networks of these websites and reveals country-level variations in hyperpartisan news and the dominance of US politics among the identified hyperpartisan news topics.

Both developed and developing countries have seen a proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in recent years. As digital transformation has influenced almost every aspect of everyday life, including interpersonal communication, information seeking and sharing, e-commerce, and entertainment, the dichotomy between online and offline has become less distinct compared to the early years of internet development. These routine practices on the internet, nevertheless, are fundamental to understanding the impact of digital technologies on society. It is, therefore, important for social scientists to theorise and scrutinise how the internet has influenced the routine and mundane lives. To date, social scientists from multiple disciplines, including sociology, political science, communication and information science, have studied how the internet has influenced the society and economy. These include the roles of the internet in establishing and maintaining social networks, mobilising social movements, and revolutionising labour markets. However, little research has addressed the impact of the internet in the everyday lives of its users. In this chapter, I will start with reviewing theoretical frameworks from different fields that focus on the impact of the internet on daily practices, to understand the profound influence of digital technologies in everyday contexts. In particular, I will discuss how the study of everyday life information seeking (information science), domestication theory (communication science), and digital divides (sociology) contribute to the theorisation of daily uses of the internet. I will summarise empirical studies that apply these theoretical frameworks in exploring the adoption and use of ICTs in daily practices. The overview and reflection of theories and empirical studies across different social science fields will provide a comprehensive picture of the role of the internet on everyday lives, as well as point out future directions for the study of the embeddedness of the internet in people’s daily lives.

TikTok has enjoyed wide popularity in the Global South. But in the summer of 2020, a tit for tat altercation erupted over the use of the app in India against the backdrop of a border dispute between India and China. India banned TikTok, along with other Chinese mobile applications. This ban raised larger ongoing issues around user privacy, cybersecurity threats, and content regulation issues on social media platforms and telecommunications equipment around the world. In this paper we explore these issues and the wider debates on social media. To do so, we interviewed policymakers and academics as well as representatives from India’s technology industry. We also applied computational linguistic analysis on 6,388 Twitter posts about the ban by Indian users. The discourses on Twitter show intense nationalistic rhetoric and that Indian Twitter users were vocal in urging the government to ban TikTok. In-depth expert interviews suggested there were intense geopolitical conflicts behind the TikTok ban. We situate these findings with a broader analysis of the current geopolitics of social media platforms.