CRITICAL SOCIAL MEDIA AND INTERNET STUDIES: A REVIEW OF THE STATE-OF-THE-ART RESEARCH

Given the exponential growth rate experienced by social media platforms within the past two decades and their numerous adverse societal impacts (e.g., surge in hate speech, racism, cyberbullying, religious intolerance, among others), the discipline of critical social media and internet studies has also become an important field of study. Within that, while many studies have been published in the past two decades, a few of them have reached a high level of impact and influence. Thus, the present study aims at developing a review of the state-of-the-art scholarly papers in this discipline with the goal to provide not only a synthesis of them but also to contribute to the expansion of this field of investigation. To this end, the present study reviews a selection of nine papers published in the timeframe 2011-2021, available on Semantic Scholar database, that have recached high levels of impact measured by the number of citations, ranging from 201 to 2,239.