Social networks are appointed as an opportunity to socially normalize disability, as demonstrated by the growing number of influencers with a disability who are followed by millions of users. Likewise, intellectual disability has its place in the networks, with special relevance among influencers with Down syndrome. In this study, a content analysis of 10 accounts of influencers with Down syndrome from seven different countries was performed. Images, videos, comments, and other interactions with their followers were analyzed. The preliminary results described the influencer profiles, the type of content posted, and their relationship with sponsoring brands. These results indicate that social networks allow them to make their interests visible, take part in the digital environment, and interact with their audience, being a positive influence that promotes respect for diversity. These platforms are positioned as powerful tools for the construction and dissemination of inclusive values and the empowerment of disabled people, minimizing controversial questions such as the instrumentalization of the disability and its association with clichés. With all the analyzed results, it is possible to evidence that Instagram can be considered a privileged network that could be utilized for the eradication of barriers and to ease the inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities in the public sphere. The conclusions are relevant for the scientific community given that they will allow us to achieve social inclusion, thanks to the impact of the posts from the influencers with disability.

Media convergence is generating many collective performances on social media, where the rise of short‐form videos has created a new opportunity for the empowerment of society on online platforms. In this context, TikTok appears as an application for creative expression through music clips and lip‐syncs. Through the #ThisIsMeChallenge hashtag, which introduces the musical theme of The Greatest Showman film, we analyze a new online practice within messages from tra‐ ditionally marginalized groups throughout individual and collective life events. In order to understand TikTok as a music venue for social empowerment, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of 100 TikTok posts under the hashtag, and an artificial intelligence sentiment analysis across 8,877 comments. The results show a wide range of performance work that addresses issues of gender, sexual orientation, racial discrimination, and other types of current hate speech. In short, we conclude that TikTok has become a platform that seems to motivate activism and empowerment of marginalized groups through music frameworks that challenge social discrimination

YouTube has grown into an unprecedented music industry where informal learning practices converge among young musicians now considered authentic internet (micro)celebrities. Due to the rise of music video trends on the platform and the educative demands to explore youth interaction on the internet, this study analyses the self-perception of youtubers in terms of multimedia, hypermedia, intertextual and transmedia competencies. For this purpose, we developed a questionnaire on musical competencies (TransMuQ), in which 603 young youtubers from Spanish and English-speaking countries participated. We found that YouTube’s performers consider themselves proficient in the aesthetics, participation and interaction, multimodal languages, technology, content creation and risk and individual management dimensions. After an extensive theory on the experimental analysis of these competencies in citizenship, we propose a new approach towards interactive codes of young YouTube musicians. The research provides a clarifying positivism about what youtubers themselves believe they are learning in the era of ephemeral digital content.

El presente estudio analiza la serie original de Netflix, Stranger Things, como constructo de inteligencia colectiva emergente. Para ello, desarrollamos un análisis semiótico me-diante tres fases inductivas e interpretativas: aplicación del Sistema Intertextual Trans-media, identificación de referencias preexistentes y análisis de reacciones en el universo fandom. El trabajo descubre la producción como una obra intertextual transmedia maes-tra que apunta hacia una asombrosa canonización del producto mediático-nostálgico y a una consecuente ejecución de la memoria cultural colectiva.
(PDF) Semiótica de la inteligencia colectiva en la serie Stranger Things. 

Transmedia storytelling has been integrated into contemporary society through social media, where influencers have enabled the building of worlds. Within this environment of human-interaction, fiction and converging social realities have become an essential tool to tell stories. On YouTube, storytelling has expanded to music, where cover videos take on great relevance. The aim of this study is to understand the transmedia music phenomenon due to the impact of music on the platform. To this end, we applied a methodology that stemmed from Grounded Theory principles in the analysis of 300 Disney animation song covers in three stages: (1) deductive and inductive codebook development; (2) social network analysis; and (3) statistical test. The results showed that youtubers highlight specific audiovisual codes from the film and cultural industries. Furthermore, we observed these productions often display configurations that expand the original story through performance, location, costumes, make-up, among others. We argue that, on the digital sphere, a sustainable transmedia music paradigm is developing, where performers construct more meaningful and valuable stories.

Las redes sociales se han convertido en el eje vertebrador de la socialización, creación y consumo de los jóvenes. Paralelamente los procesosd eenseñanza-abrendizaje han tenido una lenta adaptación a estas nuevas formas de interacción. En este trabajo presentamos ejemplos de iniciativas de éxito en el uso de Instagram como medio de apoyo al profesorado en su práctica docente. 

The current media environment is complex and has important effects on all aspects of life, including beauty and health. In this sense, YouTube has become one of the main contexts for the dissemination of tutorials and content related to medical procedures such as the application of Botox. Thus, the present study constitutes the first exploratory analysis of YouTube videos in Spanish related to this procedure. A preliminary analysis of 221 YouTube videos yielded a final sample of the 50 most viewed videos within this genre. The analysis was carried out through a quantitative content analysis assessing the popularity of the videos, contact and emotive strategies by the creator, the credibility conveyed, and the characteristics of information about the procedure itself. Results suggest that these influencers align with mainstream Internet celebrity culture in practices that aim at increasing their following and views, as well as calls for subscriptions and visits to other platforms and profiles. Moreover, they include different strategies to establish their credibility but emphasize personal experience. The positive portrayal of the procedure, including positive emotions and content that highlights the benefits, is interesting and supports the commercial nature of much of the content.

Recent media attention aimed at migrant caravans at the US–Mexico border has increased interest from different actors in the political and social spheres. Parallel to traditional and mainstream media, social media has become the prime context where narratives about the border develop, molding broader societal perspectives on the immigration issue. Through a content and discourse analysis of 105 posts connected by the #MigrantCaravan or #CaravanaMigrante hashtags, we delved into how media representations of immigration on Instagram effectively establish otherness between the different characters involved in this phenomenon. The border wall emerges as one of the main components in these narratives and a symbol of the temporal and spatial stages of the migratory journey. Meanwhile, the voice of the main character, the migrant, is mostly absent, often conveyed through biased views, filtered by the opinions of posters about immigration and characterized by new narrative configurations enabled by the Instagram format.

Internet celebrity has become a phenomenon of great interest for scholars in the last few years. This is partly due to its impact in contemporary media ecosystems, and its influence in political, social, cultural, and commercial behaviors around the world. Meanwhile, some segments of the population continue to be marginalized by sociotechnical configurations that perpetuate structures of dominance in the digital sphere and on social media platforms. This is the case of immigrants, who often face diverse digital, symbolic, and physical borders that neglect their voice and agency. Thus, the present study aims to explore the creative practices of immigrant tiktokers who have achieved a significant following on this platform. Using a case study approach, we explore four immigrant creator profiles with a following of 17,000 to 500,000 through in‐depth interviews and a multimodal content analysis of 252 of their videos to delve into their platformed practices on TikTok. The participants are Latin American immigrant creators living in the US and Spain, identified as part of a larger study on the uses of TikTok by Latinx immigrants in these two countries exploring 53 immigrant creator profiles with more than 10,000 followers. Their practices related to algorithmic (in)visibility, and their unfolding identities including their dig‐ ital, creative, political, activist, cultural, and national personas are noteworthy, and suggest unique pathways to reclaim agency through social media influence and construct multi‐dimensional microcelebrity identities beyond migratory status.

Through visual and audio elements in videos no longer than three minutes, TikTok has created new interactive modes to understand music. Amid its growing popularity, this study focuses on posts nestled under the hashtag #MusicChallenge to understand what constitutes a “music challenge” on TikTok, how this trend comprises a mode of storytelling rather than a competition, and what in-group affiliations occur through audio memetic music via image, audio, text, and story strategies. Through a qualitative content analysis via a music storytelling codebook consisting of image, audio, text, storytelling, and ingroup affiliation codes, we analyzed 150 posts in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. This trend revealed a series of immersive-narrative patterns that define the music challenge meme as a phenomenon of transmedia storytelling, self-expression, and connecting people with in-group affiliations related to nostalgia, expertise, friendship, citizenship, and age, among others, mediated by music.

El auge de redes sociales como TikTok, donde el micro-contenido adquiere gran protagonismo, ha generado una ola de retos musicales en línea. Canciones de la industria musical han dado cabida a coreografías amateur que se viralizan en todo el mundo, y que se replican en una constante algorítmica en red. El presente estudio trata de abordar las diferencias de género y la objetivación sexual de los retos musicales en la plataforma. Para ello, se desarrolló un análisis de contenido descriptivo y correla-cional de ocho canciones populares en la plataforma, en una muestra de 400 tiktoks, 200 femeninos y 200 masculinos. Basándonos en el análisis de la objetivación sexual de vídeos musicales, aplicamos una codificación que recogía a nivel demográfico la raza y la edad, seguido de factores interpretativo-coreográficos como la exposición del cuerpo, perpetración y mirada lujuriosa, rol decorativo, atractivo facial, aspecto físico, grado de sexualización global, vestuario provocativo, y bailes sexuales. Los resultados revelaron que, estadísticamente, la relación entre género y objetivación sexual era significativa en todos los casos, excepto en el de las coreografías y movimientos sensuales, posiciones sexuales y expresiones seductoras. En el resto de códigos analizados el género femenino destacaba. De este segmento sobresalían con diferencia la exposición de partes del cuerpo, el atractivo facial y el vestuario provocativo. En suma, la investigación introduce un nuevo fenómeno social caracterizado por la sexualización de sus protagonistas, donde las diferencias de género se acentúan entre la juventud, perpetuando el modelo mediático de la industria musical.

Ephemeral media has become a staple of today’s social media ecology. This study advances the first exploratory analysis of Instagram Stories as a format for political communication. Through an initial content analysis of 832 stories in three verified Vox accounts and a secondary content and discourse analysis of 114 stories, we delve into the strategies used by right-wing party Vox in Spain to portray immigration as an issue for ideological positioning. The findings shed light onto the ways in which the representation of migrants is employed as an instrument for anti-migratory policy support, through the construction of a very specific profile of a migrant in terms of age and gender and the exclusion of significant migrant populations from the argument. Moreover, the party employs the content creation functionalities of Instagram Stories to construct arguments and storylines where diverse information sources converge, effectively bypassing traditional media and reaching their supporter base directly.

Presentación de experiencias docentes en el aula universitaria utilizando tres redes sociales de gran reconocimiento internacional: YouTube, Instagram y TikTok.

Esta investigación reflexiona, desde una perspectiva teórica, cómo a través de las agencias de noticias se difunden la mayoría de los acontecimientos internacionales que llegan al resto de los medios de comunicación, provocando el conocido «efecto ventrílocuo»: múltiples medios, una sola voz; y se indaga sobre cómo las plataformas online han fomentado este fenómeno, provocando un aumento estructural de la desinformación. En este sentido, la investigación tiene por objetivo conocer el desarrollo del «efecto ventrílocuo» con el progreso de los «nuevos medios» y como consecuencia, el aumento de la desinformación. Para este análisis documental de teoría fundamentada, el procedimiento metodológico se ha basado en la revisión bibliográfica de la literatura en las bases de datos internacionales de referencia (WoS y Scopus), realizando un análisis de estudios primarios, con el fin de sintetizar la información. Los resultados indican, entre otras cuestiones, que las redes sociales fomentan espacios de desinformación estructural en el ecosistema actual. En conclusión, se determina la relación entre el «efecto ventrílocuo» y la desinformación, que surge como consecuencia de la reticularidad y descentralización informativo-digital.

This paper aims at showing a state of the art about digital citizenship from the methodological point of view when it comes to measuring this construct. The review of the scientific literature offers at least ten definitions and nine different scales of measurement. The comparative and diachronic analysis of the content of the definitions shows us two conceptions of digital citizenship, some more focused on digital competences and others on critical and activist aspects. This paper replicates and compares three scales of measurement of digital citizenship selected for their relevance and administered in a sample of 366 university students, to analyze their psychometric properties and the existing coincidences and divergences between the three. The most outstanding conclusion is that not all of them seem to measure the same construct, due to its diversity of dimensions. An online activism dimension needs to be incorporated if digital citizenship is to be measured. There is an urgent need to agree internationally on a definition of digital citizenship with its corresponding dimensions to elaborate a reliable and valid measuring instrument.