Blog

And the final speaker in this final session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Darsana Vijay, whose focus is the crisis in Indian fact-checking. Misinformation in India is a pressing societal issue; this has been highlighted especially in the context of the wide circulation of mis- and disinformation on WhatsApp, and its effects especially in rural areas with low digital literacies.

Such misinformation thus especially affects marginalised communities, especially also Muslims in India; this is a product of the increasingly Hindu-nationalist orientation of the ruling BJP party under Narendra Modi. Social media platforms have …

The third presenter in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Frederik Weber Henriksen, whose focus is on cross-cutting exposure to news content in the Danish context. This research is being done in the context of increasing polarisation, even in Denmark, which implies that hearing voices from opposite sides matters for ensuring that people form better-informed worldviews.

When encountering social media posts that one disagrees with, there are various opportunities for engagement; broader media use is likely to result in greater cross-cutting exposure, but such cross-cutting exposure itself does not necessarily lead to …

The next speaker in this final session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Helena Atteneder, whose focus is on news deserts and their mapping. Maps of news deserts construct spatial knowledge about journalism; news deserts themselves are a concept which refers to a lack of sufficient, reliable, and diverse local news, and this problem has been well recognised under this and other terms for some time.

But the term is also problematic due to its normative assumptions and descriptive fuzziness, and to approach this via mapping itself poses some notable questions. Mapping constructs rather …

We’ve just had a great roundtable of our Meta Content Library community of practice on this Saturday morning, so we’re already down to the final paper session of what has been another fabulous Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City. The first presenter in this session on journalism and its challenges is Gabriel Ponniah, whose focus is on US journalism’s reporting on generative AI during 2022-23.

ChatGPT burst into public consciousness during this time, and journalistic framing of emerging technologies has a significant impact of public understanding of such technologies; so, how did US journalism do? This project scraped …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Klara Matusewicz, whose focus is on assumptions about legitimate content moderation on Mastodon. Content moderation is of course also highly controversial in corporate platform contexts, and there is always a conflict between too strict and too lax content moderation; the Fediverse promises alternative moderation solutions, but these are not necessarily less controversial.

How do Mastodon moderators negotiate their political legitimacy, then? Since each instance is subject to the decision-making of its operators, issues of concentration, agency, and legitimacy have not been …

And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Sigrid Kannengießer, whose interest is in the media practices of Fediverse community activists as they contradict platform capitalism. Such platform capitalism is characterised by hegemonic organisation within current capitalist practices, and increasingly closely connected to technofascism.

Drawing on practice theory, the patterns of contradicting platform capitalism can be examined systematically; these include both acting with media (using media technologies as mediators) and acting on media (putting the focus of action on media and digital technologies, e.g. through infrastructuring). A focus on …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Luigia Tricase, who explores the concept of the emancipatory Internet. This requires not only a diagnosis of current problems, but also the envisioning of real utopias, to be reached via a theory of change.

Such a theory of change requires oppositional and confrontational change, symbiotic change within institutional arrangements, and interstitial change-making within the existing social order. The interstitial theory of change applies especially to the emancipatory potential of the Fediverse, in fact.

This paper works with 15 interviews and observations with …

The second presenters in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City are Leonardo Foletto, Guilherme Flynn Paciornik, and Damny Laya, whose focus is on the Brazilian Fediverse, and on what happens after people move from corporate platforms to the Fediverse environment.

This is understood as a case of decentralised deplatforming: the voluntary, horizontal migration of users and communities from corporate to non-corporate spaces. This is neither deplatforming nor replatforming, since it involves a collective but non-centralised migration mediated by open protocols and autonomous governance.

The team studied this through interviews with instance maintainers, rather …

The final session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City for the day is a panel on alternative social media platforms, and starts with a look back at some of the old questions about independent and networked platforms to which the recent move to the Fediverse and other alternatives has returned us again.

We begin, though, with a paper by Robert Gehl, who presents a genealogy of these alternative platforms. The takeover and enxittification of Twitter by Elon Musk pushed many users to explore Mastodon, Bluesky, and other platforms running on their underlying protocols (such as …

The final speakers in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City are Camilla Folena and Enrico Mariani, whose focus is on the Telegram channels of the ViVi Warriors, who are an online/offline ‘non-violent’ movement that emerged in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meta banned them in 2021 as an adversarial network spreading COVID-19 misinformation, which forced them into the Telegramsphere.

The group has a clear social movement identity, which is visually well-defined and also used as a recruitment mechanism. Movements like this exploit the crisis of trust by establishing their own epistemic authority, contesting …