The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Tom Divon, whose focus is on advocacy influencers in the Middle East. These operate in a post-Arab Spring environment, which fundamentally changed the role of social media platforms in public communication in these countries: where they once helped the Arab Spring develop, they are now used (and allow themselves to be used) as instruments of state oppression. In response, activists worked out that they needed to exploit the affordances of the medium to get their messages out, without triggering the moderation mechanisms that exist on such platforms.
Influencers use this to build a parasocial relationship, and this has infiltrated all domains of life; this is authenticity labour, which produces performative activism that draws on silly citizenship, and is even applied to influencer activities related to the current wars in the region. Yet much of the work on this continues to take a Global North perspective which sees visibility as a net good, and expects activists to willingly adopt an activist identity – but in the region it is often the state which defines activists in order to persecute them.
Advocacy influencers may therefore become influencers also through the unintended consequences of content circulation, audience interpretation, and state responses. Even deliberate ambiguity may not offer protection, and unintended decontextualisation of innocent acts might result in state oppression. Such cases are common across the region.
Platform rules and safety frameworks do not help much here: they are often designed to police what users do to each other, not what states may do to users. Such frameworks are also usually designed in the Global North, and unaware of the specific contexts of other regions. This leaves content creators in the Middle East exposed to unintended consequences, and there is a pressing need to work with platforms as well as creators to address these concerns.
