Streaming Media

The post-lunch panel at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on polarisation, and starts with a paper by Marco Bastos, who begins by introducing the various understandings of polarisation that exist in the literature. These also differ by the unity of analysis, and the present study focusses on narratives as its unit of analysis. Can these be quantified, and their polarising qualities assessed?

Narratives, put simply, are stories about how and why things happen. There are various structural models of narratives, such as Greimas’s actantial model, involving a key subject aided by supporters and frustrated …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Tom Divon, whose focus is on war influencers reporting from war zones; this can provide insights into the lived experience in such spaces, but can also misrepresent and misinform about this experience.

Social media platforms have accelerated the spread of such war content, and have themselves become environments for hybrid warfare. Media no longer just disseminate conflict information, but are themselves shaping conflict conduct and participation. This has been the case for war reporting for many decades, but is now also affected …

My next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on activism and resistance, and starts with Laura Cervi, whose focus is on makeup activism. Such activism responds to gendered violence, for instance in the context of the Ni Una Menos or Mahsa Amini Woman Life Freedom protests and more recently the war on Gaza, by appropriating platform-native beauty practices for political protests, such as makeup videos on TikTok.

This project engaged in a purposive sampling of hundreds of such videos from TikTok for a comparative multimodal analysis. TikTok is not a neutral channel in …

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 …

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 …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the great Eddy Hurcombe, presenting a paper co-authored with Anand Badola. This explores how audiences engage with influencer-style news on TikTok and Instagram.

The rise of such news influencers is a sign of the continuing crisis of journalism, and particularly its loss of younger audiences in favour of other voices. Some of these are explicitly ideological, including deeply problematic far-right actors. In response, major news organisations are also employing news influencers who employ similar content aesthetics and create more informal news content …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Elena Pilipets, who brings our focus back to TikTok and its glitch aesthetics. The platform is built on templateability and content reuse, but so far our emphasis in understanding glitch aesthetics has been on the visual rather than the sonic aspect.

Sounds are objects of resonance, and on TikTok they resonate across videos through the repetition and reuse that is a key aspect of the platform; but in ‘deep TikTok’ practices such sounds are multiply overlaid until they are no longer …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Marc Tuters, whose interest was peaked by videos of celebrities campaigning for Burkina Faso leader Ibrahim Traoré. These videos were part of a broader campaign of AI slop supporting Traoré, who has strong links to the Russian regime, and this led to a broader investigation of Russian influence operations.

Such operations no longer employ conventional propaganda dissemination techniques, but instead involve and enrol platforms and users in the production and dissemination of propagandist content; this is a form of memetic entrainment which …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Daniël de Zeeuw, whose focus is on the White House’s TikTok account and its appropriation of vibe-edits on the platform. On such platforms, multisensory streams and themes are complemented by fuzzy genres, and might be studied more appropriately through digital rhythm analysis that explores how we navigate digital media and digital media navigate us.

Vibes have become a medium for feelings, and describe a kind of postdigital intimacy where free-floating low-intensity emotion reigns and narrative recedes. Such vibes are now also increasingly …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Marloes Geboers, whose interest is in content moderation on audiovisual social media platforms, with a focus on two 2024 German state elections. These elections have been noted for the substantial presence of TikTok videos related to the far-right AfD party, with limited moderation especially of hate speech where it existed in the audio layer rather than in on-screen captions.

But beyond this, there is also a question of how different ideological actors utilise this same latent space of the TikTok environment. Multi-modal …