The final panel for today at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City involves quite a number of colleagues from my team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, and we start with Vish Padinjar, whose focus is on trajectories of radicalisation on Reddit. This focusses especially on the GamerGate misogynistic harassment campaign in 2014, which snowballed into a broader Manosphere campaign of harassment targetting supposed ‘social justice warriors’.
Vish explores this through Reddit discussions from January 2014 to December 2016 across several gaming-related, toxic masculine, and feminist subreddits. What happened here is a form of radicalisation, but not in its conventional definitions which are focussed much more strongly on terrorist radicalisation.
A better way of understanding this is to use the concept of parasitic publics: dominant, hegemonic publics are generally opposed by progressive counterpublics that want to broaden the discursive space, but this also calls parasitic publics into action which resist such progressive efforts and instead seek to shift hegemonic discourses further towards their reactionary and even fascist perspectives. Such perspectives form around a phantasmagoric imaginary that combines fears about a loss of power and status and uses these as discursive motivation for the reactionary, parasitic pushback.
Vish’s project, then, explores the shifts in the discursive space that demonstrate these relations between these hegemonic, counter-, and parasitic publics. Reddit data do not lend themselves easily to an interaction network mapping that would take us some of the way to this; instead, the approach used here is practice mapping, which identifies the repeated discursive practices employed by specific actors in the overall discussion, and maps these in a multidimensional space based on their similarities. This is then further collapsed into a lower-dimensional space using UMAP.
This produces a similarity network with several notable clusters, and these clusters are not simply determined by their subreddit preferences, but also by other, much more fine-grained discursive practices. In fact, what emerges here are superclusters that map quite directly onto distinctions between hegemonic, progressive counter-, and reactionary parasitic publics.
Activities across these spaces can then also be explored over time. Here, the similarity comparisons show that various discursive markers relating to GamerGate, then Manosphere, and related ideologies come closer together over time; this shows the gradual entanglement between GamerGate as such and broader parasitic and phantasmagoric discussions.
