The final speakers in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City are Camilla Folena and Enrico Mariani, whose focus is on the Telegram channels of the ViVi Warriors, who are an online/offline ‘non-violent’ movement that emerged in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meta banned them in 2021 as an adversarial network spreading COVID-19 misinformation, which forced them into the Telegramsphere.
The group has a clear social movement identity, which is visually well-defined and also used as a recruitment mechanism. Movements like this exploit the crisis of trust by establishing their own epistemic authority, contesting the authority of mainstream societal institutions and thereby putting themselves in conflict with these institutions. This intersects with conspiracist discourses.
This project, then, examined the platformised practices of this group on Telegram, through a process of digital ethnography that employed a lurking approach; it may be complemented by interviews in the future. But following the flow and staying with the flow is also complicated, and requires and observation of language choices and practices within this community.
The ViVi galaxy on Telegram represents a distributed geography which consists of three interconnected environments; the information orbit of 19 channels that are not ViVi channels as such; the identity cluster of 21 channels that are directly related to the movement; and the territorial extension of the movement beyond Italy and beyond the online environment of Telegram. Across all three, one logic dominates: broadcasting matters more than conversation. Only admins post, and there are few comments and feedback mainly through reactions.
A cross-cutting practice in the orbit and identity cluster is antagonistic synchronisation: it remixes mainstream media flows into internally coherent narratives, and uses media visibility as a resource for collective identity building (also drawing on offline appearances such as graffiti). Strategies here include decontextualisation, decontextualisation, and source anchoring. Opposition to mainstream media does not mean rejection of online media, then, but creative reuse.
ViVi’s manifesto makes these strategies explicit; they are actively trying to break into media coverage in order to make the movement more visible. Identity-building practices are important here, too, and have been successful also to build communities in countries outside of Italy: this draws on a recognisable logo and visual identity, as seen in graffiti, stickers, DIY and grassroots merchandise, and platformed visual content production. This is simultaneously ludic and formative.
There is also a consistent communicative register, which directs suspicion towards everyday mainstream news but suspends disbelief when it comes to the movement’s own core views. This is expressed through scientific, denunciatory, and other narrative registers, and can be seen across various narratives addressed by the movement; these include scientific knowledge about the pandemic itself, the untrustworthiness of the mainstream media, the body as a frontier of resistance, and moral and family values.
ViVi’s epistemic and moral authority originates outside its own system, then: exclusion and marginalisation by societal authorities is strategically recast as a badge of epistemic authority.
