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And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Gordon Dimitrieff, whose focus is on platform non-market strategies as a form of power projection, with a particular interest in the music industry.

Platform regulation is now having a moment, with various regulatory approaches around the world, and platform providers increasingly have their own internal departments to deal with such regulatory interventions; Gordon’s focus here is on how streaming platforms have responded to Canadian regulatory developments.

Platforms do not exist in a vacuum, of course, but are companies operating within a market, which …

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 next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Giota Alevizou, whose interest is the role of online encyclopaedias in establishing epistemic authority. This role goes back to the early enlightenment period, in fact, when printed encyclopaedias first provided apparently authoritative knowledge, but also contributed to information overload.

But online encyclopaedias – chiefly, Wikipedia – are also under considerable threat now; this is in part because of its limited and shrinking contributor and editor base, a continuing lack of support from academia, and the threat of exploitation by AI. Every era finds a …

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 …

And the final paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is presented by Matthias Kast and Martin Bürger, exploring the way that communicative AI technologies are being discussed in the German news media, with particular focus on the frames, actors, and topics.

New technology is often presented as either threat or progress, and various risk and progress frames can be defined here; a more general frame might also be identified. Their co-occurrence with actors and topics in communicative AI news coverage is also important to examine.

The study examined some 3,800 articles from …

I was the next presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, presenting our study exploring how various communicative AI chatbots respond to a range of old and new conspiracy theories. This has also already come out as an article in Media and Communication:

Katherine M. FitzGerald, Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, Timothy Graham, and Daniel Angus. “'Just Asking Questions': Doing Our Own Research on Conspiratorial Ideation by Generative AI Chatbots.” Media and Communication 14 (2026). DOI: 10.17645/mac.11337.

Here are the slides for our presentation: