Samantha Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, Axel Bruns, and Katherine M. FitzGerald
- 14 July 2026 – Social Media & Society conference, Glasgow
Presentation Slides
Abstract
Introduction
Information practices—the ways users select, share, cite, and interpret sources—are central to community formation and identity. These practices reveal how communities differentiate themselves not only through shared interests but through shared, social epistemologies: collective understandings of what counts as legitimate knowledge and authoritative sources (Fricker et al, 2020). Fan communities offer particularly concentrated, affective, and visible contexts for studying these dynamics. Operating within "feels culture" (Stein, 2015), fan communities form around intense emotional investment, highlighting the highly social and affective facets of negotiating information practices and identity formation.
The importance of studying information practices becomes particularly salient in contexts of growing epistemic polarization, where fragmented communities develop distinct standards for evaluating information. Fan studies scholarship establishes that both fandom and anti-fandom (Sandvoss, 2019) drive community formation (Gray, 2003; Barnes, 2022), with anti-fan identities existing both inside and outside traditional fan spaces. In contexts of epistemic polarization, some communities reject traditional authoritative sources in favor of collective sensemaking to establish and defend their own alternative frameworks. Scholarship on populist expertise (Marwick & Partin, 2022) helps us understand these dynamics, particularly patterns where interpretation of specific texts or events becomes central practice, mirroring patterns observed in communities centred on conspiratorial theorising.
Taylor Swift fandom during September 2023 to September 2024 provides a uniquely compelling case study. This period saw Swift's Eras Tour generate unprecedented cultural attention while events from her voter registration initiative to her presidential endorsement, alongside public focus on her relationship with NFL player Travis Kelce, sparked controversy and even conspiratorial discourse (Pengally, 2024). These developments prompted a rise in activity, as well as fan and anti-fan fragmentation. Reddit provides a valuable platform for studying these dynamics, particularly as research access to other major social media platforms has been increasingly restricted. During the study period, Swift-related subreddits experienced record activity and community splintering, with users drawing upon diverse sources—from social media posts to tabloids, mainstream news, and collectively-produced fan documents—making the platform rich for examining how communities navigate competing truth claims and establish hierarchies of legitimate knowledge.
Objectives
This study investigates information practices within Taylor Swift fandom communities on Reddit during a period of significant cultural discourse and community fragmentation. Our primary research question is: How do different Taylor Swift fandom communities on Reddit differ in their information practices, particularly regarding the sources they cite, share, and reference?
As part of this, we investigate what types of information sources (e.g., social media, news outlets, tabloids, fan documents, lyrics) are prevalent across different subreddit communities and different practices. Further, to what extent can we characterize communities based on their information practices and source usage—do patterns emerge at the subreddit level, for subreddit types, or around distinct user groups within and across subreddits?
This study contributes to growing scholarship on participatory information practices and epistemic communities online, while advancing methodological approaches for studying information practices on Reddit through URL and domain-level analysis and practice mapping.
Methods
Our approach combines qualitative ethnographic observation with quantitative analysis of information sharing practices across eleven Taylor Swift-related subreddits over one year (September 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024). The subreddit selection includes diverse communities: eight dedicated to Swift—including r/TaylorSwift (3.2 million members), relationship-focused r/travisandtaylor (116k members), queer-reading focused r/GaylorSwift (and r/Gaylor_Swift), and two explicitly anti-fandom subreddits—and three general subreddits filtered for Swift content (including r/popheads with 2.4 million members).
The mixed-methods design integrates four complementary approaches, each addressing different levels of community practice.
Contextual grounding: We conducted ethnographic observations to understand community norms and practices. We systematically analyzed subreddit rules and moderation practices, highlighting those specifically related to information sources and discussion topics. As part of the larger project, we constructed a timeline of Swift's major events during this period and corresponding changes in activity across subreddits, revealing reactive interplay as communities fractured with different perspectives on both Swift herself, and on previous moderation and content focus of existing communities.
Domain-level data collection: We extracted data on all domains shared in posts and within comments across the eleven subreddits, capturing both overall patterns and variations across subreddits, threads and users. This includes URLs shared in link posts, text posts, and comments, analyzed at the domain level to identify source types (e.g., twitter.com, variety.com, specific fan blogs). We manually categorized domains by type, based on their platform, tone/style and content—e.g. as entertainment news outlets, tabloids, fan-created/hosted resources, etc.
Practice mapping analysis: Information sharing patterns were examined alongside our broader practice mapping framework (Bruns et al., 2024), which clusters users by similarity of actions rather than direct interactions. This approach captures interplays between platform affordances and community norms, recognizing both subreddit-level and thread-level governance as well as individual user behavior as established in the literature (e.g. Robards, 2018; Rajadesingan, Resnick & Budak, 2020; a, Zhang & Althoff, 2022).
Comparative URL framing analysis: Building on the domain-level patterns identified through quantitative analysis, we conducted preliminary targeted qualitative investigation of how identical URLs are framed and interpreted across different subreddits. We manually identified instances where the same URL appeared in multiple communities and analyzed the surrounding discourse—including post titles, post text, and comment threads—to understand how communities mobilized the same sources for different purposes and from different perspectives.
Results
Our analysis reveals distinct information practice profiles across Swift fandom communities on Reddit, characterized by both the types of sources used and patterns of their presentation. Notably, users appear to congregate around particular source types even more strongly than around particular subreddits, suggesting connection to topic or type of discussion more robustly connective than community identity in this case.
Analysing practices at the individual user level, clusters form around distinct source types. There are clusters of US news sources separate to UK ones, as well as separation between trade magazines and tabloids. There are separate clusters for YouTube, for TikTok, and for fan-created content hosted on Google Docs and Tumblr. These do not appear to align strongly with subreddit communities. However, subreddits can be somewhat meaningfully characterised by their relative use of certain domains compared to others. The most striking—though expected—examples of these include the large, general pop music subreddit r/popheads being predominantly characterised around mainstream sources such as music industry magazines and links to music, and the queer analysis focused r/GaylorSwift and r/Gaylor_Swift connected to fan-created content on TikTok and Tumblr.
Further from this, our analysis supports indication of hierarchies of valued or privileged sources within different communities. Mainstream fan communities tend to prioritize official sources, including announcements from Swift and her team, and established entertainment media. Anti-fan communities show preference for tabloid sources and social media commentary that challenge official narratives, or at least offer more affective and opinionative commentary. Relationship-focused communities prioritize paparazzi images and direct social media sources. Communities oriented toward interpretive or conspiratorial readings demonstrate distinctive patterns of collective sensemaking, treating primary texts (lyrics, social media posts) as requiring decoding rather than accepting surface meanings.
Preliminary qualitative comparisons illustrate how different communities share the same sources with markedly different interpretations and framing, at both the domain and URL levels. This epistemic polarization—where communities cite conflicting sources about the same events or interpret identical sources through opposing frameworks—appears central to community differentiation, though these patterns operate at a more subtle level than initially expected.
Future Work
Understanding information practices within fragmented communities has implications for comprehending how online communities establish collective knowledge, resist or reinforce epistemic authorities, and navigate disagreement in participatory digital spaces.
This study opens several avenues for future research. While domain-level analysis provides valuable insights into source types and sharing patterns, further content analysis of how sources are used—whether cited as authoritative evidence, critiqued as biased, or reinterpreted through community-specific perspectives—would deepen understanding of information practices. Temporal analysis could reveal how these practices evolve in response to specific events or controversies.
The patterns observed raise questions about whether these clusters of information practices and hierarchies of source legitimisation in Taylor Swift fandom represent broader trends in online community formation. Applying this methodological approach to other online communities could illuminate this further, along with cross-platform analysis examining how practices shift as individuals navigate platform affordances and the corresponding communities that grow within and across different spaces online.
References
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Bruns, A., Kasianenko, K., Suresh, V. P., Dehghan, E., & Vodden, L. (2024). Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (arXiv:2407.05956). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.05956
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Pengally, M. (2024). Nearly one in five Americans believe Taylor Swift-Biden conspiracy, poll finds. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/14/taylor-swift-biden-psyop-conspiracy
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