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 their own values and brands as misaligned with the parties they belong(ed) to. Australia has seen a series of such defections over the past few years, and this also enables a study of how these defectors’ communication practices change before and after their defection.
This can be done by comparing their social media posts against their official party platform documents both before and after defections, and uses a particular text comparison tool originally designed for bible verses. However, the results to date, while statistically significant, do not necessarily show any conclusive patterns yet.
This may be an indication of limitations in the underlying data, given that party policy statements and politicians’ social media posts are relatively brief and do not lend themselves to easy direct comparison. Further, similarity might not necessarily be the best metric here; dissimilarity may be a more useful measure, but is more difficult to capture. Perhaps a keyword-based approach might be more useful here.
