Social media are becoming a vital element of intense Intellectual Capital (IC) growth. Their ultimate shape is being determined by dynamic technical innovation (involving hybrid products and services), merger and acquisition (M&A) activity among product and service innovators, as well as user...

Online publishing, social networks, and web search have dramatically lowered the costs of producing, distributing, and discovering news articles. Some scholars argue that such technological changes increase exposure to diverse perspectives, while others worry that they increase ideological...

This paper contains an overview of the relevant economic research literature on the digital transformation of news markets and the impact on the quality of news. It compares various definitions of fake news, including false news and other types of disinformation and finds that there is no...

The advent of social media and peer-to-peer technologies offers the possibility of driving the full democratization of news and information, undercutting the agenda-setting of large media outlets and their relative control of news and information flows. We are now about a decade into the era of...

Controversial news with little to no factual support has been proliferating in recent years. Such news has spread widely via social media, where individuals can easily create and distribute news. Using the news and events surrounding the impeachment of the former South Korean president Park...

We review the economics of superstars, originally developed for stars in traditional media, and discuss whether they are applicable for the (allegedly) novel phenomenon of stars in social media (influencer, micro-celebrities). Moreover, we analyse potentially new factors for creating social...

On social media platforms, unsafe and unlawful materials might hurt advertisers by generating ``brand safety issues''. Users instead might prefer or dislike such content. We study the incentive of an ad-funded platform to design its content policy and moderate unsafe content. When advertisers...

Social media stars create stardom with uploads on social media pages like YouTube, TikTok or Instagram. One of the most popular platforms, especially designed to upload picture contents, is the service “Instagram” owned by Facebook. The growing social, cultural and economic power of social...

Using Facebook's release in a given language as an exogenous source of variation in access to social media where the language is spoken, we show that Facebook has had a significant and sizable positive impact on citizen protests. By exploiting variation in a large sample of countries during...