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 are especially relevant here as they are key intermediaries who often package various issues into their content.
Such influencers can act as partisan agitators, identitarian entrepreneurs, issue-specific advocates, and in many more ways; their positions can be identified by paying attention to issue salience, issue stance, and issue complexity. Such an analysis should be applied to each of their content posts, in order to track developments over time.
At present, the analysis focusses on YouTube influencers; these are identified by conducting a seed search using a wide range of issue-related search terms, identifying genuine influencers, gathering their full video histories, and then analysing them for the issues they address.
Initial analysis has already found that more recently posted videos are greater in number, and come with greater detail in their descriptions and other metadata; at the same time, there is also considerable stability in posting activity and the share of political content in influencer channels. Also, the presence of political content does not seem to be affected much by outside events like elections, except for the COVID-19 pandemic.
That said, major events obviously drive brief bursts in the presence of specific keywords and issues across the full dataset, though individual channels are generally quite stable in their issue profiles.
Overall, then, political content in channels grows mainly through a rise in video counts; per channel, content levels and issue profiles remain quite stable; small changes in issues occur in response to events, with only COVID-19 significantly shifting the issue mix; but more detailed analysis is required to trace individual influencers’ trajectories.
