Social Media

The third presenter in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Frederik Weber Henriksen, whose focus is on cross-cutting exposure to news content in the Danish context. This research is being done in the context of increasing polarisation, even in Denmark, which implies that hearing voices from opposite sides matters for ensuring that people form better-informed worldviews.

When encountering social media posts that one disagrees with, there are various opportunities for engagement; broader media use is likely to result in greater cross-cutting exposure, but such cross-cutting exposure itself does not necessarily lead to …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Klara Matusewicz, whose focus is on assumptions about legitimate content moderation on Mastodon. Content moderation is of course also highly controversial in corporate platform contexts, and there is always a conflict between too strict and too lax content moderation; the Fediverse promises alternative moderation solutions, but these are not necessarily less controversial.

How do Mastodon moderators negotiate their political legitimacy, then? Since each instance is subject to the decision-making of its operators, issues of concentration, agency, and legitimacy have not been …

And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Sigrid Kannengießer, whose interest is in the media practices of Fediverse community activists as they contradict platform capitalism. Such platform capitalism is characterised by hegemonic organisation within current capitalist practices, and increasingly closely connected to technofascism.

Drawing on practice theory, the patterns of contradicting platform capitalism can be examined systematically; these include both acting with media (using media technologies as mediators) and acting on media (putting the focus of action on media and digital technologies, e.g. through infrastructuring). A focus on …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Luigia Tricase, who explores the concept of the emancipatory Internet. This requires not only a diagnosis of current problems, but also the envisioning of real utopias, to be reached via a theory of change.

Such a theory of change requires oppositional and confrontational change, symbiotic change within institutional arrangements, and interstitial change-making within the existing social order. The interstitial theory of change applies especially to the emancipatory potential of the Fediverse, in fact.

This paper works with 15 interviews and observations with …

The second presenters in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City are Leonardo Foletto, Guilherme Flynn Paciornik, and Damny Laya, whose focus is on the Brazilian Fediverse, and on what happens after people move from corporate platforms to the Fediverse environment.

This is understood as a case of decentralised deplatforming: the voluntary, horizontal migration of users and communities from corporate to non-corporate spaces. This is neither deplatforming nor replatforming, since it involves a collective but non-centralised migration mediated by open protocols and autonomous governance.

The team studied this through interviews with instance maintainers, rather …

The final session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City for the day is a panel on alternative social media platforms, and starts with a look back at some of the old questions about independent and networked platforms to which the recent move to the Fediverse and other alternatives has returned us again.

We begin, though, with a paper by Robert Gehl, who presents a genealogy of these alternative platforms. The takeover and enxittification of Twitter by Elon Musk pushed many users to explore Mastodon, Bluesky, and other platforms running on their underlying protocols (such as …

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 next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Frederik Weber Henriksen, whose interest is in cross-cutting engagement and polarisation. This is often connected to people sorting into homogeneous information environments (or ‘echo chambers’), yet cross-cutting exposure is actually very common in everyday experience, and such exposure can itself also be a source of polarisation.

Passive and active cross-cutting engagement and polarisation turn out to be more complex matters than simple ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ narratives tend to suggest, not least also because such cross-cutting exposure can also occur in …

The post-lunch panel at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on polarisation, and starts with a paper by Marco Bastos, who begins by introducing the various understandings of polarisation that exist in the literature. These also differ by the unity of analysis, and the present study focusses on narratives as its unit of analysis. Can these be quantified, and their polarising qualities assessed?

Narratives, put simply, are stories about how and why things happen. There are various structural models of narratives, such as Greimas’s actantial model, involving a key subject aided by supporters and frustrated …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my QUT colleague Shana Mohammadamini, whose focus is also on the protests in Iran in January 2026 that led to the regime’s murder of some 40,000 people.

Western responses to this also included the creation of AI imagery meant to support Iran and Iranians against their regime; one of the people engaging in this is the Polish content creator Rafal Wegiel, for instance, and Shana examined the themes and messages of such content.

Themes included women and freedom, resistance, protest, and mourning …