It is a genuine pleasure to share this issue’s exciting Forum articles with you. These new pieces offer forward-looking, theoretically-rich, and substantively significant clarion calls in three areas of political communication research: artificial intelligence, digital political advertisement libraries, and the politics of transgender health misinformation. Each Forum article wrestles with how information quality and availability interact with both new and established topics of inquiry. The pieces in this issue’s Forum are excellent examples of how this space has operated since 2016. They provide concise, original, useful, and provocative arguments about emerging and/or changing topics in our field, offering new frameworks for thinking, data gathering, and analysis. They create useful roadmaps for future work and they are clearly and carefully written.
Homero Gil de Zuñiga, Manuel Goyanes, and Timilehin Durotoye seek to define Artificial Intelligence (AI) for political communication scholars. Treating AI as, “the tangible real-world capability of non-human machines or artificial entities to perform, task solve, communicate, interact, and act logically as it occurs with biological humans,” the authors plant seeds for future scholars to nurture in areas ranging from computational journalism, to the psychological effects of AI literacy to considering AI’s role in accentuating, or perhaps even attenuating, different kinds of inequalities and disparities.
Travis Ridout and Furkan Cakmak provide new evidence about how the introduction of social media platforms’ political ad libraries are associated with media coverage of digital political advertising. Their analysis, originally presented at a Social Science Research Council conference on the 2020 US presidential election I co-chaired with the political scientist Julia Azari, highlight how fact-checking, news media reporting of misinformation, and discussions of the cost of advertising have increased in the ad library era. They conclude that, “ad libraries are influencing media coverage in a way that increases transparency for citizens.”
TJ Billard’s article expands our field’s thinking about political misinformation, arguing that, “health misinformation is not just a public health problem; it is a human rights problem of profound significance to the study of political communication.” Using a Health and Human Rights framework, Billard offers new ideas linking health and politics (see also Jiang et al., Citation2022), showing the ways that health misinformation matters in and for institutional politics.
As the journal proudly welcomes the incoming Forum editor Ulrike Klinger, I do have a few more pieces I am curating as the Forum’s founding editor. I look forward to bringing them to you in the next few months before ending my term and fast becoming Professor Klinger’s biggest fan.