The first paper session after the opening keynote at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium starts with Daphna Yeshua Katz and Ylva Hård af Segerstad, whose focus is on online support groups for stigmatised communities. They argue that such groups may actually limit these communities’ access to online support. This may be a problem related especially to scalability and searchability.

The project studied groups supporting anorexics, people in treatment for infertility, bereaved parents, and Israeli army veterans with PTSD, across a variety of platforms. It explored how media affordances determine the online boundary work of such online communities, by undertaking a …

I’ve arrived at the University of Urbino for the inaugural AoIR Flashpoint Symposium, our new initiative that highlights important current issues in Internet research through one-day, concentrated events. This year’s symposium operates under the title “Under the Radar: Private Groups, Locked Platforms, and Ephemeral Contents.”

The first keynote at the AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is by Crystal Abidin, whose focus is on Internet celebrities. There are a number of different types of such celebrities, from well-recognised global celebrities to more niche micro-celebrities who are known mainly to a specific subculture. These people cannot be identified from their engagement metrics alone …