Digital storytelling in cultural and heritage tourism offers significant potential for youth engagement through social media platforms. However, current digital storytelling frameworks illustrate research gaps in integrating digital storytelling guidelines with social-media-specific requirements. Therefore, this review aims to develop an integrated digital storytelling for social media framework that extends traditional digital storytelling guidelines with four additional elements of contemporary digital engagement. The investigation employs bibliometric analysis through VOSviewer software version 1.6.20 to examine four paired domains: digital storytelling and cultural tourism, digital storytelling and social media, youth and cultural tourism, and youth interaction with digital storytelling through social media. Results revealed thematic clusters informing the development of four new framework elements: (1) social media platform integration, (2) multimedia engagement, (3) community participation, and (4) cultural authenticity. This review contributes to the knowledge by advancing digital storytelling theory through social-media-specific elements, providing methodological innovation through comprehensive domain analysis, and offering practical implementation strategies for cultural tourism practitioners.

This systematic literature review examines the growing influence of social media influencers over traditional media in shaping public opinion. Analyzing 26 Scopus-indexed studies published between 2020 and 2025, the review finds that influencers build strong trust and engagement through parasocial relationships, emotional storytelling, and niche relevance, often outperforming traditional media in influencing attitudes and behavior. While influencers act as powerful cultural intermediaries in digital communication, the study also highlights ongoing challenges such as misinformation, ethical concerns, and commercialization, offering important implications for research, marketing practice, and media policy.

This article explores how social media influencers have become key drivers of contemporary activism, reshaping traditional concepts of leadership. By using their platforms to raise awareness, build communities, and mobilize followers, influencers can transform online engagement—such as hashtag activism—into offline action and real social impact. Focusing on case studies from Morocco and grounded in theories of digital activism and leadership, the study shows how influencers enable grassroots mobilization, democratic participation, and the amplification of marginalized voices. It also examines ethical challenges, including authenticity, backlash, and the tension between advocacy and commercial interests, highlighting both the potential and limitations of influencer-led social movements in driving social change.

This study explores the relationship between journalistic background, content creation experience, and self-reported information literacy among global content creators. Based on an online survey of 500 content creators in eight languages around the world, the study explains whether journalistic training or experience in content creation influences perceived information literacy, while controlling for education and economic development of the country. Results indicate that both having a journalistic background and content creation experience significantly predict perceived information literacy, with education of creators as a significant covariate. Economic development (Global South vs. Global North) is not a significant factor. Grounded in Flavell’s metacognitive theory, the findings suggest that content creators gain confidence in evaluating information through having a journalistic background and content creator experience, even if their actual ability remains untested. The implications of perceived information literacy compared to actual practice in information checking and information literacy training based on metacognition are discussed.

Kampung Giri Harja (Jelekong Village) is an art and painting village in Bale Endah District, Bandung Regency, founded by Asep Sunandar Sunarya. Formerly an unknown village, Jelekong transformed into Giri Harja Endah Village after his arrival and became widely recognized as an art village in southern Bandung. Most residents work as artists, especially wayang golek puppeteers and painters, with many streets lined with art and puppet shops. The PKM (community activity program) addresses the challenge of improving the quality of local content creators so they can support digital media literacy. Through socialization, training, counseling, consultation, and ongoing participatory assistance, the program aims to develop high-quality creative digital content that attracts audiences and strengthens digital literacy.

This article explores the influential yet underexamined role of media agencies in the digital media ecosystem, particularly within the news media sector. Media agencies shape the public sphere by directing advertising budgets toward specific platforms, thereby contributing to the platformization of media. Drawing on interviews and industry sources, the study shows that media agencies are heavily involved in digitizing, tracking, and commodifying audiences, while also recognizing the ethical concerns this creates. The article calls for greater political scrutiny and critical research into the democratic consequences of emerging value chains linking platforms, advertisers, media agencies, audiences, and news organizations.

Heritage institutions increasingly incorporate social media logic into their efforts to digitize archival sources. This study is based on an ethnographic exploration of the National Library of Israel’s (NLI) digitization endeavors, with the aim of understanding how the transition from analog to digital materials aligns with the principles of platformization. By conducting observations, examining reports, and interviewing NLI professionals, we shed light on the pervasive influence of social media logic within public sector institutions, such as the National Library. We argue that the digitization process of archival documents is a form of platformization, and its impact is evident even before the content is disseminated, exposed, and uploaded to social media platforms. Furthermore, our analysis underscores how social media logic is a guiding force behind the NLI’s digitization strategy, encompassing the selection of materials and the construction of a digital archive for future generations.

This study examined the role of a social network site (SNS) in the lives of 11 high school teenagers from low-income families in the U.S. We conducted interviews, talk-alouds and content analysis of MySpace profiles. Qualitative analysis of these data revealed three themes. First, SNSs facilitated emotional support, helped maintain relationships, and provided a platform for self-presentation. Second, students used their online social network to fulfill essential social learning functions. Third, within their SNS, students engaged in a complex array of communicative and creative endeavors. In several instances, students' use of social network sites demonstrated the new literacy practices currently being discussed within education reform efforts. Based on our findings, we suggest additional directions for related research and educational practices.

This study examines how the growth of social media has transformed information access, communication, and democratic participation, highlighting both its benefits and challenges. It explores the relationship between social media use and media literacy, focusing on user engagement, opinion formation, and online dialogue. Findings show that while most users engage with social media daily—primarily for entertainment—few feel comfortable expressing opinions openly. Social media influences political and social participation, though its impact on opinion change varies. Overall, low media literacy awareness underscores the need for education to combat disinformation, strengthen critical thinking, and promote responsible digital citizenship.

Social media has taken many sectors including the higher education by storm. However, with wide spread fears that social media may be a distractor to pedagogy, this paper investigated how social media facilitates teaching and learning. Unlike most prior studies which relied much on soliciting mere views from students and lecturers about their intentions to use or not to use social media, this study incorporated Twitter and blogs into two undergraduate courses offered in the Department of Library and Information Science at Mzuzu University which is a public university in Malawi. Data were collected in two ways: first, analysis of blog and Twitter posts by students and second, a questionnaire was sent to 64 students to find out their perception towards the use of blogs and Twitter in a classroom environment. Results suggest that if appropriately deployed, Twitter and blogs are catalysts for the much hyped learner-centred approach to teaching because using these technologies, it emerged that students shared and discussed course materials, posted their course reflections and interacted amongst themselves and with their lecturer 24/7. Challenges faced include cost of internet data bundles, inaccessible Wi-Fi, poor bandwidths and insufficient computers.

The study emphasizes the need for social studies teacher educators to address misinformation and fake news in democratic citizenship education. Guided by the Teacher Education Technology Competencies, it proposes a five-part framework for integrating media literacy into teacher education, including historical, ethical, and practical approaches to analyzing fake news. The study highlights that a comprehensive media literacy approach supports civic reasoning, understanding of political bias, and online civic participation, and stresses the importance of strengthening preservice teachers’ media literacy skills through teacher education programs.

The study examines factors influencing young people’s ability to evaluate online information, focusing on credibility awareness, evaluation practices, and assessment accuracy. Based on data from 2,747 internet users aged 11–18, the findings show that cognitive development, decision-making style, demographics, and digital literacy training all affect online information evaluation, with some unexpected results. The study highlights gaps in youths’ online information literacy and discusses implications for improving digital literacy education and intervention design.

The paper critiques current media literacy programs for focusing mainly on source accuracy and reliability while neglecting how marginalized groups are represented in media. It argues that traditional “objective” news sources often reinforce stereotypes and media injustices. The study proposes an alternative critical media education model that emphasizes representation, power, and social justice. Through pedagogical examples, it shows how combining critical media analysis with media production can help learners challenge biased representations and media injustice, beyond simply verifying factual accuracy.

This article presents a systematic meta-review of the scientific literature discussing the concepts of information literacy, media literacy, and digital literacy. While carrying out a cross analysis of the way in which literature reviews specifically address these three concepts, this article identifies, and articulates a critical analysis of, the main findings from the reviewed texts regarding the conceptual landscape that they cover. This work highlights confusion between the constitutive dimensions of literacies, recurrent difficulties in establishing theoretical articulations between contributions, and operationalization problems in observing and assessing these literacies. These issues are the subject of a discussion grounded in the specific field of media education.

The study investigates how foundational literacy influences online fact-checking behavior among college students, with news literacy acting as a mediator. Findings show that stronger foundational literacy improves fact-checking through enhanced news literacy, but reliance on heuristic (shortcut) thinking weakens this effect. The study highlights the impact of cognitive biases in social media contexts and emphasizes the need for journalism education to integrate critical news literacy, reflective media engagement, and awareness of digital information environments to support responsible digital citizenship.

The paper examines the lack of a clear definition of bias in library literature and critiques existing teaching methods that treat bias as inherently negative and easy to identify. It argues that identifying bias is a complex cognitive process involving recognizing types of bias, establishing an objective baseline, and assessing its impact. Drawing on insights from multiple disciplines, the paper proposes a clear definition of bias and a practical framework for evaluating it. The study emphasizes the need for a nuanced approach to teaching bias identification to better prepare individuals for evaluating information in a post-truth society.

This research investigated the impact of media and information literacy (MIL) on education faculty students’ acquisition of the skills needed to detect fake news. A one-group experimental design was employed with a randomly selected sample of 100 Jordanian undergraduate students. The participants completed one pre-test and two post-tests, each of which consisted of 10 closed-ended questions and one open-ended question on how to detect fake news. The results indicated that studying MIL has an impact on students’ acquisition of the skills needed to detect fake news. The findings also suggested that the methods students employed to identify and detect fake news after studying the MIL course were scientific and well-reasoned. Based on the results, several recommendations are made that will be of value to researchers and workers in this field.

The review highlights the importance of media literacy in combating misinformation by strengthening critical thinking skills. It shows that media literacy programs help individuals evaluate information sources, identify bias, and resist false or misleading content. Evidence indicates that trained individuals are less likely to believe or share misinformation. The review emphasizes effective teaching approaches, such as interactive learning and real-world examples, and stresses the need to integrate media literacy into education to support informed citizenship, public discourse, and democratic engagement in the digital age.

The study examines how information literacy skills and critical thinking strategies influence students’ ability to judge the reliability of internet sources. Using a descriptive correlational design with 500 randomly selected students, it draws on the ACRL framework and UNESCO’s Digital Literacy Global Framework. The findings show that students with strong information literacy and critical thinking skills are better at evaluating accuracy, detecting bias, and identifying misinformation online. The study emphasizes the need to integrate information literacy and critical thinking training into academic curricula to help students become informed and responsible digital citizens.

Marking biased texts effectively increases media bias awareness, but its sustainability across new topics and unmarked news remains unclear, and the role of AI-generated bias labels is untested. This study examines how news consumers learn to perceive media bias from human- and AIgenerated labels and identify biased language through highlighting, neutral rephrasing, and political orientation cues. We conducted two experiments with a teaching phase exposing them to various bias-labeling conditions and a testing phase evaluating their ability to classify biased sentences and detect biased text in unlabeled news on new topics. We find that, compared to the control group, both human- and AI-generated sentential bias labels significantly improve bias classification (p < .001), though human labels are more effective (d = 0.42 vs. d = 0.23). Additionally, among all teaching interventions, participants best detectbiased sentences when taught with biased sentence or phrase labels (p < .001), while politicized phrase labels reduce accuracy. The effectiveness of different media literacy interventions remains independent of political ideology, but conservative participants are generally less accurate (p =.011), suggesting an interaction between political inclinations and bias detection. Our research provides a novel experimental framework into assessing the generalizability of media bias awareness and offer practical implications for designing bias indicators in newsreading platforms and media literacy curricula.