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 …
The first full day at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City starts for me with a session on sonic social media, where time is amplified by sound. We start with an introduction by Elena Pilipets and Marloes Geboers, who begin by reminding us about the ambient nature of sound, which was played with by the pioneers of ambient music and theorised by various scholars focussing on the ambient commons, the role of sound vibrations, and the distribution of sound across physical and digital space.
But the first paper is by Sal Hagen, whose focus is on …
For the last stop of my current travels, I’m at the undisputed conference highlight of the academic year – the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City, which starts with a keynote by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil. She starts with the saying that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, a saying which is perhaps also applicable to our current sociotechnical situation – to the mixture of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. This is a mixture which cannot be separated any more; it is also a series of systems that beget each other: patriarchy creates colonialism, and …
