Meso News-Spaces and Beyond: News-Related Communication Occurring Between the Public and Private Domains

Abstract

The concept of meso news-spaces refers to online spaces located between the private and public realms, where everyday users, more professional media actors, or both, can produce and share news-related content among each other, yet not to a wide audience. Such spaces are afforded by digital media platforms, including, but not limited to, Facebook groups, X spaces, and group chats on WeChat, WhatsApp, or Telegram. This special issue is devoted to further understanding news-related communication that occurs neither in fully public nor fully private realms, but between or across the two. In the introduction to the special issue, we demonstrate the significance of meso news-spaces by considering the example of the use of WhatsApp groups in the mobilization of the pro-democracy movement in Israel in 2023. We then consider the challenges that meso news-spaces pose for researchers, in terms of conceptualization, research ethics, and context. We conclude with a review of the articles of the special issue, and with directions for future research around this phenomenon, that is proving to be a significant one in the digital news environment.

Keywords:

• Audiences
• journalists
• meso-level
• meso news-space
• news
• platforms
• social media
• spaces

In January 2023, Israel’s justice minister introduced part of a plan that sought to limit the authority of the judiciary and grant significantly more power to the executive, posing threats to Israeli democracy (Roznai and Cohen 2023). The subsequent months saw the uprising of a large-scale and persistent grassroots protest movement (Linder 2023). Bottom-up protests around the country were mobilized mainly through large-scale WhatsApp and Telegram groups, run by hundreds of grassroots organizations. Some were “quiet” groups, serving only to inform about upcoming protests; others were active discussion groups, some with hundreds of messages a day (see Kligler-Vilenchik and Tenenboim 2020), where people shared and discussed news about the planned “reform” and attempts to block it. There were also pre-existing groups—e.g., for workplaces, parents of schoolchildren, or neighborhoods—which suddenly became a hub for discussion around the news and mobilization of protest. Countless Israelis became part of one, several, or many such groups.

This decentralized nature—afforded, in part, by the nimbleness of large-scale groups on instant messaging platforms—seems to be one factor in the success of the protest movement, which has sustained itself consecutively for nine months¹ and, in March 2023, managed to halt the ruling coalition’s first attempt to overhaul the democratic system in one go. As an Israeli journalist observed: “The huge grassroots protest doesn’t have one head or two, but rather countless organizations that make it a decentralized human mosaic […] every neighbor who opens a WhatsApp group is a leader, and every week another leader-for-a-moment becomes the face of the protest” (Linder 2023, para. 4).

Such use of large-scale groups on instant messaging or social media platforms to produce, discuss or act around the news and current events represents what we have called meso news-spaces: “An online space, located between the private and public realms, where a group of people are involved in news-related processes” (Tenenboim and Kligler-Vilenchik 2020, p. 2). In recent years, it seems that the phenomenon has been on the rise in terms of both quantity and public attention. In 2019, Meta (then, Facebook) introduced a substantial redesign to the Facebook website and app, which put much more emphasis on private groups (Horwitz 2021). Marc Zuckerberg explained at the time that this significant overhaul was part of a larger effort to offer ways of communicating that would be less public, saying that “groups are at the heart of the app” (Horwitz 2019, para. 4). And indeed, our empirical work (Kligler-Vilenchik and Tenenboim 2020) has shown how meso news-spaces afford aspects that have long drawn participants to online communities, such as sociability, a sense of intimacy, and creative expression, thus potentially promoting a deeper engagement with news and politics, and more meaningful relationships between and among news workers and audience members (see also Lewis, Holton, and Coddington 2014; Wright 2012).

Yet at the same time, closed groups have gained attention as potential “breeding grounds” for concerning phenomena such as the spread of misinformation or incitement toward violence. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol represents a key event in this regard, as investigations by Facebook and beyond showed that closed Facebook groups were a central site where hate, misinformation, harassment and calls for violence had spread, prompting Facebook to ban prominent “civic” groups and to stop recommending such groups to users (Horwitz 2021). Thus, while these spaces are difficult to make sense of—not only for researchers, but also for governments, those in charge of law enforcement, and even the technology companies themselves—the past years have also shown that they are a space of significant civic and political action—both pro and anti-democratic—and thus cannot be ignored.

The aim of this special issue is to further understand the phenomenon of meso news-spaces, as well as other news-related communication that occurs neither in fully public or fully private realms, but between or across the two. This growing phenomenon raises conceptual, ethical, and contextual challenges.

Conceptually, it is the complex relationship to the private and the public which makes meso news-spaces both compelling and challenging to comprehend. As groups, they are often set as private or closed, and are under the wherewithal of private social media companies; yet they may deal with public affairs topics and may have wide-reaching political ramifications. They may include people who already know each other and interact daily or bring together hundreds of strangers. Located “below the radar” (Boccia Artieri, Brilli, and Zurovac 2021), they are elusive and difficult to quantify, study, as well as monitor or control; even as they are important spaces where discussions around public issues occur. They are thus quintessentially a meso phenomenon, which defies dichotomous distinctions between private and public.

In terms of research ethics, meso news-spaces raise a host of challenges to those trying to make sense of them (see Valenzuela and Santos 2024). Unlike public-facing social media platforms, they usually cannot be accessed using an API, web-scraping, or other automated processes. Most research on these spaces uses interviews, surveys, and self-reports (see Pasitselska 2024). Studies that analyze the content of conversations raise ethical challenges and dilemmas around research disclosure, informed consent, expectation of privacy, confidentiality of conversations, protection of research subjects and researchers themselves, and platforms’ terms of use—as well as the challenge of being approved by institutional review boards. What is often difficult is to go beyond single case studies, to map and describe how dominant meso news-spaces are in the communication ecology of a given society.

Indeed, this leads us to the question of context. Building on the study of political uses of instant messaging applications (Valeriani and Vaccari 2018), the study of meso news-spaces seems more prevalent in societies where instant messaging applications like Telegram and WhatsApp (or, in China, WeChat) are more dominant. In such countries, large-scale groups within instant messaging applications are a prominent phenomenon, though Facebook groups also afford meso news-spaces. Notably, the US is a key context where, although there is certainly use of groups on social media for political mobilization, large-scale groups on instant messaging platforms seem to be less central. This may have to do with the varying popularity of WhatsApp/Telegram, which are dominant in use—in general and specifically for news sharing—particularly in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Southern Europe, while at the same time they are considered niche applications in the US (Newman et al. 2023). This difference in cultural dominance is also apparent in the contributions to the special issue. The articles in the special issue consider contexts including India, China, and Western Europe. While we have two contributions from the US, they tend to focus more on use of Facebook groups and Facebook Messenger, rather than the end-to-end-encrypted instant messaging platforms (predominantly WhatsApp) that are dominant in the other contexts. It is our hypothesis that meso news-spaces may be more salient in more collectivist societies, though this is an open empirical question.

From Explaining Misinformation Spread to Analyzing Memes: The Issue’s Articles

The articles in the special issue offer new evidence and new concepts that advance the understanding of news-related communication occurring between or across public and private digital domains. The articles address issues such as the spread of falsehoods, escape from news, and engagement with it.

Falsehoods in Closed Spaces

Chadwick, Vaccari, and Hall (2023) focused on messaging spaces, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, in the UK. The authors conceptualized messaging as “hybrid public-interpersonal communication” (p. 1), suggesting that public content—e.g., about issues in the news—is layered into people’s everyday exchanges with close ties. Engagement with news is not necessarily the primary focus of this communication type. Yet, contexts in which such communication occurs can sometimes develop into meso news-spaces, either temporarily or more permanently. “Hybrid public-interpersonal communication” may involve spreading misinformation, and Chadwick and his colleagues explored the role of conflict avoidance in spreading and correcting it. Based on interviews with 102 people who use messaging, the authors suggested that users’ tendency to avoid political disagreements can obstruct correcting misinformation in messaging spaces. Furthermore, social relationships and technological design may contribute to conflict avoidance. Chadwick, Vaccari, and Hall (2023) proposed that journalists and fact checkers could invite people to meso news-spaces dedicated to combating misinformation, where they may work collectively in dialogue (see Kligler-Vilenchik 2022). People may also be encouraged to share in small groups and one-on-one what they learned in larger groups.

Additional articles provide insight into misinformation correction—or lack thereof—in closed spaces. Malhotra (2023) investigated how misinformation is negotiated within extended family group chats on WhatsApp, drawing on interviews with 26 young adults (aged 18-26) in Delhi, India. He made the case that such groups can operate as meso news-spaces by combining interpersonal interactions and news sharing and discussion, as well as by including a high number of participants. According to the study participants, their extended family group chats included between 30 and 100 members. Study participants believed that older generations were more susceptible to misinformation than their own generation, possibly due to differences in digital literacy. Although these young adults perceived correcting misinformation as important, they tended to avoid this practice when it came to sensitive issues like politics and religion. One possible explanation is respect and deference to elders. Malhotra (2023) discussed various considerations for correcting misinformation or refraining from it, showing how relational, cultural, and technological factors can play a role in meso news-space dynamics.

Correcting falsehoods may also be done through “fact bots,” automated agents that provide factchecks or context information (Frischlich et al. 2024, p. 3). Through interviews with 18 users of messaging spaces in Germany, Frischlich and her colleagues explored audience perspectives on the possible use of “fact bots” in such spaces. Interviewees’ responses reflected concerns whether such bots would make information search easier, as well as concerns that those automated agents could contribute to information overload. Interviewees also tended to think that “fact bots” would be more useful to others than to themselves. Yet, those who saw misinformation as a major problem were more open to the use of bots, whereas other participants were critical of the idea that platforms would monitor content. Trust or lack thereof played an important role in people’s perceptions, as they were concerned about the trustworthiness of information providers behind bots. Frischlich et al. (2024) suggested that to be accepted, “fact bots” initiatives should account for the identified issues and try to reach mediators—users of messaging spaces who both trust such bots and are considered trustworthy by fellow members of their digital communities.

Escaping News or Engaging with It

Digital media users may actively build their own media worlds, in an attempt to curate the content they encounter, particularly in relation to news (Thorson and Battocchio 2023). One way this can be done is by switching from one space to another within and across platforms. Thorson and Battocchio focused on this phenomenon among young adults and proposed the concept of “personal platform architecture” (p. 2), referring to the labors of users that alter the future flows of communication they receive. The researchers examined these labors and the consequences for news use through 50 interviews with 18-34-year-olds in the US, including a platform walk-through activity. Users were found to engage in emotional, immaterial, and visibility management labor through practices such as hiding content and tailoring social connections to refrain from seeing content from specific others. As part of everyday digital labor, users may carve out meso spaces that assist them in escaping from hard or traditional news. At least in the case of US young adults, they may consider such spaces as safe havens from encountering negative news (Thorson and Battocchio 2023).

A different study in the US focused on meso news-spaces managed by a news organization (Murray, Riedl, and Stroud 2023). The Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin partnered with Vox Media to study how a large Facebook group (with over 20,000 members at the time) compared with small chat groups on Facebook Messenger (with more than 10 members in a group chat). The larger group is centered on The Weeds, Vox’s podcast about politics and policy; with the small group chats including members from the larger group. Based on a real-world experiment, Murray, Riedl, and Stroud (2023) suggested that group size and discourse architecture—or how platforms allow users to communicate—could matter for the nature of resulting engagement. Their study shows that members of the small chat groups perceived them as more civil and reported being less prone to self-censor compared to the large Facebook group. Members of the small groups also had less favorable views of the large group after participating in the small groups. The study raises several possible implications for newsrooms’ use of meso news-spaces.

Engagement with news-related content in closed spaces can take different forms, including sharing visual materials. Hagedoorn, Costa, and Esteve-del-Valle (2023) showed the significant role of visual materials such as photographs, image memes, and videos in sharing news-related content on WhatsApp during the lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. Hagedoorn and her colleagues interviewed 30 people (working adults aged 25-49) from urban areas and conducted a visual thematic analysis of content collected from them. The researchers suggested that visual images can blur boundaries between private life and public concerns presented in the news—e.g., lockdown and social distancing measures. Sharing visual materials within digital groups allows people to make fun of a difficult situation while fostering a sense of togetherness, as well as to make sense of unfolding events.

From China to Chile and Beyond

The special issue also addresses digital spaces in China. Yin, Fu, and Zheng (2023) introduce a “Chinese featured meso news-space,” in which the operating actors are not licensed by the state to produce news (p. 3). These non-state media actors are engaged in practices such as presenting original news-related content in a “softened” way (p. 16) and reposting content from state-owned media to avoid confrontation. The study draws on 17 interviews with digital media practitioners, and a participant observation. It demonstrates the “dual legitimacy” challenge faced by non-state media actors: Although lacking institutional legitimacy that would come with a state license, non-state media actors try to transfer such legitimacy from state-owned media, as well as to gain identity legitimacy as professionals (Yin, Fu, and Zheng 2023).

The special issue concludes with two commentaries – by Valenzuela and Santos (2024) and Pasitselska (2024). According to Valenzuela and Santos (2024), the meso news-space is a helpful framework for studying mobile instant messaging services, shedding light on their ability to allow users to navigate private and public domains. Valenzuela and Santos also suggested that investigating dynamics of meso news-spaces can help better understand information repertoires of people in different national contexts. They provided Chile as a pertinent example, where sharing content on WhatsApp was found to be linked to users’ political knowledge and participation (Valenzuela, Bachmann, and Bargsted 2021). Pasitselska (2024) discussed characteristics of chat groups that form meso-level spaces—e.g., how they are shaped by distinctive affordances of platforms. She also identified the need for mixed methods approaches to study chat groups, setting a research agenda for the field, including a comparative survey of chat group users, more case studies in different political and cultural contexts, and content analyses of interactions within groups.

Discussion: Advancing Our Understanding of Meso News-Spaces—and Why They Matter

Taken together, the special issue’s articles push forward our understanding of the role of meso news-spaces, their varying dynamics and their potential contributions and threats to societies, across a variety of contexts. Tenenboim and Kligler-Vilenchik (2020) suggested four dimensions across which the dynamics of meso news-spaces can be considered—platforms, topics, actors, and rules/guidelines. These dimensions remain fruitful for our understanding of the phenomenon, yet reading across the articles of the special issue raises several additional relevant factors to consider—while also mapping directions for future research.

First, the articles point at the varied types of content shared in meso news-spaces. While most contributions in the special issue and in previous work on meso news-spaces focused on textual content, Hagedoorn, Costa, and Esteve-del-Valle (2023) remind us that much of the content shared in these spaces is of visual nature (screenshots, image macros or gifs), or furthermore, consists of links and videos. Here, studies investigating meso news-spaces should build on visual and audio-visual analysis tools to consider how such content is part of the dynamics of the meso news-space. Keeping in mind the various modalities of content also reminds us of the labor involved in sifting through the news, in a time of information abundance (Thorson and Battocchio 2023).

A second factor regards the characteristics of the group, such as group size and tie strength. While Tenenboim and Kligler-Vilenchik considered the actors taking part in a meso news-space, they did not focus on the nature of ties between participants. Murray, Riedl, and Stroud’s (2023) experimental study shows the difference between small-group discussions versus larger conversations in terms of civility and self-censorship. Chadwick, Vaccari, and Hall (2023) consider how messaging is a hybrid form of public-interpersonal communication, in which social dynamics such as the tendency for conflict avoidance are central. An important point here is the fact that messaging platforms afford boundary crossing between the private and the public. Future research on meso news-spaces should take into account these meso-level factors of groups, in addition to considering the nature of actors partaking in them.

A third key factor has to do with the cultural, national, and political context. The growing empirical research on meso news-spaces makes it abundantly clear that the same assumptions may not apply across contexts. Of importance here is the question of national differences in platform adoption rates and use habits (see Miller et al. 2016). For instance, to what extent are instant messaging platforms popular for large-scale groups in general (consider the distinction mentioned earlier between the US and many other countries), and for sharing news specifically? Due to the intermeshing between private and public connections, the dynamics of meso news-spaces may differ in Global South vs. Global North societies (or, as Valenzuela and Santos refer to, Majority World and Minority World), as we saw for example in the case of young people in India discussed by Malhotra (2023). Another important macro-level distinction is between full democracies, and non-democratic regimes like Yin, Fu & Zheng’s (2023) discussion of China—as well as the spectrum between these two, as we are at a time of democratic backsliding (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019). We hope scholars will further take up the concept of meso news-spaces across these varied contexts.

Fourth, these articles only begin to map the societal implications of meso news-spaces. Existing research has shown a tendency to focus on pro-social aspects of these spaces, in terms of producing news (Yin, Fu, and Zheng 2023), a deeper engagement with news (Kligler-Vilenchik and Tenenboim 2020; Murray, Riedl, and Stroud 2023), and collective efforts to curb the spread of misinformation (Chadwick, Vaccari, and Hall 2023; Kligler-Vilenchik 2022; Malhotra 2023). At the same time, we know that meso news-spaces can also be epicenters of negative social phenomena such as spreading disinformation, extremism, incitement and hate speech. Studying these groups may be harder, as the ethical dilemmas inherent in studying non-public spaces may be further exacerbated in the case of a group that is far from the researcher’s identity and milieu. Yet studying “negative” meso news-spaces is central to our understanding of current global dynamics.

On a final note, we pose as an open empirical question the relationship of meso news-spaces to public-facing social media. At a time when the “legacy” social media platforms are undergoing significant shifts and are being criticized for their role in society (e.g., Twitter’s purchase by Elon Musk, its rebranding as X and subsequent widespread concerns around content moderation on the platform; Facebook’s rebranding as Meta, its failed experimentation with integrating the metaverse, as well as scandals such as Facebook Analytica), people may be rethinking their relationships to these platforms. Do meso-spaces—whether around news or around other topics—provide a replacement for the gratifications people found in public-facing social media, or do the two phenomena occupy different niches? This is a pertinent empirical question to explore. Either way, meso news-spaces have become a significant phenomenon in the digital environment, and—despite the challenges of studying them—one well worth understanding in-depth.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The protest movement was abruptly halted due to the Hamas-Israel war starting on October 7^th, 2023.