Pranav Malhotra, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media, has recently published three articles that relate to his work on bounded social media places (BSMPs). Malhotra uses the term BSMPs to refer to more private places within social media like private groups, chats, and servers on platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Discord.

In “Toward conceptualizing bounded social media places,” published in Political Communication, Malhotra explicates the concept of BSMPs and distinguishes it from more public and algorithmically controlled places within social media. He also argues that political communication scholars who study social media should consider moving beyond using platform as a discrete object of study. Instead, they can draw on the concept of BSMPs and use the affordance of visibility as an organizing principle to understand the broader social media ecology.

“Understanding information credibility evaluation on bounded social media places: A mixed methods study” is an empirical study of BSMPs published in Communication Monographs and co-authored with Soo Yun Shin. Through both interviews and an online experiment, this article focuses on whether people trust information more if they encounter it in BSMPs. As Malhotra and Shin outline in the article: “Interviews reveal that BSMPs are associated with familiarity, intimacy, and control over curating a credible information environment, resulting in people viewing information shared within these places as credible.” Furthermore, the experiment, which compares credibility evaluation in private (BSMPs) versus public groups on social media, “confirms that the perceived intimacy of BSMPs explains why people associate these places with credible information.”

Finally, BSMPs are one of the areas of focus in “Unpacking credibility evaluation on digital media: A case for interpretive qualitative approaches.” This article is published in the Annals of the International Communication Association journal and is co-authoredwith Natalie-Anne Hall, Yiping Xia, Louise Stahl, Andrew Chadwick, Cristian Vaccari, and Brendan T Lawson. The article argues for more serious consideration of interpretive qualitative methods in studying how people assess the credibility of information online. The authors use their own research projects as case studies and argue that interpretive approaches can generate a relationally, culturally, and contextually situated understanding of online credibility evaluation. They also specifically detail the benefits of using such approaches while studying credibility evaluation in BSMPs.