Streaming Media

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Hannah Fecher, with a paper on the impact of the algorithmic environments of short-video platforms on political communication. Political actors have begun to adapt their content to these platform cultures (or to how they understand them) in order to reach constituents.

But content distribution is highly personalised and optimised to platform engagement, and some video characteristic are associated with higher vitality. Users also report a mismatch between viral tendencies and their own content preferences, however, especially also with respect to political content …

The next presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Siyu Zhang, whose focus is on political livestreaming. Such livestreams typically consist of the live video itself, alongside a live chat feed; some platforms also provide ‘super chat’ message functionalities which receive greater visibility and may also be picked up by the influencer themselves during the livestream.

Influencers themselves may signal their political identity through visible paraphernalia, express identity through their background settings, show relevant recent chat messages, and call for donations. Such monetary participation by audiences captures a behaviour that other metrics …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Felicia Loecherbach, whose interest is in video-based data donation, in the specific context of TikTok. Data donation is now a growing trend in digital media studies, of course, and many workable approaches to this have been developed, but to work with this approach remains difficult in practice.

TikTok is a key target for this – both because of its current importance with certain user demographics, the limitations of its API, and the fact that API-based observations do not accurately represent the experience …

Up next at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Ramin Soleymani, whose focus is on the analysis of social media content from a social ecological perspective. The use of social media has enabled digital nature experiences, somewhat making up for an overall decline in the direct nature experiences of an increasingly urban population; this might lead to the emergence of digital relational values including seeding, spreading, and grounding.

Relational values are a relatively new concept in the science policy arena; they complement nature’s instrumental (extractive) and intrinsic (inherent) values. Relational values refer to the relationships …

The final speaker at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library today is Kristina Petzold, whose focus is on the question of whether music-related user-generated content can be seen as cultural heritage – this includes, for instance, some of the creative content generated and shared during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is part of post-digital everyday practice.

This includes content remixes, memes, and mashups, and is therefore highly referential; it is culturally relevant (and the cultural relevance of remix practices is now formally recognised under German law); but it is also highly ephemeral, especially where it exists in …

The final speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Kieran McGuinness, Hannah Adler, and Susan Grantham, further exploring the role of influencers in the TikTok and Instagram campaigns of the major parties during the 2025 Australian federal election. This project surveyed Australian voters for their experiences with political content on these platforms during the election, some months after the election. It received some 1661 responses from a diverse group of participants.

Participants used these platforms at minimum several time a week; around 50% used them several times a day or more. There were no substantial gender differences …

The third speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is the great Susan Grantham, focussing on the 2025 Australian federal election campaign on TikTok. TikTok is now also a political campaigning tool; it was present in the 2024 US election campaign, and again in the 2025 Australian election. This study collected some 289 TikTok posts from the Australian Labor Party, 112 from the Greens, and 154 from the Liberals; the interest here is in the content and communication strategies that such content reveals.

The Greens had some 80 positive and policy-focussed videos; some 46 covered traditional political procedures …

The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.

Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms …

The second paper in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is by my QUT colleague Klaus Gröbner, whose focus is on transnational similarities between far-right news outlets. The far right has increasingly connected at a transnational level in recent years even in spite of its largely nationalist orientation; CPAC and the network of ‘patriot’ parties in Europe are both vehicles for this, and this has also led to a coalescence in their talking points over time – positioning themselves against ‘the establishment’, aligning themselves with white supremacist ideas, opposing gender policies and LGBTIQ+ rights, and pushing climate change disinformation …

And the second keynote at the AANZCA 2025 conference is by the great Crystal Abidin. She begins by introducing herself as an anthropologist of Internet cultures, building especially also on standpoint theory and triangulation as a methodological framework. Her work has focussed especially on longitudinal ethnographies of Internet celebrity and social media pop cultures; she is best known, of course, for her work on influencer ecologies and economies.

This addresses communities and culture, functions and sociality, and structures and politics; over its several iterations, this work has examined influencers as a job description and culture of practice, as a concept …