Issue 41, Winter/Spring 2026 on "Media and Platformization”

Digital platforms have moved from being “channels” for communication to becoming infrastructures that organize cultural production, economic exchange, and political life. Across the Arab region, this shift is visible in how news circulates through Meta-owned ecosystems and social media logics; how audiences are measured, targeted, and monetized; how creators and influencers professionalize “platform-native” work. Societies are being platformized as governance, labor, and public culture become increasingly mediated through platform architectures, data extraction, and algorithmic curation.

Importantly, platformization has not replaced the Arab public sphere so much as reworked and expanded it. Public debate historically anchored in legacy media institutions, political elites, and state–market arrangements increasingly operates through a networked sphere: a dense ecology of sharing, forwarding, hashtagging, influencer mediation, and platform governance, where publicness is produced across open feeds and semi-private spaces (e.g., WhatsApp/Telegram), and where algorithmic infrastructures organize attention, reach, and participation. This networked sphere can broaden participation and accelerate mobilization, while also enabling new forms of polarization, harassment, disinformation, and uneven visibility—often tied to the opaque and contested governance regimes of global platforms. In Arabic-language contexts, these dynamics intersect with dialect diversity, translation politics, uneven moderation capacity, and geopolitical pressures that shape the boundaries of permissible speech and the circulation of evidence in moments of war and crisis. For the Arab region, platformization is not a simple “import” of Western platform capitalism. It unfolds within distinctive political economies, regulatory regimes, language ecologies (including dialect diversity), and media histories—often producing asymmetries in visibility, moderation, and access. Platform governance and content moderation practices can generate uneven outcomes for Arabic-language publics, particularly in contexts of conflict, civic contention, and gender/sexuality politics. Meanwhile, the expansion of AI-driven ranking, recommendation, and synthetic media tools intensifies longstanding concerns about attention capture and metric-driven communication—while also enabling new forms of verification, automation, and audience development.

This special issue invites theoretically informed and empirically grounded work that explains how platformization is transforming Arab media and society and how Arab cases can refine global theorizing on platform power, governance, labor, and public culture.

Suggested themes and topics 

Submissions may address (but are not limited to):

1) Platformized public spheres and networked discourse

• Networked publics, connective action, and shifting forms of authority and legitimacy
• Platform logics and the transformation of deliberation: virality, outrage, humor, and affective publics (Papacharissi 2015)
• Public/private boundaries: how private messaging (WhatsApp/Telegram) reshapes “public” debate and rumor infrastructures

2) Platformization of entertainment and popular culture

• Platform-native entertainment industries: short video, streaming, gaming, and music ecosystems
• Celebrity–influencer cultures and “attention economies” in Arab contexts
• Language, dialects, and cultural specificity in algorithmic recommendation
• Monetization, sponsorship, and the politics of visibility for creators

3) Platformization of political discussion

• Political talk under platform governance: moderation, shadowbanning, demonetization, and takedowns (Gillespie 2018; Roberts 2019)
• Election communication, political marketing, and coordinated influence
• Polarization, harassment, and online “counterpublics”
• Platform infrastructures and authoritarian resilience or contention dynamics (Howard and Hussain 2013; Tufekci 2017)

4) Platformization of socio-cultural issues

• Gender norms, family, youth cultures, and moral regulation online
• Religion, sectarian narratives, and identity politics in algorithmic environments
• Diaspora networked publics and cross-border cultural debate
• Digital intimacy, self-presentation, and reputational risk

5) Activism, NGOs, and civil society in the platform society

• NGO communication, fundraising, and advocacy under algorithmic visibility constraints
• Hashtag activism and connective action: opportunities and limits (Bennett and Segerberg 2012)
• Safety, surveillance, and risk management for activists and human-rights organizations
• Platform–civil society partnerships, content takedowns, and documentation practices

6) Platformized geopolitics, war, and crisis discourse

• How platforms shape Arab publics’ views on wars, occupations, and regional conflicts
• Platform governance and the politics of evidence: images, metadata, authenticity, and verification
• Disinformation, propaganda, and cross-border information operations
• Arabic-language moderation in conflict contexts and differential treatment across languages (Reuters 2024)

7) Platform governance, moderation, and language politics

• Arabic dialects, classifier performance, and moderation errors
• Appeals, enforcement consistency, and transparency in Arabic contexts
• Content moderation labor and the political economy of “invisible governance” (Roberts 2019)

8) AI, synthetic media, and the next stage of platformization

• Generative AI in content production and political persuasion
• Deepfakes, synthetic influencers, and credibility contests
• AI-assisted verification vs. AI-assisted manipulation

9) Methods and research designs

• Digital ethnography, creator diaries, and NGO fieldwork under risk
• Governance tracing, platform/interface analysis, and policy analysis
• Computational approaches (networks, trace data, engagement distributions) with clear limitations
• Comparative cross-platform studies (Meta–TikTok–X–YouTube–messaging apps)

The above list is a non-exhaustive set for suggested areas of research. We welcome contributions that explore other dimensions related to media and geopolitics in the Arab region.

Submission guidelines

All submissions must be in Microsoft Word format (.doc or .docx), adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, and have a maximum length of 10,000 words (including footnotes and citations).

Please include the author’s name (as it should be published), their position and affiliation, ORCID ID, and a brief abstract of no more than 150 words.

Deadline for Full Papers:

April 15, 2026 for all submissions.

Please email all submissions to: editor@arabmediasociety.com. For further information regarding our publishing policies, kindly visit: www.arabmediasociety.com/publishing-policies/

Contact Information:

For any inquiries regarding the call for papers, please contact: editor@arabmediasociety.com.

Thank you for your interest and support of Arab Media & Society. We look forward to your contributions to this timely and important issue.