The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Marloes Geboers, whose interest is in content moderation on audiovisual social media platforms, with a focus on two 2024 German state elections. These elections have been noted for the substantial presence of TikTok videos related to the far-right AfD party, with limited moderation especially of hate speech where it existed in the audio layer rather than in on-screen captions.
But beyond this, there is also a question of how different ideological actors utilise this same latent space of the TikTok environment. Multi-modal semantic embeddings of these videos can help with an analysis of these phenomena, especially also as content creators utilise and recombine some of the same sounds, gestures, visual templates, hashtags, and other features in their own content.
Sound is especially interesting in this context, as sound creates ambient energies that orchestrate engagement. Sound compresses and dislocates time, and dissolves the distances between clusters of otherwise distinct video content – and this then also becomes an input signal to algorithmic recommender systems.
AfD video content plays this game of similarity very effectively, creating content which contains hateful messages but also utilises nostalgic audio tropes that connect it with mainstream content. Such videos then also become an audio template for other far-right content creators, which enables lazy derivative remixes too.
This is also true for visual templates, as in the example of using old East German motorbikes as a visual signal of political alignment with the AfD; such videos were often combined with a particular sound template, too (featuring the alt-right line ‘another Europe’), and this became the connection point between such videos even if some of the derivative content creators did perhaps not actually share this ideological alignment.
Sound becomes a networking tool, then, especially also through the sound templates available directly on TikTok for content creators; the way that TikTok connects the videos that use these same templates therefore becomes an entry point into deeply problematic spaces on the platform.
