Streaming Media

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Nico Spreen, whose focus is on the use of TikTok by populist parties in Germany during the 2025 federal election. TikTok may be expected to be especially valuable as a campaigning tool for populist parties, given its personalised, emotionalised, and algorithmically amplified content processes. Also, both the left-wing Linke and far-right AfD are especially popular with voters under 25, so there is substantial overlap between their voter bases and the TikTok userbase.

What shape does their populist communication take, then? Such communication usually employs people-centrism, anti-elitism, and an exclusion …

It’s a sunny Wednesday in Brno, and we’re starting the ECREA 2026 conference proper now. I’m in a session on the political uses of TikTok, which begins with Eduard-Claudiu Gross, on the situation in Romania. Romania annulled the first round of its presidential election in December 2024, due to a massive Russian election interference campaign, and TikTok played a role in this; the re-run in May 2025 took place in this complicated and polarised political and media environment.

This study, then, gathered some 50,000 TikTok videos from June 2024 to March 2025, from 1,000 authors, and from these examined the …

The next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Kajsa Falasca, whose focus is on TikTok engagement ahead of the upcoming Swedish election. TikTok analysis is complicated, and requires an attention to multimodal content; this study employed an approach called Multimodal Narrative Mapping, using a methodological approach which automatically scrolls through videos and analyses the content of the videos displayed.

In this sense, then, TikTok changes both the process of campaigning and the object of analysis: content served to users extends beyond the accounts that users themselves follow, and is also determined by what …

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Nadia Urban, whose focus is on algorithmic grooming and governance in social media cultures. Such processes require users to actively infer and internalise algorithmic norms: to learn the algorithm and bend it to their own ends.

But this cuts both ways: there is a conditioning mechanism in the everyday interaction between users and algorithms which also grooms the users. Algorithms produce social order in social media environments, while users are also active interpreters of these algorithm’s functionality; what is missing is a better …

The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Carlos Entrena-Serrano and Tom Wright, whose interest is in TikTok creators’ response to the Trump government’s efforts to affect how TikTok works. Both Trump and Biden pushed for a change in ownership in TikTok’s US operations during their Presidencies; this has the potential to profoundly affect millions of users, especially if it ends up changing what content is promoted by the platform.

TikTok is now a sociotechnical assemblage that is deeply embedded into the lives of its many users; efforts to change how it …

The next session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow starts with Areyana Proctor, whose focus is on racialised misogyny in the digital Manosphere: misogynoir. This is also a branding and monetisation strategy in digital content creation which is deliberately embraced by some influencers in the Manosphere.

Platform moderation is a specific risk faced by content creators, and misogyny towards women of colour is seen as a lower-risk approach, and an engagement tactic. Areyana explored this through a content analysis of some of this content, focussing on the YouTube channels of content creators with various racial identities. She …

And the final speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Monica Vania Chavez, Anna Feigenbaum, and Rinlapas Ketverapong, whose focus is on divine feminine energy content on TikTok. This encourages women to ‘step into their feminine energy’ but ultimately returns to highly traditionalist gender roles. This sits oddly next to ‘trad wife’ ideas: trad wives romanticise the past and draw on Christian roots, while divine femininity is rooted in alternative spirituality.

This project explores this for TikTok, but creating a new account and searching for divine femininity content, selecting a total of 24 …

The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Ella Duncan and Avery Fraser, whose focus is on true crime content’s gendered constructions of mothers who kill. Media representations of violence against women tend to reproduce gender inequalities, and this remains true for digital forms of such content.

True crime podcasting is a genre dominated by women, who present themselves as feminists, yet it remains riddled with misogynist tropes and stereotypes; this applies especially also to the women who committed homicides who may be covered in such podcasts. This project addresses three such …

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Gordon Dimitrieff, whose focus is on platform non-market strategies as a form of power projection, with a particular interest in the music industry.

Platform regulation is now having a moment, with various regulatory approaches around the world, and platform providers increasingly have their own internal departments to deal with such regulatory interventions; Gordon’s focus here is on how streaming platforms have responded to Canadian regulatory developments.

Platforms do not exist in a vacuum, of course, but are companies operating within a market, which …

The morning session of Day Two at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow starts for me with a presentation by Gil Sharon, on the MAGA movement’s presence on TikTok. The 2024 US election was the first election where TikTok played a significant role, and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement used the platform extensively for its campaigning.

Charlie Kirk was one of the most significant MAGA figures on TikTok, and believed that there was something about the platform that particularly managed to reach potential Trump supporters. This also involved a substantial collaborative effort; it engaged not only in top-down messaging …