Agenda Manipulation in a Platformized Attention Economy: Building, Cutting, and the Governance of Salience

About this Research Topic

Background

Classic agenda-setting research showed how professional news media elevate certain problems and attributes to public prominence. We extend this tradition by situating agenda manipulation—the strategic elevation, suppression, redirection, and structuring of issue salience—within today’s platformized attention economy. Under this umbrella, agenda cutting (the deliberate obscuring, deprioritizing, or exclusion of issues or viewpoints) is one core dimension alongside agenda building (amplification and prioritization), agenda gating (access control and frictions), and agenda steering (algorithmic curation, ranking, and monetization that nudge attention toward or away from content).

Following Colistra, we recognize newsroom-facing pressures (PR, advertising) that encourage cutting. But platforms, creators, parties, PACs, advocacy networks, and coordinated publics now also manipulate agendas through algorithmic and policy enforcement, monetization levers, UI frictions, and networked user behaviors (e.g., downranking/demonetization, brigading and mass-reporting, flooding and SEO-gaming, selective amplification, counter-messaging, and overshadowing). Our emphasis is actor-centric and comparative: who builds agendas and who cuts them, by what mechanisms, and with what effects across institutions, platforms, and regimes?

We welcome new evidence that advances the measurement of agenda manipulation at scale. For instance, Vargo and Amazeen (2021) demonstrate how corporate sponsored content can influence subsequent patterns of news coverage, offering a useful example of how agenda-cutting effects may be detected empirically. Building on such designs, we encourage applications and extensions to political actors, platforms, and advocacy networks within the broader field of agenda manipulation

This special issue explicitly integrates:
• Agenda setting & building (McCombs & Shaw; Cobb & Elder) with agenda cutting (Colistra) to model symmetric processes that elevate or suppress salience.
• Gatekeeping—including newsroom gatekeeping (Shoemaker & Vos) and networked gatekeeping (Barzilai-Nahon)—to examine how authority over inputs and pathways conditions what gains oxygen.
• Framing and priming (Entman; Scheufele) to connect what gets attention with how it is interpreted once it does.
• Platform governance & content moderation (e.g., research on ranking systems, policy enforcement, and creator monetization) to analyze how infrastructural and policy choices enact manipulation via recommender design, search, and ad markets.

By bringing these streams together, we aim to advance a cumulative theory of agenda manipulation that explains interactions among professional journalism, platforms, and other strategic actors.

We invite work that focuses on, but is not limited to, the following themes:
• Map the actors and mechanisms of agenda manipulation: Trace agenda builders and cutters within and across digital platforms (newsrooms, platforms, parties, PACs, advocacy networks, creators, PR firms, data brokers, and coordinated publics).
• Mechanisms & tactics: Identify cues and tactics for building, cutting, gating, and steering (e.g., indexing and source selection, intermedia flows, downranking/demonetization, friction and de-amplification, flooding and SEO-gaming, brigading and mass-reporting, targeted counter-messaging, algorithmic “quality” signals, and selective monetization).
• Incentives & design: Compare political, psychological, economic, and technical drivers, including incentives embedded in platform policies, ad markets, creator economies, and recommender feedback loops.
• Cross-platform dynamics: Study displacement, overshadowing, and attrition across news, search, social, short-video, messaging, and creator platforms; examine multilingual and cross-regional flows.
• Consequences for people and policy: Measure effects on attention, beliefs, trust, participation, polarization, representation, and agenda status in policymaking venues.
• Method innovation: Propose designs to detect and validate manipulation (e.g., changepoint and null-signal tests; synthetic controls for “missing coverage”; interrupted time series and event studies; algorithmic and search audits; field experiments and platform-partner studies; mixed-method linkages among moderation logs, monetization changes, and public attention).
• Norms & governance: Evaluate transparency, accountability, and regulatory approaches; compare governance regimes across countries and platform types.

This collection integrates classic agenda-setting/building with the revitalized concept of agenda cutting to foreground actor-level mechanisms across media systems. We extend Colistra’s newsroom-facing account to platform governance and user-driven coordination, offering a single forum to cumulate and compare evidence on how agendas are built, steered, gated, and cut. Vargo & Amazeen’s large-scale design shows that cutting is detectable—and, in some contexts, more prevalent than building—underscoring the need for systematic, comparative, and replicable research that generalizes to the broader space of agenda manipulation. The issue aims to produce an evidence base that scholars, journalists, technologists, and policymakers can use to evaluate how salience is governed in the contemporary attention economy.
We welcome contributions from communication, political science, sociology, computer and data science, information science, economics, psychology, law and public policy, HCI, STS, and related fields. All methodological traditions are in scope, including—but not limited to—computational text and trace analyses; field, lab, and survey experiments; platform and search audits; ethnography and newsroom studies; qualitative comparative analysis; network and intermedia models; policy/document analysis; and mixed-methods designs that triangulate across modalities. Registered Reports, replication studies, methodological notes, and data resources are encouraged.

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• Hypothesis and Theory
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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: agenda setting, agenda cutting, digital platforms, algorithmic influence, public opinion, information manipulation

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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