The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Daniël de Zeeuw, whose focus is on the White House’s TikTok account and its appropriation of vibe-edits on the platform. On such platforms, multisensory streams and themes are complemented by fuzzy genres, and might be studied more appropriately through digital rhythm analysis that explores how we navigate digital media and digital media navigate us.
Vibes have become a medium for feelings, and describe a kind of postdigital intimacy where free-floating low-intensity emotion reigns and narrative recedes. Such vibes are now also increasingly being incorporated into the messaging of elite actors, generating ambient propaganda and even ambient extremism, not least also through AI slop.
The White House TikTok account has been creating such vibe edit videos for some time: fast-paced, affectively sticky, non-narrative, eclectic montages of highly aestheticised images and sounds that share the same ‘energy’. Such vibe edits might be expected to have a unique rhythmic signature, privilege affective over discursive forms, and prefer specific types of content, and this project tested this by gathering some 1,000 White House videos which were coded (in part) manually as well as via LLM for their formal features: sonic signature, semantic features, editing style, and video style.
Of these, the vibe-edit videos featured some 50 cuts per minute, well more than shitpost, narrative, and informative videos; they also had greater pulse strength and clarity in their editing; the top 100 most engaged-with videos had an even higher cut rate, and vibe-edit and shitpost videos were especially strongly represented here. Words per second and length tend to be much lower.
73% of all vibe-edit videos have no words, 77% have a clear beat, and the median length is 21 seconds. The assumption that they are non-narrative and fast-paced holds, therefore, while other assumptions have not yet been proven. Across all videos, key events in recent months feature prominently (such as the abduction of Nicolas Maduro or the attack on Iran), and affect as well as cut rates increase towards October 2026. (There are also some clever visualisations and sonifications here which I can’t reproduce, of course.)
This is a late-fascist language of ideas without words, then; in the TikTok context, it is a visuality without images that produces an affectively sticky feel.
