10 Recommondations for researchers on anti-racist communication

Definition of anti-racist communication:

Anti-racist communication refers to intentional communicative practices aimed at combating racism across the micro, meso, and macro levels. Communicators can be individuals, groups, or whole organizations, personally affected by racism or not, and publicly known or not. The communication may occur within a specific anti-racist context or engage with racism in a more general sense. In terms of content, anti-racist communication varies in terms of message and format. It takes place across a wide variety of platforms, both online and offline, public and private, and can be disseminated through various media types. It reaches diverse audiences, affected or not affected by racism, with outcomes encompassing cognitions, emotions, and behaviors at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels.

Based on a scoping review of research on anti-racist communication on social media, we developed 10 recommondations for researchers.

1. Use an integrative definition of anti-racist communication that moves beyond context-specific descriptions to enable cross-study comparison and cumulative knowledge-building. In the following section, we present a suggestion based on this scoping review.
2. Move beyond descriptive accounts of your research subjects and instead ground your work in explicit theoretical frameworks, enabling research to generate cumulative, generalizable insights.
3. Compare different types of anti-racist content more systematically, identifying which message types and formats produce particularly strong effects on cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. Such comparative evidence is essential for practitioners designing evidence-based anti-racist communication strategies.
4. Consider the audience, not just the communicators. Invest in systematic audience research that moves beyond treating recipients as an undifferentiated mass. Specifically, examine how recipients‘ intersecting identity positions (race, gender, sexuality, and class) shape how anti-racist messages are received, processed, and acted upon.
5. Move beyond Twitter/X and invest in research on emerging platforms such as TikTok, as well as cross-platform designs that reflect the multi-platform reality of contemporary anti-racist activism.
6. Engage in interdisciplinary research more systematically, building shared frameworks rather than operating in parallel silos.
7. Account for dual outcome patterns and consider both positive and negative effects of anti-racist communication.
8. Prioritize research on algorithmic racial bias as a structural barrier to anti-racist communication, examining its mechanisms, scope, and consequences for the visibility and reach of anti-racist communication.
9. Addresses ethical considerations relevant to anti-racist communication—e.g., the anonymization of communicators of anti-racist communication in publications, and potential effects on individuals involved in studies who are exposed to anti-racist content such as personal testimonies.
10. Move beyond cross-sectional outcome measurement and prioritize longitudinal research that examines the temporal dynamics and persistence of anti-racist communication effects. Given the event-driven character of existing research, it is particularly relevant to examine whether effects persist beyond specific events or not.