Social Media

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on the 2018 and 2022 presidential elections in Brazil; the former elected the far-right anti-establishment candidate Jair Bolsonaro, while the latter saw the return of leftist Lula.

This same period also saw significant changes to the Facebook algorithm, from a downranking of news during 2018 through the emergency measures enacted after the 2020 US presidential election and coup attempt to a 2022 reduction of ‘political’ content (by some nebulous in-house definition) in users’ personal feeds …

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 …

The next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on conspiracy theories, with a focus especially on UFOs and UAPs. We start with an introduction by Marco Bastos. This has produces several hypotheses: especially, about UFOs as cover for military black ops; or about UFOs as a real, alien phenomenon. This hardly matters any more, though, because UFO claims also feed into an arms race in space technologies.

The rise of conspiracy theories also contributes to democratic backsliding: they tie into perceptions of a lack in transparency in democratic processes, especially in the US …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Destiny Hopkins, whose focus is on the terminology and identity of news influencers who have no formal journalism background or education. Such influencers have become increasingly prominent in US politics, and news influencers were invited to the Democratic National Congress alongside legitimate journalists, for instance.

This was seen critically by journalists and news organisations, of course, resulting in pushback from the influencers themselves; they pointed out the boundary work done by journalists to distinguish themselves from influencers, in particular. This is an …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Sally Tuomola, whose interest is in the produsage activities of Finnish news influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify. Her project engaged in semi-structured thematic interviews with 20 such influencers across the political spectrum, combined with digital trace data. These were chosen based on their self-presentation as correcting and countering mainstream journalism.

News influencers have been understood as doing boundary work in the journalistic field, critiquing or threatening mainstream journalism and positioning themselves as peripheral actors with distinct personas. Such news influencers engage …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the great Eddy Hurcombe, presenting a paper co-authored with Anand Badola. This explores how audiences engage with influencer-style news on TikTok and Instagram.

The rise of such news influencers is a sign of the continuing crisis of journalism, and particularly its loss of younger audiences in favour of other voices. Some of these are explicitly ideological, including deeply problematic far-right actors. In response, major news organisations are also employing news influencers who employ similar content aesthetics and create more informal news content …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Elena Pilipets, who brings our focus back to TikTok and its glitch aesthetics. The platform is built on templateability and content reuse, but so far our emphasis in understanding glitch aesthetics has been on the visual rather than the sonic aspect.

Sounds are objects of resonance, and on TikTok they resonate across videos through the repetition and reuse that is a key aspect of the platform; but in ‘deep TikTok’ practices such sounds are multiply overlaid until they are no longer …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Marc Tuters, whose interest was peaked by videos of celebrities campaigning for Burkina Faso leader Ibrahim Traoré. These videos were part of a broader campaign of AI slop supporting Traoré, who has strong links to the Russian regime, and this led to a broader investigation of Russian influence operations.

Such operations no longer employ conventional propaganda dissemination techniques, but instead involve and enrol platforms and users in the production and dissemination of propagandist content; this is a form of memetic entrainment which …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Daniël de Zeeuw, whose focus is on the White House’s TikTok account and its appropriation of vibe-edits on the platform. On such platforms, multisensory streams and themes are complemented by fuzzy genres, and might be studied more appropriately through digital rhythm analysis that explores how we navigate digital media and digital media navigate us.

Vibes have become a medium for feelings, and describe a kind of postdigital intimacy where free-floating low-intensity emotion reigns and narrative recedes. Such vibes are now also increasingly …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Marloes Geboers, whose interest is in content moderation on audiovisual social media platforms, with a focus on two 2024 German state elections. These elections have been noted for the substantial presence of TikTok videos related to the far-right AfD party, with limited moderation especially of hate speech where it existed in the audio layer rather than in on-screen captions.

But beyond this, there is also a question of how different ideological actors utilise this same latent space of the TikTok environment. Multi-modal …