Streaming Media

In the next session at the AoIR 2025 conference I was part of an excellent roundtable on data access organised by Fabio Giglietto and featuring Jessica Yarin Robinson, Josephine Lukito, Richard Rogers, and me, which of course I didn’t blog; for the first post-lunch session I’m in a session on strategies and tactics that starts with Leandro Augusto Borges Lima. His focus is on the Mexican band The Warning, which consists of three sisters from Monterrey; through playing the video game Rock Band they became interested in rock’n’roll and went viral when they posted a Metallica cover on YouTube in …

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is David Craig, whose focus is on Thai creator culture. Creator culture is now a worldwide phenomenon; these creators exist across multiple platforms within a complex transnational cultural industry and media ecology, but this still also has many diverse national and local forms.

Creators exist at the nexus between platforms, content, management, and community; this is inflected by the specific contexts of national imaginations, technonationalisms, and digital nationalism that configure differently in each country. There is also a kind of platform nationalism as national governments, media, tech, and users …

The second speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Cara Wallis, whose interest is in feminist fansubbing (or femsubbing) in China. Young women in China who identify as feminists attempt to educate and encourage others in part through such fansubbing practices; some but not all of them identify as activists, and they form a loose online network pushing back against misogyny and male domination.

Fansubbing is one part of their practices: fandom is well understood as having the potential to lead to political participation since it is part of an active, agentive, and potentially resistant participatory culture …

The final session for this first full day at the AoIR 2025 conference is on online communities, and begins with Nina Duque, whose focus is on K-Pop fandom on YouTube in Quebec. Local francophone Quebecois teenage fangirls have embraced K-Pop, much like other fan communities around the world; this is even though K-Pop is of course a highly mass-produced and industrialised entertainment product.

Much of this is consumed via YouTube, and teenagers see this as much better than television because of the instant accessibility of K-Pop content; this meets a local participatory culture, and K-Pop thereby becomes a networked cultural …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yoojin Chung, whose interest is in emotional contention in collective online co-viewing: watching the same show together across several locations, while also seeing each other’s faces and reactions. This can be facilitated for instance via platforms like Teleparty, previously known as Netflix Party, which is now used by some 20 million people worldwide and hosts some 700,000 co-viewing events per month.

Such collective experiences may be affected by social conformity, where participation patterns converge due to social peer pressure, and emotional contagion, where emotional expressions are …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Tanmay Samanta, whose focus is on digital greenwashing. Social media, and especially influencers on social media platforms, are critical to promoting sustainable consumerism; influencer marketing is also a key element of greenwashing, however.

Their style of storytelling is central to their success, and considerable effort goes into this. Greenwashing, in particular, purposefully creates false, favourable opinions about a product, service, or company’s efforts to be environmentally friendly. Tanmay explored this especially for social media influencers in India, examining their influence, their use of sustainability or greenwashing …

The next speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Felix Gaisbauer, whose interest is in pathways towards engagement with political content on TikTok. The platform has increasingly been identified as an important space for such engagement, with right-wing and far-right actors apparently especially active. This has caused some commentators to call for more non-extremist political content on TikTok, which assumes that such content does not already exist, that there is demand for it, and/or that the TikTok algorithm privileges extremist content.

To better understand this, we do need to distinguish more properly between the supply of and demand …

The final speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is David Wegmann, who returns us to the Danish YouTube data donation study we discussed earlier: his work is to make sense of these data, with a particular focus on extracting features from the YouTube videos encountered by participating users.

Collectively, these users watched some 18 million videos; some 3 million of those are advertisements inserted into organic YouTube videos, though. This leaves some 7 million unique videos, indicating a typical long-tail distribution of user attention to these videos.

Details about what types of videos these data represent are more …

The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is the great Jessica Walter, presenting a large data donation study involving YouTube users in Denmark. Such data donations are increasingly prominent in light of the decline of social media data APIs; they are enabled in Europe also by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which enables users to claim a copy of their digital data from the platforms they engage with.

These data packages can then be donated to researchers, and provide considerable detail about user activities and experiences on such platforms; the insights they provide are also skewed somewhat by …

I’m chairing the next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference, which is on disinformation and trolling. We start with Hanyu Zhang, with a paper on the Donald Trump assassination attempt and its discussion on the Chinese platform Douyin. In China, there has been a strong focus to ‘positive energy’ on social media, promoting core ideological values and nationalist narratives. This has also been applied to discussions of Donald Trump, where responding narratives highlighted both the challenges to China and the country’s resilience in the face of such challenges.

Douyin, whose international spinoff is TikTok, has been a crucial space for …