Social Media

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my excellent colleague Ehsan Dehghan, whose focus is on the current situation in Iran. Iran’s media ecosystem is tightly controlled by the regime, with many social media platforms banned but accessible via VPNs and other workarounds.

Current protests in Iran are only the latest in a long series of anti-regime protests that date back at least as far as 1999, often over regime censorship, election fraud, the economic situation, and regime violence towards women and other groups. The protests appear to be …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my fabulous QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko, whose focus is on online support for Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Such supporters may be based all around the world; one of Kateryna’s informants is a woman in her fifties from Japan who is involved in the NAFO initiative, for instance, through activism on Xitter. And while this platform is becoming much less hospitable to pro-Ukraine activists, she and others persist in their work nevertheless.

Such online political activism is much more than mere slacktivism …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Tom Divon, whose focus is on war influencers reporting from war zones; this can provide insights into the lived experience in such spaces, but can also misrepresent and misinform about this experience.

Social media platforms have accelerated the spread of such war content, and have themselves become environments for hybrid warfare. Media no longer just disseminate conflict information, but are themselves shaping conflict conduct and participation. This has been the case for war reporting for many decades, but is now also affected …

My next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on activism and resistance, and starts with Laura Cervi, whose focus is on makeup activism. Such activism responds to gendered violence, for instance in the context of the Ni Una Menos or Mahsa Amini Woman Life Freedom protests and more recently the war on Gaza, by appropriating platform-native beauty practices for political protests, such as makeup videos on TikTok.

This project engaged in a purposive sampling of hundreds of such videos from TikTok for a comparative multimodal analysis. TikTok is not a neutral channel in …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Carolina Parreiras, whose focus is on the circulation of violent images on Telegram that would be censored on other platforms. Her focus here is especially on Brazil, and she is employing a lurker ethnography approach, during the Operação Contenção in late October and early November 2025.

Such lurking is a form of participant observation, but ethically and morally questionable, since the presence of the anthropologist in an online group is not visible to other members of that group; however, if the researcher …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Rita Hermann-Gsenger, whose focus is on the German Querdenken movement which emerged especially in response to COVID-19 government health measures; it started in early 2020 and peaked in August 2020, and used Telegram as a key tool for its own organisation.

The key interest here is on Querdenken’s monetisation ecosystem; this combines platform-mediated income with multi-channel monetisation strategies. It draws on heterogeneous monetisation streams in a layered environment of communication, payment, financial, and commercial infrastructures.

The approach to this can be split …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Christian Schwieter, whose focus is on deplatformed far-right activists on Telegram during COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How do such activists claim legitimacy during crises?

The focus here is on the UK far-right activist ‘Tommy Robinson’, a former leader of the fascist EDL who has self-styled himself now as a citizen journalist; and the Austrian Martin Sellner, an Identitarian influencer who is also the chief strategist of a ‘remigration masterplan’ endorsed by the German far right and presents himself as …

(Content warning: contains references to self-harm and suicide.)

The first session on this second day at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City for me is on digital extremism, and we start with Sean McCafferty. His focus is on coerced self-harm as a form of nihilist violent extremism (NVE), and on the legal protections against this that do or do not exist in the European context.

This is a new phenomenon which has become a growing topic in recent years, also in counterterrorism contexts (though perhaps it does not fit this category especially well). NVE occurs both …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my colleague Sam Vilkins, whose focus is on the study of political defectors’ communication practices. This is influenced by the gradual incursion of social media logics into politics, which has led to the rise of political influencers as well as of politicians-as-influencers, as well as to a decline in partisan allegiance.

Overall, this has led to increasing doubt about the costs and benefits of being part of a party machine, and manifested in a growing number of political defectors who see …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my fabulous colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on tracking the ideological trajectories of Australian political influencers (with a later extension to German influencers as well). Here, the focus is on high-visibility political influencers for the period of 2016 to 2025.

Such changes in position might point to an erasure of complexities, which is also a symptom of destructive polarisation. By adjusting their positioning on various issues, influencers may increasingly form antagonistic camps, leading to greater and more profound polarisation. Political influencers …