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The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Carlos Entrena-Serrano and Tom Wright, whose interest is in TikTok creators’ response to the Trump government’s efforts to affect how TikTok works. Both Trump and Biden pushed for a change in ownership in TikTok’s US operations during their Presidencies; this has the potential to profoundly affect millions of users, especially if it ends up changing what content is promoted by the platform.

TikTok is now a sociotechnical assemblage that is deeply embedded into the lives of its many users; efforts to change how it …

The next session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow starts with Areyana Proctor, whose focus is on racialised misogyny in the digital Manosphere: misogynoir. This is also a branding and monetisation strategy in digital content creation which is deliberately embraced by some influencers in the Manosphere.

Platform moderation is a specific risk faced by content creators, and misogyny towards women of colour is seen as a lower-risk approach, and an engagement tactic. Areyana explored this through a content analysis of some of this content, focussing on the YouTube channels of content creators with various racial identities. She …

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 …

The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Ella Duncan and Avery Fraser, whose focus is on true crime content’s gendered constructions of mothers who kill. Media representations of violence against women tend to reproduce gender inequalities, and this remains true for digital forms of such content.

True crime podcasting is a genre dominated by women, who present themselves as feminists, yet it remains riddled with misogynist tropes and stereotypes; this applies especially also to the women who committed homicides who may be covered in such podcasts. This project addresses three such …

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:

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 …