Social Media

And the final speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Monica Vania Chavez, Anna Feigenbaum, and Rinlapas Ketverapong, whose focus is on divine feminine energy content on TikTok. This encourages women to ‘step into their feminine energy’ but ultimately returns to highly traditionalist gender roles. This sits oddly next to ‘trad wife’ ideas: trad wives romanticise the past and draw on Christian roots, while divine femininity is rooted in alternative spirituality.

This project explores this for TikTok, but creating a new account and searching for divine femininity content, selecting a total of 24 …

And the next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Catherine Baker, whose focus is on scientific claims in the (Neo-)Manosphere. The far right is often described as anti-science, but this is too simplistic; instead, they are more selective in their engagement with scientific information.

The Manosphere is now well-established as an amalgamation of misogynist and anti-feminist groups, traditionally based in online fora and communities but increasingly also mainstreamed into generic social media and especially also streaming media sites. This has led to the rise of the term Neo-Manosphere to describe these new …

I’m starting off the next session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow, presenting our analysis of Taylor Swift fandom on Reddit on behalf of my team. Slides are below:

The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Umberto Famulari, whose interest is in the use of Instagram in Italian politics, with a particular focus on the 2024 regional elections. This is driven especially by the continued lack of focus on the multimodal integration of images and text in political campaigning. Indeed, studies of Instagram treat posts there as cohesive messages; the way text and images work together or against one another here is far less extensively explored.

Italian regional elections provide a particularly interesting context for this, since they often involve …

The morning session of Day Two at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow starts for me with a presentation by Gil Sharon, on the MAGA movement’s presence on TikTok. The 2024 US election was the first election where TikTok played a significant role, and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement used the platform extensively for its campaigning.

Charlie Kirk was one of the most significant MAGA figures on TikTok, and believed that there was something about the platform that particularly managed to reach potential Trump supporters. This also involved a substantial collaborative effort; it engaged not only in top-down messaging …

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference is Ursula Shepherd, whose focus is on negative social media discourses about sexual violence survivors seeking justice. The voices of victim-survivors are often weakened by the failures of the criminal justice system, leading them to seek informal justice through public discourse – including by naming and shaming the perpetrators online and thereby protecting others. This may happen in fully public spaces, or more controlled online environments.

But negative discourses that downplay abuse or denigrate victim-survivors may also affect other survivors; this is a significant concern. How …

The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Tess Arnold, whose focus is on fan responses on social media to the ‘failed finales’ of popular TV shows.

Such failures may be due in part to the creators or showrunners of such shows, who are built up as television auteurs who are featured in entertainment media nearly as much as the cast themselves; to the show’s fans, who engage in textual poaching to create their own fan fiction, fan art, and other derivative content that celebrates and extends the show’s participatory culture; and/or …

This week I’m in Glasgow for the biennial Social Media & Society conference, and after a morning of workshops the first session I’m attending has started with Qianzao Yang, whose focus is on the phenomenon of the ‘hot nerd’ as constructed on social media in China. This concretises and reconstructs contemporary cultural capital, and valorises university credentials, the STEM disciplines, and international experience in desirable locations.

It appreciates a ‘scholarly aura’, expressed through visible middle-class taste and lifestyles; intelligence and knowledge are transferred here into visible signs of attractiveness, and this reflects broader hierarchies of education and social status. At …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Yuzhou Tao, who encourages us to rethink framing. Conventional communication models followed a simple sender-message-receiver model; this was always overly simplistic, and communication is now shaped by algorithmic processes interacting with social networks. This now produces a three-phase power ecology.

The focus here is on body politics in China, which is affected by identity, visibility metrics, and governance. It explores which actor groups serve as primary frame sponsors, how such frames are contested, and how amplification provides persistence for such frames.

The focus …