The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard, shifting our focus to Taylor Swift fandom on Reddit. The first Swiftie subreddit was created in 2010, but such fandom has evolved and diversified considerably over the years; several new subreddits emerged especially in 2023 in response to Swift’s romance with NFL star Travis Kelce. The present paper examines this for a period from September 2023 to October 2024.

/r/TaylorSwift remains the largest of these subreddits, but the anti-fandom subreddit /r/travisandtaylor was particularly active as the romance intensified in mid-2024. A smaller group …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, whose focus is on the manosphere on Reddit, with a particular focus on the gamergate controversy. This phenomenon has in part been studied from the perspective of radicalisation, but this is problematic: the focus of radicalisation studies is often driven by an anti-terrorism law enforcement agenda and centres the state and its institutions while othering religious and ethnic groups, rather than emphasising human experience.

A different way of approaching radicalisation is via counterpublics theory: such counterpublics are often defined in relation to …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my great colleague Ehsan Dehghan, whose focus is on sedimented polarisation across Reddit collectives. To what extent is there cross-ideological interaction on the platform? What forms does such interaction take: how deliberative or antagonistic is it?

Indeed, what do we mean by cross-ideological interaction? This could mean information sharing, cross-posting, cross-commenting, cross-linking between subreddits, or other discursive patterns. The project drew on a dataset of activity over 16 years across 11 subreddits, containing 6.2 million submissions from 801,000 authors and nearly 200 million comments from 5.5 million authors …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Ari Stillman, whose interest is in Reddit data analysis. Historically, Reddit has provided data on activities on the platform quite openly; its leaders had been strongly committed to open access and data sharing, but this changed substantially some 1.5 years ago when Reddit restricted its API, however.

This caused outrage in the user community, and especially amongst the unpaid community moderator workforce who relied substantially on API access to automate some aspects of their work. Following highly controversial debate, Reddit promised a Reddit 4 Researchers programme, yet this …

After a very lively roundtable on the Australian social media ban for young people at the AoIR 2025 conference, I’m now in a session on Reddit which features many of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues. We start with Dom Carlon, exploring the evolving trajectory of Reddit as a platform. What is the platform’s sense of identity, and how has this changed over its twenty-year history?

Reddit has shown remarkable staying power and has a unique position in the AI-infused Internet economy of today. It started in 2005 in pursuit of its mission to be ‘the front page of …

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, presenting a study of pro-Bolsonaro narratives on Facebook in Brazil. The key question here is whether online hyperpartisan groups are as stable as they are thought to be; is that true, and how does such stability fare in times of intense political crisis?

Brazil is an obvious case for the study of such questions. The project tracked some 59 pro-Bolsonaro accounts between 2021 and 2023, a timeframe including Bolsonaro’s election loss against Lula and his subsequent coup attempt. The dataset contains some 12 million …

It’s that time of the year, and I’ve made my annual pilgrimage to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the single most important highlight of the academic year. This year we’re in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, and after the local welcomes we start the conference proper with a keynote by the great Marie Santini from NetLab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who is also a genuine Niterói local. She begins by revisiting the timeline of Internet studies: we have now reached a moment of great rupture (the theme of this year’s conference) …