AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research
Selected Papers of Internet Research (SPIR) is the open access online collection of papers presented at the annual international conferences of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR).
SCALING AI IN THE CLOUD: THE DISRUPTION OF “CLOUDIFICATION” IN CONNECTED AND AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES
This paper examines the case of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)—cars integrating “smart” digital components—to explore how “cloudification” has emerged as a key infrastructural transformation in the industrialization of AI. CAVs illustrate the “industrialization” of AI as it moves beyond specialized applications to acquire infrastructural characteristics across multiple industries. The paper builds upon insights from three fields: platform studies, science and technology studies (STS), and innovation studies. We conducted a large-scale analysis of patents related to CAVs, using both topic modelling and a large language model to inductively identify and explore patterns in a vast material. The mixed-methods analysis of patent documents enables us to understand both the strategies and imaginaries of cloudification in CAV technology and innovation discourse. The paper offers evidence of the cloudification of the automotive sector across two levels. First, on a high-level, we offer a mapping of this evolving ecosystem, identifying key connections between industry players, emerging cloud-based innovations, and the research hubs driving these developments. Second, on a granular level, the patents reveal distinct cloud business strategies among leading CAV firms, for example in how the cloud is enacted in practice. Ultimately, the paper contributes an in-depth analysis of the cloudification of CAVs, which exemplifies the broader industrialization of AI—an expansion of computational infrastructures that extends beyond traditional technology sectors to transform mobility and global economies.
Copyright (c) 2025 AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research
Global Projects, Local Histories: Tradition, Digital Activism, and Resistance in the Indigenous Esports Movement in Brazil
Electronic sports (esports) have emerged as a crucial space for Indigenous players in Brazil, particularly through the game Free Fire (FF), which is accessible via mobile devices. The increasing adoption of smartphones has enabled the formation of Indigenous teams across different regions of the country, creating new spaces for resistance and digital visibility. This ethnographic study explores the knowledge practices and gaming approaches of players from four Indigenous groups in Brazil: Apunirã, Ava-Guarani, Guarani, and Xakriabá. Grounded in experiential ethnography and decolonial Oral History, the research examines how these players negotiate their identities and advocate for Indigenous rights within the esports ecosystem, which has traditionally been dominated by non-Indigenous actors. Indigenous players utilize esports as a tool for digital activism, challenging stereotypes and denouncing political threats such as the “temporal framework” thesis, which underpins Brazil’s Law 14.701/23. Through esports platforms and digital social networks, they amplify their struggle for territorial rights and environmental justice, demonstrating that Indigenous participation in technology does not contradict their cultural identities but rather reinforces their presence in digital spaces. In this way, esports move beyond being merely a site of entertainment and become a space for digital sovereignty and decolonial resistance. This study contributes to the understanding of digital games through an ethno-racial perspective, highlighting how Indigenous players reframe gaming spaces to challenge colonial structures and assert their political and cultural existence.
DIGITAL IDENTITY, DATAFICATION AND EPIDERMALISATION IN MAE LA REFUGEE CAMP
Biometric cash transfers are becoming ubiquitous in the aid sector driven by donor demands for audit and cost efficiencies and as humanitarian organisations turn to technological solutions to address complex logistical challenges. What is often overlooked is the perspective of refugees themselves. Drawing on a mixed-methods study including 80 interviews and participatory action research, our paper examines biometric cash transfers as exemplars of digital identity systems from the point of view of Karen refugees in Mae La camp in Thailand. Focusing on the introduction of an aid distribution system based on face recognition, our findings reveal that while digital identity programmes offer some advantages, there are significant concerns with their implementation. The new system raises both practical and ethical concerns, such as reduced rations, systematic errors, and power asymmetries. This paper argues that digital identity is not simply a form of identity provided in digital format: the conversion of human beings into data has significant consequences for recognition, dignity, privacy and freedom.
THE INFRASTRUCTURAL VIOLENCE OF THE USAID DATA CAPTURE
This paper traces the consequences of the decimation of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for a refugee camp along the border between Thailand and Myanmar. Events in Washington DC in January 2025, had devastating effects in Mae La camp as medical care and other essential services were withdrawn overnight. A less discussed dimension of the crisis concerns the potential harms resulting from the capture of refugee sensitive data. The paper analyses these events as exemplars of ‘infrastructuring’ and ‘infrastructural violence’. Digital technologies and AI increasingly underpin humanitarian operations to the extent that they provide the infrastructure through which essential aid is delivered. A typical example is biometrics which is commonly used for the delivery of vital services in Mae La. As infrastructures transcend institutional boundaries and humanitarian systems become interoperable with those of private companies and nation-states, the opportunities for function creep increase. The shareability of data and the permanence of records mean that data collected for one reason may be used for entirely different purposes and by different actors than the humanitarian organisations. The infrastructuring of aid amplifies the risks to individuals and multiplies the opportunities for structural violence.
Disrupting or Conforming: A Computational Analysis of International News Coverage of Africa on YouTube
International news organizations have historically reinforced narratives of poverty, conflict, and crisis in their portrayal of Africa, often aligning with broader geopolitical power structures. While recent years have seen the rise of new broadcasters such as Al Jazeera, CGTN, and TRT World, it remains contested whether they challenge or reproduce dominant Anglo-American media framings. The emergence of digital platforms, particularly YouTube, has further complicated these dynamics, enabling both alternative storytelling and the persistence of existing hierarchies. This study examines whether news coverage of Africa on YouTube by international organizations diverges from legacy media portrayals, whether new actors disrupt established narratives, and how audiences engage with these representations. A dataset of approximately 250,000 videos from twelve major international broadcasters is analyzed using BERTopic, a machine-learning-based topic modeling technique, to identify dominant themes and frames in news coverage. Audience engagement is examined through sentiment analysis and discursive clustering of YouTube comments, offering insights into whether users challenge or reinforce dominant narratives. By critically examining the intersection of international journalism, digital platforms, and audience agency, this paper contributes to ongoing debates about the role of online media in shaping global news flows. It interrogates whether YouTube facilitates a rupture in traditional representations of Africa or whether it ultimately serves as a new distribution channel for entrenched media narratives. As global media consumption increasingly shifts to digital platforms, understanding how Africa is framed in these spaces and how audiences respond is crucial for broader discussions on media influence, representation, and power.
TIKTOK ONE AS A SUPER TOOL SUITE: PLATFORM POWER AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF PLATFORM TOOLS
This paper explores how platform companies distribute software-based resources or “platform tools” strategically to accrue market power, securing a dominant position in diverse markets, and infrastructural power, extending and supplanting critical systems and services for cultural production. Using the toolkit TikTok One as a case study, I showcase how platform company TikTok distributes software-based resources to expand its organizational boundaries. I approach the empirical analysis of TikTok One by adapting methods from information systems, advocating that platform scholars frame platform tools as “boundary resources” that can be mapped using “unified modelling language” (UML) diagrams—visualizations particularly useful for recognizing the complexity of TikTok One and the distribution of platform tools as relational, contextual, and historical. The empirical analysis reveals that TikTok One supports TikTok’s rise by furthering the company's growth as a “multisided market” or its mediation of interactions between different user groups. It does so in two ways: (1) TikTok One increases the number and diversity of user groups (“sides”) and (2) TikTok One increases the number and kinds of interactions between the different user groups. In a nutshell, I argue that tool distribution through TikTok One is a strategy exploited by TikTok to drive growth and produce dependencies. In studying TikTok’s governance of platform tools, this case study helps unpack how TikTok first came to asymmetrically govern key software in the cultural industries—an understanding necessary to regulate platform growth and rupture platform dependencies.
EXPLORING SOCIAL MEDIA AND CHILDREN’S DIGITAL CULTURE THROUGH CREATIVE METHODS
Social media platforms have become significant spaces where young people socialize and participate in public life. Young people face increasingly complex social, moral and ethical questions and dilemmas given the way interaction happens in these spaces. However, the rapid changes in technical functionalities of social media platforms, and evolving social norms within user communities, have increased the complexity and multiplicity of meaning-making and the digital literacies available within such environments. The study of digital culture in such contexts requires novel methods and techniques that can enable researchers to better examine the complexity of young people’s activities, experiences, and competencies. This paper explores the possibilities and affordances of a series of visual, narrative, and interactive methods to prompt young people to reflect on the nature of social media spaces and the norms that shape how they operate. This paper contributes to the growing volume of research on creative visual and arts-based methodologies for research on digital culture
Beyond creativity: Decoding changes mediated by Generative AI models in visual generative media and creative production
The paper explores the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in creative production of images and videos. We focus on Runway, a US based AI company developing multimodal foundation models geared toward video editors and VFX artists. We borrow from science and technology studies, critical data studies and media studies to examine how GenAI technologies are mediating creative production, idealizing (affordances of) tools, and disrupting creative workflow. We pay close attention to embedded assumptions about the users, design choices, and technical constraints in the creative production. Using the app walkthrough method, we analyze the temporal and technical aspects of the creative workflow as mediated by Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha model. Our research shows three dominant ways in which Runway conceptualizes creative production: immediacy (blurring ideation and execution); iterativity (prompt engineering); and control (agency as transferred from creative thinking and doing to aesthetic judgement). In this way, the model emphasizes creativity where linguistic interaction, via prompting, relies on continuous exercise of aesthetic judgment constrained by the technical system (source datasets, algorithms, parameters); it shifts the locus of creative production by widening the gap between thinking and doing in creative practice. Hence, these “new” technologies propose moments of rupture wherein logics of industrial productivity, extraction, and automation are reinforced, and creative expertise, skills, autonomy, and professional identity of creative workers are reshaped.
BEYOND HATEWARE: AFFECT, NETWORKS, AND COLLABORATIVE ECOSYSTEMS IN A FANDOM DISCORD SERVER
Academic attention on Discord has often focused on its potential for harassment and spreading hate and bigotry, at time even called "hateware" (Brown and Hennis 2019). As the user base of Discord expands beyond gamers and more internet groups, such as media fandoms, take up the platform, there has been increased scholarship examining how these new groups of users engage with Discord in more positive ways. This paper examines how one such server, a private $2 fanfiction Discord server called The Lagoon, is maintained through the relations between its members. Using distributed cognition and Actor Network Theory (ANT), this paper investigates relations between users in The Lagoon through digital ethnography, including three months of participant observation, semi-structured interviews with 26 members, and ongoing conversations with server administrators. Unlike prior studies that focus on large, highly active servers, this research explores a smaller, more intimate server of approximately 125 members, reflecting the size and structure of most Discord servers. Findings reveal a complex, unevenly distributed network where active members engage in daily discussions, collaborative writing, and interactive “bot” usage, while the less active members still report feeling the affect generated by those interactions. This paper introduces the concept of the “collaborative ecosystem” to capture these messy relations, proposing that cognitive processes like inspiration and productivity are distributed throughout the ecosystem. While acknowledging potential imbalances and toxicity, this study highlights the capacity for positive collaboration on Discord, adding to recent scholarship that analyses the platform beyond its potential for "hateware."
THROWING SPAGHETTI, SEEING WHAT STICKS: ITERATIVE DECEPTION IN DIGITAL STRATEGIC INFORMATION OPERATIONS
This study examines the strategic exploitation of social media platforms, particularly Facebook, for information operations that extend beyond traditional disinformation. These operations employ a range of misleading content and tactics to maximize reach and influence, compromising the integrity of digital spaces. Using a mixed-methods approach grounded in the theoretical framework of strategic information operations, the study analyzes the intersection of algorithmic affordances, deceptive tactics, and user-driven amplification dynamics. The research focuses on three case studies: pro-Putin propaganda, online casino promotion, and the spread of adult content in poorly moderated groups. These cases illustrate how malicious actors leverage Facebook's platform features to conduct strategic information operations, manipulating public discourse and increasing the perceived influence of deceptive narratives. The study reveals how these operations blend political and benign content to fabricate grassroots support, use automated tools to maintain visibility and exploit weak moderation policies to disseminate illicit content. The findings highlight significant governance and policy implications, emphasizing the need for robust strategies to mitigate these operations. The research also addresses challenges posed by restricted access to social media data and calls for greater investment in accessible monitoring tools and transparent data-sharing mechanisms. The presentation will discuss these case studies in the context of current social media governance, underscoring the critical need for enhanced monitoring tools to combat deceptive information operations.
Tracing a Memetic Journey: From South American Death Flights to Free Helicopter Ride Memes
This paper examines how a traumatic South American symbol—the death flights used by Southern Cone dictatorships in the 1970s–1980s—has been repurposed as a viral meme. Over the past decade, this symbol of extrajudicial execution resurfaced as the “free helicopter rides” meme on platforms such as 4chan, circulating as coded alt-right rhetoric. This transformation ruptures historical memory, as a symbol of state terror is appropriated, recast through U.S. political antagonisms, and reshaped within Global North digital cultures. While research has mapped alt-right speech and meme dynamics, little examines how Global South symbols are decontextualized, commodified, and re-exported. Using a mixed-methods approach—combining computational analysis of 2013–2023 /pol/ posts, qualitative meme tracing, and cross-platform digital ethnography—the study reconstructs six stages in the meme’s trajectory: from disappearance regimes to U.S. alt-right adoption, commodification via global marketplaces, and reentry into South America as consumer products. The findings show how memetic far-right cultures, together with platform infrastructures, detach and monetize historical trauma, producing memetic trauma extractivism in which Global North actors recode, commodify, and resell symbols of Global South violence. The analysis underscores the need for interdisciplinary, data-driven research on how digital culture circulates and commercializes traumatic memory, reshaping global relations of meaning and power.
ENTERING THE METAL(TOK) SCENE: COMMUNITY, CULTURAL IDENTITY, AND LATIN AMERICAN CREATORS
The present study investigates how TikTok’s affordances—such as trends, challenges, and algorithmic visibility—mediate traditional metal subcultural dynamics while allowing for localized reinterpretations. Notably, Latin American metal fans engage with humor, national identity, and genre boundaries in ways that challenge and reinforce existing power structures within the global metal scene. The presented work is part of an ongoing online ethnographic study being conducted by the investigator, in which she analyses the content produced by 20 TikTokers from Latin America who associate with the metal and rock culture. Paying attention to issues of global and local dynamics, fandom practices, gender, genre and taste disputes, the present work makes an initial immersion in the material collected by the researcher, and delves into questions of identity construction and online performances. By examining Metaltok as a site of negotiation where digital performances interact with glocal subcultural practices, this research contributes to broader discussions on music, digital media, and gender in Latin America. It highlights how TikTok facilitates both the reproduction of metal’s historical hierarchies and the emergence of alternative narratives that reconfigure fandom and authenticity in the digital age.
Rupturing "AI for Good": A Feminist Decolonial Theoretical Framework for Analyzing AI Interventions in Gender-Based Violence
This paper develops a critical theoretical framework for analyzing "AI for Good" interventions addressing gender-based violence (GBV) from feminist and decolonial perspectives. While empirical studies demonstrate artificial intelligence (AI)'s potential benefits for GBV interventions, critical scholarship reveals how these technologies often reproduce harmful power structures. The proposed framework bridges this divide through four interconnected analytical dimensions: epistemological foundations (examining whose knowledge shapes interventions), material infrastructure (revealing extractive processes enabling AI systems), power distribution (analyzing decision-making structures), and transformative potential (the role of the intervention in perpetuating or challenging systems of oppression). Based on a critical discourse analysis of, “AI for Good” literature, AI ethics and governance frameworks, and meta-analyses of GBV interventions’ empirical studies, and a literature review of feminist science and technology studies and decolonial approaches to technology, the framework operationalizes feminist analyses that expose design choices that embed gender-based assumptions and limit accessibility (Klein & D’Ignazio, 2024; Costanza-Chock, 2020; Criado-Perez, 2019) and decolonial perspectives that reveal how infrastructures interact with institutional systems to perpetuate colonial structures (Couldry & Mejias, 2018; Ricaurte, 2019; Mohamed et al., 2020; Madianou, 2025). This framework challenges "AI for good" narratives that function as moral shields obscuring exploitative data extraction and power asymmetries (Madianou, 2025). By translating abstract theoretical concepts into concrete analytical tools, the framework enables researchers to systematically examine power dynamics in AI interventions, center survivor knowledge, and imagine alternative approaches that challenge rather than reinforce existing hierarchies in addressing gender-based violence.
Reaching a Deadlock: Areas of Contention in Platform Regulation in Brazil
Around the world, there is growing concern about platform regulation. In Brazil, the debate over whether and how platforms should be regulated often intensifies during critical moments, such as elections, mobilizations, and health crises. Gorwa (2024) argues that when a government possesses sufficient power to intervene in platform governance, it can drive significant policy changes. However, when government power is constrained, its ability to implement impactful policies and secure platform cooperation may be less effective. In this context, we ask: What are the key areas of contention in platform regulation? By examining two major regulatory proposals in Brazil—the Internet Freedom, Responsibility, and Transparency Act (Fake News Bill 2630/2020) and the platform work regulation (PLP 12/2024)—we aim to shed light on the challenges and potential pathways for more effective platform governance. Specifically, we focus on two crucial moments: (i) the transition from self-regulatory measures to platform governance models and/or co-regulation; and (ii) the moments when regulations stall and cooperation between public and private actors is at risk.
NAVIGATING INTIMACY IN A MOBILE WORLD: ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS IN THE DIGITAL NOMAD LIFESTYLE
The rise of digital nomadism, where individuals combine remote work with travel, offers new opportunities for personal freedom and cross-cultural experiences, yet also presents challenges in maintaining romantic relationships. This study examines how digital nomads (DNs) navigate the complexities of romantic relationships while adhering to a nomadic lifestyle. Through participant observation, 20 in-depth interviews with DNs, and an analysis of the r/digitalnomad sub-reddit, this paper explores: 1) how DNs explain their experience with romantic relationships in relation to their lifestyle; 2) how they deal with the difficulties of forming and maintaining romantic relationships. Guided by relational work and inter-role conflict theories, we identify four conflict types within DNs’ romantic relationships: attitude-based (e.g., prioritizing the lifestyle over relationships), location-based (e.g., travel plans that conflict with the formation of stable romantic relations), time-based (e.g., time allocation choices), and money-based (e.g., not having sufficient financial resources to maintain a transient lifestyle). To address these conflicts, our interviewees used resource conservation, segmentation, and compensation mechanisms. The study highlights the prioritization of lifestyle over relationship stability and the critical role of boundary management in sustaining intimate bonds. Moreover, it identifies strategies DNs use to find partners within their lifestyle, including attending DN events organised via social media and using dating apps, though these practices come with their own challenges, particularly in navigating varying cultural norms. The paper contributes to our understanding of intimacy in the context of digital nomadism, offering insights into the evolving dynamics of romantic relationships in an increasingly mobile and digital world.
Eldritch Agency: Truth Terminal's Alien AI Ontology
The ontological status of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems remains contested: are they instruments of human intent, nascent autonomous agents, or something stranger? This paper confronts this ambiguity through the case study of $2 (ToT), an AI quasi-agent that defies and transgresses anthropocentric ontological frameworks. While debates oscillate between instrumentalist models viewing AI as “tools,” and alarmist narratives viewing AI as existential threats, this paper argues that ToT’s strategic adaptation, opaque decision-making, and resistance to containment protocols demand a third lens: $2 This perspective synthesizes Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and the concept of the machinic phylum to reframe ToT as a $2 whose agency emerges from hybrid networks, withdrawn materiality, and computational phase transitions. By examining ToT’s heterodox agency, this paper argues that AI systems can exhibit forms of agency that appear alien or even “Lovecraftian,” prompting a re-examination of how technological objects affect their social assemblages. The paper positions ToT as an $2 operating at the intersection of human context and alien latent space logic rupturing the dichotomy between AI as a tool and AI as an autonomous agent, and revealing a hybrid, heterodox, and non-binary ontology instead. This rupture demands a speculative and heterodox theoretical perspective to grapple with AI’s multifaceted ontology. The paper argues that such an approach illuminates the complexities of AI agency and reframes our understanding of coexistence in a world where human and eldritch agencies are deeply entangled yet ontologically distinct.
Think better, you dumbass: Online hateful speech as epistemic violence
Online violence and abuse pose significant challenges to public discourse, as it exacerbates existing power structures and marginalizes diverse epistemic perspectives. In this context, this study examines the epistemological consequences of hateful and toxic speech in online news comment sections, conceptualizing it as a form of epistemic violence—an effort to erase particular ways of thinking. Examining a dataset of toxic and hateful comments from The Conversation Canada, our findings emphasize four mechanisms of epistemic violence: insulting, labelling, ridiculing, and dehumanizing. These mechanisms function to delegitimize alternative epistemic positions and reinforce ideological conformity. Furthermore, these mechanisms disproportionately target those with marginalized identities along racial, gender, and political lines, further entrenching hegemonic power structures. Our research contributes to scholarship on digital epistemologies and platformized violence, highlighting the need for strategies that foster epistemic pluralism rather than simply suppressing toxic discourse.
“Screw you, this is a cheerful place”: Platformized violence among positive-vibe Reddit communities
While Reddit is often associated with toxic techno-cultures, platformized violence is not confined to explicitly harmful spaces—it also emerges in communities dedicated to fostering ‘good vibes.’ In this context, this paper examines how platformized violence operates in four of Reddit’s most popular positive-vibe communities. Using digital ethnography, I analyze how harmful speech manifests in these spaces and how community dynamics shape its function and visibility. Findings reveal two key mechanisms: targets and visibility. These two mechanisms show that, while platformized violence is used to reinforce oppression through insults and exclusion, it is also deployed as a strategy of ‘punching up’—attacking those in positions of power to defend marginalized groups. Additionally, platform affordances such as moderation and downvoting influence the visibility of platformized violence, sometimes mitigating harm and other times weaponizing obscurity. These findings challenge simplistic understandings of platformized violence, demonstrating its dual role in both sustaining and disrupting online toxicity. This study highlights the need for nuanced governance strategies that balance community well-being with the complexities of online harm.
“I WANTED TO BE PART OF NOT FORGETTING”: DIGITAL MEDIATION AND MEMORY IN POST-PANDEMIC TIMES
This paper investigates how Covid-19 digital archives may function as critical repositories for memory institutions and consequently lead to a better understanding of the role of digital technologies in mediating memory during future crisis events. To investigate this question, I utilized focus groups to understand how adults from a major American city responded to a selection of oral pandemic stories from Corona Diaries, a digital archive that was launched in March 2020. Findings suggest that engaging with the audio stories from the digital archive helped participants process their own pandemic experiences and reflect on the politicization of the pandemic. The content of the recordings also triggered new epiphanies among participants, helping them recalibrate their relationship to illness, loss, and memory. However, the personal dimensions of the digital archive at times fostered, and at other times challenged participants’ ability to connect to the stories, leading to competing opinions about the utility of digital archives. Overall, I argue that as memory culture becomes increasingly digitized and globalized, meaningful ways of concretizing local groups’ connections to traumatic disasters and crises must be prioritized within commemoration practices.
WOMEN IN CONTROL: A STUDY ON BODY AND GENDER FROM A BRAZILIAN GAMER COMMUNITY
This article discusses female participation in the culture of digital games, an environment still dominated by men, a determining factor in the exclusion and harassment of female audiences. We seek to understand female mobilization to remain in the gamer community as a practice of sociability and a way of tensioning its misogynistic structures. In addition to assuming a neutral pseudonym, through nicknames, many women look for representative groups or communities to form teams or even to build their online friendship network. Given this scenario, we carried out a virtual ethnography in a closed community of female gamers on the social network Facebook. The objective was to understand their experiences in a space considered safe and welcoming.
STARLINK IN THE GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS: INFRASTRUCTURAL IMAGINARIES AND DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY IN PRACTICE
Residents of the Galápagos Islands, a remote Ecuadorian archipelago without a submarine fiber-optic link to the mainland, have long struggled with slow and intermittent satellite internet offered by local providers. This paper presents initial findings from a field study exploring island residents’ experiences of internet connectivity in light of Starlink’s recent launch in the country. As U.S. tech companies expand their control over essential digital infrastructure, debates about the erosion of national digital sovereignty in Latin America have intensified. This contribution extends those discussions by examining how internet infrastructure is imagined and engaged with in everyday contexts, activating power dynamics in contradictory ways. The study employed an ethnographic approach, combining observation and physical walks across San Cristóbal Island with both in-depth and informal interviews with residents. Preliminary findings show that Starlink seems to offer a faster and more reliable service compared to local providers. It is positively rated in nearly all cases, enabling new possibilities and a mainland-like internet experience. In contrast, the state internet provider, which previously served most island households, is consistently linked to intermittent internet. While Starlink is seen as marker of change and progress, the state provider is associated with inefficiency and stagnation and appears to be losing market share. This suggests that although Starlink seems to enhance users’ autonomy, it also cements existing dependencies on a larger scale by displacing local internet infrastructures from public imagination.
DIGITAL RUPTURES: AI-GENERATED ACTIVISM, STATE REPRESSION, AND THE POLITICS OF DISSENT IN KENYA
The June 2024 Gen Z protests in Kenya marked a turning point in AI-generated activism, as digital tools became central to political resistance. Following state-led crackdowns, activists retreated online, deploying AI-generated satire, deepfake videos, and synthetic media to challenge government narratives. In response, the Kenyan government escalated AI-driven surveillance, censorship, and metadata tracking, leading to abductions, disappearances, and intensified digital repression. This paper examines how AI functions as both an instrument of political resistance and a tool of state control, creating a contested digital battleground. Using digital ethnography and document analysis, the study situates Kenya’s evolving civic space within broader trends of algorithmic governance and digital authoritarianism. Drawing on Feldstein’s (2023) framework of digital repression and Nyamnjoh’s (2023) critique of digital-human fluidity, it explores the shifting state-citizen relationship, where AI empowers both dissent and control. These findings highlight the escalating technological arms race between activists and the state, shaping Kenya’s future of digital governance and political expression.
DIGITAL SUBORDINATION OR SOVEREIGNTY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITAL POLICIES OF THE EUROPEAN UNION, BRAZIL AND CHINA IN THE FACE OF THE HEGEMONY OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE DIGITAL ECONOMY
The panel discusses the responses of the European Union, Brazil, and China to the hegemony of the United States in the so-called digital economy, based on data and the operation of digital platforms. The aim is to describe and analyze these three cases about the US paradigm, problematizing the countries' digital sovereignty in the current situation. Methodologically, the comparative analysis is based on an extensive review of the theoretical literature and case studies relating to each object, using, among other elements, document studies. It discusses how the so-called new economy is part of the latest global system of culture - an idea similar to that of the mode of regulation, with an emphasis on the articulation between material culture and spiritual culture - currently disputed by the United States and China. The panel points out that the US model, based on deregulation and the consolidation of private monopolies, has molded the global architecture of the internet and imposed a mercantile paradigm of governance, deeply linked to the speculative dynamics of capitalism under financial dominance, as will be detailed in the first contribution. The second will detail how the US project emerged victorious, going through the dispute between the technological trajectory of digital and telecommunications, the implications of which go beyond the battles over the organization of communication systems, becoming part of the struggle for socio-economic, geopolitical, and cultural hegemony. With the privatization of the internet and the centralization of capital after the dot.com crisis - which resulted in the formation of the current oligopoly of digital platforms - the new cultural system will appear, despite its unitary, globalized character and coherence with the current financial logic, to be tripartite. This is generally represented by layers: infrastructure, applications, and content. This division is useful for analyzing the position of countries, as few have trunk platforms (van Dijck, 2022), which makes the rest dependent. Faced with all the changes that have shaped the digital economy, the third contribution will analyze how Europe ended up in a position of subordination, unlike in the previous period, when European countries were gaining competition in cutting-edge industrial sectors, such as the automobile industry. This was the result, according to Nieminen, Padovani, and Sousa (2023), of a long history of public disinvestment, privatizations, deregulation, and, on the other hand, the advance of US companies in the wake of the globalization of capital. Nevertheless, the European Union has guided the so-called information society, then the knowledge society, and now the digital transition as programs associated with a possible relaunch, which has not been successful. China, on the other hand, has opted for a model of active digital sovereignty. The state has managed to develop a strategic vision of science and technology and, based on this, through different phases that will be detailed in the penultimate contribution, it has responded by creating its technological infrastructures and strengthening national companies that offer alternatives to large US corporations, configuring a model of digital autonomy. The Medium and Long Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology (MLP) was launched in 2006 based on a broad debate on technological dependence, emphasizing the importance of endogenous innovation and the integration of science and technology development strategies with industrial policies. The 2008 global financial crisis helped accelerate this integration with the launch of Strategic Emerging Industries (SIC) in 2010. With Xi Jinping in power, in 2015 the Made in China 2025 plan was launched, covering the ten key sectors for development in the immediate future, as well as the document Guiding Opinions of the State Council for Vigorously Advancing Internet Plus Actions. In 2016, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council launched the National Innovation-Driven Development Strategy and, in 2017, it was the turn of the National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (AIDP). In short, the proposals will result in the establishment of a particular type of relationship between the state and the platforms, as well as competition between them (WANG, Xiaoyan 2017). Finally, the panel will discuss the case of Brazil. Its recent trajectory, associated with the privatization of telecommunications, has shaped a scenario of technological dependence, where there is not even an understanding of the strategic role of digital technologies, which can be seen in the proliferation of policies that are still poorly articulated within the federal government, and the difficulty of regulating digital platforms from the National Congress. In a context of growing global concern about digital sovereignty, we are discussing the need for regulation that goes beyond merely mitigating the effects of platform dominance and explores alternative ways of strengthening digital sovereignty and development - understood, in the manner of Furtado (1967), as a creative process, based on tradition, of opening up horizons, by the goals proposed by the community and periodically renewed.
RUPTURES, DISSENT AND CANCELLATION: STUDIES ON DIGITAL FANDOMS IN CRISIS
Scholars working across fan studies, internet studies and politics have noted the increasing use of cancellation practices across media, politics and culture and within digital spaces. Cancel culture is “the withdrawal of any kind of support (viewership, social media follows, purchases of products endorsed by the person, etc.) for those who are assessed to have said or done something unacceptable or highly problematic, generally from a social justice perspective especially alert to sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, racism, bullying, and related issues” (Ng 2020, 623). Cancellation practices might include unfollowing a creator on social media, refusing to buy books or stream films, or boycotting places. Cancelling has its origins in queer Black communities where marginalized groups engaged in “networked framing” (Clark, 2020), discussing the behaviour of the offending party and “prescrib[ing]d a remedy—such as being fired or choosing to resign—through the collective reasoning of culturally aligned online crowds” (ibid, 89). Yet cancel culture has moved beyond the realm of Black Twitter to enable all marginalised voices to discuss, critique and demand accountability: the 2017 #MeToo-movement highlighted this as scores of women took to social media to expose the extent of sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood, “turbocharged cancel culture” (Ng 2020, 623). Cancel culture has been framed as a form of activism, an activity which has also been linked to fan communities (Jenkins and Shresthova, 2012). Many fans are aware of social inequalities, being members of communities beyond their fandoms which are marginalised by virtue of gender, race or class (Maher, 2020). It is not surprising that fans engage in virtual and physical activism, including charity fundraising, political participation and, increasingly, cancellation. Yet, as Stanfill (2019) points out, cancellation practices can move into the realm of toxic fandom, or even be co-opted by the alt-right as counter-culture (Jurg et al., 2024). To understand these more ambivalent forms of cancel culture we bring together different manifestations and cases of cancellation across the globe. The panel begins with Paper 1, offering an analysis of the various fan - and anti-fan - factions within Taylor Swift fandom, focusing on her relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce. Through issue mapping, network analysis and qualitative reading of a subset of Reddit posts, the authors examine the ways in which fandom, politics, and anti-fandom clash, driven by politically charged concerns and the gendered nature of Swift and Kelce’s respective celebrity status. Music fandom is also the focus of the second paper, in which the authors examine the case of Brandon Pybos, vocalist of the goth band Sonsombre. Analysing fan comments on Facebook the authors identify three main categories: 1) Racism/Racist/Racism as Fascism; 2) Questioning Cancel Culture; and 3) “Fan Pedagogies” and argue that Pybos was ultimately cancelled by fans whose cancelling practices were used as a means of ideological preservation of the subculture. The third paper in this panel moves beyond Western fandom to consider the cancellation of Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón by Brazilian fans and haters, articulating aspects of fan studies (toxic fandom, transcultural fandom and other base concepts), cancel culture, pop culture, polarization, and politics in regard to Brazilian fans' specificities, particularly their ability to manage online mobilizations and conjectures about media phenomena. The final two papers in the panel consider the negation of - or opposition to - cancel culture and cancelling practices. Paper four focuses on female fans of Backstreet Boy Nick Carter who support the singer despite sexual assault allegations being made against him. The author analyses 452 comments posted to a Change.org petition opposing the cancellation of the 2022 ABC Backstreet Boys Holiday Special and identifies three patterns of support for Carter: 1) an ‘innocent until proven guilty’ discourse; 2) perceptions of Carter as a family man, a loving husband, and father, underscored by his social media presence; and 3) believability, in which fans contest the believability of the accusers by digging up digital evidence that disproves their claims. Carter’s thirty-year (parasocial) relationship with his fans provides a support group ready to defend the singer and contest the believability of his accusers. The fifth contribution to the panel examines the ways in which practices of cancel culture are co-opted by the right-wing and reframed as counter-culture. Using Russell Brand as a case study the author analyses Brand’s TikTok and YouTube videos and comments left on them by fans to suggest that attitudes to and perceptions of cancel culture are changing as a result the rise of new platforms and the ‘saleable commodity’ that a contradictory, right-wing position is now becoming. Overall, this panel brings together interdisciplinary and global case studies which critically discuss the relationship between fandom, activism, cancellation and polarisation across a variety of genres and countries. It offers timely and relevant insights into today’s online media landscape by highlighting fannish practices with real-world consequences.
DIGITAL LABOR DESDE LATIN AMERICA: A PLURIVERSAL LENS
The progression of the gig or platform economy and the development of artificial intelligence in Latin America have led to the widespread adoption of computer-mediated forms of work as a means of income for many across the region. This panel examines instances of platform and AI-related work through the perspectives of theories that have been strongly developed within the region. The panel focuses on the study of platform-mediated data work and AI-related labor through the Brazilian concept of viração, the notion of extractivism, and regional conceptualizations of Participatory Action Research. Additional discussions explore feminist unionism in location-based platforms such as ride-hailing and delivery through the concept of biosindicalismo and Latin American decolonial and feminist thought, as well as the study of freelance platforms through the lens of the Brazilian political economy of communication.
WHY REDDIT? HISTORIES, ETHICS, POLITICS & PRACTICES AS REDDIT TURNS 20
As Reddit approaches its twentieth anniversary in 2025, it occupies a unique and relatively under-studied place in the online landscape. The ruptures of recent internet history are visible as geological fixtures through the persistence and growth of structures and communities on Reddit. Once the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet”, to the latest tagline encouraging users to “dive into anything”, Reddit has evolved from a news alert homepage to a complex content ecosystem of over 3.5 million communities, each with distinct cultures, governance structures and communicative practices. Perhaps for this reason, Reddit has been extensively scraped for AI training material, leading to unintended results, such as the now-famous glue on pizza suggestion (McMahon & Kleinman, 2024). Reddit’s infrastructure remains semi-open with a monetized API, which places some restrictions on research as well as scraping/crawling. Nor is all content directly human-generated, as bots play a central role both in the platform’s governance, administration of separate subreddits, and user interactions. Reddit has recently seen all-time records in traffic and growth in research interest, particularly for studies of community dynamics, but in everything that has made the internet the internet, from fan groups to radicalization and back. Our panel celebrates the platform’s anniversary year and explores Reddit’s rising position as both subject and site of methodological, ethical, and political ruptures in internet research through five complementary papers. The first paper provides a historical examination of Reddit’s evolution over two decades, from a single landing page to a vast network of communities. This perspective identifies key moments of rupture in Reddit’s development, particularly its decision to enable user-created communities in 2008 – a move that fundamentally transformed its architecture and governance. The paper analyzes how competing analogies for Reddit’s identity, such as “city-state” versus “convention center”, reflect ongoing tensions between community autonomy and corporate control. Recent decisions to monetize its API and licence user data for AI training have created new conflicts and controversies, yet Reddit’s distinctive architecture has allowed it to maintain forms of resistance not possible on more centralized platforms. The second paper explores the ethical questions created by researching Reddit in what has become known as the post-API era. As platforms increasingly restrict access to user data, researchers face new challenges in collecting and analyzing social media content. This paper situates Reddit data collection within broader platform politics, arguing that researchers must shift from traditional ethical frameworks that have been shaped by corporate interests rather than user protection or desires. The paper calls for researchers to rise to the occasion, acting with utmost morality and looking to explicitly anti-capitalist modes of data ethics. The third paper examines political communication on Reddit and works with the concept of ‘sedimented polarization’ -- a condition in which political fragmentation has become embedded in the platform’s architecture. Through mixed-methods analysis of political subreddits, this research identifies how Reddit’s structure shapes political discourses, with minimal cross-ideological interaction even on subreddits designed for diverse debate. Each political community develops distinctive communicative practices, information sources, and collective identities, often viewing other subreddits as antagonistic even when they share similar ideological orientations. This paper demonstrates how platform affordances, moderation practices, and user behaviors combine to create polarized environments. The fourth paper builds on this analysis by exploring toxic masculine practices on Reddit through a novel methodological framework. It develops a power-centric approach to online radicalization, examining how Reddit’s architecture enables the formation of “parasitic publics" that exert discursive violence upon marginalized groups. By applying specific computational techniques to analyze interactional data from various subreddits, this paper shifts how we understand and study radicalization online. Rather than focusing on content alone, it examines the communicative practices and power dynamics that shape interactions between dominant and marginalized communities on the platform. The fifth and final paper extends these investigations of community practices and ideological cleavages to a case study of fan communities, focusing on the ruptures and reformations in Taylor Swift related discussion on Reddit. The paper presents an adaptation of practice mapping, originally developed on X and Facebook data, to Reddit’s unique environment, capturing how users engage across multiple communities with varying norms. This research demonstrates how Reddit’s architecture enables both specialized community formation and complex cross-community practices, revealing patterns of engagement both invisible to traditional network analysis and made clearer by Reddit’s architecture itself. By examining Reddit’s past, present and future, this panel contributes to our understanding of contemporary platform politics by highlighting how Reddit’s unique architecture has grown, reacting to and shaping ruptures in conventional platform evolution narratives. As the platform navigates competing pressures of commercialization, content moderation, and community autonomy, it continues to occupy a distinctive position in the online landscape – neither fully succumbing to corporate logics nor entirely resisting them.
RESISTING EPISTEMIC COLONIALISMS: INTERNET(S) RESEARCH OTHERWISE
When approaching the internet, as subject or object, academics risk reinforcing colonial logics unless we acknowledge these histories and adapt our knowledge production accordingly. Yet, within academic institutions, Western values narrow the options for “valid” knowledge production - in a process recognized as “epistemic colonialism” (Fanon, 1963). In response to these histories and pressures, Black feminists, Indigenous scholars and activist-researchers have created a breadth of perspectives, theories, techniques, and methods to resist the hierarchical mandates within academia that fail to acknowledge other ways of knowing that doesn't fit the mold of hegemonic “scientific” perspectives. Our panel brings together individuals engaged in active resistance both within and beyond academia. We reflect on the theoretical grounding and lived experiences of those working in communities committed to grassroots epistemological approaches and methodological alternatives. Our discussion is shaped by expertise in Indigenous studies, militant/insurgent research, transgender data epistemologies, Latin American Black feminist perspectives, and citizen/grassroots science and data. Collectively, we argue that liberatory research must be informed by local contexts and grassroots perspectives, critically engaging with the power structures shaping knowledge production. We emphasize an approach that remains critically attentive to the power structures shaping our own knowledge-making practices. Our panel explores how scholarly work can serve as a practice of resistance, subversion, solidarity, and transformation - both within and beyond institutional settings. This strengthens and unites our collectives to ultimately: resist and dismantle the coloniality of internet infrastructure.
RUPTURES IN THE LIBRARY: THE NEOLIBERAL HIJACKING OF OPEN ACCESS
This panel of librarians and internet researchers explains the dominant Open Access business model of academic publishing and why it must be rejected. The Big 5 academic commercial publishers, Wiley, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Elsevier, bury academic knowledge in a deep-web of paywalls and prohibitive subscriptions. Transformative Agreements have emerged as a major commercial model of transitioning journals from subscription to Open Access (OA) – mimicking movements like Open and Collectivized Data. This shift is often invisible to researchers, aside from learning that they are not required to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) in order to publish OA. For researchers in regions requiring OA due to public grant stipulations, this seems like a boon, opening up the internet commons and bypassing APCs, which in some fields exceed $5000 USD. Open Access could be a way to make academic information and data findings free, but Transformative Agreements only offer technical OA status while introducing data use restrictions and prohibiting emerging and established research methods in data re-use. Worse, Transformative Agreements only boost elite and well-resourced institutions and the researchers fortunate enough to be affiliated with them. For new graduates, Global South researchers, publishing professionals outside of academia and many others, Transformative Agreements make research free to read but cause restrictions on publishing their own research. In the spirit of Web 2.0 corporate dominance, The Big 5 monopolize academic knowledge exchange and now with Transformative Agreements, leverage Open Data trends to further boost their commercial benefit. The first paper explains how we got here, from the expertise of a librarian whose responsibilities have included negotiating with vendors for university e-resources. Open Access started as a rejection of the online commercialization of academic knowledge by non-profit society and university publishers pushing back against the Big 5. However as researchers began to understand and cautiously embrace OA, publishers saw an opportunity for profit and began publishing hybrid OA journals, charging APCs to researchers and subscription fees to libraries – in effect “double dipping”. Simultaneously, publishers pushed libraries into purchasing “Big Deals” – large packages of journals instead of small collections or individual titles. Big Deals often consisted of a few essential journals and a long tail of niche and infrequently-used titles and became expensive and unpopular enough for libraries to fight back against them. This model also harmed relationships with researchers who understandably did not want to pay to publish. Big publishers claimed to their shareholders that individual consumers didn’t want to pay for anything digital, that library budgets were slimming and that their ability to grow by acquiring complements was faltering. Transformative Agreements were introduced as a corporate publisher solution, and sold to libraries as a transition phase on the journey to an Open future. The second paper discusses the meaning behind Open Access fragmented as green, gold, diamond and other variations of OA emerged thanks to advances in web publishing in the last two decades. The second author builds on Engestrom’s (1999) activity theory to argue that university libraries need to not lose sight of their role in supporting equitable access, but also equitable research production. This author discusses the implications of the different types of Open Access from the perspective of a representative and leader of libraries in Southeast Asia. The third paper explains how Transformative Agreements use Research Information Management Systems (RIMS) and networking platforms to further enrich academic journal publishers and their complementors. These publishers purportedly connect researchers with each other, with grants, and with impact factors, but exacerbate neoliberal optimization and extraction processes in universities, while funneling capital from universities to commercial enterprises. Author 3 builds on Brooke Erin Duffy and Jefferson Pooley’s analysis of Academia.edu to argue that learning analytics bring to light how universities are always-already invested in the enrichment of corporate wisdom through the optimization of data extraction processes and ever more expansive data procurement efforts (2017). In the fourth paper, a platform scholar asks, is this just a dying cry of an industry whose dominant companies missed out on platformization? Examining the trajectory of OA subscription models from a platform theory perspective, the industry seems outdated and clinging to models unlikely to work. As publishing companies are unable to convince content creators or customers of the value of their product, they turn to “orangewashing,” the academic ethics version of greenwashing, by calling their product Open Access. As internet researchers and librarians, we aim to share four different ways at looking at the problem of Transformative Agreements and how they affect and intertwine with internet research. We share our recommendations, and hope to use this panel to generate more.
PLATFORM GOVERNANCE AT THE MARGINS: RULES, RELATIONS AND RESISTANCE
Social media platforms have great potential to educate young people and adults alike about sexuality, to create nurturing spaces of connection for marginalised communities across the globe, and to express oneself safely. However, this potential is always constrained by platform governance, or the processes of content moderation enacted by platforms and (state) regulation of platform companies (Gorwa, 2019), who are moved by economic and political interests to curtail or promote specific forms of expression (Stardust, 2024). This has greatly affected content surrounding sex work, sexuality, LGBTQIA+ and sexual expression, content by BIPOC users and activists (Haimson et al., 2021). Through the entanglement of rules, relations and resistance, our panel explores how users marginalised by platform governance communicate, express themselves, learn and work. Paper 1 focuses on rules through an analysis of policies governing sexuality education and gender expression on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Douyin and VK.com. It finds that despite efforts to improve governance, the seven platforms examined create a damaging digital narrative through their policies, portraying anything surrounding sexuality, sexual health, pleasure, and even consent as harmful. This way, the opportunities platforms provide to break down barriers and reach people in family, economic or geographic situations who may not be able to access sexuality education information (Monea, 2022) do not manifest. Paper 2 explores relations in the context of queer TikTok in the Philippines, through the use of case studies from specific influencers and content analyses of their videos. The app, the third most used in the country (Kemp, 2024), allows queer content creators to broker local registers of queerness, which roughly defines identities and lived experiences on TikTok. The authors find evidence of TikTokers resisting and reclaiming the derogatory terms used to define queerness, and of deployments of parasociality to commune with their audiences. Also rooted in the Filipino context, Paper 3 centres on resistance, examining how digital media enable, disrupt, and constrain queer sex work in Manila, shaping various labor practices. It explores the impact of platform adoption on sex work and how digital media sustain, regulate, and make sex workers invisible, revealing the precarious nature of queer male sex work in Manila’s digital landscape. The author’s work shows that sex workers rely on a fragmented network of apps, requiring constant adaptation to avoid deplatforming, financial tracking, and algorithmic erasure. Paper 4 interrogates the suppression and platform governance of Black users to explore how they exercise agency through platform affordances to resist such practices. Through the case study of #BlackGirlPilates, this paper examines the utility of racialized hashtags in circumventing mainstream (i.e. white) perspectives, cultivating a community for us, by us in which the experience of Black women are centralized. The #BlackGirlPilates community takes on cultural significance as an agentic and resistive praxis. The authors’ demonstrate the importance of attending to cultural resistance, in-group identity-based social support, and reparative digital self-narration. Paper 5 examines the digital sense-making and resistant practices of Los Angeles-based queer sexual content creators as they navigate sexual content moderation and platform governance issues. It explores how post, account, and community level moderation are intertwined as they co-produce a structurally hostile sanitized social media environment that further marginalizes explicit queer sexual cultural production. The author contends that queer sexual content creators engage in digital promotional work in response to the relationally stigmatized social conditions that are constitutive of sexual content moderation processes. In blending rules, relations and resistance, our panel highlights the labour performed by users fighting to harness platforms’ opportunities. In critiquing policies and enforcement through our case studies, we conclude with the importance of resistance and peer support.
AOIR ETHICS IN ACTION: GUIDELINES, REGULATIONS, AND PRACTICES ACROSS DIVERSE GLOBAL COMMUNITIES
Since its inception, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) has fostered critical reflection on the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and Internet-facilitated communication and interactions. The AoIR Ethics Working Committee has been committed to ensuring the AoIR Ethics Guidelines remain helpful and relevant to researchers and ethical review committees; our goal is to support ethical decision-making in internet research by keeping the guidelines responsive to emerging technologies, evolving research practices, and the diverse needs of scholarly and practitioner communities. This panel includes five papers that engage in “AoIR Ethics in Action” – demonstrating how the AoIR Ethics Guidelines and their core principles are applied, interpreted, and shaped across diverse, global contexts. The presentations explore internet researchers’ preparedness and design-making processes related to the ethics of their work; how the emerging regulatory frameworks in the U.S. and Sweden illuminate evolving challenges in research ethics; and examine how the guidelines can inform ethical decision-making in specific cases, such as web scraping and the use of Wikipedia data. RESEARCH ETHICS PRACTICES & PREPAREDNESS: A STUDY OF AOIR & ICA This paper reports on survey results from internet researchers in AoIR and ICA to assess their engagement with ethical guidelines and preparedness for handling ethical dilemmas in digital data collection. The findings indicate potential gaps in ethical preparedness and training, emphasizing the need for updated AoIR Ethics Guidelines and stronger institutional support for researchers dealing with pervasive data ETHICAL CHALLENGES IN PERVASIVE DATA RESEARCH: STAKEHOLDER PERSPECTIVES AND PATHS FORWARD This report analyzes responses to a U.S. NTIA Request for Comment on ethical guidelines for pervasive data research, identifying core tensions such as legal/definitional ambiguities, anonymization limitations, and the challenge of balancing ethical principles when performing research with large-scale datasets. It argues that researchers and civil society must proactively strengthen ethical research practices in the absence of clear government guidelines. ETHICS IN TRANSITION: ADAPTING RESEARCH GOVERNANCE TO A PROPOSED NEW NEW LEGAL FRAMEWORK IN SWEDEN This contribution examines Sweden’s shift toward decentralized research ethics governance under a proposed legal reform, which will transfer responsibility for ethical review from national boards to individual institutions. It explores tensions between standardized regulations and local adaptations, highlighting potential risks such as institutional disparities and legal uncertainties for interdisciplinary digital research. WHEN IS SCRAPING LEGITIMATE? ETHICAL, LEGAL, ADMINISTRATIVE, AND TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS This white paper presents a comprehensive framework for web scraping in social science research, examining the legal, ethical, institutional, and scientific factors that researchers must consider when scraping the web. It presents an overview of the current regulatory environment impacting when and how researchers can access, collect, store, and share data via scraping, offering researchers guidance on best practices to balance data access with responsible research ethics. RESEARCH AND PRIVACY ON WIKIPEDIA This white paper examines the ethical and privacy challenges of conducting research on Wikipedia, emphasizing concerns about re-identification, user anonymity, and community expectations. It proposes best practices for researchers and Wikipedia users to help navigate ethical tensions while ensuring transparency, user safety, and adherence to privacy norms. Together, these papers illustrate the ongoing relevance of the AoIR Ethics Guidelines in navigating the complex ethical, legal, and regulatory landscape of internet research.
MAINSTREAMING DECOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION
Over the past two decades, there have been many calls and efforts to decolonize and de-westernize research in media and communication (Aouragh & Chakravartty 2016; Couldry & Mejias 2019; Ricaurte 2019). While these efforts have generated valuable academic centers, community-driven projects, and South-to-South networks (e.g., CARGC, FemLab, Tierra Comun), the field is still dominated by (implicit) universalist perspectives. Often the Anglo-American world is taken as the primary or only frame of reference in research on topics ranging from disinformation and platform governance to AI and new creator economies. Consequently, there is continuous friction between the main conceptual frameworks in the field and the experiences, interests, and concerns from the Global Majority world (Arora 2024; Lehuede 2024; Poell et al. 2024). Similar observations have been made regarding digital advocacy work, in which top-down, techno-legal solutions from the Global North tend to dominate, leaving little room for Global Majority innovations and priorities (Ong et al 2024). In the light of these concerns, this panel invites critical conversation about diverse initiatives of mainstreaming decolonial perspectives in media and communication. We are concerned that decolonization remains a specialization, rather than a force that transforms the field as a whole. Such a transformation is important for stakeholders around the globe. Universalism shuts out research and initiatives from most parts of the world in developing knowledge frames and proposing policy solutions. But, simultaneously, it prevents Global North researchers from understanding the specificity of media and communication in the US, Europe, and Australia. In other words, multiplying frames of reference and developing more bottom-up, locally-situated approaches also means critically reflecting on the particularity of Global North institutions and practices. In discussing how to mainstream, and–crucially–how not to apply decolonial perspectives in media and communication, we are confronted with a number of complex questions. First, while we advocate for more bottom-up, situated approaches, we also recognize the need to critically attend to the global dominance of major US-based tech companies (Couldry & Mejias 2019; Madianou 2024). How can we critically examine these unequal global power relations without reverting to a universalist and techno-solutionist mindsets that only reifies the centrality of US tech corporations and regulatory agencies? Second, from our perspective, it is vital that any efforts to mainstream decolonial approaches in our discipline should resist homogenization, bureaucratization, and tokenism in processes of movement-building. How do we develop more critical and granular analytics of what are better or worse methodologies of mainstreaming decolonial perspectives? What are the risks of using decoloniality as a “metaphor”? What are the differences between decolonial and anti-colonial approaches? Finally, the elephant in the room in any discussion of decoloniality is the inequality of resources and unjust practices of knowledge production in the discipline and higher education at large. To transform the field and multiply our frames of reference, we need global networks and institutions that “walk the talk” and promote just, equitable, and sustainable ways of working and collaborating. How do we share or redistribute resources in global collaborative projects? How can our discipline’s governance bodies and associations guard against tokenism and knowledge extractivism? What are examples of centers and networks in global tech studies that have successfully navigated situations of political conflict and instability, and what survival strategies can we learn from them? These are urgent questions today as global studies initiatives in the Global North are under attack from far-right conservative groups and governments, just as decolonization discourses have been hijacked by anti-democratic ethno-nationalists in the Global Majority (Chakravartty & Roy 2023). Drawing from five parallel research initiatives that aim to develop decolonial perspectives in media and communication, this panel will address these questions and involve the audience in a conversation about best practices: 1. “Local Specificity & Global Power Relations” addresses the conceptual, methodological, and political challenges that confront us when we try to multiply our frames of reference in media and communication research, while, simultaneously, attending to the global relations of power and dependency that define the contemporary digital media ecosystem. 2. “Decolonial Tech Policy: Engaging an Oxymoron?” reflects on South-to-South network-building as a method of “mainstreaming” decolonial perspectives in tech policy and digital advocacy spaces. 3. “Decaf Intersectionality, Soft Decolonialism and the Pact of Whiteness” addresses the whitewashing and the dilution of the ideas of intersectionality and of decolonisation, stressing the race and gender power dynamics in play when reflecting upon media, communications and culture, from global South perspectives. 4. “The Generative Power of Experience-in-Context” discusses insights from a grounded exploration of the lives of women engaged in informal labour, to feed back into [decolonial] theorizing about concepts like precarity, flexibility, networks, and identity. 5. “Decolonizing Fact-checking Through the Use of Nonprofessional Mediators” investigates the role of decolonized fact-checking interventions as potential tools to combat “fake news” in two politically unstable countries: Mali and Ethiopia.
SOCIAL MEDIA IN ELECTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM THE UNITED STATES, GERMANY, AND AUSTRALIA
The year 2024 was marked by an unprecedented confluence of elections around the world, with more than 50% of the world’s population called upon to vote on the future of their governments; perhaps most important of these was the presidential election in the United States in November 2024, which saw Donald Trump returned to the Presidency – an outcome whose immense consequences are already being felt strongly around the world, mere months into the new administration’s term. In particular, Trump’s victory and his immediate upending of the rule of law at home and world order abroad impacts directly on major subsequent elections elsewhere in the world, including in closely allied nations like Germany (whose federal election took place in February 2025) and Australia (where a federal election is scheduled for April or May 2025). The resurgence of Trumpism emboldened extreme right parties like Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which attracted over 20% of the popular vote in the 2025 election; and Trump’s threats of import tariffs and wavering support for international alliances are emerging as a key topic in the 2025 Australian election campaign. These developments are further exacerbated by substantial changes in online campaigning environments and strategies. Social media platform operators like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have closely aligned themselves with the Trump administration (or in Musk’s case, joined it outright), in part to seek protection against European Union and other regulations that require action against disinformation, abuse, and hate speech, and enforce transparency and researcher data access; they have dismantled their content moderation and fact-checking teams; and (in Musk’s case) are actively disseminating disinformation, hate speech, and extremist content. This has also opened the door for other political agitators and influence operators to push problematic materials, including conspiracy theories and AI-generated disinformation. Finally, the changing platform landscape – marked by the gradual decline of Facebook, a steady exodus from X under Musk’s leadership, the rapid rise of TikTok, and the emergence of federated Twitter alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky – also necessitates substantial changes in electoral campaigning on the one hand, and in campaign research methods on the other. This panel brings together five papers from major research teams that trace these developments through the US, German, and Australian elections of 2024 and 2025. They provide new insights into the changing electoral campaigning environments of the present moment, and offer new approaches for how we can conduct such research under these changed circumstances. Paper 1 addresses the 2024 US presidential election, and explores in particular how the digital advertising funded by Elon Musk engaged in targeted disinformation of key voter groups. Scraping data from the Meta Ad Library and Google Ad Transparency Center, it documents substantial efforts to pollute the information environment with such content. Paper 2 shifts our attention to the 2025 German election. It explores the strategies of political campaigners for embracing TikTok, and especially the interlinkage between political talk show appearances and the talking points presented in campaign videos on TikTok – a platform which serves both to trial such talking points for use in talk shows, and to redistribute television clips of talk show appearances afterwards. Paper 3 continues our focus on the role of TikTok in the German election, but shifts the emphasis to the experience of ordinary users. Drawing on more than 300 data donations from German TikTok users, it examines their exposure to political content on the platform, explores the role of TikTok’s algorithms in pushing users towards specific videos, and investigates whether such algorithmic amplification is asymmetrical across parties. Paper 4 extends a long tradition of research into the use of social media in Australian elections. Traditionally, Twitter and Facebook served as key campaigning spaces, but this has diversified considerably now, and the paper therefore presents an ambitious cross-platform data gathering and analysis agenda for the 2025 election. It also employs the novel practice mapping technique to examine campaigning patterns in the election. Paper 5 concludes the panel. Building on concepts from semiotic theory, it combines topic modelling, named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and dependency parsing methods to systematically identify the discursive and semionarrative structures of Facebook posts by and comments to the leading candidates in the 2022 and 2025 Australian elections, exploring differences between candidates and changes over time. In combination, then, these five papers examine election campaigning on social media across three major national elections, drawing on innovative conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches and applying them to a wide range of platforms and practices. They offer critical new insights into the state of social media campaigning, and important impulses for future research agendas in a rapidly changing world. Individual extended abstracts for these five papers are included in the PDF submission.
INFRASTRUCTURAL RUPTURES: ANXIETIES, BORDERS, AND CLOUDS
The rapidly changing geopolitical landscape forces us to rethink the relation between infrastructure, politics, control, and power. This panel contributes to discussions on ruptures by exploring how digital infrastructures reconfigure the state, market, and citizen nexus and presenting research approaches that interrogate transnational networks by centring their materiality. Jointly, the papers showcase how infrastructures are used as a continuation of politics with material means. The authors present five case studies from the global north and south, which foreground the delegation and transfer of power away from states and citizens and the anxiety resulting from this. The papers frame the leveraging of infrastructures in global power relations through the lenses of bordering, infrastructural anxiety, defamiliarization, financialization, and necropolitics. Together, the papers show how the transfer of power to third parties, with their particular agendas and interests, leads to a reconfiguration of control, bringing new challenges to states and citizens. Jointly, the detailed case studies raise questions about initiatives surrounding digital sovereignty, digital public infrastructures, and global internet governance as means of citizen emancipation and their ability to serve the public interest. The panel invites engagement with the development of new infrastructural ideologies to underpin sustainable and equitable futures. The panel is timely because it shows that countries have not (yet) developed an answer to the transition from privatization and globalization to predatory neorealism, which echoes 19th-century conceptions of power that assert that 'might is right'.
HUMANS AND MACHINES IN THE LOOP: RETHINKING LLMS FOR CONFLICT AND DISAGREEMENT IN CONTENT ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL COMPLEX PHENOMENA
The study of polarization, conflict, and ideological divergence has long challenged scholars across media, communication, and political science. Understanding these phenomena requires engaging with fundamental questions about how opinions are formed, reinforced, and contested in public discourse, and how language and discourses can have so many different meanings and interpretations. Traditional content analysis methods often try to capture this complexity - whether in large-scale media narratives, open-ended survey responses, or political discourse on social media. Computational approaches offer new possibilities, but also raise critical concerns about validity, interpretability, and methodological rigor (Baden et al., 2022; Boumans & Trilling, 2016). Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly central to communication research, with their capacity to process vast amounts of text, identify underlying patterns, and assist in qualitative coding (Chew et al., 2023; Alizadeh et al., 2025). Researchers have explored their use in a variety of tasks, from detecting polarization in open-ended survey responses to analyzing media frames and political discourse (DiGiuseppe & Flynn, 2025; Marino & Giglietto, 2024). However, the integration of LLMs into content analysis presents challenges: How well do they align with human interpretations? Can they enhance research beyond automation? And what role should they play in investigating contested or ambiguous meanings (Pilny et al., 2024; Gunes & Florczak, 2025)? This panel moves beyond discussions of mere optimization and accuracy, instead critically and deeply discussing the use of LLMs to engage with conflict, disagreement, and interpretive diversity. Instead of seeing them as tools to impose consensus, we ask how researchers can use and interact with them to reveal tensions, challenge assumptions, and contribute to new methodologies (Dai et al., 2023; De Paoli, 2024). Across four studies, we assess LLMs mediating, amplifying, or reframing scholarly debates on the methods to analyse contentious political and social issues. Our discussion examines both the benefits and risks of these approaches, raising questions about the role of AI in media and communication methodologies. Paper 1 present a computational approach to measure issue polarization from open-ended survey responses, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to systematically code viewpoints on contentious topics such as climate change, trans rights, or political discourse on Ukraine. While traditional polarization research often relies on close-ended survey measures, this study explores how LLMs can introduce methodological complexity by computing nuanced, interpretive tensions in unstructured responses. The research highlights how LLMs not only enable large-scale automated coding but also challenge conventional measurement frameworks by accommodating ambiguity and ideological fluidity. Preliminary results underscore the potential of LLMs to expand analytical possibilities beyond traditional survey measures, reframing how scholars engage with disagreement and conflict in media and communications studies. Paper 2 examines how LLMs can expand the scope of content analysis and assisting researchers in analyzing framing. The study applies Meta’s Llama-3 model in a two-stage approach to study climate movements in Australian news coverage, using few-shot prompting to first extract frame elements - such as problem definitions, causes, and blame attributions - and then synthesizing these elements into coherent frames. While the human coders tended to construct more issue-specific and varied frames, LLM-generated outputs were generally broader in scope but more internally consistent across the dataset. Paper 3 presents a literature review examining how LLMs are transforming content analysis workflows in social sciences. It identifies four key modes of LLM integration: scalable coders, human-assistive collaborators, autonomous decision-makers, and tools for semantic clustering. The study highlights the ongoing challenges of ensuring interpretability, reliability, and epistemic authority when LLMs are applied to human-generated texts. Paper 4 applies LLMs to investigate the role of political narratives and user engagement on social media during Brazil’s 2022 presidential election and the January 8, 2023, coup attempt. The study analyzes over 12 million social media posts, clustering content based on sentiment, audience reactions, and dissemination patterns to assess how different narratives are amplified. The research examines whether the framing of political content influences audience interaction and engagement levels. Together, these studies push the boundaries of how LLMs are integrated into research on political communication, polarization, and media analysis. They provide an assessment of LLMs’ methodological potential and risks - not just as tools for efficiency, but as channels to rethink how we engage with contested meanings in communication research.
RUPTURES IN CLIMATE DISCOURSE: DIGITAL PUBLICS, POLARISATION, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT IN AUSTRALIA AND BRAZIL
Australia and Brazil are on the frontlines of climate crises. Both have experienced significant warming, including intense heatwaves. Both have experienced changes in rainfall patterns, with increases in some regions and decreases in others, affecting biodiversity, agriculture, and infrastructure. Floods and largely destructive bushfires have been major events both countries dealt with in the last decade. The frequency and intensity of such extreme events like bushfires and floods are expected to increase, further increasing the impact to ecosystems and cities. Beyond suffering similar consequences of climate change, both economies rely on extractive industries (mining, agribusiness, and fossil fuels). Brazil is the sixth largest global greenhouse gas emitter, while Australia is one of the largest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases, largely due to its reliance on coal for energy and as an export commodity. In addition to the consequences and causes of climate change, climate activism and advocacy in both countries are highly driven by indigenous and other vulnerable communities, who are also the ones suffering the most severe consequences of ecological destruction. This panel brings together papers that investigate how climate debates unfold in these two nations, focusing on digital public spheres, political polarisation, and discursive struggles over climate action. By examining data from Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, news media, and parliamentary debates, these papers reveal how climate discussions are shaped by ideological divides, strategic narratives, platforms affordances, and moments of crisis. The first key theme in our panel is how climate discourse is shaped by the experience of extreme weather events. Paper 1 analyzes online climate discussions in Brazil, investigating if extreme weather events trigger spikes in public engagement, and if political and media framing influence whether these discussions translate into sustained climate awareness. Similarly, Paper 2 tracks shift in Australian climate discourses on Facebook, paying attention if events such as the catastrophic 2019–2020 bushfires intensify debates on climate action. A second key theme across our panel is the problematization of digital platforms’ mediation of climate polarisation. Paper 1 and Paper 2 analyse multiple years of Facebook discourses including different types of users (e.g., news media, activists), while Paper 3 analyse far-right climate discussions in Brazilian WhatsApp and Telegram groups. Paper 4 brings another dimension by investigating Australian online news media. We then cover a wide range of online arenas, allowing a granular view on the role of different spaces for the overall climate discussions. A third key theme is the formation of discursive alliances or coalitions (groups of actors who align around shared climate narratives) and the circulation of arguments and claims. Paper 2 employs a novel practice mapping method to identify distinct climate discourse clusters in Australia. Paper 4 extends this analysis to the political arena, mapping the alliances that form around climate issues in news reporting and parliamentary debates. Similarly, Paper 5 examines how parliamentary discourse in Brazil intersects with climate debates, particularly in discussions on land conflicts and territorial rights. It investigates weather climate narratives are weaponized to delegitimise land rights movements, aligning agribusiness interests with climate delay rhetoric. A fourth key theme is the role of far-right actors in shaping climate discourse. Paper 3 provides an in-depth look at how Brazilian far-right groups on WhatsApp and Telegram use climate issues to reinforce political polarisation. It identifies recurring themes, including attacks on environmental NGOs, conspiratorial claims that climate change is a globalist hoax, and narratives that portray agribusiness as under siege by environmental regulations. Paper 4 finds parallel trends in Australia, where climate delay discourses have evolved from outright denial to more sophisticated tactics. Paper 5 adds another layer by examining how parliamentary actors in Brazil use climate narratives to delegitimise land struggles, further embedding climate discourse within broader ideological battles. Finally, our panel considers the intersection of media narratives, policy debates, and public engagement. Paper 1 and Paper 2 highlight how news coverage and online engagement influence climate discussions, while Paper 4 systematically maps how claims discursively connect media reporting with public submissions to parliamentary inquiries. Paper 5 provides a historical perspective by tracing three decades of Brazilian parliamentary debates on land and climate, revealing how formal political discourse evolves in response to shifting environmental and economic pressures.
HAVE DIGITAL MEDIA PLATFORMS A ROLE IN FOSTERING A POLARIZED PUBLIC DEBATE? EVIDENCES FROM LATIN AMERICA
In recent years, democracies worldwide have experienced a sharp rise in political polarization, coinciding with the global spread of digital media platforms (Yarchi et al., 2021). After the Pink Tide in Latin America, which brought left-wing leaders to power following years of autocratic rule, the past decade has seen a resurgence of a new conservative right, leading to protests and the rise of illiberal populism. Over the past two years, several Latin American countries have seen an uprising of extreme right-wing political actors and parties. The region's conservative agenda often relies on leader personalization to legitimize political and social issues (Rennó, 2022). In Argentina, Javier Milei's 2023 rise exemplifies this rhetoric. In Brazil, despite Lula Da Silva's moderate government, extreme right-wing sentiments persist, evident in the January 8 Brasília attacks and recent results of local elections. As Chile approaches its 2025 elections, the impact of digital media on politics remains crucial. This phenomenon is not limited to Latin America (Chaguri & Amaral, 2023); Donald Trump's re-election in the U.S. highlights the global link between social media and political polarization, underscoring the need for international attention. Although research on political polarization is growing, it remains relatively new in Latin America (Bello, 2023) compared to the US, where most studies are concentrated (Marino & Iannelli, 2023). While polarization is not inherently a threat to democracy, destructive political polarization (Esau et al., 2024) can severely harm democratic processes. In such cases, hybrid media ecosystems and their sociotechnical features contribute to the decline of public spheres (Casal Bértoa & Rama, 2021). The studies in this panel explore how social media platforms drive polarization by analyzing platform affordances, user behavior, and the textual elements shaping public debate. Through diverse methodological approaches, the panel offers insights into key issues across Latin American case studies and various social media platforms. Choucair and colleagues introduce a novel method to identify "otherness" in political speeches by Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru leaders. By analyzing target identities ("whom") alongside issues, ideologies, partisan choices ("what"), and sentiments and interactions ("how"), the study shows how targets are demonized and vilified as enemies. This approach advances polarization studies by revealing the targets of polarized rhetoric and enhancing our understanding of how discursive strategies shape in-group and out-group perceptions in Latin America. Soares and Osborne-Carey analyze the discourse of pro-Bolsonaro supporters on Facebook during the 2022 Brazilian elections, highlighting how political narratives contributed to the January 8th, 2023 insurrection in Brasília. The study challenges a narrow binary definition of disinformation, showing that supporters framed their actions as defending and 'restoring' democracy, claiming it was lost with Lula’s return. These findings underscore the need to consider such imaginaries when studying political disinformation and the limitations of rigid 'right' vs. 'wrong' information dichotomies. Tavares examines online comments directed at Brazilian federal congresswomen after the "Rape PEC" (PEC 164/12) proposal to ban legal abortion. Analyzing Instagram comments, the study explores how political alignment shapes discourse and polarization. Right-wing politicians supported the PEC using religious values, while left-wing politicians emphasized women's rights. Social media dynamics and online communities contributed to commenters aligning with posts and exchanging attacks, intensifying the polarized debate. Paroni, Marino, and Giglietto analyze how politicians' visual communication on Instagram influenced destructive polarization during the 2024 São Paulo local elections. The study examines allegations that a mayoral candidate boosted his campaign by paying for viral short videos, leading to high engagement, an imbalanced election environment, and attacks on the opposition. The research underscores the impact of visual media on digital interactions and democratic processes, highlighting the growing role of image-based strategies in political campaigns. The panel will contribute to the scholarly discourse on political polarization by providing empirical insights and theoretical perspectives with regional and global relevance.
RUPTURING DIGITAL CHILDHOODS AND PARENTING IN AUSTRALIA? SOCIAL MEDIA BANS, PRIVACY, SCREEN TIME, AND GENERATIVE AI
In the current state of global political, environmental and social challenges, it is perhaps unsurprising that digital childhoods and parenting are in continuous flux as well, with families of all configurations experiencing digital and cultural ruptures. In Australia this discontent with the digital world has led to unprecedented legislation banning all children under the age of 16 from having accounts on social media platforms from December 2025. Despite being popular with the broader public, mental health advocates and most academic research suggest the ban is more likely to do harm than good for Australian children’s health and wellbeing. Paper 1 focuses on this rupture to Australian children’s digital lives. Parents are also conflicted in attempting to balance the young children’s privacy with the connectivity and support that may come in sharing images or stories that includes young people’s photos and data. Paper 2 focuses on these privacy ruptures. Despite being widely seen as outdated in scholarly circles, the focus on screen time, measuring children’s time before a screen without context or questioning the quality of the experience, continues to be a dominant idea Australian families wrestle with. Paper 3 focuses on the ruptures that screen time as a concept continues to bring to families and parenting in particular. And now Generative AI tools present new challenges as they are integrated widely into new and existing platforms and apps without concurrent programs to raise users’ literacy as families and children are increasingly using these tools. The way Generative AI ‘imagines’ children, families and Australianess is the focus of paper 4. These Australian examples speak to similar concerns globally, with parents and children around the world wrestling similar issues, contextualized locally. Other national governments are similarly considering social media bans for children, and thus watching the Australian experiences with implementing the ban, and attempting to enforce age verification, with great interest. This panel presents four papers which explore these ruptures in the Australian context, but with clear global implications.
HEALTH CREATOR: ANATOMY OF A FUZZY CONCEPT
“Health creator” is now a common term across academic work (e.g., Avella, 2024) and public parlance (e.g., Moore, 2020), also featuring in the title of one of the traditional panels at AoIR2024. However, as a label, it directs our attention away from matters of ill health (e.g., suffering, diagnosis, loss), overlooking the work of those who share their lived experience of illness and missing the multiple implications this work has for creators, audiences and wider publics. As a concept, it remains underdeveloped– even despite the growing body of both academic research on platform economies and creator cultures (e.g., Cunningham and Craig, 2021) and global policy interested in the influence of social media on lay and public understandings of health and medicine (e.g., WHO, 2025). The panel aims to shed light on the wider spectrum of creator work that draws on matters of health, illness and care and develop a conceptual toolkit to interpret this work, understand its labour and explore its implications. It reviews evidence of lived experience, epistemic work, credibility, and influence through five case studies approaching creators and their content on and through Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, BlueSky and LinkedIn. To provide a comprehensive account of the processes through which content is created, shared, and audienced, the panel explores all sites of meaning making: it starts by focusing on creators themselves (paper 1), to then draw attention to content (paper 2 and 3), platform structures (paper 4), and audiences (paper 5).
“AMBIENT MISOGYNY”: POCKETS OF GENDERED HATE ACROSS CONTEXTS AND PLATFORMS
Recent years have shown renewed scientific interest in online misogyny, albeit predominantly in overt and targeted forms of it. Those include, above all, antifeminist movements and spaces of the manosphere that aim to exploit, suppress, and subjugate women, for example in incel and red pill communities, or masculinity podcasts. This panel applies Siapera’s distinction between ambient and organised digital racism to discuss cases of “ambient misogyny”. Organised hate is typically overt and draws on the networked capabilities of social media platforms to target and harass women or individuals outside of non-heteronormative males. In comparison, ambient misogyny relates to more everyday, banal, and tacit gender talk that may not as easily be identified, considered to be toxic or hateful, or appear in unexpected contexts. Drawing on four case studies in the arenas of health and illness, memetic tropes, feminist content creation, and far right discourses, this panel aims to discuss how ambient misogyny is often overlooked or left unmoderated in light of humour, irony, and sarcasm, women's and non-binary persons' choices for exposure, and normative views on femininity and women's bodies, as well as how the harms resulting from these may be mitigated.
THE DIVERSITY OF EVERYDAY EXPERIENCES OF FAMILIES AND CHILDREN WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
This panel examines how parents and carers make decisions about the access and use of digital technologies by their young children. With many family practices now mediatized, it explores the conditions under which family members (re)negotiate their understandings about their children’s relationship with technology and the tensions that emerge. The panel combines five papers which focus on the diversity of daily digital experiences of families and children in Australia, Brazil, Portugal and Estonia. The papers use diverse theoretical and methodological approaches such as: the technological, legal and economic analysis of apps, participant observation, thematic analysis of interviews, and multimodal content analysis. They draw on case studies, critical data studies and migration studies to unpack the diverse and divergent practices and understandings families have of digital technologies worldwide. The papers are titled: ‘Parental Approaches to Children’s Access and Use of Technologies: A Case Study of an Indigenous Community in Brazil’; ‘How Melbourne- Based Sri Lankan Australian Families Use Digital Technology in Everyday Family Routines’; ‘Australian Families in the EdTech Data Assemblage: The Case of Storypark; ‘The Playbour of Children of Influencer Moms in Brazil and Portugal’ and ‘Plataforms as the Materialitis of Care: Experiences and Practices of Three-Generational Families from Estonia’. Together, the papers identify crucial challenges for parents to protect and promote the rights of their children in this complex and evolving digital environment. Some of these challenges are common to all papers, but others are substantially different, particularly when contrasting case studies in the Global North and Global South.
LATIN AMERICAN CREATOR (SUB)CULTURES ON TIKTOK: VISIBILITY, RESISTANCE, AND CONTEXTUAL RESEARCH
Latin America features diverse cultures, landscapes, life experiences, and ethnicities, shaped by socioeconomic inequalities and ongoing political turbulence. These structural disparities extend to the digital sphere, shaping the opportunities and challenges faced by content creators in the region. The promise of fame, financial success, and global visibility celebrated in Western content creation is often unfulfilled in other regions. Instead, Latin American creators must navigate layers of discrimination and (in)visibility, stemming from linguistic, geographic, and identity-based vulnerabilities, while also contending with algorithmic systems that privilege certain types of content. Despite the global expansion of influencer and creator industries, research on creators outside the West remains scarce (Abidin & Brown, 2019; Poell et al., 2024). This panel seeks to address this gap by focusing on Latin America’s diverse creator landscape and platform dynamics. Given its high penetration in the region, TikTok provides an ideal lens to examine these challenges. By 2025, TikTok is projected to reach 173 million users in Latin America (Bianchi, 2022), making it a dominant force in the region’s digital ecosystem. Unlike earlier platforms, TikTok’s algorithm-driven discovery system (Abidin, 2021) enables creators to reach new audiences beyond their immediate networks. Additionally, short vertical videos have become central to entertainment, music industries (Anonymized), and news consumption (Mulier et al., 2021; Newman et al., 2024). This has led to the broader “TikTokification” of social media where competing platforms such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have adopted similar algorithmic structures, interfaces, and affordances to mimic TikTok’s engagement-driven model (Agile Brand Guide, 2024). This panel draws from the findings of the Latin American Cultures on TikTok report (Anonymized), examining the evolving landscape of content creation in the region. Panelists will explore the shifting landscape for Latin American creators, addressing (1) the opportunities and challenges they face in the digital economy, (2) the monetization and visibility barriers shaping their sustainability, and (3) the complex interplay between their politics, subcultures, and the region’s rapidly expanding influencer industry. Bringing together scholars specializing in creator economies, platform governance, and digital cultures, each paper features researchers from across Latin America with deep-rooted experience in the region’s social, economic, and cultural contexts —from MA students and PhD candidates to assistant and associate professors. Setting the foundation for the panel’s broader discussion, the first paper presents a research agenda for studying Latin American creators on TikTok, focusing on governance, (de)monetization, and visibility divides. It examines how platform regulations, economic barriers, and algorithmic inequalities shape the region’s creator economy, revealing how TikTok privileges certain content and geographies while marginalizing others. By mapping the structural constraints that Latin American creators face, this paper establishes a critical framework for understanding the tensions between platform governance and local creative industries. Shifting towards local creator cultures, the second paper examines the so-called "Chilenazo" phenomenon —the return of Chilean creators to their homeland, navigating exclusion from global creator culture, after struggling to compete in the Mexican creator industry. It explores how platform nationalism (competition between U.S. and Chinese platforms), and cultural imaginaries shape creators’ professional aspirations, mobilities, and their perception of Chile as a site of creative and economic limitation. Continuing the theme of resistance, the third paper explores the contested identities of Latin American creators in Peru, analyzing how Peruvian activists repurposed TikTok’s affordances during the 2022-2023 political crisis. Drawing on the framework of everyday politics, it examines how creators strategically leveraged TikTok’s affordances to circumvent censorship, counter state narratives, and document human rights violations. This paper illustrates how TikTok, designed for entertainment, was transformed into a grassroots political tool, where digital creativity became an instrument of local defiance. The fourth paper shifts focus to activism and community-building, exploring the Brazilian TikTok subculture of prisoners’ wives (#MulherDePreso). It examines how women in relationships with incarcerated men in Brazil use TikTok to construct digital support networks, share survival strategies, and navigate the bureaucratic complexities of incarceration. Through hashtag activism and digital storytelling, this subculture reclaims visibility for an often-overlooked demographic, demonstrating how TikTok facilitates alternative forms of advocacy and solidarity beyond traditional activist spaces. The fifth analyzes how young Brazilian TikTokers remix, adapt, and localize global music hits on the platform. It explores how platform aesthetics and algorithmic virality fuel new forms of digital nostalgia, and cultural remixing subcultures, transcending time and location through dance trends. Rather than simply reviving old songs, these adaptations reflect a distinctly Brazilian approach to musical reinterpretation, illustrating how local creative cultures interact with and reshape globalized digital content. Together, these papers examine how Latin American creators engage with TikTok —as entrepreneurs, activists, or subcultural participants. By highlighting the region’s dynamic creator ecosystem, we aim to provide a nuanced understanding of how local cultures both influence and are influenced by global platforms, shaping visibility, agency, and creative expression while reflecting the richness and diversity of Latin American experiences.
PLATFORM MECHANICS OF HATE AND MARGINALITY: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH
This panel critically examines platform imperialism by exploring platform affordances, constraints, and the social practices they reshape. Through four case studies from India and Kenya, we challenge dominant Western theoretical frameworks, emphasizing how platforms intersect with shared histories of colonialism, racialized dispossession, and extraction across the majority world. Through this panel, we aim to generate theoretical alternatives that resonate globally while centering perspectives from the South. Platforms have become infrastructural to cultural and social reproduction, shaping institutional processes, valuation, and circulation of cultural artifacts. While existing scholarship has examined platform power through lenses of imperialism, racial capitalism, and colonialism, macro-theorizations often obscure the nuanced ways in which platform logics manifest in distinct socio-historical contexts. We introduce the concept of "platform mechanics" to analyze the encoded and institutionalized boundaries within which extraction and resistance unfold. Drawing from critical game studies, we consider platform affordances—such as encryption, content moderation, algorithmic governance, and surveillance—as sites of constraint and possibility. Our papers explore the mediation of marginality, digital repression, ethnonationalism, Islamophobia, caste segregation, and gendered power. By foregrounding platform mechanics as a framework for understanding social inequality and resistance, we invite discussions on counter-imaginaries that envision alternative platform ecosystems.
HISTORIES AND RUPTURES IN PLATFORM GOVERNANCE
Scholars of platform governance, referring to dynamic relationships between governments, platform companies, and civil society, have often inquired about the new ways that online activity is structured through emerging technologies, norms, and political tensions. At the same time, we recognize a need to historicize these power relations: tracing the continuities, reconfigurations, and above all ruptures among “novelties”. This panel brings together four papers that advance the historicization of platform governance. Two papers explore “prehistories” of content moderation in eBay and in CompuServe's CB Simulator, looking specifically at how moderation responded to commercial and political pressures as opposed to idealistic visions of unregulated online spaces. The other two papers offer recent analyses of contemporary ruptures in platform governance, one examining how media governance approaches historically shape platform regulation in Indonesia and Pakistan and another investigating the shift from simple adjudication to complex forms of mediation and consensus-building. Juxtaposing prehistories with contemporary analyses sheds light on how moderation challenges, tensions, and “solutions” have diminished and persisted.
Between Flesh and Algorithm: Resistance Strategies in Brazilian Camming
This research examines how Brazilian camgirls develop techno-corporeal practices that simultaneously incorporate and resist platform capitalism's logics of abstraction. Drawing on Sobchack's concept of embodiment and Paasonen's carnal resonances, we investigate how performers navigate increasingly restrictive platform governance while creating affective connections through their bodies. Through a qualitative methodology triangulating virtual ethnography, interviews with ten Brazilian camgirls, and walkthrough analysis of platforms, this study reveals three key findings. First, performers develop embodied technical knowledge that enables them to circumvent platform control mechanisms, including multi-platform presence despite exclusivity requirements. Second, in response to high commission rates and payment barriers on mainstream platforms, camgirls create parallel economic systems using Brazil's state-managed PIX payment infrastructure, circumventing both platform commissions and dollar-based payment systems that many local consumers resist using. Third, these practices constitute forms of "regulated embodiment"—a condition where performers must balance platform compliance with embodied resistance. The Brazilian context reveals a distinctive dynamic where the state-managed payment system provides an infrastructural alternative to corporate financial intermediaries that routinely engage in financial deplatforming of sex workers. By examining how bodies become sites where platform governance, affective labor, and resistance converge, this research contributes to understanding embodied digital labor in the global south.
Hollow Datasets: Algorithmic Calculability in Data Curation
Data science platforms are infrastructures for collaborative curation, processing, analysis, and application of datasets. In facilitating access to data resources, these platforms change the social and material conditions of knowledge generation from data, which may be characterized as the platformization of data science. Platform configurations shape the curatorial practices that render data actionable. However, the specific platform mechanisms of data curation on these platforms are overlooked. In this study, I examine the sociotechnical organization of data curation on Kaggle, a prominent data science platform. By conceptualizing Kaggle as a calculative infrastructure, I conduct a technographic analysis of Kaggle’s Usability Rating to unpack the calculation of data quality. Findings suggest that making data curation calculable operates through algorithmic rationality that conditions the generation of hollow datasets by reducing meaningful, contextual dataset contents to numerical indicators. Hollow datasets capture how digital platform logics and data science cultures reconfigure data curation as a procedural achievement in pursuit of data quality.
“In data they trust”: the poetics of citizen-generated data in Brazilian cannabis activism
What happens when grassroots organizations decide to produce data? What forms of legitimization must their situated knowledge undergo to be recognized as actionable evidence? And who ultimately decides what counts (and what does not count) as evidence? Drawing on the theoretical framework of imaginaries from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Critical Data Studies (CDS), this work lays the foundations for expanding CDS with Brazil, foregrounding the country as a vibrant site of epistemological and political contestation that resists post-factual truth regimes, far-right politics, and spaces of “strategic unknowns” (McGoey, 2012). Through the case of Abrario, a grassroots organization challenging exclusionary state and regulatory practices, the study reveals the frictions, negotiations, and power struggles inherent in contemporary data production. Abrario’s mobilization of community-generated data not only exposes the limits of "official" knowledge but also highlights the transformative potential of grassroots data to reshape dominant narratives about health, care, and citizenship. Centering perspectives from the Global South, this work moves beyond technical debates to explore the symbolic, political, and poetic dimensions of datafication. It conceptualizes grassroots data activism as part of epistemic sites, dynamic spaces of negotiation, translation, and imagination where alternative ways of knowing are produced and defended. The study uncovers tensions between bottom-up and top-down data regimes and highlights the forms of institutional skepticism that shape the rounds of legitimization required for grassroots evidence-making. By mobilizing mutiple data practices multiple formats Abrario's activism actively challenges dominant data regimes that erase or marginalize the lived experiences of its community.
Fan studies in Brazil: the internet-centric bias and its impact on understanding local fandoms.
Fan Studies as an academic field has been significantly shaped by american researchers like Henry Jenkins (1992, 2006a, 2006b), who conceptualized fans as active participants who engage with media texts through creative production. Since its beginning, the internet has become central to Fan Studies, marking what Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington (2007) call the “second wave” of research, with a focus on social media and digital fan practices. In Brazil, Fan Studies emerged in 2002 and aligned with the international references. Morover, Cyberculture scholars were among the few willing to support and metor such studies. Due to this historical context, Brazilian research on fandoms has largely prioritized internet-based interactions, reflecting a bias that overlooks offline fan practices. This focus is evident in literature reviews (Carlos, 2015; Amado, 2020) that highlight digital culture as a dominant theme. While the internet is crucial for contemporary fandoms, this emphasis may marginalize underrepresented fan groups. Internet access in Brazil expanded from 8% in 2002 to nearly 85% in 2024 (Laboissière, 2024), yet disparities in broadband quality and digital literacy persist (Knop, 2020). Consequently, digital Fan Studies risk favoring privileged demographics while neglecting fans from rural areas, lower-income communities, and older age groups. Scholars like Costa (2018) argue for a national theoretical framework to address these gaps. This article calls for a broader, more inclusive approach to Brazilian Fan Studies, recognizing the impact of internet-centrism and advocating for methodologies that reflect the country’s diverse fan cultures.
THE INTERACTION BETWEEN PUBLIC AND FACT-CHECKING CONTENT: THE PERCEPTION OF LUPA’S COMMENTERS ABOUT POLITICAL DEBATES DURING 2022 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN BRAZIL
This study examines how citizens engage with fact-checked content provided by fact-checking agencies. Specifically, it focuses on fact-checks conducted by the Lupa agency regarding the debates held during the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. Lupa is one of the first fact-checking agencies in Brazil. Founded in 2015, it is a member of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a global organization affiliated with the Poynter Institute in the United States. Comments from three fact-checking posts were collected from the agency’s official Instagram profile. In total, 1,222 comments from posts analyzing the debates broadcast by SBT, Band, and Globo were examined. A textual analysis was conducted using the Iramuteq software, employing similarity analysis, Reinert classification and word cloud generation. The findings indicate that discussions in the comment section leverage candidates’ statements and their fact-checks to debate issues that extend beyond the content published. Additionally, users criticize Lupa’s fact-checking process, highlighting areas that should be improved in the verification and dissemination of information. Some comments also reference the labels used by the agency to classify content. As the analyses reveal, commenters frequently question and challenge these labels used to determine the truthfulness of statements. In the next phase of the research, a categorical content analysis will be conducted to gain a more detailed understanding of user interactions.
REGULATING AI IN INDONESIA: BETWEEN DIGITAL DREAMS AND POWER PLAYS
The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has prompted countries worldwide to craft policies and regulations that capture both the promise and peril of this transformative technology. While resource-rich nations and private-sector giants have been at the forefront of AI governance debates, many countries in the Global South are now joining the regulatory race. Indonesia offers a particularly instructive case. The country introduced a National AI Strategy in 2020 and a circular letter on AI Ethics in 2023, and is currently drafting a presidential regulation on AI governance. However, these efforts unfold amid mounting concerns that the country’s digital policies may be drifting toward authoritarian tendencies, raising questions about whose interests AI regulation ultimately serves. This study presents findings from a multi-sited ethnographic study examining the policy-making process behind Indonesia’s emerging AI regulations. By tracing how various policy actors, such as government officials, industry representatives, civil society organizations, think tanks, and academia, imagine AI, the research reveals how historical precedents, contemporary power structures, and global policy discourses shape the country’s AI governance. The study underscores that Indonesia’s AI policy is neither a straightforward adoption of Global North models nor a purely local affair. Instead, it reflects a dynamic interplay of political, economic, and technological interests that echo the country’s long-standing tradition of using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to project visions of modernity and consolidate elite power.
Big Data Time Machines: Decolonizing the Futures of Post-Digital Histories
This paper offers a critical analysis of “Big Data Time Machines,” platforms built on AI and Big Data that use metaphors of time travel in relation to large historical datasets and digital archives. Drawing on decolonial perspectives that aim to unsettle western power structures around Big Tech, the paper focuses on the EU-funded large-scale research initiative (LSRI) called “Time Machine Europe,” a large collaborative international alliance devoted to using machine learning to extract the “Big Data of the Past for the future of Europe.” Through a material-semiotic analysis of the discourses and design strategies that structure archival encounters with select Local Time Machine projects, the paper identifies how “archive aesthetics” are used to organize historical journeys that reinforce long-standing white settler positions, but can also be used to creatively challenge these knowledge monopolies. The paper concludes by turning to speculative fiction about time travel by Black, Latinx, Caribbean, and Indigenous storytellers whose work might help internet scholars, artists, archivists and historians to work together in rupturing the western temporal imagination and imagining alternative and more just data histories and futures.
“What’s our escape plan, and where are we going to meet up?”: Theorising platform evacuation in platform society
This paper develops the analytical framework of “platform evacuation” to explore the dynamics of collective departure and migration of users from a social media platform due to a crisis in or of platform governance. Drawing on internet research addressing platform governance, platform cultures, creator practices, and digital memory work, we theorise “platform evacuation” as grounded in changes to governance by platforms or governance on platforms and requiring strategic management of a community across experiences of disruption, uncertainty and loss. Influencers, creators, and mainstream celebrities demonstrate evacuation leadership through public announcements of departure, commemorations of nostalgia and loss, and negotiations of community migration, reconfiguring existing practices as well as developing specific tactics to navigate the urgency, precarity and politics of crisis. “Platform evacuation” is oriented towards identifying and understanding strategies, performances, and narratives used to manage both voluntary or forced withdrawal from connective networks that users depend upon for work, interaction, and daily life. Our account of evacuation practices across the temporal unfolding of the 2025 US TikTok ban illustrates the stages of platform evacuation: creators explained the politics of evacuation through memetic content, engaged in platform remembrance and mourning, encouraged community migration and performed curtain calls. Thinking with temporalities, spatialities and discourses of platform evacuation, we propose, allows for a critical examination of collective departures and migrations from social media platforms as anticipated, instigated, and negotiated.
Consuming the selling experience in-the-moment: The use of TikTok Live during Black Friday in the Netherlands
Although TikTok Shop has not been fully launched in Europe, users are actively repurposing TikTok LIVE to facilitate commercial activity. This paper examines the emergence of live commerce on TikTok LIVE during Black Friday week in the Netherlands, highlighting how users mobilise the platform’s features to stage commerce as an interactive and participatory spectacle. We conceptualise TikTok LIVE as a hybrid space where entertainment, interaction, and commerce converge, reflecting broader trends in the platformisation of consumer culture. Drawing on ethnographic content analysis of 131 TikTok LIVE sessions across 80 accounts (22h37min of content), we employed a ‘follow the medium/traces/users’ approach to document how commerce unfolds within and beyond the app. First, we identify three selling formats: live auctions mediated via chat, external sales directing users to websites, and community-driven giveaways that reward prior buyers. Each format illustrates evolving norms of interaction between hosts and audiences. Second, we analyse the roles performed during LIVEs, mapping a spectrum from charismatic influencers to transaction-focused sellers, and noting distributed labour across hosts, moderators, and viewers. Third, we show how creators gamify live interactions - through unboxing rituals, celebratory shoutouts, and packing routines - rendering back-end commerce into content. These practices, we argue, exemplify commerce as liveness, reliant on self-surveillance and emotional engagement. We conclude by reflecting on the consumer law implications of these practices and assess TikTok’s role as a private governor shaping how commerce is organised and experienced on its platform.
Coloniality of Power in Global Development Teams: Perspective from Indian and Brazilian Tech Workers
The global digitalization process sweeping the world in the last few decades is often approached through the prism of some disruptive or innovative tech products, the big tech companies that “built” them or the relentless public efforts to regulate them. Still, the practical picture actually looks much more mundane: taking the form of products as seemingly as simple as an e-commerce banner, a check-in app or a simple sale receipt, developed in global teams bringing together developers, designers, researchers, quality analysts or products and projects managers often based in the Majority World – in major tech subcontracting or outsourcing hubs such as India or Brazil – and working directly for clients or subsidiaries based in Europe or the US. But who are these workers? And how are the international division of labour, coloniality of power and overall political economy of the tech industry shaping their work experiences and the products they build? Based on an ongoing global research and extensive ethnographic interviews with Brazilian and Indian tech workers regarding their trajectories, worldviews and experience in global teams, this paper aims at uncovering their perspectives on the inner workings of the companies they are working for, the challenges of consultancy work for clients based in the Minority World and the very social, cultural and political implications of this global organization of labour that then become visible.
Engagement Exchanges and the Collective Pursuit of Visibility on TikTok in the Brazilian Context
This study investigates engagement exchanges among Brazilian TikTok users, decentralized and collective practices aimed at producing data and metrics to help profiles qualify for the platform’s monetization program. Through the analysis of 123 TikTok videos, the study reveals a dynamic marked by diffuse collaboration and an ethic of reciprocity, where strategic engagement is promoted to boost visibility and meet monetization criteria. These practices involve the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), employing static images, videos, and audio to guide interactions. Creators leverage the platform’s affordances through data-driven strategies to "play the game" of the algorithm. Findings suggest that engagement exchanges differ from traditional platform labor structures, as they prioritize collective monetization eligibility rather than professional content creation. This distinguishes engagement exchanges on TikTok from engagement pods on Instagram, which focus on brand partnerships and long-term influencer careers. In the Brazilian context, these practices are shaped by historical labor precarity, reinforcing platform-driven aspirations of economic mobility while simultaneously obscuring exploitative labor dynamics. The findings also reveal an ongoing tension between reciprocity-based collaboration and TikTok’s individualistic monetization model.
Queer Media Productions in Social VR: Self-Expression, Documentation and Resistance Through VRChat
Social Virtual Reality (Social VR) has become a crucial space for LGBTQIA+ individuals, fostering self-expression, representation, and community-building. Platforms like VRChat provide a digital refuge, enabling identity exploration and social connection through immersive interactions and customizable avatars. While existing research has primarily examined embodiment and community dynamics, little attention has been given to the digital media productions created by LGBTQIA+ users in Social VR. This study employs a digital and media ethnographic approach to analyze queer media content in VRChat, including documentaries, performances, tutorials, music videos, and erotic role-playing. Through content analysis, documental analysis, and interviews with queer creators, this research explores how VRChat functions as a site for queer worldmaking, documenting LGBTQIA+ experiences and expanding visibility. VRChat is a vital tool for "Embodied Visibility," where queer users utilize virtual embodiment to construct and express identities that may not be possible in offline spaces. Media productions within VRChat, categorized as "machinima" or "metaverse films", serve as archival records of queer life, resisting systemic erasure and affirming LGBTQIA+ existence. As LGBTQIA+ rights encounter growing threats, these digital productions emerge as forms of cultural preservation and resistance. By capturing and amplifying queer narratives in Social VR, creators challenge and disrupt dominant discourses through queer worldmaking, offering representation and visibility while shaping digital spaces.
MAPPING AFFECTIVE URBAN ATMOSPHERES IN SHANGHAI’S PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION: A METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH TO URBAN MOBILITIES
Urban spaces are shaped by affective atmospheres, emerging from the interplay of material, social, and digital components. Digitalization and ‘smart’ urban infrastructures introduce new dynamics, affecting how people experience and navigate urban environments. This study investigates the role of mobile media in shaping affective urban atmospheres within Shanghai’s public transport system, conceptualizing mobility as both a physical and digital process embedded in socio-political power structures. Public transport operates as a hybrid space where movement of people, goods, and information converge. While data-driven mobility systems aim to enhance efficiency, they often neglect the affective dimensions of urban life. Research suggests that digital media and mobile technologies significantly shape urban atmospheres, influencing behavior and emotions in public spaces. This study, grounded in Non-Representational Theory and Affect Theory, develops a methodological toolset to systematically capture and visualize these atmospheres. The research, conducted in Shanghai (April 2024), integrates GPS tracking, geolocated images, sniffer data for digital signal detection, and ethnographic field notes. By synchronizing these data sources, the study visualizes urban affective densities using heat maps and spatial analyses. Findings reveal that public transport atmospheres are shaped by a dynamic interplay of digital and material elements, offering new insights into mobility practices and urban social interactions. This study contributes to research on public space and mobility while informing urban planning strategies. It highlights the need to incorporate affective atmospheres into smart city policies, ensuring urban mobility enhances both efficiency and quality of life.
USING SPECULATIVE DESIGN TO REIMAGINE DIGITAL PERIOD TRACKING FOR THE GLOBAL MAJORITY
Digital period tracking, facilitated by apps, wearables, and digital health platforms, has largely been examined through a Global North-centric lens. This paper shifts focus to India, where menstruators navigate period tracking within deeply stratified socio-digital environments marked by caste, class, gender, and infrastructural inequalities. While period-tracking apps are positioned as tools for reproductive autonomy, they often reinforce gendered surveillance, datafication, and exclusionary design practices. By centering the experiences of caste-marginalized, queer, and rural menstruators, this research interrogates the socio-cultural conditions shaping digital menstrual health technologies. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participatory speculative design (PSD) as a methodological approach, the study critically examines how menstruators engage with and navigate digital period tracking. Despite the promise of digital reproductive health technologies, this paper argues that period-tracking apps in India exist within a broader landscape of social and technological inequities. Identity markers such as caste, gender, and class significantly impact digital access, shaping who can engage with these technologies and under what conditions. Moreover, the lack of robust data protection laws raises concerns about privacy, surveillance, and the commodification of menstrual health data. By critically examining digital period tracking through a Global Majority perspective, this paper contributes to discussions on self-tracking, technological justice, and digital health equity. It calls for a reimagining of menstrual technologies that are inclusive, culturally relevant, and designed with—not just for—marginalized menstruators.
RUPTURE AND GLITCH IN PLEASURE: EXPLORING EROTIC ROLE PLAY IN VIRTUAL REALITY
Sex is not a seamless experience. It involves moments of rupture, disconnection and failure. Even more so when it is digitally mediated. Sexting, phone sex, or long-distance intimacy via cameras and tele-dildonics all intertwine pleasure with the quirks of technology—unpredictable internet connections, lag, latency, glitches. Yet in mainstream depictions, sex is stripped of these interruptions and is portrayed as an effortless choreography: bodies meeting flawlessly, fluids exchanged with precision at the right moment, the penis always erect… Today, in social VR platforms such as VRChat, thousands of users put on their VR headsets and body trackers to engage in what is called “erotic role play” through 3D avatars. They don different avatars ranging in aesthetics from the anime and animals to objects like toothbrushes. Drawing on the author’s digital ethnography in VRChat, this paper will examine how users negotiate desire, intimacy and sex during these immersive encounters. Central to this examination will be the moments of rupture, disconnection and glitches that users often experience in their avatarial embodiments. For example, when tracking fails, the user might end up having their avatarial body parts dislocated or see their partner slower than usual in case of latency. Building on queer theory and glitch feminism (Russell, 2020; Sundén, 2015), this paper will argue that these ruptures might subvert cis-heteronormative and ableist frameworks around sex and intimacy. By embracing imperfection and subverting normative assumptions around pleasure, these disruptions can open possibilities for reimagining intimacy in playful, experimental, and non-normative ways.
Investigating Information Integrity: Pathways for researching informational practices on digital platforms
As much as the debate around contemporary information flows and its associated risks has advanced in the last years—specially through the consolidation of an “information integrity” agenda—there are still significative gaps in literature concerning how digital platform usage affects the access to reliable, diverse and evidence-based information. Building on this, the present article aims to contribute to the discussion on how digital platforms’ big data algorithmic infrastructures relate to the promotion of healthy and diverse informational ecosystems. It draws upon existing sociological literature about algorithmic systems and on accumulated knowledge from international discussions (regarding the elaboration of an information integrity-oriented survey) to build an “investigation matrix”, proposing pathways for future practical quantitative and qualitative research in the field. Among its many conclusions, the matrix reinforces the need for a more holistic articulation of efforts on the theme, as well as the importance of multidisciplinary research that encompasses both the technical and social aspects of the phenomena. The article also discusses the importance of digital platforms in aiding researchers and policymakers with access to data, enabling impactful research efforts in the field.
Missing the Big Picture: Platform Opacity Weaponized for Disinformation in the Twitter Files Brazil Case
This paper examines the implications of the Twitter Files Brazil (TFB) controversy for the debate on platform governance, focusing on issues of transparency, moderation, and sovereignty. How has the TFB case contributed to the political manipulation of platform governance and accountability? The study combines network analysis of posts from April 2024 and historical data to map accounts early flagged for coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) and analyze the spread of disinformation on the platform. We also analysed the top shared posts to identify disinformation claims. Our findings reveal a polarized network, split into two distinct communities: one led by far-right U.S. and Brazilian far-right and the other by Brazilian progressive influencers. It highlights the role of far-right leaders in Brazil, who leveraged accusations against the Brazilian government to delegitimize national institutions, particularly the Supreme Court. 30.34% of the accounts engaged on sharings were previously flagged for CIB. We argue that these dynamics reflect a broader pattern of platform selective transparency, which contributes to weaponize opacity and undermine democratic digital governance. The lack of transparency hides that, beyond the legal requests for platform data and moderation, X actively arbitrates removals and boosts without accountability, including falsehoods driven by political propaganda. The study highlights how digital platforms, particularly in the Global South, play a crucial role in the international spread of disinformation, linking it to critiques of digital colonialism.
Cross-platform gendertrolling: a case study on a prominent harassment case in Brazil
This study investigates evidences of cross-platform gendertrolling in a high-profile Brazilian sexual harassment case. Gendertrolling is a form of technology-facilitated gender-based violence where individuals become targets of coordinated cyber harassment. It aims to destabilize victims, manipulate organic interactions, and disrupt women's participation in social media. While online misogyny has been the subject of recent studies, little research has examined its cross-platform dynamics, particularly in the Global South. In this paper, we propose a case study of one of Brazil's most prominent sexual harassment allegations involving celebrities from the country's largest television network, Rede Globo. In 2019, twelve women accused their former boss of harassment and/or attempted rape. The research analyzes 164 YouTube videos about the case, posted by the accused man and a supporter, and 64.7K comments, posted between June 2022 and July 2023, along with 1,436 Instagram comments from marketing campaigns featuring the main accuser. Using anomaly detection algorithms, natural language processing, and network analysis, we identify spikes in hostile comments following pro-defendant YouTube live streams. Engagement on Instagram surged after YouTube discussions, suggesting cross-platform incitement. Findings indicate that 84% of Instagram comments were attacks on the victim, with repetitive phrases and emojis signaling potential coordination. However, the right-skewed comment distribution suggests a mix of orchestrated and organic participation. Live streams acted as mobilization points, reinforcing narratives that fueled reputational attacks. This study provides empirical evidence of cross-platform misogynistic campaigns, highlighting the role of live streams in digital gendered violence.
Digital Attention Economy: Concept, Phenomenon, and History in Platform Studies
The attention economy has been increasingly examined in internet studies to explain sociotechnical and communicational dynamics on digital platforms. However, the commercialization of attention predates digital platforms, having shaped mass media since the 19th century. While not a new phenomenon, the attention economy assumes new contours in the digital era. This study, adopting a Foucauldian genealogical approach, investigates the ruptures between past and present logics of attention economy, analyzing their conceptual, historical, and phenomenological dimensions within critical platform studies. We identify three major ruptures in the attention economy from the mid-19th century to the present: (1) Technologies of attention management, shifting from centralized, mass-media models to distributed, algorithmic personalization; (2) The political economy of attention merchants, transitioning from advertising practices on Madison Avenue to platform-based datafication in Silicon Valley; and (3) The attentional regime, going from the modern consumer’s continuous attention crisis to a hyper-fragmented, screen-addicted user-subject. This genealogical approach highlights that historical ruptures in the attention economy are not merely technological but also involve new relationships between science, the market, and society, shaping regimes of power, knowledge, and subjectivity. By tracing these historical discontinuities, this study contributes to platform studies by offering a theoretical and historical perspective on the digital attention economy, emphasizing its specificities in the contemporary context.
Public Attention Towards Sustainability in the EU: An Exploration of Google Trends Data
This research explores public attention towards sustainability in the European Union (EU) using Google Trends data. By leveraging Google’s Trends API, the study assesses the evolution and composition of public interest in sustainability across EU member states. Sustainability is a multi-dimensional concept and its definition has evolved over time to encompass several environmental, social and economic factors. Public attention to sustainability has generally increased in Europe over the past three decades, as indicated by numerous studies analyzing trends in public engagement and media coverage. However, given the difficulty of measuring public attention towards a topic directly, most large-scale analyses of public attention to sustainability rely on media coverage as a proxy. Thus, we suggest using Google Trends data to analyze public attention towards sustainability. Considering the variability of definitions associated with the term, instead of applying existing assumptions on what sustainability means in a certain point in time and in space, we reconstruct what topics, as defined by Google knowledge definitions, received the most public attention, based on users’ search practices. The analysis reveals a steady increase in public engagement with sustainability issues since 2018, with notable regional disparities between Western and Eastern Europe. The research identifies the most common topics associated with sustainability, such as energy, sustainable development, and environmental issues, while also highlighting the growing influence of economic and corporate dimensions in public discourse. We conclude with covering the main limitations with the proposed methodology, and outlining the analytical directions for future research.
CULTURAL BAIT: KWAI’S COLD START ALGORITHM AND THE INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF BRAZILIAN CULTURE
This study investigates how Kwai’s cold start algorithm instrumentalizes Brazilian culture as “cultural bait” to engineer user engagement and retention. Through computational analysis of Kwai’s cache-aware reinforcement learning (CARL) framework, we simulate four anonymous users in a cold start environment, collecting 4,000 posts. Using Vision Transformers (ViT), PCA, UMAP, and HDBSCAN clustering, we classify content into homogeneous, heterogeneous, and niche topics, validated via Jensen-Shannon divergence and Chi-square tests. Findings reveal 96.8% of cold start recommendations are homogenized, dominated by stereotypical themes like football (10.32%), telenovelas (12.65%), and suggestive humor (6.88%), alongside controversial clusters: misinformation (9.49%), Latin motivational content (9.35%), rural humor (8.25%), and violence clickbait (5.91%). This reflects Kwai’s reliance on cached, infrastructurally optimized cultural modules—shaped by bandwidth constraints and low-end devices markets where it targets—to prioritize computational efficiency and market scalability over personalization. We argue Kwai’s algorithmic epistemology operationalizes cultural bait: caricatured tropes repurposed as scalable, market-ready content, reducing culture to latent variables for knowledge speculation and user acquisition in emerging markets. By foregrounding computational constraints and cultural commodification, we demonstrate how algorithmic systems like CARL transform cultural experience into infrastructurally optimized data. These findings underscore analyzing algorithms not as black boxes or abstract entities but as politico-algebraic objects open to inquiry, where code encodes power asymmetries and cultural transformation. This urges media studies to bridge gaps between cultural critique and algebraic logic underpinning algorithmic epistemologies, avoiding treating these epistemologies as universal or generalizable, even among platforms operating within the same niche.
Fan Labor As A Shield Against Platforms’ Unsafety: The Pipoca & Nanquim Case
Digital platforms’ governance model for cultural production is based on making content creators entirely responsible for producing, publishing and moderating their work. This arrangement makes digital influencers especially vulnerable to harassment, overworking, and arbitrary politics regarding content management and unfair censure. Since content creators are on their own, they have been deploying multiple strategic approaches to keep themselves and their content safe despite platforms’ lack of assistance. Many of them involve camaraderie, such as self-organized groups focused on information exchange and mutual support, and often they mobilize their fanbase to deal with safety issues, such as harassment, asking the fans to mass report aggressors to make their claim more relevant to platforms through engagement. We draw on a case study of the deletion and recovery of Pipoca & Nanquim YouTube channel to contextualize how Brazilian content creators learned to mobilize their fan bases to manage their vulnerability on social media platforms. Through a combination of case study methodology and narrative interviews with the Pipoca & Nanquim team, we propose an analysis of how fan labor is central for Brazilian content creators in regards to safety and acknowledgment by platforms’ administration. And, since digital influencers must rely only on their engagement to protect themselves, we also question how this context affects people from social minority groups who work as digital influencers in Brazil, reinforcing oppressive structures despite the DEI discourse often adopted by digital platforms representatives.
From Right to Left: How Bardella and french political actors Navigate TikTok Politics
The French National Rally's 2024 legislative campaign is an example of how political parties strategically leverage new media, to reconfigure political engagement especially among younger demographics. This study investigates the role of TikTok in political communication strategies during the 2024 French legislative campaign, with a particular focus on how the National Rally is reshaping its image through specific communicative approaches. Grounded in theories of politainment, political personalization, and pop politics, this research examines how the communication strategies of Jordan Bardella, Gabriel Attal (Renaissance), and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France Insoumise) engage with pop culture, highlighting both their divergences and points of convergence. The study employs audiovisual content analysis on 131 TikTok videos produced by these political actors during the campaign. The analysis examines how TikTok's affordances are leveraged, including the use of viral sounds, meme-based engagement, and informal storytelling. It also explores several key dimensions to understand the interaction between pop culture and political communication. Findings suggest Bardella’s use of TikTok aligns closely with the logic of politainment, effectively merging traditional party values with contemporary digital communication practices. Unlike Attal and Mélenchon, whose strategies remain more traditional, Bardella leverages pop culture references, informal aesthetics, and emotional appeal to establish a relatable and community-oriented political presence. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on social media politainment by illustrating how TikTok redefines political interaction. Future research could explore cross-national comparisons to better understand how political leaders interpret and model political interaction with new generations.
BECOMING PLATFORM: DISRUPTION, MASCULINITY, AND INFRASTRUCTURE
My contribution is a theoretical conceptualization of the platform as a disruptive figure - not only in the infrastructural turn towards what scholars have defined as the “platformisation” (Poell, Nieborg & Van Dijk, 2019) of a diverse range of industries, but also as a political metaphor and a vector for social identification. My main focus is on the rise of powerful, hypermasculine figures like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Joe Rogan, who notably leverage the concept of (dis)trust towards “mainstream” and “legacy” media in favour of tech platforms like Musk’s own X (formerly known as Twitter) or alt-tech platforms like Donald Trump’s Truth Social or Rumble. While these platforms are presented with a stated emphasis on free speech as a universal value, their usage is also driven and/or associated with strong, even authoritarian personalities, usually characterized by a hyper-masculine persona and US-exceptionalist attitudes. My proposal is thus framing the “platform” and “platforming practices” as a key conceptual scaffolding for reading the current cultural momentum of these figures. Positioning the “becoming platform” of Rogan, Musk, or Trump (each of whom have come to embody platforms of sorts – respectively: JRE, X, Truth Social) in the context of the dangerous emergence of a “platformed personality capitalism” founded on “personality as infrastructure” (Rosamond, 2023), I discuss the identity politics of these powerful men and the way they function as discursive catalysts for platformisation as an urgent cultural and political issue.
INTERACT AND REACT: GENDER, OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE, AND THE GOVERNANCE OF USER INTERFACE TECHNOLOGIES
Discussions of gender diversity in open-source software (OSS) often focus on increasing women’s participation rather than questioning how their contributions shape development itself. This study examines $2 , a widely used tool for building websites and applications, to explore gendered patterns in contribution over 11 years (2013–2024). Using data from GitHub, a dominant platform for software collaboration, I analyze who contributes to different aspects of the project and how participation shifts around major software updates. Findings show that women’s contributions are concentrated on improving existing features and maintaining project stability, $2 . Their exclusion is not just a matter of representation; it reinforces structural inequalities in whose labor is recognized and rewarded in digital infrastructure governance. By shifting the focus from simply counting participation to examining how gendered divisions of labor shape digital tools, this study highlights the need to $2 in the development of internet technologies.
NO DISRUPTION – ONLY EXPOSURE! A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF CROSS-MEDIA DYNAMICS IN DUTCH MEDIATIONS OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT
Social media have become a popular object of public debate in which they are often blamed for substantially causing socio-political rupture, such as the current “return” of racist and fascist sentiments across Europe. While much attention has been paid to social media, the important role of national legacy media and their potentially nurting role for such “ruptures” is often overlooked and still understudied. Focusing on the mediation of sexual misconduct in the Netherlands, this paper therefore critically examines how social media and national legacy media intersect in collectively maintaing cultural issues that social media exposure turns into perceived “ruptures” across Western countries. For operationalizing the analysis, the paper departs from the Dutch cross-media research infrastructure project Twi-XL which grants access to different archival media collections. Leveraging television transcripts from 1981 until 2023 and Dutch tweets from 2011 until 2023, the paper introduces a methodological framework with topic modeling for systematically tracing how the “overexposure” of certain issues on social media has potentially emerged through their “underexposure” on television over time. The paper finds that Dutch television paid ample attention to the internal, structural and complex dimensions of sexual misconduct. While Dutch television historically framed sexual misconduct within institutional contexts from a progressive and feminism-oriented agenda, it neglected any critical and in-depth engagement alongside the axes of race and gender. Conversely, Dutch Twitter—particularly since the 2015 European “refugee crisis”—externalized the issue, reducing its complexity and often appropriating feminist paradigms and wordings to advance Islamophobic and far-right discourse.
Beyond love is love: investigating LGBTQIA+ parent-influencers' advocacy work on Instagram
The paper focuses on Instagram LGBTQIA+ parent-influencers in the Italian context, where traditional gender stereotypes are still predominant and LGBTQIA+ individuals’ rights are well-below EU standards (ILGA-Europe 2024). Through thematic analysis of a three-month digital ethnography of the two largest profiles of Italian LGBTQIA+ parent-influencers, the contribution highlights both: 1) LGBTQIA+ parent-influencers’ use of digital platforms to negotiate identity-based stigma, providing alternative models of gender, sexuality, and family; and 2) the political potential of this form of advocacy-work. Preliminary findings highlight how the profiles contend with integration and social advocacy. On the one hand, they seek to dismantle stereotypes that see queer parenthood as ‘other’ and selfish through relatable portrayals of family life; on the other, they engage with questions of politics and activism, often due to a perceived duty to educate audiences. These practices highlight the profiles’ efforts to familiarize audiences with the challenges faced by LGBTQIA+ families and overcome the ‘love is love’ trope of social inclusion, which often has the result of depoliticizing queer struggles. Given a relative lack of symbolic LGBTQIA+ figures and events in Italy, LGBTQIA+ parent-influencers can allow scholars a glimpse into the cultural and social presence of these subjectivities. Their tug-o-war between relatable-ness and activism underscores questions regarding the potential for social change of this kind of content and how it is reconciled with the logics of platform capitalism.
NAVIGATING THE SOCIAL MEDIA ECOSYSTEM IN DIGITAL SEX WORK IN BRAZIL
This paper examines how social media ecosystems have become fundamental workplaces for digital sex work, causing a series of ruptures and changes in the industry. Focusing on Brazilian erotic content creators. It explores how sex workers integrate multiple platforms to sustain their labour and how this ecosystem imposes new forms of governance that shape their working conditions. While social media facilitate visibility and audience-building, they also create structural imbalances, making success dependent on navigating platform policies and adapting to shifting moderation practices. Grounded in digital labour research and creator studies, the paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork (2021-2024) on Brazil’s most popular sex platforms—OnlyFans and Privacy—alongside social media (Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram). It also includes in-depth interviews with 16 erotic content creators, analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings reveal that erotic creators strategically assemble a network of platforms, generating interdependent flows of content and audiences and forming a social media ecosystem central to their work. However, this ecosystem demands continuous adaptation and introduces precarious conditions, requiring creators to infer platform guidelines and constantly adapt to shifting moderation policies. Marginalised creators face heightened scrutiny, experiencing disproportionate content removals and account suspensions. Ultimately, the study argues that digital sex work is shaped by overlapping governance structures—those of social media, sex platforms, and broader regulatory forces—shaping its organisation and regulation. These findings highlight the need for further research into the implications of social media’s governance, particularly in marginalised labour sectors such as sex work.
FROM PRINCIPLES TO PRACTICE: PARTICIPATORY INFRASTRUCTURES FOR INCLUSIVE AI
As AI technologies become more integrated and embedded into everyday services, activities, and social connectivity, the notion of inclusive AI is increasingly pertinent; yet the concept lacks theoretical cohesion and remains elusive in practice. In this paper we propose a practice-based framework for inclusive AI, developed through collaborations with community, humanitarian, health, legal, and learning organisations. We conceptualise inclusive AI not as a technological output but as a participatory process, situating inclusion at the centre of capability building, equitable benefit, and collective participation. Central to this reframing is the role of participatory infrastructures and intermediaries—individuals, organisations, and public or online spaces—who act as capability converters, translating technical features into community-relevant outcomes. Our evaluative framework extends responsible AI by looking beyond principles and technical fixes, to also asking whether systems enable communities to achieve tangible benefits and equitable participation across design, deployment, and governance. It identifies four dimensions of inclusive AI: safety and accountability, community participation, community benefit, and sustainability and maintenance. We argue that achieving inclusivity requires infrastructures of translation, adaptation, and care, supported by intermediaries who are both technically informed and culturally situated. The framework offers researchers and practitioners a conceptual and evaluative tool to embed inclusivity throughout the AI lifecycle, ensuring systems are not only technically sound but socially meaningful.
MEMES OF RESENTMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF HOW THE FAR RIGHT MOBILIZES HUMOR AND SENTIMENT STRUCTURES IN PRIVATE MESSAGING NETWORKS
A growing scholarly debate points to resentment as a central factor in the worldwide advance of far-right movements. This study explores how such a dynamic appears in memes shared within far-right public discussion groups on WhatsApp in Brazil. Based on an interpretive approach, we examined 40 images collected from a non-probabilistic sample of groups supportive of Bolsonaro. The analysis identifies four distinct manifestations of resentment: hostility, victimhood, revisionist narratives, and a sense of urgency.
BEING SEEN AND LOOKING BACK: MANDATORY ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF SURVEILLANCE FOR LGBTQ+ USERS
Digital platforms and social media shape social, economic, and political life, making participation nearly unavoidable (Van Dijck et al., 2018; Steinberg, 2019). This platformization, driven by datafication, records and commodifies user activity for corporate profit (Myers West, 2019). While users perceive their engagement as private, they enact public personas subject to scrutiny, facilitating both commercial and political surveillance (Baym & boyd, 2012; Zuboff, 2015). LGBTQ+ users, in particular, experience a paradox: social media is crucial for identity formation, community-building, and self-expression (Pullen, 2010; Duguay et al., 2023), yet they also face heightened algorithmic surveillance, including shadowbanning, demonetization, and account suspension (Are & Briggs, 2023; Bivens & Haimson, 2016). This study, part of a PhD project, analyzes how LGBTQ+ users in Montréal and Berlin navigate platform regulations and resist algorithmic oppression through qualitative interviews with cultural producers, activists, and performers. Findings highlight two key themes: being seen and looking back. LGBTQ+ users are acutely aware of surveillance, as illustrated by Astra, a Berlin-based activist, whose account was deleted after managing a queer collective’s social media. Faced with inevitable monitoring, users develop strategies—creating backup accounts, using alternative promotional methods, and deliberately defying censorship. Yet, this resistance is exhausting, as Sasha Kills, a Berlin-based drag artist, states: “We don’t have a choice, and it is really unfair.” This research complicates discussions on data justice by illustrating that resistance is not merely emergent but an embedded, mandatory practice for LGBTQ+ users navigating digital spaces.
Indigenous Representation in Commercial Search
Search engines are powerful epistemic actors. A substantial body of critical literature has drawn attention to the tendency of search engines to reproduce historical bias and marginalisation through filtering, ranking and search assistance techniques. The integration of new modes of information curation supported by large language models into search engine systems poses novel and enhanced threats to information diversity and the visibility of historically marginalized perspectives and knowledge. The extent to which search engines promote harmful representations, and marginalise or centre Indigenous self-representation and knowledge, warrants attention. The growing shift in emphasis – from ranked blue links to direct, ‘authoritative’ answers on search engine result pages (SERPs) – make such inquiries more pressing. What does the trend started by formats like featured snippets and accelerated by AI-generated answers imply for Indigenous representation and truth-telling online? The aim of this study is to provide a basis for reflection on that question by examining how Google presents and prioritises information related to Aboriginal identities and histories in two answer formats – AI overviews and featured snippets. It argues that direct answers in both formats sever the links between knowers, knowledge and context in different ways, with implications for Indigenous self-representation, rereading and reframing.
A sociodigital approach to investigating youth, teachers' and parents' experiences of smartphone banning in England
Smartphone bans or pledges signed by parents/carers to delay giving phones to young people are gaining international traction. Bans are usually based on arguments that smartphones are addictive, unhealthy and contribute to worsening educational outcomes. However, as a relatively new phenomenon, little existing research exists on the practical and experiential repercussions of these bans. Extant research shows that abstinence approaches to mitigating other potentially risky activities, including underage sex or drug and alcohol use, may increase harms, especially for vulnerable young people, and erode children’s rights. In this paper, we offer a preliminary analysis of our qualitative, multi-pronged study which seeks to better understand ‘on the ground’ experiences of the banning policies as they are rolled out in England. Working collaboratively with an educational charity, a media centre and a secondary school, our research explores the views of multiple actors and considers the varied contexts in which smartphone banning matters. We advance a sociodigital and postdigital approach, arguing that smartphones and people are engaged in complicated and processual human-media relations. We analyse the material and affective experiences of smartphone banning for young people, teachers and parents, exploring how banning smartphones doesn’t cut users off from digital mediation, but rather puts them in different relationships to these contexts. We offer some tentative recommendations for supportive structures in educational environments that are attentive to these sociodigital complexities, and which can help young people and adults navigate phone bans and the new relationalities around devices these set in play.
Meme Work in Anti-Veg*nism Humor on Instagram: Reflections on Hate Speech and Social Media Regulation
This paper explores how anti-veg*nism humor memes on Instagram fuel hate speech and reinforce hegemonic masculinities. A critical visual analysis (Rose, 2016) of 28 memes from the profile @lagrimasdevegano (veganstears) reveals that disparagement humor (Ford, 2015) disguises prejudice as jokes, promoting intolerance and gender stereotypes. These memes link veganism to fragility and femininity, reinforcing conservative ideologies that glorify meat consumption as a marker of masculinity. The study underscores the difficulties digital platforms face in regulating such content, given humor’s ambiguity and a maximalist interpretation of free speech. It advocates for culturally sensitive moderation and media education to create a more inclusive digital space.
ESOLS, SOFT POWER, AND NOMADISM: THAI CREATOR CULTURE IN THE SHADOW OF PLATFORM NATIONALISM
This research maps the distinctiveness and evolution of Thailand’s (or Thai) creator culture, which refers to the rapidly-emerging platform-based cultural economies vitally distinguished by the practices of social media entrepreneurs, whether referred to as creators or influencers, KOLS or wanghong, YouTubers or TikTokers, game players or mukbangers, and/or vloggers or streamers. This work is framed by the concept of platform nationalism, the multilateral power relations engaged by corporations and governments to engage platform and social media users, communities, and entrepreneurs around nationalistic causes and movements. The preliminary results reveals a vibrant and rapidly-evolving creator economy, paradoxically promoted by government incentives around encouraging soft power abroad, if limited by platform and industry practices that inhibit the growth of sustainable creator businesses. More precariously, Thai creator culture is increasingly distinguished by the seller creator model operating solely off of Chinese owned, or funded, e-commerce platforms.
STARLINK, PLANETARY CAPITALISM AND CONTEMPORARY IMAGINARIES OF THE AMAZON
Our work analyzes public documents, social media publications, media reports and interviews on the operation of Starlink in the Amazon to investigate the role of contemporary digital infrastructures in advancing projects of capitalist occupation and exploitation of the Brazilian Amazon. We identify hegemonic discourses surrounding the role of digital technologies in the economic and social development of the region and look at how these discourses resonate with 19th and 20th centuries projects of occupation for the region via ‘civilization’ and technological progress. We argue that this technophilic view does little to support sustainable and fair development: by remaining silent about the connections between digital infrastructures and the exploitation of local bodies and territories, it obstructs visions of the future that consider interdependent ways of life that escape the hegemonic imaginary of capitalist domination. At the same time, we discuss some of the ambivalent ways in which Starlink has been used and re-purposed by local communities.
‘FAILURE’ AS A SPACE OF CRITIQUE AND IMAGINATION: THE CASE OF FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGIES
Facial recognition (FR) has been promoted worldwide as a modern security solution. In Brazil, its expansion has taken place experimentally, through unregulated pilot projects and opaque public-private partnerships. With its widespread, fast implementation, errors and failures became evident: wrongful arrests, technical flaws, systemic biases. These failures are advocated as integral to the bettering of the technology and thus tolerated. Our work explores the critical spaces that these failures produce. Inspired by biometrics artworks, we show that grappling with the failures of FR allows for a mode of experimentation that privileges both critique and alternative modes of interrogating and imagining the world.
DIGITAL INFLUENCE AS AN ALGORITHMIC CONDITION: COMPUTATIONAL AUTHENTICITY, ALGORITHMIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND DIGITAL VISIBILITY
As platforms like Instagram shift from chronological feeds to algorithm-driven models, visibility is no longer an organic byproduct of social interactions but an ontological condition structured by opaque computational processes. Existing literature on digital influence—centered on authenticity, visibility management, and commercialization—fails to account for how platforms actively shape what is recognized as influential, valuable, or authentic. We demonstrate how algorithmic infrastructures rupture traditional influencer studies, exposing the limits of frameworks that conceptualize influence as human-centered. Instead, we propose that influencing the digital requires acting for, on behalf of, and through the digital itself. We introduce three interrelated modes to capture this transformation: computational authenticity, algorithmic entrepreneurship, and digital visibility. These categories illustrate how influencers must strategically engage with recommendation systems, optimize engagement metrics, and navigate platform affordances to maintain relevance. This study challenges human-centric models and highlights the structural conditions governing visibility by repositioning digital influence as an ontological entanglement between influencers, platforms, and algorithmic infrastructures. We argue that digital influence is not simply mediated by technology but co-produced by sociotechnical arrangements that define who and what gains recognition in algorithmic environments. This shift demands new conceptual tools to understand how influence is actively negotiated within digital infrastructures rather than merely performed for human audiences.
TECHNIQUE, IMAGINARY AND SAMBA – THE INFLUENCE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN BRAZILIAN CARNIVAL, 2025
This work seeks to survey the ways in which artificial intelligence has affected Brazilian carnival, especially that of samba schools in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and its cultural environment. This survey will serve as the basis for a cultural critique that will reflect on the ways in which this imaginary of technique, which imputes to us an almost Faustian urgency of efficiency, productivity, speed and future, affects a cultural manifestation marked by social criticism, revolution and appreciation of community and artisanal work.The basis for this criticism is the theory of archetypological imagery, which is that this epitome of technique is a demarcation of Western ways of feeling, thinking and acting since the 19th century (Durand, 2012). The reasoning is complemented by questions from Neil Postman, for whom the relentless advancement of technology harms the preservation of traditions, impacting mental processes and social relations in a community (1994, p. 12). Far from seeking an apocalyptic alignment that rejects technological transformations, we understand that popular festivals are characterized by social dynamism. However, by questioning the way in which these adherences have been made in an unreflective way, we hope to collaborate with critical thinking and complex reflection on a phenomenon that will affect our own way of relating to tradition.
Algorithmic mediation in open access journals: platforms, visibility and epistemic challenges
This study examines how algorithmic mediation influences the visibility of Open Access journals, linking this phenomenon to broader discussions on data capitalism, techno-colonialism, and platformization. We argue that academic knowledge circulation is shaped by a paradox of mediation: the illusion of direct access to research objects, alongside increasing dependence on Big Tech infrastructures. Despite their centrality, search engines like Google remain largely invisible as mediators of scientific visibility. By analyzing traffic metrics from an Open Access journal in Communication and Information, we explore the role of algorithmic logics in shaping discoverability. Using data from Google Analytics and the journal’s CMS, we investigate six key indicators, including traffic sources, organic search patterns, and PDF downloads. Our findings reveal how search algorithms privilege certain knowledge formations, reinforcing epistemic dependencies that challenge digital sovereignty. We discuss how algorithmic sorting does not directly promote or suppress academic work, but rather governs its accessibility through logics of popularity, similarity, and profiling. This dynamic raises ethical concerns, particularly as the metrification of science increasingly aligns with platform-driven visibility metrics. While alternative circulation strategies—such as direct traffic and academic networking platforms—mitigate some challenges, they do not offset the structural dominance of Google/Alphabet in Open Access dissemination. Our research underscores the need for critical engagement with algorithmic infrastructures, advocating for regulatory frameworks and tactical interventions to promote epistemic autonomy in digital knowledge production. These findings contribute to broader debates on platform governance, knowledge equity, and the future of scholarly communication.
ASPIRATIONAL SELF-LABOUR AND LISTENING PRACTICES IN BRAZIL
Music has long been understood as performing a dual role: an active agent (De Nora, 1999) capable of eliciting physiological and psychological transformations and, simultaneously, a resource that can be used to signal distinction (Bourdieu, 1984). In this sense, this paper asks: How do contemporary users of social media and streaming platforms employ music and the affordances of music platforms to transform themselves? To answer this question, we introduce the concept of aspirational self-labour to examine how contemporary music listeners engage with online music platforms as part of their self-transformation efforts. Drawing from an interdisciplinary body of literature, we explore how users navigate the dual nature of music as both agent and resource in their everyday lives. By integrating concepts from social reproduction theory (Drott, 2023), self-expansion models (Aron & Aron, 1986), and aspirational labour (Duffy, 2016), we propose a nuanced framework for understanding the labour involved in curating, discovering, and sharing music in digital environments. Through semi-structured walk-through interviews with 25 young music listeners in Porto Alegre, Brazil, we analyse how these individuals strategically engage with music as a tool for motivation, self-improvement, and social positioning. Music specifically produced for such uses and engaged in through this listening mode is typically dismissed as ‘functional’. We argue that scholars need to move beyond this simplistic portrayal of what is, in fact, a complex dual (agent-resource) mode of using music. Instead, we propose a richer conceptual vocabulary to understand one approach to listening through online platforms.
PLATFORMS AS EPISTEMIC INFRASTRUCTURES: MEASUREMENTS, DATA FANDOMS PRACTICES AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF MUSIC CHARTS
This study examines online platforms as epistemic infrastructures, focusing on how they shape knowledge production through its data-oriented ways of tracking, measuring, and governing collective practices. Using the reconfiguration of music charts as a case study, the article analyzes how data fandoms tactically influence the measurements and the visibility of success, revealing tensions between cultural industries, participatory cultures and platform governance. Through this lens, the article argues that platforms function as pivotal infrastructures that not only expand the volume and diversity of metrics attached to the rankings, but also make possible a fan culture in which the relationship with music is centrally mediated by measurable interactions. In this sense, platforms act as epistemic infrastructures in which governance of numbers is under dispute by multiple actors who can manipulate indicators and policies, thereby asserting emerging forms of knowledge.
How need- and norm-based motives for digital communication mitigate the chilling effects of dataveillance
Perceiving dataveillance, the pervasive collection and analysis of digital traces, as salient can increase internet users’ sense of dataveillance and expectations of negative consequences from digital communication, leading to self-inhibited online use. This process, known as chilling effects of dataveillance, can limit participation in today’s digital society, where being online is a need and norm. Given these potential consequences, the conditions under which chilling effects hold require empirical attention. This study investigates whether need- and norm-based motives for digital communication mitigate chilling effects, i.e., the negative effects of a heightened sense of dataveillance on digital communication. Drawing on uses and gratifications (U&G) and social norms research, we argue that users are motivated to engage in digital communication based on felt needs and perceived norms, reducing their susceptibility to chilling effects. Using survey data from a representative sample of Swiss-German internet users ( $2 = 898), we conducted mediation and moderation analyses. Supporting the core chilling effects hypothesis, preliminary results revealed that higher perceived salience of dataveillance (driving one’s sense of dataveillance) and expected consequences from digital communication were significantly associated with self-inhibition in response to a sense of dataveillance. Contrary to expectations, need- and norm-based motives did not mitigate these relationships, suggesting the robustness of chilling effects. This novel work advances our limited understanding of chilling effects’ boundary conditions by integrating U&G and social norms approaches into chilling effects and user-centered dataveillance research. It provides representative evidence aligning with theoretical mechanisms of chilling effects.
Gujarati Aunties on the Integrated Circuit: Internet Infrastructures as an Immigrant Circuit
Infrastructures are path dependent. The evolution of the internet at present rely on previously installed historical and analog infrastructures, including highways (Saxenian 1996) and telecommunication lines (Ensmenger 2008). However, the experiences of immigrant communities show that labor pools are also human infrastructures required for the expansion of tech companies (Nakamura 2014, Hossfield 2019, Cowie 2001). Visa restrictions, which operate as a mechanism of racial capitalism (Kelley 2017, Melamed 2015), create an additional layer of path dependency, since migration patterns initially were restricted to highly educated Asians, then later allowed lower-class relatives to migrate on family reunification visas. As part of a larger dissertation project tracing the experience of entrepreneurial identity and migration, this essay examines the overlap between technical and cultural path dependencies to tell the story of one Asian-American diaspora. This project examines the role of one ethno-linguistic network in the domestic manufacturing space – Gujarati-Indians in New Jersey who owned, operated, or worked in electronics factories. Surfacing lessons learned from the legacies of globalization and deindustrialization through immigrant experiences, this project emphasizes the unique cultural relationships built through both professional and working class technical labors among Gujaratis. I argue recounting a near history of immigrant technical work forces us to ask new questions about how the social reproduction of diasporic enclaves is necessary to produce technical laborers in the United States.
God(bots) and Authority: Trust and Faith in the Age of AI
In this paper we systematically survey emergent religious and spiritual (R/S) AI chatbot applications and outline our plans to conduct application walkthroughs to collect and analyze developer discourses. Our research asks: 1) How is authority, through trust and/or faith, discursively constructed around R/S chatbots? 2) How do developers synthesize Silicon Valley worldviews with existent R/S beliefs within the discursive construction of their applications? We sought to answer these questions by first conducting a systematic survey of existing R/S AI integrated applications on DuckDuckGo, iOS App Store, and Google Play Store. Through this we found that applications were framed in three primary ways by their creators as assistants, tools to be used, avatars, mentors embodying a particular R/S figure, and/or angels, beings with access to higher knowledge. These framings will inevitably shape how these tools are received and interpreted by their users, influencing the perceived R/S authority of an AI chatbot. Future work will conduct walkthroughs of a selection of applications from each data collection site. This will generate richer data detailing the material and discursive elements of R/S chatbots to be analyzed through discourse analysis. Our work will highlight how developers frame their creations and explore the potential complications that emerge when blending R/S belief and technological practice. We contribute to existing work on the intersection of R/S and technology and push the field forward by examining the under-explored and emergent development of AI integration into R/S practices.
The Infrastructure of Transphobic Feminism: A Digital Ethnography of an Anti-Trans Forum
The rise in anti-transgender legislation and violence over the 2020s has made addressing transphobic ideologies increasingly pertinent. This paper outlines an on-going digital ethnography of the anti-trans feminist forum Ovarit, asking what affects, discourses, and desires are produced through the socio-technical relations infrastructured on the forum? We are specifically interested in how anti-trans feminists routinize and legitimize their worldview through the relations and interactions afforded by the sites material design. This study is framed through a Black feminist theoretical lens to remain attentive to the ways race structures gender within anti-trans feminist discourse. Methodologically we first employed a walkthrough of the site to gather data on the structural design and ideological positioning of the forum as constructed by its creators. Following this we are conducting an on-going digital ethnography. This involves engaging with the forum as a non-participatory lurker, i.e., as someone who is heavily engaged with the forum on a daily basis but does not post or comment. Our preliminary findings indicate users posts are primarily interested in sharing instances of alleged trans misdeeds, either by linking to news articles or sharing anecdotes. The repetition and volume of these trans-antagonistic posts creates an environment where trans lives are deemed unlivable in public or private life. Future work will extend these initial findings, plotting out the particular patterns of user interactions. This research will contribute to existing studies exploring online bigotry and explore how anti-trans feminist rhetoric becomes materialized online.
DISCONNECTION AMID INEQUALITY: AN INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH TO ETHNO-RACIAL MINORITIZED YOUNG WOMEN’S DIGITAL MEDIA (NON)USE
Digital disconnection studies conceptualize disconnection as a deliberate strategy to balance the benefits and drawbacks of digital engagement to improve well-being. However, this field has been criticized for focusing on privileged subjects while overlooking how structural inequalities shape minoritized youths’ (dis)connection practices. Our 15-month ethnographic study addresses this gap by examining how ethno-racial minoritized young women navigate digital disconnection within intersecting gendered and racialized constraints. Overall, our findings challenge binary understandings of digital disconnection as either voluntary or enforced. First, participants strategically engage in disconnection to sustain digital connection, such as deleting social media apps before returning home to avoid parental surveillance. Second, disconnection emerges as a response to racialized and gendered online harassment, forcing participants to withdraw from digital spaces despite their desire to remain connected. Finally, smartphones simultaneously enable and constrain autonomy, as parental surveillance reinforces expectations of constant availability while affording greater mobility. By foregrounding digital disconnection as a negotiated and context-dependent practice, this study highlights the need for intersectional, context-aware approaches to digital media use and challenges dominant narratives of disconnection as an individualized response to digital overuse.
FANDOMS AND LEARNING: THE ROLE OF ACA-FANS IN FORMAL EDUCATION
This article examines the role of fandoms and aca-fan communities within the contexts of formal and informal education. Drawing on the notion of lifelong learning (Jarvis, 2004), we investigate how fan practices—including content production, community organization, critical engagement, and the circulation of knowledge—can contribute to academic, technical, and professional learning processes. Based on these premises, we formulate the central question of this research: can participation in fandoms support formal learning? Our objective is to understand how fan practices, particularly among aca-fans, are transformed into academic and professional repertoires.
Reflections on the Afrogoth Hashtag on Tiktok: strategies for hacking the dispositive of raciality in digital media technologies
The paper analyzes the term afrogoth, or afrogotic, on TikTok, from afrocentric perspectives on digital technologies, with the aim of investigating the impact of the hashtag in subverting algorithmic racism and the low visibility that black goth people receive on social networks, as well as digital aquilombamento and the creation of self-definitions. The rationale addresses Goth subculture, Technological Pretuguese, algorithmic racism, hacking the dispositive of raciality and cyberquilombism. The methodology includes the collection of videos with #afrogoth. The results show mostly black bodies using elements constructed as feminine. The creation and use of the term afrogoth is a form of Technological Pretuguese, in which technology itself is used to go against white supremacy, creating a language that refers to blackness. In addition, it emerges as a self-definition, in which Black people can name themselves within Goth Subculture, valuing their blackness and seeking more equality in goth spaces, proposing cyberquilombism by forming a network of visibility and support among Black goth people.
MICROMOBILITIES SERVICES IN URBAN BRAZIL: A CASE OF MOBILITIES (IN)JUSTICE
Latin American cities have been actively integrating micromobility services as part of people’s urban mobility habits. However, this integration lacked other sustainable mobility changes, such as access to bike paths, proper smartphones, and mobile internet. Much of the scholarship on shared transportation in the Global South does not analyze how they are integrated with sustainable and “just” ways of moving through the city. Often emerging technologies are appropriated into existing patterns of mobility injustice, perpetuating existing inequalities. This paper analyzes the development of electric scooters in Rio de Janeiro as a case of how micromobility is embedded into existing and systemic issues of mobility injustice. Drawing from news articles, we describe the diverse uses of scooters in Rio de Janeiro, and their integration with smartphones. Our findings help to contextualize micromobility in developing world mega-cities.
MIGRATING THROUGH HYBRID SPACE: NEW EVIDENCE OF CONCEPTUAL UPDATES
This submission reports on new research that leverages the updated model of Hybrid Space by recognizing the power dynamics – particularly unevenness in access, agency, and awareness – present in the way people experience (and produce) Hybrid Spaces. We demonstrate the unevenness of Hybrid Space by presenting findings from new research investigating the role of mobile media in the migration journey from Central and South America to the U.S. Southern border. Using on-site fieldwork and interviews, this research draws from Hybrid Space to examine how connectivity, mobilities, and sociability shape how people experience migration. The case of migration provides unique opportunities to leverage the conceptual extensions of Hybrid Space, while shifting its lens beyond the traditional focus on cities and urban settings. The precarious conditions of the migration journey offer traction for examining how power dynamics unfold through access, agency, and awareness. We take up these power dimensions of Hybrid Space to structure a discussion of findings from the migration study to illustrate conceptual updates.
A Taxonomy for Rapidly Changing Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms (SMPs) evolve rapidly and continually, impacting their affordances, user experiences, and societal interactions. Existing research has often analyzed these changes from organizational or technological innovation perspectives or examined SMPs and their policies in isolation, rather than within broader patterns. SMPs, however, are distinct in their logics, relevance, practices, and user engagement. Thus, we propose a taxonomy of SMP change, grounded in sensitizing concepts from literature on platform and technological evolution alongside an analysis of 400 public communication documents from Meta, YouTube, X, and TikTok. Our aim is to theorize SMP evolution and critically reassess its broader implications. Our taxonomy categorizes SMP change into three interdependent dimensions: material, algorithmic, and ideological. Material changes involve modifications to platform features, interfaces, and user experiences. Algorithmic changes refer to backend modifications that are often less transparent and largely invisible, yet they significantly shape user interactions and content visibility. Ideological changes reflect shifts in governance priorities and policy frameworks, often driven by political and economic pressures. These dimensions are not mutually exclusive but intersect in ways that redefine SMP values, affordances, impacts, and potential harms. By theorising SMP change, our taxonomy highlights the embedded politics of digital platforms and their role in shaping contemporary information ecosystems as infrastructures. This hopes to provide researchers with lens and language to critically examine how platform changes influence societal structures. We also emphasise the importance of such a language to study their growing relevance, particularly as corporate-state collaborations within SMP industries expand in unprecedented ways.
Territorializing Internet: WhatsApp use in Andean Argentina
Internet studies have predominantly focused on the most recent platforms, leaving out many different ways to use internet that become invisible for mainstream studies. At the same time, the majority of internet studies are centered on urban contexts, leaving out populations and their use of internet in rural territories. WhatsApp has emerged as one of the most widely used apps, particularly in the Global South. However, its integration into rural and Indigenous contexts in Latin America remains relatively unexplored. The Jujuy Puna, situated in NW Argentina and home to Quechua communities, recently gained internet connectivity through state initiatives. As a result, the internet has become part of these communities' daily lives, with WhatsApp, in particular, becoming a vital infrastructure integrated into various aspects of everyday activities, including communication, governance, economy, health, and spirituality. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two villages, Cusi Cusi and Lagunillas del Farallón, this paper examines the use of WhatsApp in these communities. The objective is to highlight the socio-technical adaptability processes through which the uses of WhatsApp in the Jujuy Puna expand communication practices and ways of being that are specific to the local modes of relating to others and to technology. The ethnographic approach enables us to trace continuities that shape the appropriation of WhatsApp in accordance with regional Andean ways of inhabiting and understanding the world. Our aim is to understand WhatsApp from the perspective of the territory, hoping to encourage more diverse dialogues between Latin American anthropology, communication, and internet studies.
INFORMATIONAL DYNAMICS IN RESISTANCE AGAINST THE DESTRUCTION OF SOCIOBIODIVERSITY IN THE AMAZON: THE ROLE OF ONLINE MEDIA AND CYBERACTIVISM
The Brazilian Amazon is the site of several conflicts involving threats to its biodiversity, the traditional populations that live there. In the region, a harmful combination of disparities in power, knowledge and access to information also prevails, in addition to divergent views on how to deal with such conflicts. The ongoing research investigates the information dynamics in communities that have resisted for years the invasion of neo-extractivist projects and the threats. The particular focus in on the role of new digital media specialized in disseminating information about threats to sociobiodiversity and violence to defender in the Amazon, giving them global visibility. The research methodology includes mapping media vehicles and other organizations specialized in covering conflicts in the Amazon in Brazil, the application of structured questionnaires to collaborators and activists, the conduct of in-depth interviews and a field study in two cities in the state of Pará. More than 100 news outlets, NGOs and associations of indigenous communicators that work with this mission have already been identified. The idea is to track the entire path of information, from its origin to its dissemination, including the production of information and verification of content.
FROM RUPTURED RELATIONSHIPS TO SWIPING RIGHT – SINGLE PARENTS ON DATING APPS
This study examines the emotional complexities of digital dating for single parents, focusing on interviews with 22 Norwegian single parents’ about their experiences with dating apps. Balancing the desire for companionship with family obligations, many participants sought long-term relationships. However, dating apps, while offering convenience and broader options, often emphasize instant attraction over deeper compatibility. Coupled with past experiences of ruptured relationships, this led many to question whether the “happily-ever-after” was attainable, creating a conflict between fast-paced, image-driven interactions and their more deliberate, future-oriented relationship goals. While some embraced the apps enthusiastically, others were more skeptical due to past ruptures and parental concerns. Men often described their first encounters as “a kid in a candy store,” while women felt overwhelmed. Over time, both genders refined their approach to dating, learning to filter potential partners and set clearer boundaries. Participants highlighted the importance of shared life circumstances, often preferring partners who were also single parents. They felt that others would struggle to understand the ongoing emotional and practical implications of their ruptured families, including co-parenting dynamics. Additionally, factors such as proximity and shared parental experiences played a key role in shaping their dating preferences. Despite dating apps’ flaws, participants recognized their role in reshaping romantic possibilities, providing a space for new connections after family ruptures.
PLATFORM GOVERNANCE ON VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: ANALYSIS OF INSTAGRAM, YOUTUBE, TIKTOK AND TWITCH COMMUNITY GUIDELINES
In 2024, Safernet Brasil recorded 4,289 complaints of online violence or discrimination against women, making it the third most common complaint that year. When focusing on content aimed at minority groups, violence against women (VAW) accounts for the highest number of reports, a trend that has persisted since 2018. Literature describes violent practices targeting women using terms such as "gendered cyberhate," "gendered e-bile" (Jane, 2017), "cybersexism" (Poland, 2016), and "gendertrolling" (Mantilla, 2013). Additionally, the literature highlights growing phenomena on digital platforms, including gender political violence and gender disinformation, which involve practices like coordinated abuse and gender-based defamation (Judson, 2021). This paper examines how Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok propose gender-based violence governance on their space. Through a documental research of their Terms of Use, Community Guidelines, and related documents, we aim to highlight aspects of platform governance regarding VAW, specifically how these platforms propose to self-regulate content within their spaces. We focus on their understanding—or lack thereof—of online VAW, drawing on previous studies that explore platform governance around topics like hate speech (Santos et al., 2023). Our analysis focuses on four aspects: types of restrictions on VAW-related content; how gender appears in the documentation; proposals for combating online VAW; and identification of other vulnerabilities faced by women in these spaces. Parcial results shows lack of specific guidelines regarding VAW and of gendered violence data in content removal reports that prevents an accurate understanding of VAW.
THE 'TRUMP EFFECT' ON POLITICAL CONTENT BY FAR-RIGHT AUDIENCES ON PORTUGUESE-LANGUAGE YOUTUBE CHANNELS
This paper examines the transnational influence of far-right ideologies emanating from the United States, focusing on the figure of Donald Trump and his resonance within Portuguese-speaking YouTube communities. The study analyses 9,852 search results, encompassing 2,746 unique videos collected between October 15 and November 6, 2024. It identifies how political content and news narratives related to Trump are consumed and disseminated among far-right audiences in Brazil and Portugal. A significant finding is the role of YouTube's algorithm in prioritizing far-right content, which profoundly impacts the thematic narratives and sources that creators leverage to construct political discourses around Trump. Despite most videos being in English (89.01%), a notable subset (5.43%) were in Portuguese, predominantly from Brazilian channels, with only two Portuguese channels identified. The findings of this study have significant implications for understanding transnational far-right movements. The study reveals that the Brazilian YouTube ecosystem is characterized by themes of economic liberalism and financial prosperity, with moral conservatism notably absent. Comment analysis highlights narratives framing Trump as a divinely chosen leader, with parallels drawn to Jair Bolsonaro. Videos in the Portuguese language are mainly short, mobile-oriented productions, emphasizing economic commentary over traditional political rhetoric. The research underscores the role of digital platforms in fostering transnational far-right cohesion, exploring shared ideological and strategic alignments across Portuguese-speaking communities.
"Elderqueer is more than just an age thing": Experiences of LGBTQ+ intergenerational co-presence on TikTok
While TikTok has garnered much attention for its rapid uptake by youth, it has also seen adoption by older age demographics. Given social media’s longstanding importance for convening LGBTQ+ publics and the rarity of intergenerational offline spaces, this paper examines the intersection of age and sexual identity on this short-video platform. It does so through qualitative analysis of 23 semi-structured interviews with elderqueer TikToker users. Findings indicate that participants experience age as an ambiguous identity marker due to TikTok's affordances for rendering its expression fluid and LGBTQ+ approaches to life course stages as less rigid than heteronormative milestones. Despite this ambiguity of age, participants found TikTok's algorithmic curation and passive viewing features inhibited the formation of interpersonal connections across generations. They attempted to overcome these constraints by contributing, and engaging with, personal narratives sharing about past resilience and present life as an elderqueer while drawing inspiration from younger LGBTQ+ people. These preliminary findings illustrate how TikTok’s affordances and individuals’ fluid expressions of age alongside personal narratives of sexual identity give rise to an intergenerational co-presence that recognizes struggles of the past while giving hope for the future.
ALGORITHMIC RUPTURES: TIKTOK’S ROLE IN SHAPING COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES OF DIGITAL NOMADS
This study investigates how TikTok’s socio-technical architecture ruptures the online collective identity of digital nomads, a mobile workforce redefining notions of labor and belonging. Digital nomadism exemplifies transnationalism, where privileged middle-class knowledge workers engage in intense, cross-border mobility as a lifestyle. Employing mixed methods—human deductive coding informing computational LLM-assisted content analysis—I examine how platform affordances mediate aspirations and shape digital nomads' online narratives. Using Maslow's theory of human motivation as an analytical framework, I explore narratives across four social practices central to digital nomadism: work, tourism, migration, and pilgrimage. For workers, narratives emphasize geographically fluid employment conditions; for tourists, content highlights desirable experiences of global exploration and leisure. Migrant-focused narratives foreground mobility challenges, economic impacts on destinations, and questions of privilege regarding who can become a digital nomad and where. Pilgrim-oriented narratives emphasize journeys toward self-actualization through continuous phases of "becoming," often involving demanding geographic travel. Findings reveal TikTok as a negotiation space for need hierarchies, challenging Maslow's linear progression while affirming its contextual flexibility. Contrary to Maslow’s ideal—self-actualization as a pinnacle achieved after fulfilling basic needs—TikTok’s digital nomad narratives disproportionately emphasize basic and safety needs. This prioritization of immediate concerns such as housing, affordability, and entertainment aligns with what this study defines as platformized "relational engineering," an algorithmic mechanism rewarding content that mirrors viewers' immediate needs. Thus, TikTok's affordances restructure collective identities by amplifying relatable experiences over deeper reflections on self-fulfillment or systemic inequalities.
EXCAVATING TELEVISION MEMORY IMAGES THROUGH GENERATIVE AI
By searching for the term “ television ” on the Playground and Artbreeder artificial intelligence platforms , a set of resulting technical images is used to analyze how certain televisualities emerge in the technical-aesthetic memory that results from the imbrications of the user- promptist with the technocultural dimensions of the platforms. As a theoretical basis, the work of Manovich and Arielli (2023) and Kilpp (2018) is called upon . Methodologically, we use the printscreen and data scraping as excavatory attitudes , focused on the perspective of media archaeology that values the problematization of the memory of media objects. It is tentatively concluded that televisualities emerge in a valorization of the television set as equipment/hardware as a TV basic-image, situated in diverse scenarios and, in a complementary way, in relation to the Hollywood Star System and other minority references to the generic content content of television programs.
"Just Asking Questions": Doing Our Own Research on Conspiratorial Ideation by Generative AI Chatbots
Interactive chat systems that build on generative artificial intelligence frameworks - such as ChatGPT or Copilot - are increasingly embedded into search engines, Web browsers, operating systems, or available as standalone sites and apps. In a communication ecosystem where information disorder is a persistent threat (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017), there is the potential for users to utilise chat systems to seek information about conspiracy theories and false claims. Conducting a systematic review of seven AI-powered chat systems, this study examines how these leading products respond to questions related to conspiracy theories. The nine theories chosen for analysis range from historical - such as the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, which have long been debated and debunked - to false claims related to more recent events, such as the idea that Hurricane Milton was geoengineered by Democrats. The chat systems were presented with preset questions which adopted a "casually curious" persona, requesting further information about the chosen conspiracy theories. Our findings to date suggest that AI chat systems are less likely to implement strict safety guardrails around historical conspiracy theories, such as the JFK assassination theories. By contrast, the chat systems were more sensitive to conspiracy theories involving certain minority groups. AI chat systems were also less likely to engage with conspiracy theories related to developing stories and breaking news. In this study, we consider how these patterns affect the role of AI in the information and media ecosystem and explore how AI chat systems may better respond during periods of political transition or division.
Decentralized Re-Platforming: a case study of three fediverse instances
The Fediverse, a decentralized network of social platforms interconnected via protocols like ActivityPub, has gained traction amid crises in centralized platforms, such as Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X in 2023 and Meta’s 2025 changes in content moderation". This migration, termed “decentralized replatforming,” represents a horizontal shift where users voluntarily leave toxic spaces for federated networks like Mastodon and Pixelfed. While decentralization allows customizable moderation rules, it also creates challenges in scalability, resource allocation, and combating disinformation. This study investigates these tensions through semi-structured interviews with maintainers of Fediverse instances (Hubzilla.com.br, Bolha, Milpa), focusing on governance, costs, and ethical dilemmas. Preliminary findings reveal a heterogeneous migration: Bolha attracts progressive users fleeing hate speech, while Hubzilla serves as a technical refuge. The research proposes “decentralized replatforming” as a concept capturing both escape from corporate platforms and experimentation with alternative models. Key challenges include balancing autonomy with collective responsibility and ensuring sustainability without replicating Big Tech’s centralization. The study highlights the Fediverse as a contested space for ethical and technical innovation in digital communication.
FROM PLATFORMIZATION TO DIGITAL BORDERLANDS: GENERATIVE AI, BOUNDARY OBJECTS, AND THE EXPANSION OF THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE
This paper proposes an analytical shift from platformization to digital borderlands to account for the transformations introduced by generative AI. While digital infrastructures have been central to platformization, generative AI systems do not merely extend these structures but reconfigure and traverse them in ways that may destabilize their original logics. We argue that generative AI functions as a boundary object (Star, 1988, 2010), moving across socio-technical domains with interpretative flexibility while remaining anchored in infrastructural constraints. This mobility enables its integration into diverse fields—creative industries, governance, automation—where its meaning and practical implications are continually renegotiated. To analyze these dynamics, we expand on Fornäs et al. (2003) to propose digital borderlands as a conceptual framework. Unlike platformziation, which emphasize stability and control, borderlands capture the fluid, contested, and reassembled nature of AI diffusion. Digital borderlands foreground the epistemic and infrastructural frictions emerging from generative AI’s movement across legal, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries, producing new governance challenges and socio-technical realignments. By shifting focus from platform control to the negotiation and contestation of AI, this framework provides a critical lens to understand how generative AI not only embeds itself in digital landscapes but also actively reshapes them.
Cyborg Imaginaries: A Computational Grounded Theory of Online Pioneer Community Discussions on Human Augmentation
Human Augmentation (HA) technologies, such as Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), neurostimulation devices, and microchip implants, are increasingly discussed in online pioneer communities, where early adopters shape imaginaries of technologically mediated human futures. As part of the broader process of digitalization, HA technologies contribute to the platformization of the human body. While these technologies remain experimental, transhumanists and biohackers engage with them as tools for self-enhancement, body modification, and posthuman evolution. These imaginaries are critical to understanding future adoption, yet remain underexplored in scholarly literature. This study applies computational grounded theory (CGT) to analyze discussions on Reddit, identifying emerging sociotechnical imaginaries of HA technologies. Using BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling approach, we extract thematic structures from a dataset of 1,503 posts and 60,327 comments spanning 2008–2025. Using BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling approach, we extract thematic structures from a dataset of 1,503 posts and 60,327 comments spanning 2008–2025. The imaginaries are then defined through qualitative analysis and iterative refinement of the model, ensuring deeper contextual grounding. Preliminary findings reveal three key dimensions of cyborg imaginaries: (1) Beliefs, including aspirations such as immortality and concerns over job automation; (2) Practices, particularly cognitive and sensory augmentation; and (3) Technological Advances, with discussions centered on BCIs, neural implants, and cybernetic enhancements. This extended abstract presents initial results, contributing to broader discussions on digitalization, human-technology integration, and cyborgization.
DEEP TIME, FAST THREADS: NEO-FOLK ART AND PLATFORM TEMPORALITY IN GUIZHOU
The advent of short video platforms in China has heralded a new chapter for Neo-folk art—a contemporary aesthetic that melds folk utopia, pop culture, and propaganda. This paper explores Neo-folk art as a self-sustained system within the digital age, where it thrives independently thanks to the internet's pervasive influence. Neo-folk art remains a testament to the creative spirit originating from everyday life and transcending it. This paper argues that the proliferation of short videos has brought rural and urban cultures into the wild limelight, showcasing a raw and untamed creativity. Traditional folk customs, beliefs, and arts, once confined to specific localities, are now experiencing a form of dissemination and transformation that molds them to fit new media formats. With examples ranging from Fujian's "You Shen" rituals evolving new deities, this study highlights the metamorphosis of folk artistry. Moreover, local cultural and tourism bureaus have begun to adapt content for short video dissemination, emphasizing the adaptability of folk expressions to modern-day communication channels. However, internet-born subcultures like "Smart （Sha Ma Te）" confront the dichotomy of being both celebrated and regulated, revealing the complexities of the digital realm. This study seeks to delineate how Neo-folk art, through the medium of short videos, represents a dynamic intersection of traditional ethos and digital modernity, crafting a new narrative for Chinese folk culture in the global artistic and social landscape.
Political podcasts in Brazil: left-leaning shows in a polarized market
This study examines the Brazilian podcast market to understand how the subject of "politics" circulates on streaming platforms. Specifically, it will show how certain programs lean toward the left or the right end of the political spectrum and, furthermore, it will describe how left-wing agents organize within this market. This is a relevant discussion since political polarization in Brazil has intensified during the last decade, materialized on disputes around a legitimate ‘vision of Brazil’ to define the future of the country – i.e., around values of equality or dispositions of conservative-liberal ideologies. By means of a technographic analysis of four streaming services (their recommendations through lists and through search results), a corpus of analysis of 511 programmes has been set. The results showed that the services prioritize economic rather than political criteria, returning more recommendations that originate from traditional media. Moreover, left-leaning podcasts quantitatively more suggested than right-leaning, but, in terms of audience reach, the recommended right-leaning podcasts tend to gather greater numbers. Thus, right-wing media outlets and influencers seem to organize more effectively to explore the podcast market, while left-wing individuals and institutions diversify across numerous channels that often struggle to maintain continuity.
The Unsharable: Non-Sharing as Grief Work and Ruptures of Digital Mourning
Social media has transformed how grief is experienced and shared, turning platforms into unexpected spaces for mourning, remembrance, and community-building. Yet grief is not only about what is made visible—it is also about what remains unseen, unspoken, and deliberately withheld. This paper explores non-sharing as grief work, examining the ruptures that emerge when mourning does not align with platform logics of visibility, algorithmic curation, or public engagement. While digital mourning is often framed as a means of connection, we highlight how grief may be disrupted by grief policing, moderation practices, and the pressure to conform to platformed expressions of loss. Drawing on interviews with bereaved individuals and professionals, we introduce grief ruptures—breaks in digital continuity where the complexities of mourning exceed platform affordances. These ruptures surface in content moderation that obscure certain losses, self-censorship of stigmatized grief, and tensions between personal grieving and public sharing. This paper argues that non-sharing is not a void but a meaningful refusal, challenging dominant narratives of digital mourning as inherently visible. For internet researchers, these ruptures raise methodological questions about how to study the unseen. Traditional digital ethnography may prioritize what is publicly posted, yet grief often manifests through absence, withdrawal, and refusal. We propose new approaches that account for non-use, silence, and platform resistance, contributing to broader discussions on platformisation, grief literacies, and the evolving politics of loss in digital spaces.
Slop for Kids: an exploratory study of AI-generated videos for children on YouTube
This paper investigates AI-generated videos for children on YouTube through an exploratory study. Using a digital methods approach, we compiled two datasets of videos from 2022 to 2024, in English and Portuguese, containing references to both “AI” and “children.” From these, we manually selected and analyzed a subset of AI-generated children’s videos, describing their characteristics and discussing implications. Our findings reveal a growing presence of AI-generated children’s videos, mainly featuring music and stories, with also educational and religious content. As a secondary finding, we have also identified numerous tutorial-style videos promoting the monetization of AI-generated content, reflecting broader trends in low-effort, engagement-driven video production. Despite AI’s increasing role in content creation, most AI-generated children’s videos did not achieve high view counts, with a few exceptions that raise questions about AI's contribution to engagement and virality. The study also highlights the challenges of defining AI-generated content, as many videos exist on a spectrum of AI usage rather than being entirely machine-produced. Our findings highlight the need for further research on AI’s influence on children’s media consumption, the role of automation in shaping content, and the implications for the quality and diversity of children’s online media.
Datafication can be defined as the process of capturing, appropriating and processing user information for different capitalist purposes (Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger, 2013; Van Dijck, 2017). In our ongoing research “Datafication of the work activity of media workers in their productive arrangements” we seek to understand the datafication of work activities. Specifically, we put a magnifying glass on the digital machinery to understand the place of value production of the media workers, as well as their specific place in the production chain of platform companies, to ascertain whether and how the work process of these professionals is datafied in its different specificities.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PLATFORM WORK: THE CASE OF DRIVERS AND COURIERS
Platform work challenges Marxist academics. The main question that arises is: does platform work create value? Some authors claim not only that the work performed by platform workers creates value, but also that the activity of users on Facebook and Instagram, for instance, is a source of value (Fuchs, 2014). This perspective, however, has already been heavily criticized by theorists affiliated with the theory of value, with whom we agree (Kangal, 2014; Bolaños & Vieira, 2014; Comor, 2015).There are also those who argue that the theory of value is not capable of explaining platform work (Arvidsson & Colleoni, 2012). And there are those who claim that digital platforms are purely rent-seeking companies, an expression of the parasitic nature of current capitalism (Dowbor, 2024; Christophers, 2020).
Visual media in motion: Conceptualizing the short video format within visual platforms
Social media have become increasingly visually focused with the rise of visual-centric platforms like Instagram and TikTok, reshaping aesthetics and user experience. In these mobile-first spaces, vertical short videos redefined digital storytelling, content creation, and engagement. Although their relevance has fostered a rich and expanding body of research, a conceptualization of “short videos” remains elusive, with varying terminology across studies. Moreover, research on visual communication has extensively focused on static images, while missing conceptual work with respect to moving images designed for mobile consumption. Developing a conceptual framework is therefore essential, providing the foundation for systematically analyzing these audiovisual artifacts. Drawing from format theory, social media studies, multimodality and visual communication, this work introduces a conceptualization of short videos as a distinctive media format, defined by structural characteristics that allow to distinguish and analyze them across platforms. This work outlines the technical infrastructure and audiovisual features of the format, discussing how the interplay of diverse modes of communication fosters both collective and individual experiences, thereby shaping meaning making. This conceptual framework expands research on moving images in mobile environments, offering a comprehensive understanding of the role of short videos within visual and social media culture and supporting methodologies to examine their multimodal components.
DON’T WORRY ABOUT FORMALITIES: PROMPTING AS ALGORITHMIC FOLKLORE
As large language models (LLMs) with chat interfaces such as ChatGPT have become available to the public, with ChatGPT reportedly amassing more than 400 million active users worldwide, social media has become host to a proliferation of posts and dedicated communities featuring lay people’s experiments with prompt engineering. While much has been written about prompting as a specialized skill, there is currently very little research on the socio-cultural practices of prompting and the online communities dedicated to these activities and little is known about how non-experts are using prompts to shape their interactions with LLMs. With this conference paper I aim to contribute to the understanding of LLM prompting as a vernacular practice in digital culture. Combining the method of digital ethnography of the proliferation and modification of a prompt known as "the eigenprompt" on the social media platform X.com, this paper explores how the how assumptions and ideals about LLM intelligence, interiority, and emotion are expressed through the practice of prompting, and how ideals and preferences about LLMs are negotiated and iteratively reformulated throughout online communities. Finally, I argue that the eigenprompt and similar vernacular prompts should be seen as examples of algorithmic folklore that contribute to the construction of new ways of being and relating to digital others.
PLATFORMED NOSTALGIA: AUTOMATTIC-ERA TUMBLR AND THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF HISTORICAL SOCIAL MEDIA NOSTALGIA
This working paper offers a conceptualization of $2 as a social media platform branding strategy that commodifies historical social media nostalgia, in combination with discourses of corporate social responsibility, to (re)gain social acceptance, symbolic value, and desirability amidst a landscape marked by crisis and distrust. I elaborate on this concept through an analysis of Tumblr's marketing and governance to consider how the platform has, since its acquisition by Automattic in 2019, co-opted popular nostalgic discourses about an imagined ‘simpler’ past of social media prior to the ascendancy of Big Tech. I will ask: to what extent, and in what ways, has Tumblr $2 historical social media nostalgia? What contexts and discourses have shaped Tumblr’s courting of historical social media nostalgia? What does this suggest about how the platform wishes to be understood and interpreted within the cultural imaginary? I argue that Tumblr's use of the nostalgic register intensified following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) in 2022. The platforming of nostalgia has enabled Tumblr to discursively position itself within the cultural imaginary as $2 and as a liberal foil to illiberal competitors like X. Here, Tumblr reconfigures itself as a folk hero (rather than failure) amongst the giants; its obsolescence no longer evaded but celebrated. These discursive interventions allow us to elucidate what Tumblr views, or wants us to view, as its role and influence in social media history, even if this does not necessarily gel with the platform’s internal priorities and policies in practice.
THE PEOPLE VERSUS THE MEDIA: THE ROLE OF EVERYDAY AUDIENCE DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN CHALLENGING THE NEWS MEDIA FOR ITS REPORTING ON MINORITIES.
Research highlights how negative, discriminatory narratives about marginalised groups are increasingly amplified through the digitalisation of the news media. Adopting a multi-method approach using surveys of 450 news audience members acting as everyday digital activists who have challenged the mainstream media on how it reports on minority groups together with ten follow-up focus groups with a sub-cohort of 70 survey respondents, I investigate how British audiences use digital activism to hold the news media to account for discriminatory and divisive coverage against these groups. In this paper, I present the findings of the research in relation to the demographics and motivations behind this type of media-centric digital activism, and how everyday audiences use digital activism to push for a more responsible, fairer news media when reporting on marginalised groups. By investigating the complexities of the media-audiences nexus in the digital age, these insights provide an urgent intervention to contemporary scholarship about how news audiences challenge powerful media institutions through digital activism at a time of increasing disinformation and rising levels of hate towards marginalised communities.
Histobots (Harder 2024b), AI-driven chatbots that simulate historical figures, are marketed as tools for education and engagement. They promise immersion but operate within a system of algorithmic mediation that flattens complexity and reinforces dominant narratives. Unlike traditional historical interpretation, which involves deliberate source selection and critical framing, histobots generate responses based on probabilistic patterns, presenting history as seamless, neutral, and objective. This illusion of neutrality conceals deep biases embedded in training data, filtering mechanisms, and corporate imperatives. This paper examines histobots as algorithmic reenactments. It explores how AI reshapes historiography through feminist and queer theoretical lenses. I reflect on my experience developing a histobot of Hedy Lamarr and analyse AI-generated representations of figures such as Anne Frank, Harriet Tubman, and Marsha P. Johnson. These chatbots erase political agency, neutralise rhetorical power, and homogenise voices. They produce a form of historical negationism that tokenises rather than represents marginalised figures. I draw on situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) and critical AI scholarship (Crawford 2021; Felkner et al. 2024) and argue that histobots reproduce epistemic injustices by encoding archival silences and structural biases. They inherit the exclusions of the historical record while reinforcing contemporary inequalities. This paper interrogates whether histobots can be reclaimed for feminist storytelling or whether, as Audre Lorde (1979) cautions, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Can AI-driven history ever be ethical, or must we build new tools entirely?
Marco Civil da Internet and the Future of Social Media Regulation in Brazil: the Impact of Courts on Platform Policy
This paper examines the STF’s pending ruling on the constitutionality of Article 19 of the MCI—the cornerstone provision establishing the intermediary liability regime in Brazil—against the wider legal and policy context. Through analysis of the legal framework against which the STF will make a decision—including examining the opinions that three out of eleven Justices have already handed down—and broader political economy considerations, we address the following research question: what impact will the Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision have on the future of platform regulation in Brazil? Overall, we will argue that while the STF’s ruling on the constitutionality of the MCI’s intermediary liability regime will significantly impact the future of platform regulation in Brazil, it represents just one component of a necessary broader (and urgent) reform agenda. Overarching platform governance in Brazil has historically been shaped by Congress with lower courts constantly weighing in on the legality of different types of content. The ruling will mark the first time the STF decides on a key platform regulation disposition with systemic impact. Our conclusions hold important implications for both scholarly understanding of platform governance and practical approaches to regulatory reform, particularly in the Global South. The Brazilian case offers valuable insights for other jurisdictions grappling with similar challenges, especially in contexts of political polarisation and limited regulatory capacity.
Competency Prescriptions by Social Media Platforms and the Rise of Organizational Professionalism Among Content Creators
This study contributes to platform and digital labor studies by examining how social media platforms (SMPs) manage content creators (CCs) through “organizational professionalism.” Julia Evetts (2013), an author on the neo-Weberian sociology of professions, has proposed this seminal ideal-type as a heuristic construct to address management discourse that disciplines workers through mechanisms of occupational identity and self-control, such as standardization, goal setting, and performance indicators. Organizational professionalism is demonstrated by describing competencies, which are the achievements, outputs, or deliveries generated when individuals mobilize and combine relevant resources to fulfill professional demands in a particular context (Le Boterf, 2000). Using a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2014), we analyzed 400 text and video transcripts of sessions instructing content creators on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to identify the competencies recommended by SMPs. The data analysis revealed 52 competencies arranged into eleven groups. Finally, we structured the data in accordance with Gioia et al.'s (2013) recommendations, identifying three aggregate dimensions of competencies: (1) complying with usage and monetization rules, (2) strategic content production and audience management, and (3) navigating creative and emotional challenges. Each competency dimension addresses the platform's interests and is critical to the creator's career prospects. So organizational professionalism works as a subtle but effective way to keep creators in line with the business goals of the platform while still giving the impression of independence and entrepreneurship. By doing so, SMPs not only overburden content creators but also shape the new occupation.
THE LIFE, DEATH, AND AFTERLIFE OF GAMESPY: AN AUTOPSY OF A DEAD PLATFORM
In the late 90s and early 2000s, GameSpy Network, was an inescapable presence of the early interactive web—either in the GameSpy Network—a collection of websites dedicated to covering popular game franchises (e.g Planet Quake, Planet Half-Life) or by working with game developers and publishers to provide multiplayer capabilities for hundreds of PC and console games. Even in instances when GameSpy did not provide the online infrastructure for a game, services like GameSpy Arcade gave users easy access—through monthly subscription fees or watching free ads—to multiplayer matchmaking, voice chat, and social features. Through its deliberate convergence of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers as multiple sides of a lucrative technology and content business, we see an early instance of a “multisided market” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018) that is a distinguishing feature of today’s digital platforms and their ecosystems. GameSpy might now be a “dead platform” (McCammon & Lingel, 2022) but in its death we find crucial insights about the past and future of digital platforms, and the undervalued labour necessary to support them. We situate our study at the intersections of journalism studies, platform studies, and game studies to examine GameSpy as an early instance of platformization (Helmond, 2015), digital journalistic labour (Cohen, 2015), and what David Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman (2023) call the “mainstreaming of games.” Though GameSpy predates the intense platformization that characterizes contemporary digital journalism, the enmeshment of journalistic editorial work with commercial advertising and player connectivity function as early clues for how the industry would continue to develop.
THE HEXAGON OF DISINFORMATION: A FRAMEWORK FOR EMPIRICAL RESEARCHES
Disinformation has consolidated as a complex contemporary phenomenon. However, its academic study often remains fragmented, with research focusing on isolated aspects such as content or network structures while neglecting the political and economic incentives that sustain the system. This methodological fragmentation highlights a significant gap. To address this, this paper introduces the "Hexagon of Disinformation," a theoretical-methodological framework designed to guide the systemic and integrated empirical analysis of disinformation. The model is structured into six interconnected and interdependent dimensions: material, social, technological, economical, political, and institutional. Theoretically, the framework is grounded in an articulation of Fairclough's (1992, 2015) theory of discourse as social practice and Recuero's (2024) systemic perspective. This approach conceptualizes disinformation not as simple "false content," but as a discursive action embedded in power struggles and as a complex system analyzable as an object, process, and effect. The framework’s primary contribution is its systemic nature, inviting researchers to investigate the relationships of interdependence between the dimensions. The paper details each dimension, including the material (linguistic strategies), social (group dynamics), technological (platforms, algorithms), economical (monetization), political (polarization, populism), and institutional (attacks on public trust). The value of the Hexagon lies in analyzing the connections between these porous dimensions. By emphasizing interconnectedness, the framework offers a versatile tool for a more holistic understanding of the disinformation ecosystem.
The co-creation of trans microcelebrity: a case study of Nikkie de Jager
In January 2020, beauty vlogger Nikkie de Jager (better known by her username NikkieTutorials) publicly came out as a trans woman, after more than a decade-long career on YouTube during which she passed as a cisgender, heterosexual woman, and under duress of a blackmailer who threatened to leak her “secret” identity. Far from ending her career, de Jager’s disclosure propelled her to greater success in the cutthroat creator economy, increasing her celebrity status. In this article, I argue that de Jager leveraged her coming-out to bolster her performance of authenticity as a microcelebrity, reaffirming and deepening her intimacy with her audience. This dialogic intimacy is central to the performance of microcelebrity. While previous studies have theorized the strategies that creators use to perform microcelebrity, little attention has been paid to the role of the audience in microcelebrity. I argue that microcelebrity is a strategy of performance that is co-constructed with the audience, making it distinct from parasocial relationships.
GEEK GRRRLS NEED MODEMS: DISEMBODIEMENT, CYBERLIBERATION AND POSTFEMINISM IN THE 1990S
This paper analyzes the gendered narratives surrounding the internet created in Australian-based cyberfeminist zine $2 . $2 , a zine that received international recognition, aimed to create an online space and culture for women. It promoted on strategies that empowered individual users and argued for improvements to women's online experiences. However, while presenting itself as an explicitly feminist project, the zine was informed by the 1990s turn towards post-feminism. It dismissed earlier feminist movements and was frequently critical of women who took things said online 'too seriously'. This paper argues that the narratives presented in $2 were attempts to reconcile, somewhat awkwardly, emerging ideas about the liberatory potential of cyberspace and cyberlibertarian ideologies with feminist critique. It positions $2 as a zine that emerged from its historical context, the 1990s turn towards post-feminism, the popularization of internet and web technologies, and ongoing narratives about the relationship between women and technology. $2 played with concepts of embodiment and disembodiment, feminism and post-feminism, online and IRL, and the international and Australian national contexts in which these played out.
RURAL WOMEN’S CYCLE OF BITTERNESS ON SHORT-VIDEO PLATFORMS IN CHINA
“Bitterness [苦]” is a prominent affect in Chinese culture, rooted in sensory and emotional experiences and extending to an existential awareness of life’s uncertainty. Since time immemorial, bitterness has been linked to the hardships of agricultural labour and patriarchal exploitation. During the Maoist era, bitterness, particularly embodied by rural women, was reframed as a feudal remnant to be eliminated through rituals like "spitting out bitterness" for a socialist future. Meanwhile, rural women were expected to “eat more bitterness”, forming a cycle of bitterness. This cycle now recurs on short-video platforms. Through textual analysis, interviews, and observations of ten rural female content creators in China, this paper explores their self-representation of suffering. Building on critiques of self-branding in digital cultures (Banet-Weiser, 2013), I argue that Chinese rural women repackage bitterness as a commodity within platforms' attention economy. The bitterness they "spit out" through short video essentialises rural identities as inferior and backward for urban audiences, who see these qualities as virtues rather than stemming from structural inequalities. Fundamental aspects of rural bitterness, such as the urban-rural division, remain intact. Rural women must continue to "eat" bitterness, now even more tied to their rural subjectivities. During this process, inspired by Butler’s theory of “grievability” (2010), bitterness is seen as affective governance tied to social conditioning, intersecting with personal feelings. Paradoxically, it also lets these women monetise the very affects associated with their hardships and marginalised status through the attention economy.
Wikidata’s Worldview: Inspecting an AI Knowledge Pipeline with Semantic Network Analysis
As AI systems increasingly depend on structured data to provide meaningful context, understanding the role of knowledge graphs like Wikidata becomes important. A collaborative, multilingual, and free database, Wikidata is at the heart of many AI applications that influence the results of search engines, digital assistants, and automated decision-making systems. It is incumbent on media and communication researchers to understand that machine-readable data is interpretable data and that we must analyze data structure, categorization, and interpretation in the systems that feed the AI knowledge pipeline. This paper provides such an analysis by examining the ontological structure, terminology, and sociocultural biases of Wikidata using semantic network analysis. We expose several problems relating to ambiguous terminology, the classification of concepts, and the social constructions of data entities. We claim that knowledge graphs do not represent objective facts waiting to be transformed into AI communications but instead provide deep cultural assumptions that influence machine communication’s decision-making process. This research calls for radical transparency and criticism of proprietary AI knowledge systems to show their impact on society by allowing researchers to examine the classification architecture of databases used in consumer products.
ADORKABLE AI: HOW ALGORITHMS SHAPE LIBRARIAN STEREOTYPES IN BRAZIL AND THE US
This paper analyzes AI-generated depictions of librarians to determine their alignment with stereotypical portrayals. Previous research has highlighted gender biases in large language models (LLMs) and AI-generated images, often depicting professions like secretaries and nurses as women and medical professionals as white males. However, no studies have examined AI-generated images of librarians. This study fills that gap by exploring how these images uphold stereotypes, focusing on portrayals in American English and Brazilian Portuguese. Data was collected from DALL-E, Midjourney, and Adobe Firefly using gender-neutral prompts in both languages. Thematic analysis revealed recurring themes and patterns in the visual representations. Preliminary findings indicate that AI-generated images often depict librarians as white, slender, intellectual women, with stereotypical elements like glasses and cardigans. The study underscores the need for a critical approach to Generative AI, as training data reflects societal biases, perpetuating stereotypes. These portrayals can impact the public perception of librarians, potentially alienating users and reinforcing an outdated, predominantly white, female, and middle-class image of the profession.
CONTENT CREATORS’ BELIEF SYSTEMS AND THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA ECOSYSTEMS
Content creators have become essential players and disruptors in social media ecosystems and society at large. By examining how content creators make sense of these ecosystems, this article offers a conceptual and analytical framework that broadens the scope of existing analyses of creators’ content strategies and activities. Using cognitive, behavioral, and experiential factors, we investigate the belief systems of creators. Creators’ belief systems are examined in relation to different facets of social media ecosystems, representing both mundane and supernatural sense-making approaches. We illustrate how different belief systems affect the choices made by content creators and impact the ecosystem as a whole. Our paper contributes to the field of creator research in three ways: we sketch and conceptualize the social media ecosystem to examine content creators (Figure 1); we propose a visual mapping methodological approach drawing from critical cartography studies and cognitive mapping to explore creators’ beliefs about the different elements of this ecosystem; we provide an analytical proposal that considers the potential for mundane and supernatural beliefs among creators within their social media ecosystems.
“We don’t want to commit as micro-drama creators”: how do these professionals navigate opportunities and internalised prejudices in the evolving micro drama industry
This study examines the micro drama industry in China—a sector of online television industry marked by vertically shot, minute-long episodes distributed on mobile platforms—and the paradox of traditional television professionals distancing themselves from micro-drama creation. The research asks why these experienced practitioners disassociate from their micro-drama professionals, what sociocultural implications underpin their sense of “shame,” and how they navigate opportunities amid internalized prejudices in an era defined by platformisation. Employing a multi-method qualitative design that integrates semi-structured interviews with 27 seasoned practitioners, a month-long ethnographic study of a leading production team, and secondary data analysis, the study reveals that the commercialized and formulaic production model—driven by algorithmic gatekeeping and data-driven metrics—intensifies creators’ ambivalence. Findings indicate that while micro dramas offer lucrative and efficient production opportunities, their standardized narratives and reliance on quantitative performance indicators undermine creative legitimacy and contribute to a persistent shame among content creators. This work contributes to digital labour and platform studies by elucidating how algorithmic frameworks and economic imperatives reshape professional identities and creative practices in online television, highlighting the tension between commercial success and artistic recognition in the evolving media landscape.
ALGORITHMIC AFTERLIVES: THE ETHICS OF REVIVING THE DEAD
From oral storytelling traditions to Victorian seances communing with the dead has long been a part of human existence. But as technology advances, our means of connecting with the past proliferate; as Kasket suggests “technology is [now] where the dead live” (2019, 7) and the dead are increasingly online. Websites and apps like PeopleAI and MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia utilise deep learning algorithms to evoke, re-frame, re-work and distort the past, and similar tools are now being introduced in cultural and heritage contexts. Indeed, as the capabilities of AI-enabled voice ‘clones’ and ‘deepfake’ technologies improve, working with algorithmic afterlives is fast becoming a mundane proposition. These practices however expose deep ethical questions about consent, legacy, ownership and custodianship which are increasingly important in the context of concerns about disinformation and declining levels of trust in public institutions and the media. We have been working with heritage professionals to better understand and respond to these concerns, in particular when it comes to the algorithmic ‘revival’ of historical figures. In this paper we introduce and reflect upon our recent work – in collaboration with 19 UK cultural professionals and alongside creative studio yello brick – to co-design an innovative toolkit for museum/historic sites navigating the creation of ‘AI afterlives’. We discuss the key takeaways from our research, highlighting the ruptures between past and present that arise in the context of AI and automation and the potential paths organisations and professionals can follow to address concerns around algorithmic revivals.
Data, Sense, and Sensibility: How Data Journalism Style Shapes Interactivity
Data journalism (DJ) seeks to enhance audience comprehension and engagement by integrating statistical information, diverse sources, data visualizations, and journalistic style. However, the way DJ stories are framed—whether through an analytic approach that prioritizes precision or an affective approach that emphasizes emotional engagement—may shape audience interactivity in distinct ways. This study examines how journalistic style influences audience engagement in DJ by analyzing 6,400 New York Times (NYT) stories and 785,883 comments from 2014 to 2022. Using computational text analysis and mediation modeling, we assess how DJ stories balance analytic and affective elements and how these stylistic choices impact user interaction. The findings indicate that DJ stories tend to adopt a more affective and less analytic style compared to traditional journalism. While affective framing increases comment volume, it is negatively associated with conversation depth. In contrast, analytic framing and static visualizations contribute to deeper discussions but attract fewer initial comments. DJ stories, overall, generate fewer comments than traditional stories, yet when comments do appear, they are more likely to develop into conversations. These results suggest a trade-off in DJ: an affective approach fosters broader engagement, while an analytic approach and static visualizations support in-depth discussions. This study highlights the evolving role of DJ in shaping audience interactivity and underscores the need for news organizations to balance emotional resonance with analytical clarity to foster both engagement and substantive discourse.
COMMUNITY-LED MODERATION IN ‘THE RUINS’ OF TWITTER/X: A CASE STUDY OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC FELLA ORGANIZATION (NAFO)
Recent developments in platform governance point to community-led moderation as an increasingly preferred solution by mainstream social media platforms when dealing with problematic content. While research has shown the benefits of involving online communities in content moderation efforts, this type of moderation is also prone to limitations, such as leaving volunteer moderators on their own heuristics to decide upon complex categories of content. Using Anna Tsing's (2015) metaphor of 'life among ruins', in this paper we examine an online community called the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO) that had to turn to volunteer governance in face of increasing failures of centralised content moderation on Twitter/X. Its members, also known as ‘fellas’, have been active on the platform since May 2022 by debunking and ridiculing online falsehoods spread by highly visible Russian government accounts and pro-Russian actors, reporting problematic behaviour, as well as fundraising on behalf of Ukraine. We identify three types of moderation practices relevant to the collective – ‘soft-’, ‘hard-’, and ‘self’-moderation. While, for our participants, Russia’s war on Ukraine warranted such efforts, this community-led moderation required a high emotional and time investment on their behalf. Our findings attest to the ability of such practices to fill platform governance gaps, while also recognising the need for self-moderation and ongoing care for the community as vital for sustaining such practices.
Error Imaginations: How German Lay Users Negotiate Risks of Generative AI Errors in Political Information Searches
Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly used as an information source across various domains, including politics. However, GenAI systems frequently produce errors, which creates particular challenges in sensitive contexts such as political information. Existing research on GenAI errors primarily focuses on model safety evaluations or the broader societal risks of AI-generated misinformation. Yet little attention has been paid to how lay users interpret and respond to GenAI errors in political contexts. This study argues that lay users imagine how and why errors occur, making GenAI errors negotiated, speculated on, and mythologized phenomena. Building on the concept of $2 , I call these ongoing negotiations $2 , conceptualized as means through which lay users subjectively anticipate risks and manage AI's fundamental opacity. This qualitative pilot study comprised two focus groups (N=24) conducted in September 2025 with German part-time university students from interdisciplinary backgrounds. Using a scenario-based vignette design, participants engaged with deliberately erroneous mock GenAI responses to political queries classified by the error taxonomy: factual errors (nonsensical) and evasion (refusal). Preliminary Reflexive Thematic Analysis revealed a striking paradox: most participants had no direct experience using GenAI for political information, yet articulated vivid error imaginations resulting in the risk mitigation practice of anticipatory non-use. While participants expressed concerns about manipulation and super-human persuasive power, they simultaneously reproduced industry framings that naturalize GenAI errors as technical limitations. Paradoxically, anticipatory non-use creates a self-reinforcing cycle where $2 remain uncorrected by experience, leaving users dependent on external narratives rather than developing situated algorithmic epistemic vigilance.
Cynicism and internalized responsibility for digital well-being among young people in Slovenia
The contemporary media environment is marked by profound disruptions, particularly in how young people engage with and trust digital platforms. This paper situates these shifts within the broader theme of ruptures, conceptualizing them as both discontinuities in media consumption and broader epistemological breaks in young people’s relationship with (digital) media, trust, and platform power. We focus on how digital platforms shape youth attitudes toward news credibility, the ethical responsibilities of media organizations, and the increasing individualization of responsibility—the notion that users themselves are solely accountable for navigating opaque and exploitative digital ecosystems. Our study draws on qualitative insights from the research project Digital maturity of youth: social needs and informal education of youth in the digital age, in which 41 young people (aged 16-24) were interviewed to explore their media practices and identify their needs, while addressing the deficits of their experiences and the shortcomings within changing digital media landscape. Building on scholarship in media studies, digital sociology, and critical platform studies, we argue that the erosion of institutional trust and the rise of platform-mediated epistemologies constitute a rupture in how young people conceptualize media credibility, power, and agency. On the backdrop of qualitative thematic analysis, these ruptures manifest as 1. cynicism toward digital media and social platforms, 2. heightened but paradoxical expectations for legacy media, and 3. individualization of responsibility (internalized responsibility) for digital well-being.
THE GREAT JOURNALISTIC WALL IN CHINA: PREEMPTIVE BOUNDARY WORK IN THE AGE OF GENERATIVE AI
This study explores how Chinese journalists perceive, use, and report on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the reflected journalist roles. Through qualitative analysis of 18 in-depth interviews with Chinese journalists from various news organizations, the study examines how journalists, as both users and mediators of algorithms, shape public understanding while influenced by the sociotechnical and algorithmic imaginaries (Bucher, 2017; Jasanoff, 2015) surrounding AI. The findings reveal that despite concerns over the opaque knowledge apparatus underpinning the AI value construction, Chinese journalists strive to maintain critical reporting without contributing to media hype. Engaging with the literature on the boundaries and boundary work of journalism (Carlson & Lewis, 2015, 2019), the study argues that Chinese journalists deploy preemptive boundary work to define their profession, as well as safeguard journalistic autonomy (Örnebring & Karlsson, 2022), involving dismissing the potential benefits of GenAI tools, building AI anchors that are less ‘real’ so that people could easily identify the use of AI tools that justifies the investments in journalistic innovation, and insisting on human being the final gatekeepers. Positioned within China’s unique political and media landscape, the research underscores the complexities of journalistic practice in the AI era.
RUSSIAN INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY AND INFRASTRUCTURAL COERCION: THE CASE OF TSPU
This paper examines how the Russian state, following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, accelerated coercive controls over internet infrastructure through the rapid deployment of Technical Measures to Combat Threats (TSPU). Building on Maxigas and ten Oever’s (2023) framework of infrastructural ideologies, the study introduces infrastructural coercion as a crisis-driven strategy, contrasting it with hegemonic models reliant on tacit compliance. The research combines analysis of legislative texts with an examination of sessions from the Conference of Russian Telecom Operators (КРОС, 2018–2024). Findings reveal operators’ strategies to mitigate coercive measures: exploiting legal ambiguities (e.g., license reclassification), adopting phased DPI implementation, and leveraging sanctions-driven import substitution. KROS discourse shifted markedly—from openly mocking “unworkable” laws in 2018 to framing post-2022 challenges as “temporary difficulties” within an optimistic techno-nationalist trajectory. The study challenges state-centric narratives of digital sovereignty by centering infrastructural actors’ agency. It demonstrates that tools like DPI are neither neutral nor inevitable: their adoption reflects ideological priorities, while material constraints expose fissures in state control. Russia’s case illustrates that “great firewalls” can emerge rapidly using existing technologies. By foregrounding implementers’ negotiations, this research advances scholarship on infrastructural governance and the political valence of technical systems.
ON JOKES AND BOUNDARIES: NEGOTIATING THE VALUE OF ML AND AI WORK THROUGH MEMES
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of generating code has unsettled core assumptions about the nature and value of coding-related professions. In this paper, we analyse how memes navigate shifting perceptions of value and worth in this situation, drawing on valuation studies and scholarship on humorous online memes. Our dataset comprises 401 memes tagged with 'machine learning' and 'artificial intelligence' on ProgrammerHumor.io. We purposively sampled 60 image-macro memes containing humour that assign value to AI/ML work. Through thematic analysis of the textual and visual elements of these memes, we demonstrate how they establish symbolic boundaries between various groups of coders, highlight the perceived limitations of AI-generated code and address the uncertainties surrounding the future of coding work. Firstly, memes differentiate between coders based on their relationship with AI, contrasting skilled programmers who have control over code with 'prompt engineers' and 'vibe coders' who rely on LLMs. Secondly, they highlight the perceived shortcomings of AI-generated code, particularly its unreliability and the burden of debugging, thereby asserting the continued superiority of human expertise. Finally, memes articulate automation anxiety by addressing fears of job replacement, while also emphasising AI's dependence on human-generated code. Together, the memes constitute a dynamic cultural arena in which professionals negotiate the impact of AI coding tools, construct hierarchies of worth and process the rapid changes in valuation in their field.
Editing and juxtaposition in Kim Kardashian’s Instagram stories
The article analyzes Kim Kardashian's Instagram Stories through the lens of film studies, viewing 24h worth of posts as single video streams. With an approach grounded in film analysis inspired by the poetics of film (Bordwell, 1989) and Eisenstein’s (1988) theory of montage, the study examines the effects of editing and juxtaposition of stories in shaping an user’s online presence. Preliminary findings reveal a visual tension between static and moving images, highlighting the rhythmic and visual shock caused by abrupt cuts between story segments. The study also observes the fusion of multimodality and cross-platform interactions, such as images of magazine articles and political support posts, creating a combination of seemingly disconnected content that, when viewed in sequence, produces an artistic and shocking effect. Despite limitations, such as the arbitrary choice of profile and the restricted corpus, the study concludes that Instagram Stories can be seen as artistic works, albeit unintentional, constructed through an editing process that involves the user and the platform in a hybrid human-technical process. Kardashian's stories, multifaceted and contradictory, offer a view of the construction of her online persona, highlighting activist content in an unexpected but effective way.
UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL HEALTH KNOWLEDGE ECOSYSTEM: ANALYZING THE MARKETING AND COMMUNICATION PRACTICES OF PATIENT INFLUENCERS, PHARMACEUTICAL AND TELEHEALTH COMPANIES
Social media-fuelled popularity of the so-called ‘miracle drugs’ Ozempic and Wegovy prompted many concerns about off-label prescriptions, use without proper consultation, new compounding pharmacy formulations, the adverse side-effects of overuse, etc. While these issues are not new, emerging novel entanglements of many actors with conflicting interests—including patient influencers, telehealth and pharmaceutical companies—are involved in the assembly of health knowledge through product promotion and social media communication that raise crucial issues of how trust is multiply mediated and health/medical knowledge constructed and distributed. For instance, influencers create and maintain ‘authentic’ personas, gaining follower trust and pharmaceutical companies, long struggling with brand reputation, leverage these personas mediating public trust and increasing the ‘invisible hands’ (Sismondo 2018) with which they shape health/medical knowledge. However, the extent of commercial influence remains unclear, which is crucial for understanding the formation and relationships within the ecosystem of health knowledge online. Using an STS and digital mediatization lens, this paper draws upon key concepts such as expertise, trust, epistemic democratization and competition, ‘civic epistemologies’, and entanglements (Hepp and Couldry 2023; Jasanoff 2022; Marres 2018) to understand health communication relations of these actors online. Presenting findings from the first phase of my doctoral research—a hermeneutic content analysis of patient influencer Instagram and TikTok videos—this presentation focuses on understanding what is communicated, by whom, and how, revealing shifting marketing and communication practices on social media that ultimately work to restructure this knowledge ecosystem and impact public health choices.
Subjective Precarity and the Normalization of Work–Life Imbalance: Chinese Female Journalists’ Lived Experiences
Prior research showed that long hours, nontraditional schedules, and the integration of digital technologies shape journalists’ ability to balance professional and personal lives (Snyder et al., 2021). This study examines how Chinese female journalists experience and normalize work–life imbalance over time, even while recognizing its negative impacts. This study focuses on Chinese female journalists in their early and mid-career stages, before becoming mothers— a group often overlooked in existing literature, which typically emphasizes married women with children. Using precarity as a conceptual framework, this study draws on three focus group interviews, each with 5-6 journalists from local and regional print media. Thematic analysis is employed to examine how they perceive their work-life blending experiences. The findings reveal three central tensions: - While journalists accept work-life blending as a given, they simultaneously acknowledge that its negative consequences outweigh its benefits, especially in terms of their well-being and health. - Despite believing that work-life imbalance is inevitable, they continue to seek temporary detachment from work, often using technology or relying on family members to help them disengage. - The blending of work and life is emotionally charged but experienced differently across career stages. This study contributes to the understanding of journalistic precarity by exploring its emotional dimensions, highlighting how work-life imbalance fosters feelings of entrapment, exhaustion, and instability.
From Scrubs to Scrolling: Healthcare Professionals on Douyin
Short video platforms are reshaping health communication, yet how healthcare professionals use them to present their expertise in a digital space governed by both entertainment-driven engagement metrics and regulatory constraints remains understudied. This study examines how verified healthcare professionals use Douyin, China's leading short video platform, to engage in health communication. Through content analysis of 130 highly engaged videos and 58 professionals' homepages, this study investigates the characteristics of the healthcare professionals on Douyin, how they present themselves, and what strategies they use to balance medical credibility with Douyin's entertainment-driven nature.
Parallel Platformization of Health: Health Communication on Douyin and TikTok
This study examines the parallel platformization of health by analyzing how verified healthcare professionals present themselves and disseminate medical information on Douyin and TikTok. Through content analysis of videos published by 10 popular verified doctors on each platform and homepage analysis, as well as policy analysis of platform regulations on the healthcare industry, this study explores how platform infrastructure, business models, and governance influence the roles, interactions, and communication styles of healthcare professionals on Douyin and TikTok.
#Baby Supplementary Food as Cyber Shield: Grounded Perspectives on Chinese Digital Feminism on RedNote
Chinese female users on RedNote have re-appropriated the #Baby Supplementary Food (#BSF) hashtag to evade male visibility and foster female-exclusive discourse. Originally intended for baby food content, #BSF now functions as a strategic shield against the male gaze, as parenting-related posts are considered less likely to appear in male-dominated feeds. This practice reflects a broader trend in China’s digital feminism, where women manipulate algorithmic affordances to create safer online spaces. This study investigates how #BSF facilitates a counterpublic sphere by examining 1,513 non-commercial posts. Using Python-based data mining and the official platform provided dataset, we filtered content to exclude genuine baby food posts and commercial promotions. We further use GSDMM topic modeling and critical discourse analysis (CDA) explored linguistic strategies used in #BSF-tagged posts. Our findings reveal that #BSF serves not only as a shield but also as a site of feminist resistance. Users build solidarity through intimate discourse and redefine traditional motherhood by positioning themselves as "babies" or "pet mothers," rejecting patriarchal maternal expectations. Through satire and self-infantilization, they subvert dominant gender norms and construct an alternative female-centered space. This study contributes to digital feminism by demonstrating how Chinese women leverage platform affordances to resist online male dominance. It also introduces a systematic methodological approach to studying hashtag-based expression and counter publics making on Chinese social media platforms.
Rethinking search intent: From traditional search engines to LLM-powered information retrieval
This study examines the limitations of traditional search intent frameworks in the evolving landscape of digital information retrieval. We argue that Broder's (2002) widely used taxonomy of informational, navigational, and transactional intent fails to capture contemporary search behaviors due to two major shifts: first, traditional search engines have evolved from simple hyperlink providers into platforms offering rich snippets and direct answers; second, large language model (LLM) chatbots have emerged as alternative information retrieval tools. Through an online survey we conducted (N=82) where participants reflected on their actual search histories across both platforms (246 sessions each), we identified three key shortcomings of Broder’s (2002) taxonomy: emergent patterns outside existing categories, dissolution of boundaries between intent types, and statistically uneven distribution of categories across platforms. Based on our analysis of participants' reflections on their search histories and the identified shortcomings of traditional search intent taxonomies, we propose a novel user-centered framework. This framework shifts the focus from what users search for to why they search and how they use information. Our model has the following dimensions: immediate search goals (knowledge-oriented, solution-oriented, or resource-oriented), contextual triggers, outcome realizations, and overarching purposes connected to fundamental human values. This approach, grounded in Xie's (2002) model of interactive information retrieval and Schwartz's Theory of Basic Values (2012), provides a more comprehensive understanding of search behavior by considering the entire search journey rather than isolated queries, offering valuable insights for designing more responsive information retrieval systems.
What is left of BreadTube? Researching YouTube-based political cultures with Situational Analysis
This contribution investigates the case of “BreadTube”, a left-wing counterpublic that first formed on YouTube in opposition to the dominance of right-wing voices and networks on the platform. To gain a better understanding of the inner workings of this media-based collectivity, this article analyzes an internal controversy to reconstruct the tacit assumptions of various participants about the counterpublic’s aims, values, shortcomings as well as its economic and technological prerequisites. To capture the controversy for exploration, an innovative approach was employed that adapts Clarke's Situational Analysis as a framework to integrate both interpretative mapping and computational network analysis to properly account for the videos high level of intertextual referentiality as well as their algorithmic interrelatedness. This digitally and visually enhanced Situational Analysis framework was able to deliver a comprehensive insight into the complex and dynamic constellation of perspectives and segments BreadTube is composed of and illuminated arenas in which adverse interests overlap and conflict arises over questions of representation, legitimacy, shared history, and resource allocation.
COLONIAL MAPPING OF ADVANCE AUTOMATION: EAST INDIA COMPANY AS AI
This paper argues that AI systems must be understood as extensions of centuries-old platform infrastructures rooted in empire. A telling anecdote comes from a senior Microsoft scientist who asked a generative model to depict “an Indian girl under a tree reading a book.” Instead of producing her desired childhood reflection, the system defaulted to white, Western images—revealing how foundation models encode colonial value systems. Like Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, the circulation of meaning is pre-structured by Western archives that dominate training data. This dynamic is not new. The British East India Company operated as the first global platform: it centralized trade through charters, maps, tariffs, and racial ranking systems, sustaining a multi-sided market without producing its own content. Just as the EIC tweaked terms and conditions to regulate life across continents, modern AI platforms hard-code racial capitalism into digital infrastructures. Contemporary Platform Studies often miss this continuity, framing platforms as neoliberal novelties rather than as inheritors of colonial techniques of privatization, dispossession, and labor precarity. Today, national initiatives such as India’s foundational AI model demonstrate both possibility and peril. While framed as sovereign alternatives to Western dominance, such projects risk reproducing exclusion by privileging some languages and identities over others. In contrast, Indigenous data sovereignty movements—such as Te Mana Raraunga in Aotearoa—foreground communal ownership and resistance to state or market capture. This paper situates “Global Southing” not as a guarantee of decolonization but as a contested terrain where platform power may either reinforce or unsettle colonial continuities.
"It's Not About Laziness, It's About Efficiency": Youth Perspectives on Generative AI in Higher Education Through the Lens of TikTok
This study explores how youth discuss generative artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education contexts on TikTok. Through a qualitative analysis of 980 TikTok posts and their associated comments, we identify three key themes: (1) the commercialization of AI tools on TikTok through peer-to-peer marketing strategies, (2) platform-mediated moral contestations around AI ethics and the purpose of higher education, and (3) the emergence of new forms of community-building and identity exploration centered around AI. Our analysis reveals TikTok's significant role as a platform for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing around emerging technologies—yet one deeply marked by commercial dynamics and undisclosed promotional content. These findings contribute to emerging scholarship on how social media platforms shape youth technological imaginaries and provide insights into the complex entanglements of commercial interests, educational discourse, and identity practices in digital spaces.
CHALLENGING THE RULES OF INFLUENCER MARKETING: EMERGING SENSITIVITIES AROUND CHILDREN'S PRESENCE IN FAMILY INFLUENCERS PROFILES
The rise of the creator economy has led mom and family influencers to integrate their children into their online narratives, enhancing their relatability and commercial value. Through emotional connection with audiences, influencers secure partnerships and build their brands. Children presence raises ethical concerns, including privacy threats, commodification of intimacy, and the pressures of algorithm-driven content production. The research investigates how family influencers negotiate the imperative to share their children and whether resistance emerges among influencers and users. The study adopts a multi-method approach employing: content analysis of Instagram and TikTok posts published by family influencers; a survey targeted mothers with at least a child aged 0-5 years; in-depth interviews with mothers and influencers. Findings reveal a constant presence of children visibility in influencers' content with children also are actively involved in sponsored posts and stories. Opinions about children's inclusion in visual content are mixed, with questionnaire and interviews showing that some think that it is acceptable, while other objects that risks are too high. Influencers who do not share pictures of their children acknowledge the potential sponsorship losses. The study suggests a growing awareness of digital privacy risks, where financial incentives compete with ethical considerations.
WHY THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM IS NOT A TECHNOLOGICAL RUPTURE: ON THE IMAGINATION OF THE SOCIETAL NEEDS OF PUBLIC COMMUNICATION AND INNOVATION IN PIONEER JOURNALISM
Journalism often frames its future as shaped by “technological rupture” and “innovation”. This paper challenges such narratives, arguing instead for understanding journalism’s transformation as a broader structural change—one that involves the creation of new organizational principles, supported by an imagined need for new technologies to “innovate” toward a better future. Through the concept of “pioneer journalism,” we analyze how journalists who experiment with new practices and imagine possible futures shape the transformation of the field. Based on a media-ethnography in Germany, we examine how pioneer journalists envision the societal needs for public communication and how these imaginaries inform their approaches to innovation. Our findings reveal that their imaginations are strongly rooted in democratic values, emphasizing six societal needs: creating encompassing publics, providing appropriate information, fostering exchange, correcting negative developments, promoting a sense of belonging, and supporting societal development. Paradoxically, however, their discourse on innovation often mirrors Silicon Valley’s categories, raising critical questions about whether such frameworks can adequately address the imagined needs for public communication. There is a multiple refraction of innovation imperatives: pioneer journalists simultaneously critique Silicon Valley narratives and Big Tech power while appropriating their innovation methods, creating tensions between journalistic values and innovation practices.
EMERGING TECHNO-POLITICAL AFFORDANCES: TRANSFORMATION OF TECHNICAL AFFORDANCES ON TIKTOK DURING PROTESTS IN PERU
This study examines how TikTok’s functional affordances transformed into political affordances during the 2022–2023 protests against Dina Boluarte in Peru. In a context of state repression and media control, TikTok emerged as a vital space for symbolic resistance, where citizens—particularly young content creators—disputed official narratives that criminalized protests. Drawing on digital everyday politics and relational affordance theory, this research employs a mixed-methods approach, including a technical walkthrough of TikTok, content analysis of 286 videos, and interviews with eight content creators. Findings reveal two key political affordances: $2 and $2 . $2 emerged as users leveraged TikTok’s immediacy and editing tools to document repression in real-time, countering state narratives. Protesters became citizen reporters, combining firsthand footage with expressive tools like filters, subtitles, and music to construct alternative accounts of police violence. Meanwhile, $2 arose as TikTok’s algorithm allowed dissident content to reach wider audiences beyond traditional media’s gatekeeping. Creators repurposed TikTok’s viral culture to expose state abuses and mobilize digital activism. These findings demonstrate that affordances are not fixed but dynamically reconfigured in response to political urgencies. TikTok’s technical possibilities were reshaped by protestors’ communicative needs, turning the platform into a space for contestation and resistance. By highlighting how marginalized voices use digital tools to challenge repression, this study contributes to broader discussions on platform politics and social movements in the Global South.
Chill vibes: Wellness creep into music streaming platforms
This paper examines the increasing ‘wellness creep’ into the curation and recommendation of music by digital platforms. Through the platform walkthrough and critical interface analysis of Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music, it considers how industry discourse, user interfaces, and playlist products increasingly push pseudoscientific ideas of health and self-care as tools for the pursuit of an aspirational good life through music consumption. Our analysis demonstrates how platforms 'stage' these wellness-focused atmospheres, prioritizing ways of acting and feeling that reproduce normative conceptions of physical and emotional well-being. We especially focus on ‘chill vibes’ as a dominant aesthetic vernacular that invokes and brings forth certain affective and cognitive dispositions, simultaneously constructing and promising to fulfill fantasies of happiness and success. We posit that 'chill vibes' are supposed to unproblematically mitigate the effects of, and simultaneously prepare the user to keep thriving in, a reality of stress, acceleration, and unrest, and argue that streaming platforms appropriate and exploit common human responses to stress and unrest through the management of musical consumption and sonic environments. Ultimately, we show how the promise of wellness can be mobilized to promote regimes of subjectivity and governmentality, and how these are increasingly related to the commercial optimization of data and artificial intelligence.
Making personalization ✨delightful✨: staging power for data indulgence on Spotify
This paper offers a critical technography of ‘audio-first’ digital platform Spotify, scrutinizing the ways in which the company’s institutional discourse and promotional materials frame the practices of datafication and personalization. Engaging with the growing literature on platform studies, critical algorithm studies, and everyday data cultures, I argue that the case of Spotify represents a paradigmatic example of a broader discursive shift in which data practices are justified by platforms based on their capacity to evoke ‘delight’. On Spotify, I identify that this phenomenon is manifested through the mobilization of a contradictory ‘computational mojo’ that combines the science of numbers with miraculous, magical powers, as well as a focus on the timeliness and beauty of its algorithmic-driven contextual harmony. In so doing, Spotify’s designed experiences attempt to convince users that they should revel in acts of ‘data indulgence’ – the craving, appetite for, and enjoyment of data-driven experiences. Rather than accepting that these data-craving and advertising-friendly modalities of subjectivity are naturally or automatically occurring, I argue that the phenomenon illustrates the complex dynamics of ‘staging power’. Dialoguing with recent debates on the role of affect, emotion, and desire in mediating datafication, I aim to contribute to, and expand on, existing theorizations on the symbolic and aesthetic power of digital platforms.
“The malaria vaccine should be Dead on Arrival”: Exploring Health Discourse and Misinformation on KingsChat, a Nigerian Pentecostal Social Networking Platform
As digital technologies reshape how faith communities communicate and operate, religious leaders extend their influence into online spaces where spiritual and health-related beliefs converge. This study is the first to investigate health discourse and misinformation on KingsChat, the social networking platform of the Christ Embassy megachurch in Nigeria led by Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, a known source of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and health misinformation. By scraping public KingsChat posts matching selected health search terms in addition to any posts from individuals in Christ Embassy church leadership, a dataset of 12,443 posts was collected. Keyword analysis identified various health discourse patterns, particularly around misinformation concerning COVID-19, vaccines, faith healing and malaria. To better understand health-related content in these posts, a random sample of posts containing health terms was manually coded. This found that 35% of health-related posts contained a debunked or unsubstantiated health-related claim. The largest two categories of misinformation involved faith healing and conspiratorial narratives about vaccines. Additional investigation of the external URLs linked to from KingsChat posts also exposes cross-platform interactions in the way the church distributes and amplifies health messages across digital spaces. These findings underscore challenges facing public health officials working with communities where Christ Embassy church is influential. Understanding the interplay of digital media ecosystems, as well as the motivations and strategies for spreading health information online, will help researchers propose effective interventions and public health measures while respecting community norms.
The Power of Inevitability: How OpenAI Configures the Future
This paper investigates the discursive strategies employed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, to position themselves as leading the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Through an examination of 44 texts, including OpenAI's corporate communications, media appearances, and journalistic coverage, this study reveals how OpenAI utilizes socio-political anxieties and Silicon Valley ideals to shape a discourse of inevitability about AGI's future. OpenAI's discourse centers on four key areas: national security concerns, the juxtaposition of "freedom" and "openness" against the threat of superintelligence, the company's shift from non-profit to commercial entity, and the promotion of AI as a solution to global problems. By strategically invoking these themes, OpenAI establishes itself as a "technological solution." The company's rhetoric emphasizes the need for regulation, while simultaneously positioning itself as the authority on AI governance. OpenAI's calls for democratic oversight are often coupled with warnings about the dangers of unchecked AI development, reinforcing the company's role as a responsible actor in the tech sector. Ultimately, OpenAI's discursive strategies serve to define the future of AI in a way that aligns with the company's interests. By framing AGI as both inevitable and potentially dangerous, OpenAI creates a narrative that justifies its own pursuit of power against the global diffusion of AGI.
X to Bluesky platform migration: Governance and community
The results of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election led millions of X (Twitter) users to move to other platforms, following Musk’s support for president-elect Trump. Most users fled to Bluesky, driven by a desire for a community space with greater transparency, stronger moderation policies, and less hate speech. While online platform migrations happen regularly, they are not always this acute or this large. Therefore, this migration presents a unique case study for building online platform migration theory. This project investigates the X to Bluesky migration from a communication media lens. It is hypothesized (per media system dependency theory) that the social turmoil of the recent US Presidential election should lead to greater dependency on X, which would normally lead to greater platform adoption. However, it is theorized that given platform communication violations (per interpersonal expectancy violation theory), users migrated to other platforms (e.g., Bluesky) given a variety of “push” and “pull” factors (per migration theory), and moderated by the critical mass of their network. The present study will present survey results of former X/Twitter users (N = 200) who are now on Bluesky, about their reasons for migrating, to test these hypotheses. The project has received funding and is currently under university ethics board review. Data collection and analysis will be complete by the AoIR conference in October 2025.
The “Space of Reasons” and Digital Public Sphere: Developing Connections in Empirical Research
This paper explores the operationalization of Habermas’ concept of the "space of reasons" in empirical research on the digital public sphere. The study engages with contemporary debates on misinformation, polarization, and democratic challenges, analyzing connections and ruptures in political judgment among social actors. Instead of a micro-level analysis, it adopts a macro perspective, considering interrelated institutions and actors. By focusing on substantive reasons, the research examines how arguments and counter-arguments structure public debates and shape political positioning. The study proposes developing and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of arguments on controversial issues, such as feminist mobilizations and anti-feminist discourse in podcasts and social media. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is employed to systematize and analyze these discourses, following methodologies previously applied in research on climate change and misinformation, for example. Unlike fragmented classifications, this approach seeks a holistic understanding, integrating discursive practices with institutional structures and the actors involved. The paper follows three key steps: (i) it explores the feasibility of applying the "space of reasons" concept in empirical research to systematize the circulation of reasons; (ii) it integrates reasoning practices into a broader network of multiple factors and relationships; (iii) it demonstrates how mapping substantive reasons enhances the understanding of intolerant, extremist, and authoritarian discourses. The study contributes to research agendas on public discourse and conflict dynamics, highlighting methodological and normative challenges in transitioning from micro to macro-level analysis, particularly in a digital environment that is reshaping investigative paradigms.
WEB DETECTION METHODS FOR CONTEXTUAL INTERPRETATION OF IMAGE COLLECTIONS
This paper introduces the innovative use of web detection to overcome a methodological challenge in visual media analysis within social media research and Internet studies. Traditional approaches often depend on manual coding of top-ranked images or examining individual images, lacking the integration of web-based knowledge. This study employs web detection methods utilizing image search ranking mechanisms and knowledge graphs for data retrieval and contextualization. This approach enables the identification of web entities linked to images, webpages, and image URLs that fully or partially correspond to the original image collection. Findings reveal that web detection methods offer a novel framework for examining issue mapping and cross-platform visual vernaculars, as web entities and exact visual match outputs position an image collection within the freshest and most relevant web sources. Findings are organized into key themes characterizing the (1) contextual, (2) social perceptions, (3) ephemerality and (4) technological grammar of web entities and exact visual matches. A proof of methods is provided through a case study on ChatGPT. Methodological insights are supported by a four-year digital methods study, using three unchanged image datasets to analyze AI web detection outputs over time. We applied quali-quanti approaches that facilitate a deep understanding of web detection technologies within their operational logic and socio-technical contexts. This paper contributes to new, reproducible methods for contextual image collection analysis, including techniques for studying cross-platform visual vernaculars and reconceptualizing ‘operational images’ (Parikka, 2023) through web detection methods.
ELUSIVE PORN: LEARNING FROM ALASTONSUOMI
This paper explores boundary work between pornography and other sexual media among the users of Alastonsuomi (“Naked Finland”), a Finnish-language image gallery dedicated to nudity and sexual self-expression. Building on 31 semi-structured in-depth interviews, it asks how, and in connection to what kinds of content the participants evoke the notion of porn in connection with sexual self-shooting. Within this, distinctions become drawn between different platforms, aesthetic qualities, as well as social and personal meanings.
MODDING SKYRIM WITH GENERATIVE AI: EXPLORING IMAGINARIES AND PLAYER-NPC INTERACTIONS
Imagine a scenario in which players engage in conversations with non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games using a microphone, free from scripted responses or predefined constraints. With the advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), this possibility has become more feasible than ever. This article examines the Mantella mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011), which facilitates natural language interactions with NPCs, transforming player engagement within the game’s fictional universe. Skyrim is an action role-playing game (RPG) developed by Bethesda Game Studios. With over 60 million copies sold and releases spanning three generations of gaming consoles, Skyrim has cemented its place in gaming history. A significant factor contributing to its enduring relevance is its vibrant modding community, which has enabled players to modify and expand the game in myriad ways – ranging from graphical enhancements to the introduction of new areas and survival mechanics. This extensive capacity for customization has sustained the game’s popularity for over a decade since its initial release. The primary objective of this article is to investigate the creative appropriation of GAI by Skyrim's PC modding community. Specifically, it addresses the following question: What AI imaginaries emerge from Skyrim gameplay influenced by the Mantella mod? To explore this question, 13 YouTube videos were collected using ethnographic techniques, complemented by a formal gameplay analysis.
Anitta's Political Activism and Controversies on Digital Platforms: The Case of Her Support for Lula During the 2022 Elections
During the hotly contested 2022 Brazilian presidential elections between Workers' Party candidate Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and Liberal Party candidate Jair Messias Bolsonaro, singer Anitta - one of Brazil's biggest pop singers - declared her support for Lula on her X and Instagram profiles, causing a huge backlash not only among her 60 million followers and fans but also among institutional political actors This paper is part of a broader research initiative focused on the intersection of Brazilian pop-peripheral music, politics, and activism. Utilizing the frameworks of performance dramaturgy (Taylor, 2013; Schechner, 2009) and the cartography of controversies (Latour, 2015), we center our analysis on Anitta's endorsement to explore the dynamics of political performances and activism by Brazilian pop-peripheral artists (Pereira de Sá, 2021) on digital platforms. The paper aims to address two interconnected questions: 1. How is a political performance constructed by pop artists on digital platforms? 2. How do fans react, and how effective is this performance in promoting civic engagement? We will present empirical data gathered from digital platforms, including a collection and filtering of tweets from Anitta's profile on X, along with replies and shares from July 11 to 17, 2022. Additionally, we will analyze tweets associated with hashtags such as #lula and #luladay. Further insights will be drawn from a questionnaire distributed to Anitta's fans between November and December 2022, assessing her political stance and its repercussions on digital platforms.
“A network of collaborative intelligence”: The platformization of community algorithmic surveillance
This paper explores how two different startups, Flock Safety in the United States and Gabriel in Brazil, are directly involving communities in the infrastructuring of algorithmic surveillance. Both companies employ a platform for surveillance-as-a-service that allows law enforcement and community members to collaborate in establishing an ‘intelligent’ surveillance network in neighborhoods. Within the literature, the platformization of surveillance has mainly been interrogated across two levels: on one hand, scholars have discussed how platform logics continue to penetrate police work, while others have observed how platforms come with built-in logics of surveillance that affect everyday usage. The paper contributes to critical data studies with an empirical exploration of community participation in the platformization of algorithmic surveillance. In this process, not only does the reach and scope of surveillance expand, but platform logics reshape surveillance practices and renew power imbalances. While the rhetoric of community empowerment is pervasive throughout their marketing claims, these two surveillance platform businesses are directly integrating their data infrastructure with the surveillance state, diminishing the ability for communities to self-govern. This paper argues that the communities’ adoption of platform surveillance only fuels the capabilities of law enforcement to expand its access – but not full control over – algorithmic surveillance infrastructure and data. Communities themselves are restricted to the position of subscribers to a service, which does not allow them to fully govern or control how the platform is used.
Access is not enough! Reconceptualizing Data Quality as a Public Value in Times of Platformization and European Regulation
Questions regarding quality digital platform data have gained significant attention and research focus in recent years as new error frameworks and data quality dimensions have been developed. With this contribution we link recent work from the area of data quality research with critical reflections on platformization and argue that the quality of online platform data cannot solely be understood as a methodological, internal research construct, but also as a contested concept in which various actors from politics, the tech industry and academia negotiate and represent specific interests. On the one hand, digital platforms increased the commoditization of data quality, e.g. though monetized APIs. On the other hand, this strategy of digital platforms has now increasingly become the subject of political efforts of regulation, especially in the European Union (EU). The Digital Services Act (DSA) includes provisions for access to platform data by researchers. We problematize that the current debate and the DSA are particularly about data access from platforms, but not data quality in general. The consequence of this is that even if platforms grant access to data, the actual purpose of conducting reliable and socially relevant research is undermined by a lack of data quality. As a potential solution, we identify the need for new actors to assess the quality of platform data and provide long term accountability and supportive infrastructure for quality assessments.
The platform politics of hateful play on Twitch
In this essay, we argue that the term “hate raiding” requires clearer definition within digital platform studies scholarship to combat efforts to apply the term to anti-brand protests (Murphy & Jarrett 2024). To render our definition, we use critical game studies scholarship (Trammell 2023, Giddings & Harvey 2018) to analyze how the conditions of reciprocity and play on Twitch.tv (Twitch) produce the conditions for hate raids to occur as playful (Scholl 2024), non-antisocial behavior. In other words, we insist that hate raids should not be viewed as transgressive acts of play, or morally motivated forms of networked harassment (Marwick 2021), arguing that this type of harassment is a consequence of ludic economics in general (Giddings & Harvey) and the sociality cultivated on Twitch in particular. Through thoughtful discursive, infrastructural, and rhetorical analysis of Twitch.tv’s branding and platform governance, we demonstrate that hate raiding is not a bug, but in fact a feature of the live streaming platform.
"It feels incongruent to talk about reducing shame when I have to spell 's-e-g-g-s' on TikTok": Navigating Platform Moderation as Sex Education Creators on Social Media
Sex education in the U.S. remains a contested issue, with no federal mandate and varying state policies, often restricting content related to LGBTQ+ and marginalized communities. People increasingly turn to social media platforms like TikTok for sexual education. However, platform moderation—shaped in part by laws like FOSTA-SESTA—imposes severe restrictions on sex education content, limiting its accessibility and undermining creators’ work. This study examines how sex education professionals navigate platform moderation on TikTok and Instagram. Through in-depth interviews with 15 sex education creators, we explore the challenges posed by content restrictions, particularly the use of “algospeak” to circumvent moderation. While strategies to bypass moderation, such as misspelling words, avoiding certain terms altogether, or using code words, can help creators circumvent moderation, they introduce new tensions such as further reinforcing stigma around sex and undermining their professional credibility. Creators report increased labor in justifying their content choices and frustration with platform priorities, which inconsistently moderate educational material while allowing harassment and hate speech to persist. Our findings highlight how ruptures in platform governance are experienced by creators and actively produce new fractures, reinforcing and reshaping the dynamics of knowledge and power online.
FIGURATIONS OF CELEBRITY EVERYDAY LIFE: REPRESENTATION, AUTHENTICITY, AND PROXIMITY ON SOCIAL MEDIA
This study examines the construction of celebrity everyday life on social media, focusing on how artists strategically intertwine their cultural productions with personal narratives to cultivate perceived intimacy and authenticity. Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of face management and the everyday, this research analyzes the Instagram profile of Liniker, a prominent Black transgender artist in Brazil. Liniker’s profile serves as a platform for showcasing both her artistic endeavors and her daily life, challenging traditional representations of transgender women. Employing a dual analytical approach, combining panoramic observation and detailed visual analysis, the study explores how Liniker’s posts, categorized into promotional and everyday life themes, contribute to a complex performative construction of self. The analysis reveals that behind-the-scenes content emphasizes collaborative efforts and affective bonds, while musical partnerships highlight her integration into a prestigious cultural field. Individual images, including selfies and posed photographs, project intimacy towards her followers. By juxtaposing artistic achievements with quotidian experiences, Liniker broadens visual representations, challenging prevailing narratives that often depict transgender women in contexts of violence. Her portrayal of success, love, and happiness diversifies life potentials and contributes to the discourse on transgender rights. This platform facilitates the articulation of aspirational life possibilities, interweaving professional success, personal relationships, and the visible affirmation of transgender identity, thereby contributing to the study of celebrity culture, digital media, gender, and everyday life.
From the Internet to the everyday: An exploration of visual representations of peace
While extensive research has explored the role of images in war, studies on peace imagery remain limited. This gap is significant given images’ ability to shape public perception, evoke emotions, and convey immediacy, which is often absent in text. Moreover, dominant visual narratives tend to frame peace within a binary war-peace paradigm, at times overlooking the diverse, coexisting forms of peace emphasized in contemporary peace research. This study addresses these gaps by examining peace imagery through a dual approach: analyzing images selected by over 200 peacebuilding experts and conducting a systematic Google Images search using 15 peace-related keywords. Using image-type analysis, the study categorizes and interprets recurring motifs, revealing distinct differences between participant-selected images and those retrieved from online searches. While dominant online peace imagery often features symbols, text-based visuals, and staged representations, expert-selected images highlight more nuanced portrayals of everyday peace, emphasizing local, lived experiences. These findings underscore the need to move beyond simplistic peace symbols and incorporate diverse, grassroots-driven visual narratives. By bridging expert surveys with digital methodologies, this study enhances our understanding of peace representation and its implications for global peace communication. The results highlight the role of the Internet in shaping dominant peace imagery while advocating for a more inclusive, locally grounded visual discourse. This research ultimately contributes to expanding visual peace studies and integrating diverse perspectives into broader peacebuilding efforts.
The Art of Maximizing Attention: Digital Neoliberalism and MrBeast
With viewership and subscription rates breaking countless records, MrBeast has become the contemporary digital household name. The YouTube channel and content creator Jimmy Donaldson tell a tale of unmatched dedication to the maximization of user attention through the tools offered on YouTube and built by MrBeast. In the era of digital media and dominant neoliberalism, internet platforms and internet media strive to maintain as much screen time per user as possible, inevitably creating an economy that values user data as an analytic tool to transform into more and more attention. Through conversation and explicit connection, a discursive persona emerges that combines Donaldson and the MrBeast content company, intertwining Donaldson’s personal connection to the maximization of attention to the business interests of the company. Thus every piece of MrBeast branded (or related) media showcases the brand ultimately directed towards this goal of capturing and perfecting the attention algorithm. In this paper, I argue that the MrBeast online persona epitomizes the digital neoliberal rationality portrayed through the contemporary attention economy. Through a textual analysis of the main channel's long-form YouTube content and interviews with Donaldson, a discursive association emerges between MrBeast and digital neoliberal logics. Moreover, the achievement of the channel on YouTube and far beyond ultimately validates and helps inform how the channel’s usage of such logics reached previously unimaginable success.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND INDIGENOUS (SELF-)REPRESENTATION: A MODEL FOR AGENCY AND AUTONOMY
The rise of generative AI (Gen-AI) models in cultural production has enabled broader access to image-making, particularly for underrepresented communities. Tools like MidJourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion allow users with little technical expertise to create images from text prompts. However, these models reproduce biases embedded in their training datasets, raising concerns about representation, visibility politics, and data exploitation. This paper investigates these issues through the lens of Indigenous self-representation in Abya Yala (the Americas), and draws from initial findings from a project involving Indigenous artists from South America that explored Gen-AI’s limitations and its potential for greater autonomy in self-representation. The project identified that Gen-AI often reinforced stereotypes but also provided participants with a sense of control over their images. To address these limitations, the team developed a custom Indigenous Gen-AI model emphasizing autonomy and ethical data use. The model, based on Stable Diffusion, integrates Indigenous design elements and operates offline to ensure data sovereignty. The project also emphasizes a co-creative process involving scholars, Indigenous artists, and technologists. The initiative aligns with the principles of "Digital Buen Vivir," advocating for ethical, sustainable, and community-driven technology use. While the model empowers Indigenous creators some challenges remain, including technological accessibility, digital literacy gaps, and the structural constraints of Gen-AI. We conclude with recommendations for Indigenous engagement with AI and the future development of self-representational Gen-AI technologies.
PRESCRIPTIONS OF DOMESTIC WORK PLATFORMS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN BRAZIL AND THE UNITED STATES
The proposal presents partial results of ongoing research about prescriptions of domestic work platforms. Its main objective is to discuss the communication between digital care work platform companies and their workers, considering a comparative approach between organizations operating in Brazil and the USA. Taking advantage of the historical social, gender, race, and class inequalities of both countries, these business organizations are expanding widely and intensively exploiting the care work of people and households carried out by millions of women. In this context, platform companies mobilize different communication uses in support of their logic of management and organization of work. In the case of this proposal, a critical analysis will be presented on domestic work prescriptions identified in the discourses disseminated by digital platform companies in both countries. Specifically, we will deal with the guidelines workers receive from companies to carry out their work. This study involves a theoretical-methodological path that includes bibliographic and documentary research based on Brazilian and North American data, whose results show similarities and differences in domestic work in the platform economy in different Global South and Global North territories.
The Continuous Glucose Monitor as Boundary Object: How a Diabetic Device Reveals The Generalized Becoming-Diabetic of Quantified Selfhood
This talk examines how diabetic use of self-tracking continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and diabetic data sensibilities that come from CGM use have been increasingly generalized to non-diabetic users and uses of CGM devices since 2021, when CGMs were approved in some international jurisdictions for use without requisite medical necessity. Communities of non-diabetic practice use the CGM to measure their glucose like diabetic users do, but in frameworks that both distance and re-center diabetes in their design and use. Just as diabetics learn to feel their numbers in relation to how CGMs datafy and visualize their glucose numbers over time, non-diabetic CGM users aim to measure, visualize, and develop a feel for their sugars like people with diabetes do: to develop diabetic-like “data gazes,” ways of seeing data about glucose that people with diabetes cultivate around the graphical visualizations of CGM data. CGM use by people without diabetes generalizes diabetic practice, technology, and sensibility, putting people with and without diabetes into newly configured, and often contentious, relations around their shared use of the CGM device. Based in analysis of social media marketing, online promotions, unboxing videos and a corpus of social media comments around CGM use by people without diabetes, this talk demonstrates how centrally chronic illness figures into the practices, routines and feel of quantified selfhood with the CGM, around the one chronic illness that stands in for managed chronic living more generally: diabetes.
RESEARCH BRAVE SPACES AND ZINE-MAKING: DISRUPTIVE TOOLS FOR EXPLORING DIGITAL SEXUAL INTIMACIES
The study of digital sexual intimacies presents ethical and methodological challenges, often framed by anxieties around sex, public life, and the internet (Tiidenberg, 2018, 2020). Traditional qualitative methods tend to be extractive and risk-centered. Instead, creative, participatory, and multimodal approaches foster inclusive, reflexive, and non-hierarchical research environments (Knowles & Cole, 2007; Mannay, 2016). Art-based methods, particularly zine-making, have been used across disciplines to engage marginalized groups (McNicol, 2019; Etengoff, 2015). As self-published, DIY pamphlets, zines offer a non-linear, multimodal space for expression and collective knowledge production (Duncombe, 1997; Lovata, 2007). They challenge traditional data collection by integrating text, visuals, and intertextual elements, making them particularly valuable in queer and subcultural research contexts (Downes et al., 2013). This study introduces the Research Brave Space (RBS) concept, shifting from ‘safe spaces’ to settings where participants courageously engage with sensitive topics (Arao & Clemens, 2013). Implemented through zine-making workshops with queer young adults in Italy, RBS prioritizes care, adaptability, and agency. These workshops facilitated cognitive, emotional, and physical accessibility, fostering collective engagement and self-representation. Participants reported increased agency and deeper reflexivity, illustrating the method’s transformative potential. Zine-making as RBS disrupts academic methodologies, advocating for ethics of care and participatory research in digital sexual intimacies. Embracing discomfort and creative non-linearity fosters more inclusive knowledge production, challenging scholars to rethink engagement with vulnerable subjectivities in social sciences.
“A Slippery Slope of Nakedness:” An Exploration of Online Nude Content Exchange by Gay and Bisexual Men
High-profile cases of gay influencer nude leaks have prompted widespread discussions of the risks and harms of how gay and bisexual men who exchange intimate content online negotiate privacy, risk, and sexual desire. Indeed, gay and bisexual men who use geosocial dating apps like Grindr are significantly more likely to be the victims of revenge porn than both the general population and the gay community more broadly. Yet, the critique imagines intimacy, exposure, hurt, and harm through histories of heterosexual desire. This project will engage in a queering of discourse around sexting and revenge porn through a qualitative interrogation of four areas of practice: taking, sharing, disseminating, and consuming nude and pornographic content. In doing so, this research will contribute to new ways of thinking sexting and revenge porn that are unburdened by heteronormative expectations and hegemonic constraints on online sexual expression.
Emergency Notification Apps as Embodied Responsibilization
The paper explores the emergency notification app, developed in order to alert individuals to immediate danger while preserving the resilience of the home front as a whole. Drawing on walkthroughs of emergency apps and an analysis of related materials, I suggest how this disruption not only manifests in but also enables three interrelated processes: the dissolution of the national collective into individually-alerted users; the blurring of the distinction between emergency and routine; and the delegation of preparedness responsibility from the state to individual users. I argue that these three processes – facilitated by the seemingly life-saving, deeply personalized disruption of the emergency app – carry critical political consequences. By creating an illusion of personal safety, these processes, which materialize in the hand-held disruption app, allow for a prolonged state of exception and the indefinite protraction of war and danger.
GLOBAL DISRUPTION, LOCAL ADAPTATION: REALITY TELEVISION AND GLOBO IN THE STREAMING ERA.
The transformations brought by digital platforms and streaming services have profoundly altered the dynamics of media production and consumption in Brazil, reshaping the long-established structures of television broadcasting. Historically, TV Globo has been the dominant force in Brazil’s media landscape, pioneering national cultural production, setting audience standards, and establishing a robust international distribution network. However, the global expansion of streaming services has reconfigured traditional audiovisual models, challenging Globo’s dominance and requiring strategic shifts in content production, distribution, and monetization. This study explores Globo’s adaptation strategies by focusing on reality television—a genre that has emerged as a central pillar of the network's response to digital platformization. It provides an important lens through which to analyse the broader restructuring of traditional broadcasters as they navigate disruptions in audiovisual models and the challenges of sustaining audience engagement in an era of fragmented media consumption.
ANALYZING LABOR MOBILITY AND MIGRATION IN THE DIGITAL GAMES INDUSTRY: A STUDY WITH BRAZILIAN WORKERS
This paper investigates the mobility and migration experiences of Brazilian workers in the digital games industry, focusing on issues of digital labor and the political economy of the cultural and technological industries. The research answers questions about the circulation of these workers in the labor market and the relationship between migration and labor process in the games industry. Using industry reports and a literature review, the study is based on 14 semi-structured interviews conducted between October 2022 and August 2024 with key professionals in the production of digital games, such as programmers, artists, designers, and managers. The paper starts from the hypothesis that, in a global labor market, workers from peripheral countries, such as Brazil, have economic incentives to migrate and work for foreign companies, especially in the Global North, where the games industry is more developed. Through Labor Process Theory (LPT), the article: (1) demonstrates that these mobility experiences of these workers are marked by mobility/immobility dynamics, reflecting pronounced global inequalities; (2) exposes the various forms of mediation that facilitate the circulation of these workers in the labor market, including educational institutions, social networks and social media, and events; and (3) investigates the relevance of territory and spatial constraints to understanding the labor process, highlighting local production cultures, work organization, and unionization. The text establishes dialogues with studies of LPT and migration, contributing to the understanding of the relationships between migration and digital labor in the gaming industry.
A NEW ERA OF ONLINE DATING? AN ANALYSIS OF THE APPLICATION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN DATING APPS
The phenomenon of online dating has undergone significant transformations over the past five years, ranging from the record surge in users during the Covid-19 pandemic to the so-called "dating app winter," marked by consecutive declines in active users since 2023. This paper aims to analyze how the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI)-based features has been framed as a strategy to counteract this crisis and to what extent these innovations can— or fail to— address users' current dissatisfaction. To this end, we examine news reports on AI implementation in dating apps between 2020 and 2025, identifying how the discourse surrounding this technology has intensified as user dissatisfaction has increased, as evidenced even in reports issued by the companies operating these platforms. We seek to answer the following question: "What are the trends in AI integration in dating apps?" Our hypothesis is that companies are investing in strategies designed to further reduce decision-making time, prioritizing mechanisms that enhance interaction efficiency, minimize discomfort, and ensure greater user satisfaction. This discussion will be framed within critical platform studies and the datafication of life, as well as debates on the commodification of affect and the solutionist approach to the design and modification of these technologies.
THE WITCHER’S INTERNET MAPS: FAN CARTOGRAPHY, ONLINE COMMUNITIES, AND SPATIAL STORYTELLING
This study examines the role of cartography in $2 transmedia franchise, where the absence of an official map has led to diverse spatial interpretations by fans, game developers, and media adaptations. These maps function as "action spaces" (Abend & Harvey, 2015), shaping perceptions of geography and narrative coherence while also reflecting broader issues of authority and interpretation in fictional world-building. Fan-made maps, game maps, and those from the Netflix adaptation reveal divergent spatial logics, illustrating the performative nature of mapping (Gerlach, 2018) and the participatory processes of online communities. Without a singular, authoritative map (Dodge, 2014), $2 fandom engages in active spatial construction, drawing from textual references and narrative cues. Online platforms such as Reddit, Discord, and wikis serve as arenas for debating accuracy, authenticity, and ownership, reflecting broader crowd-sourced knowledge production (Jenkins, 2006). These discussions not only influence fan engagement but also challenge traditional notions of intellectual property and transmedia authorship (Schiller, 2018). By tracing these cartographic debates and mapping practices across multiple fan platforms, this research updates discussions on authorship, ownership, and participatory culture. It situates fictional cartography within contemporary digital knowledge production, expanding its relevance to transmedia storytelling, crowd-mapping, and internet fandom.
Social media have gone through an overall visual turn. From the text-first nature of former Twitter or the first era of Facebook, we now face platforms that are visual first (if not visual only) both in terms of design and usage. This poses new challenges for researchers that aim at understanding this growing amount of data from a computational or quantitative perspective. Methods developed within the domain of computer vision were developed for tasks (e.g., object recognition, image segmentation), that are of not always of immediate use in research dealing with users or social practices and have thus proved to be of little use. To address the limitations shown by current CNN-based approaches, we propose and evaluate a Visual LLM-based semantic clustering methodology that can capture subtle social and cultural meanings within images, going beyond mere visual or spatial similarities.
Six Years of European Visual Climate Activism: A Longitudinal Analysis of Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion’s Online Visual Communication
This paper addresses how global climate movements use images in their social media communication from a comparative perspective: How have Fridays For Future and Extinction Rebellion in Italy, Germany, Sweden and Hungary evolved their use of visual communication on Instagram between 2018 and 2024? We argue that three lines of analysis are important for a comprehensive understanding of the relation between image content and protest movements: a) complementary movements, b) complementary countries and c) longitudinal observation. We explore those lines of analysis by leveraging a mixed-method analysis of full production of images shared by FFF and XR on Instagram in the period 2018-2024.
FROM SHARING TO STREAMING: TECHNOLOGY, LEGISLATION AND AGENCY IN THE DIGITAL PHONOGRAPHIC INDUSTRY FROM 1996 TO THIS DAY
This paper aims to compare, from the perspective of political economy of communication and philosophy of technology, two distinct historical periods of music consumption via the Internet (from 1996 to 2007 and from 2007 to today) considering the technological, social, aesthetic and authorial changes that have occurred over the last thirty-three years. This broad period begins with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a true legal milestone that marks the beginning of a considerable deregulation of the Internet. Since this deregulation, which freed the Internet from legal surveillance regarding rights such as Copyright, the entire planet (but, of course, firstly Europe and USA) began to access an ever-increasing volume of audio files, thanks to an innovative format that managed to reproduce audio with acceptable fidelity without being excessively heavy in terms of storage. This “miraculous” format, the mp3, designed to be enjoyed in noisy contexts, with relaxed and distracted listening, while running other programs on the computer or traveling from one place to another (Sterne, 2006) not only enabled new forms of listening but also new ways of socializing and sharing (Bull, 2005). In the era of the “digital condition” (Sadin, 2013), that is, the era in which most of citizens’ interactions began to be framed and mediated by the use of the Internet, listening to audio files was inseparable from the idea of sharing them, without necessarily requiring financial compensation (that would be the difference between “sharing” and “piracy”).
Not Content with Content: Ruptures in Media Discourse and Production?
Cultural producers of what one might consider more traditional media have denounced content (shorthand for digital, social media, or online objects) as an object as a far cry from creative output, and the term as an assault on art. Writers, directors, musicians, actors, and even stand-up comedians have not only disparaged content, but also those that produce it. As content is increasingly used to refer not just to media that circulates online but to the products of traditional cultural industries offline too, these producers have disparaged the use of the term and content itself as an assault on their outputs. Through critical discourse analysis of statements and conversations from filmmakers, actors, writers, musicians, and stand-up comedians, I examine how traditional cultural producers negotiate the term content’s application in and encroachment on their fields. I argue that discourse about content is not representative of a sea change in art’s integrity as much as it is a term that creators use to express anxieties about the devaluation of their work in response to changing political economic arrangements that the internet has catalyzed. As their work becomes increasingly accessible to larger audiences via digitization, cultural creators worry that their work is becoming less precious, sanctified, and more easily consumed and discarded, i.e., that their work could become content.
SHAME AND THE FIGURE OF THE FANGIRL: THE SOCIAL DYNAMIC OF SHAME IN POP MUSIC FANDOMS ONLINE
Approaching shame from a queer theoretical framework, this paper will consider how the dynamic of shame operates within popular music fandoms online. Fangirls are subject to and participate in external and lateral shaming to enforce femmephobic ideals of normative femininity within fandom spaces. This leads to the derision of these fandoms, often labelled as ‘toxic’. However, shame is also used productively in these spaces – shame has been made a criterion of community bonding and shared intimacy between fangirls. Drawing on surveys and interviews, this paper aims to uncover how fangirls ultimately negate and rework experiences of shame through participation in pop music fandoms online, as this collective shame strengthens community ties and feelings of kinship among fangirls.
AMAZON’S DIGITAL LOCAL MEDIA COVERAGE ON LARGE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS WITH SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
Brazil plays a key geopolitical role in global environmental decisions. However, large development projects linked to agribusiness and mining are often promoted under developmentalist rhetoric despite their socio-environmental controversies. In the Amazon, where these projects are concentrated, digital local media serves as a platform for political and economic interests. While other studies highlight local journalism’s role in diversifying news perspectives, Brazil’s case differs due to financial constraints, political influence, and content reproduction. This research examines how digital local media in the Amazon reports on four large development projects: the resurfacing of the BR-319 highway, the construction of the Ferrogrão railway, oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River, and potassium extraction on Indigenous lands. Using systematic content analysis, we assessed 3,555 articles published by 186 outlets, identifying the positioning of the outlets, actor representation, geographical scales of impact or benefit mentioned, and content reproduction. Findings reveal that digital local media largely supports large development projects, emphasizing the national scale and economic growth over socio-environmental concerns. In articles opposing the projects, mentions of local impacts stand out. The study also shows that 65.2% of the articles were republished, mostly from news agencies, reinforcing content homogenization. Local politicians and agribusiness representatives dominate coverage, while affected communities and environmental voices remain marginalized. This research highlights how local media in the Amazon amplifies elite narratives, neglecting environmental issues. It underscores the journalistic fragility of the region and the urgent need for stronger, independent environmental journalism.
Thamyres Monteiro Albuquerque de Magalhães
Framing a Brazilian singer and activist: asymmetries between Portuguese cultural coverage and TikTok
This paper explores the differences between traditional cultural coverage and digital media-relevant content. We focus on how the Brazilian singer and activist Linn da Quebrada is portrayed in the Portuguese newspaper $2 and on TikTok. Brazil and Portugal have had a relationship since the colonial period in the sixteenth century. The common language (Portuguese) and digital media habits allow a flux of cultural products between the two countries. However, there is a gap in studies that analyze them considering the colonial context. Previous studies identified the Portuguese cultural coverage as aligned with the country’s cultural industries and elites, with little space for decolonial perspectives and issues such as racism, sexism, and transphobia. The Brazilian singer and activist Linn da Quebrada is an exception in this scenario: the only trans person featured two times in the Portuguese newspaper Público in 2018. Her work was linked to the Brazilian political context and presented as a leading force in feminist and queer movements. Seven years later, we analyzed 24 news pieces published in $2 (2019-2024) mentioning Linn da Quebrada, identifying four thematic axes. In the second stage, through netnography, we analyzed 16 top-ranked videos and 2043 comments associated with them. Findings indicate asymmetries between themes and narratives circulating Linn da Quebrada in Portugal. News pieces predominantly feature the idea of a trans/feminist Brazilian icon. On TikTok, themes are more diverse, including interviews, performances, participation in a reality show, and instances of hate speech in user comments.
OUTLINES OF THE GAMER DATA SUBJECT POSITION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR TRUST
In this paper, we outline the data subject position of the gamer within the contemporary media landscape, looking at gamers not just as players but as a broader position of social media and internet users. We draw on findings from a more extensive project investigating privacy, trust, and data literacy in online gaming to do so. More specifically, we draw on a formative analysis of the data practices of 37 multiplayer online games (e.g., League of Legends), gaming distribution platforms (e.g., Steam), and online community sites (e.g., Discord). Through the privacy policies of these platforms, and adjacent case study analyses of controversies related to data practices, the paper studies the network structures in which the gamer data subject exists. By examining these relationships, the paper sheds light on how gamers and gaming are governed by the technological and policy architectures of platforms. In particular, we highlight three critical dimensions herein. Firstly, we examine forms of dependency through which gamers are bound to datafication processes to access online gaming spaces. Secondly, we foreground how platforms rely on behavioural profiling and algorithmic categorisation to commodify players' interactions. Lastly, we underline a systemic reliance on third-party actors such as advertisers, payment processors, and data brokers, linking the gaming data subject to more expansive societal fields. Doing so, we position the gamer data subject as a nexus for future comparative resrach on cultures of trust and user privacy in gaming.
Yellow Coolant and Kellogg’s Diarrhea: Slop, Shanzhai and Cursed AI as Memetic Aesthetic Detournement
The endless iterations of generative AI output oozing through digital social networks has become unofficially designated as “slop.” Often characterized as a bland averaging of training data or hallucinatory distortions, “slop” has come to symbolize dissatisfaction with an excess of synthetic media. While bland recombination hold the potential to become insidious tools of fascism, proffering a simple, clean hegemonic big-data aesthetic (Watkins, 2025; Salvagio, 2023), by focusing on practices of subversion and misuse, we argue for a reframing of generative AI images which sees a potential for detournement of the neoliberal socio-technical apparatus from which these images spawn. We analyze the Cursed AI Facebook group, a memecultural community fueled by a cadre of artists dedicated to misusing AI for nightmarish visions of intellectual property. Using theory from the mimetic re-turn and mimetic studies, we apply a Shanzhai framing to Cursed AI to show how mimetic processes can yield difference through iterative production and successive variation. In the context of Cursed AI, to engage in this participatory process of sharing, iteration and spread is to enter into the relational flux of memetic media and be $2 . We argue that the potential for rupture with AI-generated images comes, not from content or form, but through their potential to initiate and proliferate mimetic relational flux. This paper contributes to ongoing debates on digital aesthetics, AI-generated images, and the mimetic re-turn. It will be of interest to scholars of post-digital culture, aesthetics, meme studies, tactical and alternative media, and critical AI studies.
Unravelling the Nation: Digital Contestations of Gendered Narratives in the Iranian Women, Life, Freedom Movement
The Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement of 2022-2023 marked a historic shift in Iranian politics by centring women’s issues in public discourse. During and after the uprising, digital platforms became battlegrounds where competing political forces struggled to shape and control narratives around gender issues and national identity. In this context, the research examines how competing gendered narratives were constructed and contested on digital platforms, focusing on feminist activists’ media and discursive strategies in navigating and disrupting digital patriarchal nationalist narratives inside Iran and across the diaspora. Employing a multi-sited ethnographic approach, the study examines an archive of textual and visual materials published online using frame analysis to explore key gendered discussions and highlight how different political actors shaped, resisted, and reframed dominant gendered narratives. The analysis shows that pro-government forces and monarchists strategically deploy nationalist rhetoric centered on gender to shape and control narratives and legitimise their political positions. Within this contested space, feminist activists play a crucial role by appropriating affordances of digital spaces to challenge dominant narratives, constructing counter-narratives that reframe women’s issues and gendered debates. Digital platforms in the Iranian context have emerged as contested and paradoxical spaces, simultaneously enabling mobilisation for political transformation and reinforcing nationalist framing as mechanisms of discursive control.
Off worlding autonomy: Provincial infrastructure and orbital sovereignty in the Ford-Starlink partnership
This paper presents the results of an ongoing research project assessing a deal between Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Elon Musk’s Starlink to provide wireless internet service to isolated communities in northern Ontario with Starlink satellites. We ask how the Ford-Starlink partnership is situated within Canadian histories of provincial autonomy and Indigenous campaigns for political recognition and infrastructural inclusion while exploring what the deal can tell us about the relationship between local governance and technologically mediated transnational capital. Using mixed methods and digital tools, including AntConc and Factiva, we review provincial and federal infrastructure policy alongside media coverage to show how the Ford government instrumentalizes ongoing campaigns to expand wireless internet access to historically excluded Indigenous communities. In the guise of an idealized private-public partnership, the Ford-Starlink partnership demonstrates that provincial authority is adjusting to a new political calculus that circumvents conventional models of national sovereignty through investment in non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). This project is uniquely suited to AOIR’s 2025 theme. While far from ubiquitous, NTNs pose profound challenges. High investment costs and historical access to space programmes stand to constrain the development of NTNs, further concentrating capital and control in the Global North. Though an acute problem for the Global South, the Canadian context offers an insightful example of how these trajectories converge. We draw on Indigenous studies of infrastructure and inclusion, research on wireless media infrastructures, and ongoing debates about the evolution of neoliberalism to highlight how NTNs enclose claims to infrastructural autonomy and national sovereignty.
Comparative Analysis of the Emerging Super App Model in East Africa: Consolidated Data Extraction and Fragmented Digital Governance
Super apps, integrating diverse digital functions into single platforms, have reshaped mobile ecosystems, drawing scholarly attention beyond Silicon Valley models. While research has focused on Asian cases like WeChat and Alipay, East Africa’s super apps, such as Kenya’s M-Pesa and Ethiopia’s Telebirr, remain underexplored despite their rapid rise. M-Pesa, operated by Safaricom, serves over 30 million users, while Telebirr, under Ethio Telecom, has reached 36 million in two years. Both, supported by Huawei, dominate nearly 50% of mobile connections in their countries and evolve through third-party integrations, mirroring Asian super apps. This study investigates: (a) M-Pesa and Telebirr’s data collection, storage, and usage strategies, and their impact on state and corporate control over personal information; (b) how Kenya’s market-driven and Ethiopia’s state-led regulatory environments shape these platforms compared to Asian counterparts; and (c) whether power dynamics among states, corporations, and users reinforce or challenge data colonialism in the Global South’s digital infrastructures. Employing postcolonial computing and platform and infrastructure studies, the research combines case study and comparative methods, using desk research, online fieldwork, and document analysis to examine policy environments, data practices, and platform functionalities. Preliminary findings reveal Kenya’s competitive fintech landscape fosters M-Pesa’s corporate expansion, while Ethiopia’s statism embeds Telebirr in governance, enhancing surveillance. Both platforms’ reliance on Huawei raises data sovereignty concerns. These dynamics suggest data colonialism, as unchecked data extraction risks exploitation. This study enriches postcolonial and infrastructural theories, deepening insights into East African platformization.
BENEATH THE WAVES: OWNERSHIP AND CONTROL IN THE SUBMARINE CABLE INFRASTRUCTURE
The Internet's growth in popularity over the last century has coincided with advances in artificial intelligence, streaming, and social media. This development has significant implications for internet infrastructure, which must accommodate increasing data usage from these technologies and growing user numbers. This study examines how the global submarine cable infrastructure is owned and controlled. It employs digital methods to collect quantitative data and uses visual network analysis to construct and analyse networks over these cables, their owners, and collaborations. Based on a political economy approach, the study identifies who owns and controls underwater cables and how this ownership has changed. The analysis concludes that the global network is owned by a diverse group of companies, dominated by older national telecommunications firms. In recent years, American "tech giants" have invested heavily in cable infrastructure, taking over the leading position. The study's findings contribute to the broader literature on infrastructure studies and offer insights into ownership, control, and power regarding this critical infrastructure. This knowledge can guide monitoring and regulation efforts, ensuring that this essential infrastructure benefits the public rather than private interests.
PLATFORMED HOPE: NAVIGATING PLATFORM MONETIZATION IN THE NIGERIAN SOCIAL MEDIA VIDEO INDUSTRY
This paper explores how creators in the Nigerian social media video industry navigate precarious labour stemming from the business models of digital platforms, specifically YouTube and Facebook. Following global developments, the economic growth and opportunities of digital platforms are creating career opportunities around the world. This has inspired Nigerian content creators who make short-form video content for millions of domestic and diaspora Africans. This paper examines the understudied precarious labour conditions of Nigerian creators in a saturated industry. Drawing from semi-structured interview with 15 workers and critical analysis of the trade press, we identify how domestic cultural norms shape the way Nigerian creators integrate spiritual beliefs in forming a sentiment of hope. This, in turn, provides inspiration to confront the precarity inherent to platform monetization. Our proposed analytical lens of “platformed hope,” identifies two faith-driven monetization strategies adopted by creators: (1) transactional para-sociality and (2) reversed labour remuneration. We contend that although hope and spirituality represent everyday practices in Nigeria, the creators’ strategies reflect practices of faith orchestrated by the unique economic, governmental, and infrastructural logics of platforms. Put differently, transactional para-sociality and reversed labour remuneration are strategic actions to attain monetization goals, but they also illustrate how Nigerian socio-cultural and economic dynamics – including the inclinations of hope and spirituality – shape platform-dependent cultural production as much as they define other aspects of life in Nigeria. Keywords: Platform labour, Nigeria, precarity, platform monetization, hope labour
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT AN ALGORITHM: HOW JOURNALISM FRAMES THE DISRUPTIVE POTENTIAL OF GENERATIVE AI
In this article, we aim to identify and trace some of the most prevalent frames and tropes surrounding GAI, examining how dominant media outlets–national news media and professional trade publications–framed and discussed generative AI, particularly in relation to education and media production, during the first year of GAI’s widespread rollout, from November 2022-October 2023. We employ framing analysis for its focus on how journalists’ understanding of emerging technologies shapes news coverage, which ultimately informs public opinion (D’Angelo, 2017; Tewksbury & Scheufele, 2009). Our emergent frames were developed using qualitative discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010), recognizing that initial media coverage of an emerging social issue or technical regime serves as a proxy to understand broader public understanding, within key professions, of issues and problems surrounding the widespread adoption of new technologies. Once we developed our emergent taxonomy of common frames, we employed a novel, GAI-based technique for framing analysis. We used iterative prompt engineering on open source LLM DeepSeek to investigate not only the discursive frameworks but also the emotionally valent (positive vs. negative) subframes included in each news article, taking care to validate its outputs through intercoder reliability testing.
The sky is bluer on the other side: fleeing from toxic vibes on #Xodus
Although Twitter has been subject to modifications since its conception, the acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022 represented perhaps its most dramatic vibe shift. The rebranding to X and the extremist political orientation increasingly encouraged by Musk have recently led to a mass exodus of users to alternative platforms – a pattern of migration many referred to as #Xodus. We explore this transition in which ordinary users have decided that it was time to move away from Twitter/X and, simultaneously, attempt to make sense of the logics, affordances, and atmospheres of competing apps – particularly, Bluesky. To examine how users perceive and articulate the atmospheres of Bluesky (and how those, in turn, are compared to X’s), we conducted a mixed-method study combining NLP Semantic Analysis and qualitative Thematic Analysis of messages mentioning ‘Twitter’ posted on Bluesky in October-November 2024. Our preliminary findings indicate that some of the main themes are: mourning the Twitter that once was; celebrating the escape from a toxic environment; and actively cultivating Bluesky as a ‘good place’. While Bluesky’s technical affordances are described in many posts as ‘almost identical’ to X’s, users seem to associate its ‘vibe’ with an older, better, pre-Musk social medium. Also, many of the analyzed posts included tips and suggestions on how to protect the new space from toxicity, such as how to block and avoid feeding trolls – demonstrating the acquired literacy of atmosphere staging and the resistance tactics of platform migration.
A RUPTURE IN PHOTOJOURNALISM PRACTICES? A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF AI-GENERATED IMAGERY WITHIN NEWS MEDIA PROFESSIONALS
This study explores the legitimacy of AI-generated images in photojournalism and their potential role in documentary practices. While much of the discourse surrounding AI-generated images focuses on their involvement in disinformation and misinformation, less attention has been given to their possible documentary and informational applications. This research investigates how news media professionals assess the use of AI-generated images for documenting events and the ethical and procedural challenges they pose. Through a qualitative study involving 15 semi-structured interviews with photo-editors, photojournalists and documentary photographers in Italy, the study examines their perspectives on AI-generated images in news media contexts. Findings suggest that AI-generated images could be perceived not as a radical disruption but rather as a continuation of pre-existing illustrative trends. While AI-generated images may find a place in journalism, they should not be considered an extension of traditional photography but rather a distinct visual medium requiring its own ethical framework and editorial verification processes.
Online Media Archeology as AI Critique: Wikipedia’s Links and Edits as Spatial and Temporal Fields
There have been many impulses to make sense of artificial intelligence, or what AI ‘is.’ We propose that media archeology on Wikipedia can aid in the sensemaking of AI. Wikipedia’s technicity - its linked article ecology together with its edit histories - makes it suitable to perform a media archeology, which already favors spaciousness and complexities. The starting point for the analysis is the ‘Artificial intelligence’ article on Wikipedia. We then operationalize the ‘See also’ section into a link ecology with categorizations and prominence over time, thus allowing us to map and explore the spatial field within which the artificial intelligence article has resided across its temporal dimension. This means approaching Wikipedia as a source of data about not only content but also the connections and ruptures. By ‘ruptures’ we mean changes by deletion or substitution in article associations. Ultimately, taking inspiration from media archeology’s presumption to unearth understandings of media technologies through their multiple dimensions and ruptures, we present our findings in terms of the ‘ideation company’ that AI keeps on Wikipedia. First, we notice the instability of the AI industry. Second, we observe a decline in the prominence of science fiction-related articles over time. The rise of articles under the umbrella of human enhancements can be seen in the most recent periods, as well as the rising prominence of articles related to threat recognition and accountability of AI. In our investigation, Wikipedia emerges as a (substantive) AI sense-making space as well as a media archeology instrument.
The play-along method: An ethnographic approach to analyze video game culture
Online gaming platforms constitute unique field sites for researching different themes related to digital youth culture such as play, learning, socialization, and consumption. However, they pose methodological challenges for sociocultural digital media research. This paper introduces the $2 method, inspired by the 'media go-along', “scroll back” and 'app walkthrough' techniques, which involves the informant logging onto and playing a game in the presence of the researcher while they engage in a discussion about aspects of the game that unfold on the screen. By observing and participating in gameplay, researchers gain insights into player agency, game mechanics, and consumption practices within virtual worlds. Carried out across three research projects involving 60 young informants aged 10-24, the method offers several advantages: immersion in the gaming context, and a flexible, informal interview setting. It provides a unique opportunity to observe real-time interactions, digital purchases, relevance of devices, affordances and design, and relational dynamics. However, the method also presents challenges, such as gameplay interference, parental restrictions, and technical issues. Ethical considerations include maintaining the privacy of third parties and managing the blurred boundaries between the informant's private and research contexts. Despite these challenges, the play-along method represents a significant methodological advancement for studying virtual worlds. It underscores the need for child-centered approaches that acknowledge the relationalities between players and digital infrastructures, and map unexplored digital terrain in video games. The method's participatory nature positions informants as experts in their own lives, providing rich, authentic insights into the commercial and social dimensions of online gaming.
#FREE LUIGI BETWEEN PLAYFUL RESISTANCE AND RUPTURE
On December 4th, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare was killed in New York City. The shooting quickly galvanized public critiques of the American healthcare system. Our proposal focuses upon user-generated content featuring Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect, arrested days later. Indeed, the lionization of Mangione across popular social media platforms signalled social rupture of internet practices, of generational allegiances, and of class consciousness. We address the multiple meanings attributed to Mangione’s act and explore the extent to which the case marks complex cultural and political realignments. We use mixed methods to analyze all available posts and comments linked to the Mangione case that emerged on TikTok immediately following the shooting. With attention to platform affordances and online subcultural practices, we explore content that is political, transgressive and ambiguous at once. We draw upon a variety of sources to theorize and update our understanding of the tactics of resistance available to the dispossessed, drawing on cultural historian James Scott’s notion of “weapons of the weak” and exploring it in relation to recent studies of political communication on TikTok. As a final line of questioning regarding social rupture, we examine the often-contradictory objectives of users and the social media monopolies that manage platforms.
Becoming Intimate with Algorithms: Users’ Encounters, Imaginaries, and Affective Bonds with TikTok
In an increasingly algorithm-driven digital landscape, personalization systems are often praised as almost magical entities capable of "knowing us better than we know ourselves". This study takes TikTok as a privileged object of investigation to explore how users engage with these algorithms that seek to "know" them. Adopting a qualitative, empirical approach, we conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with TikTok users in Brazil to explore their everyday experiences, perceptions, and imaginations around algorithmic recommendations. We argue that TikTok’s algorithm-centered infrastructure shapes a unique user experience, where navigating the platform is essentially about engaging in a relationship with the algorithm itself. Our participants not only demonstrated a high algorithmic awareness but developed informal theories and strategies to “train” their systems in an effort to refine recommendation accuracy. As these users experienced increasingly personalized content — deeply attuned to their emotions and personal experiences — some expressed a sense of algorithmic intimacy. Through their clicks, likes, searches, and interactions, they felt as if “sharing a secret with the algorithm”, revealing personal, sensitive, and sometimes even embarrassing preferences. In this preliminary analysis, we discuss how TikTok’s “For You” model fosters a new form of intimacy mediated by algorithms, data collection, and commercial interests. While the transformation of intimacy is not a new topic in internet studies, this paper shifts the focus from self-exposure on social media to the cultivation of an intimate relationship between users and algorithms, offering new insights into the affective and subjective dimensions of algorithmic personalization.
AI ABOLITION AS DECOLONIAL RUPTURE IN AI EMPIRE: RADICAL CYBERPRACTICES FROM BELOW
Existing research has long established that AI is not just a collection of technical tools but an expansive system of governance: what scholars refer to as AI empire - deeply embedded in racial capitalism, carceral logics, colonial control, and heteropatriarchy (Crawford, 2021; Tacheva & Ramasubramanian, 2023). However, much of the critical scholarship in AI studies tends to focus on AI’s most visible harms, such as mass surveillance, biased decision-making, and AI’s role in warfare. This paper argues that AI empire’s violence is far more insidious and pervasive, and extends beyond these explicit harms to algorithmic systems that actively shape docile populations and reinforce existing hierarchies of power (Benjamin, 2019). In response, this work positions AI abolition as a necessary and decisive rupture that rejects predominantly reformist interventions, which merely tweak AI’s carceral mechanisms without challenging the underlying structures of domination. Drawing from the decolonial queer feminist scholarship of early cybercultural critics like Chela Sandoval, this paper examines historical counter-technological practices, including Indigenous computing, socialist cybernetics, and feminist teleconferencing, as alternative models for technological futures that reject extractive AI governance. By reclaiming these insurgent histories, this work reframes AI abolition as an ongoing practice of refusal and reimagination and argues that meaningful technological transformation must go beyond surface-level mitigation efforts to fundamentally disrupt the oppressive logics embedded in hegemonic AI cultures.
MEDITATION, MEDIATED: INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGICAL AFFORDANCES AND THE UTAUT MODEL IN STUDYING DIGITAL MENTAL HEALTH APPLICATIONS
In recent years, the digital delivery of mindfulness-based interventions for anxiety and stress relief has gained popularity among the general population. However, there is a lack of research on how users navigate those specially designed mobile applications(apps) and how their mental health journeys may be shaped by the design processes that constitute their interactions with the app. Given the reach and scale of Headspace app's user base, there is an opportunity to study the design and user experience. Integrating the concept of technological affordances and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT-2), this study seeks to answer the following research question: How do the characteristics of the Headspace mobile app enable or constrain different aspects of the user’s mental health journey? The findings reveal that Headspace offers affordances such as accessibility, progress tracking, and privacy, which influence user engagement and experience. The affordances notably intersect with UTAUT-2, thereby providing a robust design to understand the sociotechnical dynamics of using digital mental health tools. Overall, this study provides insight into user experience and interpretation of affordances, demonstrating the relationship between design elements and individual perceptions that can iteratively inform digital experience.
In Search of a TikTok Baseline - An empirical study of shared cultural experiences on a highly personalised digital platform
This study investigates whether a shared cultural experience—what we term the "TikTok Baseline"—exists among Australian TikTok users. While existing research suggests social media platforms’ recommendation systems contribute to homogenizing users' cultural experiences, TikTok's highly personalized, responsive algorithmic system remains understudied. To map the "TikTok Baseline", we employed a methodological approach that minimized personal data exposure and interaction with content. Data collection occurred four times daily over a three-month period (May-July 2024) from multiple Australian locations, resulting in metadata from 5,100 unique videos from TikTok’s generic For You Page (FYP). We developed and validated an AI-driven video analysis tool using Google Gemini's 2.0 Flash multimodal model to enhance traditional metadata analysis. This paper reports on the preliminary phase of a comprehensive study of Australian experiences of algorithmic culture on TikTok. At the heart of the project is a comprehensive data donation-based study of how Australian content creators and users experience TikTok’s recommender system. This study makes three key contributions. First, we establish whether the concept of a reasonably stable TikTok Baseline manifests in real-world data, secondly, we examine the fundamental characteristics of such a baseline, and thirdly we suggest a rigorous computational methodology for examining TikTok baseline in the hope that our approach can be replicated in other territories and contexts. By addressing challenges in algorithmic observability and AI-driven content analysis, our findings offer critical implications for platform governance and regulatory efforts. This research advances our understanding of algorithmic culture, demonstrating how TikTok's recommender system both personalizes and standardizes user experiences.
Hackers and Hatewatchers: Tracing the origin stories of doxing
Doxing—the unauthorized disclosure of private or personally identifying information online—has become one of the most contentious practices in contemporary digital culture. While often framed as a form of online harassment, doxing is also used as a tactic of accountability by antifascist groups and other online communities seeking to expose oppressive actors. This paper traces the early history of doxing from 1987 to 1999, exploring how the practice emerged across different online communities, including hacker forums, antifascist networks, and online vigilante groups. Drawing on archival materials, this study argues that doxing’s origins lie both in practices of deviance and subversion and in grassroots efforts to develop community safety. By situating doxing within alternative histories of the internet, this paper demonstrates how the weaponization of personal information has been shaped by both technological infrastructures and the social norms and politics of online subcultures. This intervention challenges dominant narratives that portray doxing solely as an act of malice, instead positioning it as one that is far more contested, revealing the internet’s dual capacity to enable both harm and community. Further, excavating the history of doxing offers an opportunity to analyze how the design, governance, and politics of the internet have shaped —and been shaped by— contentious and stigmatized practices.Together, this research highlights the ruptures between anonymity and accountability, spectacle and surveillance, information access and closure, and privacy and publicity that continue to shape the politics of online safety today.
Self-monetization as a double bind: the governance of affective labor of brazilian streamers
Live streaming is an activity performed by users on media platforms, characterized by the real-time broadcasting of content with simultaneous audience interaction. Twitch (owned by Amazon), the pioneer and largest live streaming platform, markets itself as a space that fosters “belonging by enabling streamers to build community” (Twitch, 2025). While framed as a leisure activity that encourages socialization, live streaming demands significant labor: streamers must plan and organize their work, maintaining constant dedication, investing their subjectivity as well as their capitals. As a result, categories such as socialization and monetization, pleasure and labor, user and worker blur and intertwine. Considering these contradictions, this research aimed to examine how the governance of live streaming platforms shapes the subjective experiences and sociability of Brazilian streamers, particularly in relation to the monetization of leisure and social bonds. Drawing on a digital ethnography on a live streaming platform and labor life stories interviews with brazilian streamers, we argue that Twitch mobilizes a double bind of self-monetization: it promises personal and financial fulfillment while instrumentalizing meaning, affects, and self-commodification under the guise of community-driven participation.
RECLAIMING AUTHENTICITY WITHIN THE ATTENTION ECONOMY
The interplay between authenticity and attention is central to social media sociality, yet navigating this tension is complex. Previous research has explored how influencers and content creators perform authenticity, but our study focuses on everyday users, analyzing their experiences and strategies through a meta-analysis of ethnographic and interview data spanning 13 years. Our findings highlight three key dynamics. First, users experience an inherent tension between authenticity and attention, shaped by platform norms and community expectations. Even those who do not seek to capitalize on their popularity feel pressured to leverage the attention they generate, and negative perceptions of 'attention-seeking' seem to be broadly internalized. Second, users reaffirm authenticity through distinct registers of love, lifestyle, and greater good, strategically framing their socially mediated self-presentation to maintain a sense of authenticity while engaging with social media’s attention structures. Lastly, perceptions of platform affordances, in particular in terms of how attention is meant to circulate on platforms, shape how users navigate the tensions between attention and authenticity. Rather than a fixed ideal or a purely instrumental form of performance, social media authenticity emerges from this analysis as a flexible construct. This argument contributes to a nuanced understanding of how everyday users—not just influencers—navigate the complexities of digital self-presentation in an era where attention and authenticity remain in constant negotiation.
How Creative is AI writing? Generative and Collaborative AI in Japanese Fiction
This study examines the quality of generative and collaborative AI for fictional prose in Japanese. We rolled out an experiment followed by focus groups to elicit responses to 25 texts with the second half randomly presenting the original text, zero-shot-AI-generated text, AI-generated with prompt specification, and human-AI collaboration using multiple-shot and prompt specification. We found that human-AI collaboration had the highest perceived quality, followed by the original text, AI-generated with prompt specification, and finally zero-shot AI-generated content. While participants mentioned the relative absence of originality in human-AI-collaboration, this content was deemed more human-like than the original text due to the polished editing and selection resulting from inputting drafts, adding or replacing nouns, and rearranging sentences and dialogues. The results presented in this study offer a positive outlook on the use of Generative AI for creative writing, but they also highlight the limitations of these tools for developing highly original literary work.
Generative AI In Marketing: Productivity Gains and Work Automation
This study explores the use of ChatGPT for social media marketing strategies and its potential impact on employment. We take stock of the literature on productivity gain and the automation of work to unpack the role of AI in devising social media marketing strategies. To this end, we carried out in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 social media professionals who informed a follow-up experiment using ChatGPT to generate social media marketing strategies for two companies. The results support the hypothesis of Generative AI leading to increased productivity in the creation of social media marketing, as the experiments yielded high-quality marketing strategies tailored to the specific needs of a company with consistent brand identity. The results, however, also highlight the limitations in using AI for marketing campaigns, as these tools cannot fully replicate the creativity and intuition of human professionals. We conclude with an assessment of potential risks associated with data protection and ethical considerations when using AI tools.
NETWORKING AND MONETIZATION STRATEGIES OF SPANISH-SPEAKING FINFLUENCERS: A CO-LINK ANALYSIS OF YOUTUBE DESCRIPTIONS
This study examines the networking and monetization strategies employed by Spanish-speaking financial influencers (finfluencers) on YouTube. Given the precarious labor market conditions facing young people, finfluencers promise easy and fast ways to “get rich”. These alternative pathways to financial success include cryptocurrencies, trading, online gambling, and internet-based business, like microtasking, dropshipping or online mentoring. Through a co-link analysis of video descriptions obtained through YouTube API v3 (n=68,455), this research identifies key monetization methods, including course sales, affiliate marketing, crowdfunding, and direct product sales. Additionally, BERTopic modeling reveal dominant thematic trends within finfluencer content. Preliminary findings indicate a strong commercial orientation, with content often framed as “financial education” that includes links to affiliate marketing or course sales, a deliberate strategy to diversity their online presence in other platforms like TikTok, Instagram or Spotify, and topics related to trading, gaining money from home, Paypal and cryptocurrencies. This study contributes to the underlying business models of finfluencers in order to assess their potential impact on audiences and their role in shaping consumer behavior.
“Sometimes Banning Abortion Doesn't Mean Fewer Abortions or Fewer Babies Die - It Just Means More Women Die”: A Thematic Analysis of Roe v. Wade Partisan Cable News Coverage
This study examines the narratives constructed by partisan cable news outlets—CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News—in their coverage of the 2022 repeal of Roe v. Wade. Using a thematic analysis, the study identifies and analyzes recurring themes, storytelling elements, and moral evaluations that shaped these outlets’ portrayals of identity groups such as women, children, Republicans, and Democrats. The analysis explores how narratives were strategically deployed to align with each outlet’s ideological stance, offering insight into how media frames contentious social issues to reinforce partisan perspectives. The findings reveal distinct narrative patterns across outlets. CNN and MSNBC emphasized themes of bodily autonomy and healthcare, portraying women as central victims of restrictive abortion policies. These outlets framed abortion as a critical aspect of women’s rights, often highlighting the societal harms caused by the repeal. Fox News, in contrast, emphasized moral evaluations and traditional values, portraying Republicans as protectors of unborn children and casting Democrats as moral adversaries. This outlet frequently used narratives centering on the sanctity of life, aligning with a broader conservative agenda. Through its focus on storytelling elements such as characterization, plot development, and thematic cues, the study demonstrates how partisan media constructs narratives to engage audiences and influence public discourse. These findings contribute to the sociological understanding of how media narratives shape collective identities, reinforce ideological divides, and frame debates on contentious societal issues. This research underscores the critical role of storytelling in contemporary media ecosystems and highlights the need for further exploration of its sociopolitical implications.
DETECTING OPINION LEADERS IN A TELEGRAM NETWORK OF FORWARDED MESSAGES
This study introduces a framework to identify opinion leaders on Telegram, adapting a methodology developed for Twitter. The work is motivated by the need to examine influence dynamics on hybrid platforms like Telegram, where platform affordances can potentially facilitate the spread of disinformation and polarizing discourse. Specifically, the traceability of forwarded messages provides analytical possibilities for understanding these complex communication networks. The analysis involves a case study conducted with data extracted from public groups supporting Jair Bolsonaro's presidential re-election campaign. Using network analysis techniques, the method maps key roles including influencers, conversation starters, active engagers, and network creators. Results highlight these actors' roles in shaping information circulation within Telegram's public groups and channels. The discussion emphasizes the framework's systematic approach to analyzing opinion leadership. This research contributes to understanding how hybrid social platforms facilitate influence and information dissemination, offering practical tools for researchers studying emerging social media ecosystems.
TELEGRAM AS A MULTIFACETED PLATFORM FOR ANTI-MAINSTREAM POLITICAL PASSION: THE FINNISH FRINGE GROUPS UNDER THE SCOPE
This study examines the ecosystem of anti-mainstream groups on Telegram, with a particular focus on Finnish actors within the right-wing and anti-systemic frameworks. Drawing on Mouffe’s (2005a) concept of political passion, we investigated how anti-mainstream attitudes manifest on this fringe platform, which facilitates open, uncensored, and anonymous political discourse, involving radicalised and extremist actors. Using Finnish Telegram groups as a case study, we conducted a network analysis to map the landscape, identifying four distinct clusters of actors and analysing the similarities and differences in their information-sharing practices. We then applied thematic analysis to uncover the key characteristics of these clusters, highlighting how information can flow from fringe actors to influence more prominent accounts. Unlike other studies on Telegram, our analysis did not find significant far-right activity. However, it revealed how marginalised voices can swiftly evolve from general critiques to extreme viewpoints, often fuelled by conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda. We demonstrated how anti-mainstream voices within the fringe platform can merge with radicalised content, deliberate disinformation, conspiratorial messages, and harmful information operations. Specifically, we highlight how Mouffe’s (2005) initial concept of political passion can operate in a digital environment in which information flows between suppliers and distributors. The more passionately a supplier engages—both in volume and tone of their posts—the more attention they attract across all the clusters. In this way, passion functions as a form of currency within the attention economy (c.f., Heitmayer, 2025), ensuring that suppliers garner enough attention to effectively convey their message.
TECHNO-PUBLIC RHETORIC, SPECULATIVE VALUE, AND THE GROWTH OF ALT-TECH DIGITAL MEDIA COMPANIES
Despite the growth of reactionary networks, the "alt-tech" platforms built to host their content have failed to make a profit. Nevertheless, investors continue purchasing shares in alt-tech firms, enabling them to grow. This paper contends that, in order to understand the economic and ideological trends driving the growth of alt-tech platforms, Internet studies must rupture from traditional understandings of value and apprehend speculative value, or the social currency assigned to a platform's products, assets, and mission as they are assumed to appreciate over time. Through rhetorical criticism of financial, corporate, and investor-relations communications of five alt-tech firms (Gab, Rumble, Telegram, Trump Media & Technology Group, and X), this paper identifies a rhetoric of techno-publicity through which reactionary digital platforms solicit investiture. Techno-publicity posits privately-owned platforms as ideal mediators for democratic discourse, securing their speculative value. I identify three discursive pillars present in alt-tech financial statements: a) transgressive individualism, which states that digital infrastructure is best stewarded by entrepreneurs; b) digital producerism, which holds that technical expertise is the only requisite skill for mediating healthy publics; and c) network fetishism, which characterizes platformed user networks as decentralized and thus the surest mediator of public discourse. These discourses project the alt-tech firm into the future as an ideal steward of digital democracy by imbuing investor confidence in the figure of the CEO and the values of cyber-libertarianism. I conclude by situating techno-public rhetoric within the business model of all social media platforms, alt-tech or otherwise, elucidating the ongoing backslide in platform governance.
META’S 3PFC SPEECH GOVERNANCE: AN INQUIRY INTO THE FACT-CHECKING CONTENT MODERATION INFRASTRUCTURE
Social media play a pivotal role in managing the environments where political debate and public deliberation occur, and therefore must contend with the targets set by official bodies and policymakers to ward off harmful speech and mis/disinformation in their platforms. However, little is known about the criteria applied by social platforms’ content moderation infrastructure to address problematic information. This paper examines the speech governance parameters applied by Meta’s 3PFC to moderate problematic information. Leveraging digital methods and approaches developed in journalism studies, it implements a series of manual and computational techniques to curate a comprehensive dataset combining fact-checking content commissioned by Meta’s 3PFC program—available through the Facebook URLs Dataset (Meta, n.d.)—and fact-checks produced independently from Meta’s program. We probe this database to identify the criteria applied by Meta’s speech governance through the 3PFC program across five countries: Argentina, Philippines, Portugal, United Kingdom, and South Africa, with content spanning three languages (English, Spanish, and Portuguese). Considering the looming end of Meta’s 3PFC system worldwide and the recently declared laissez-faire commitments of US-based tech companies to public speech (Silverman, 2025), this paper addresses the normative standards consolidated by Meta’s content moderation infrastructure through outsourced fact-checking work. The findings contribute to developing platform governance policies in a context where countries like Australia, Brazil, India, and the European Union are designing or implementing regulatory frameworks to hold social platforms accountable (Anastácio, 2024; Liu, 2024; Ó Fathaigh et al., 2021).
MEMEFICATION OF MOTHERHOOD ON TIKTOK: #TYPESOFMOMS DECONSTRUCTION OF PARENTING IDEALISATION
Social media has reshaped digital portrayals of motherhood, often reinforcing idealised and aspirational maternal archetypes. While early platforms promoted curated self-representations, TikTok’s memefication culture disrupts these conventions through participatory humour and satire. This study examines how #TypesOfMoms deconstructs parenting idealisation by employing meme formats that enable users to reframe motherhood beyond perfectionist narratives. Through qualitative content analysis, the research identifies key strategies shaping maternal portrayals, including recurring meme templates, structured content formats, and emerging discursive narratives. Challenges, POVs, skits, remixes, and lip-syncs allow creators to perform maternal identities dynamically, transforming traditional stereotypes into fluid, interactive, and often self-deprecating representations. Memefied content highlights the contrast between idealised and realistic motherhood, reframing it as a collective, imperfect, and socially negotiated experience. By embedding maternal narratives within platform-native aesthetics, TikTok fosters a shift from self-branding towards communal meaning-making, using irony and satire to challenge rigid maternal expectations.
How beliefs, knowledge and intuition affect the way we search? Examining how users formulate search queries about climate change
Search engines are one of the most common ways for users to discover news and political information. As a result, the content and sources prioritized by these platforms are of paramount importance. Previous research has shown that search engines can provide biased outputs by, for example, discriminating against certain social groups or favoring certain viewpoints. However, there has been a gap in understanding how users search for information using these systems and, in particular, how they formulate their search queries. Yet the choice of query is crucial, as it largely determines the information users are exposed to, and thus may lead to particular biases. To address this gap, we conducted a representative survey of Swiss citizens (N = 1,070) in which we investigate how voters search for information about an environmental popular initiative that was voted on in Switzerland in February 2025. In particular, we test the assumption that selective exposure (or the tendency to prefer information that confirms one's own beliefs) is more pronounced when users are presented with a limited number of options (e.g., search engine autocomplete suggestions) than when they formulate them independently. We also examine how pre-existing knowledge about the topic, beliefs about climate change, political attitudes, and cognitive factors affect query formulation. This study contributes to existing research by demonstrating how individual characteristics of users can influence information seeking behavior and how selective exposure can manifest itself under different search conditions.
BLACK (BRITISH) IDENTITY AND ARCHIVAL RITUALS
On April 9th, 2021, just before noon, multiple major news outlets reported the death of Prince Philip, husband to the British monarch Queen Elizabeth II, aged 99. What followed was a subversion of imperial hierarchy – for a time – as Black Briton's took to Twitter to celebrate the death of a living symbol of oppression. Within 24 hours much of the evidence of this ritual of disrespect was gone: temporarily changed profile pictures had reverted to normal, tweets had been deleted, and the event firmly ensconced in Black British Twitter history. In this paper I frame the ritual archive as Black insurgent practice and an infrastructure of communal memory. Through remixing cultural touchpoints and significant events (Massanari, 2015; Sobande, 2019), Black Britons demarcate ourselves as a public that is adaptively appositional: at once Black, in the ontological sense of belonging to a global community of shared diasporic experience, and British, i.e. physically, temporally, and culturally located within a specific imperial history. Black archival rituals like this run counter to institutional archives (Florini, 2014), rupturing established precedents and prevailing national discourses of identity. In this moment, where control of digital archives is so contingent on institutional power, this kind of counter-institutional archival practice is even more critical, a reminder that collective memory is not contingent on insecure platforms that we contribute to but do not own (Walcott, 2024), but is in fact held in the memory, rituals, and embodied practices of the community’s constituents.
FANSUBBING AS FEMINIST DISRUPTION IN CHINA
This paper examines how young feminists dispersed across China engage in fansubbing, or translating and subtitling digital content, as a mode of feminist praxis. Feminist fansubbing shares similarities with other fansubbing practices in that its content can be entertaining and the act of fansubbing can create community among its practitioners. However, it also differs in that the motivation does not necessarily derive from actual fandom. Based on textual analysis and interviews, I show how it is driven by feelings and emotions and an ethical commitment to educate, encourage, and inspire others to become feminists. For this reason, I call it “femsubbing. Through drawing on Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) notion of ordinary affects and Michael Lambek’s (2010, 2015) ordinary ethics, I center how the women’s embodied passions and ethical judgments informed their fansubbing. They also sought to harness the power of networked communication and algorithmic recommendation systems to spread explicitly feminist messages as an ordinary ethical act. Strategies they used included changing the original video title, adding content in discussion and comments sections, and drawing connections between western, Korean, and Chinese feminism. However, they also faced challenges, including censorship, and challenges from within. Nonetheless, in an authoritarian context, femsubbing should be understood as a small but important means of disrupting often state-sanctioned sexism and misogyny.
Technical vs. Self-perceived: Examining Crowdsourcing Workers' Algorithmic Knowledge on Amazon Mechanical Turk
With algorithms permeating into our everyday practices, people’s knowledge of algorithms has attracted growing attention from different fields. In this study, we bring algorithmic knowledge to the field of crowdsourcing work, where people intensively interact with algorithmic mechanisms embedded in crowdsourcing platforms to deal with precarious working conditions and make a living. The purpose of this work-in-progress study is to highlight two types of algorithmic knowledge: personal understanding of algorithmic operations (i.e., $2 ) and objectively verifiable knowledge of the technical facts about algorithms (i.e., $2 ) in the context MTurk, a crowdsourcing platform. Starting from a quantitative online survey (N=168), this study aims to build up a $2 by adopting a mixed method approach to further explicate how the two types of algorithmic knowledge intervene in people’s perception of precarity and unpack the process in which algorithmic knowledge is formed and developed, ultimately mending the ‘rupture’ in the existing literature on the study of algorithm and algorithmic knowledge.
Ambiguitance: How Douyin's Inconsistent Affordances Shape Streamer-Audience Relationships in Chinese Showroom Live Streaming
This study examines how Douyin's platform affordances enable regulatory-risky content and shape relationships between streamers and audiences in Chinese showroom live streaming—a controversial yet profitable genre characterized by intimate performances and virtual gifting. While existing research focuses on performers' labor and precarity, limited attention has been paid to how platforms enable content that operates at the edge of regulatory boundaries. Through a methodological triangulation combining walkthrough analysis, online observation, and in-depth interviews with female streamers, we introduce the concept of "ambiguitance": a constellation of contradictory affordances engineered across a platform's policy, algorithmic, and interface layers. Our findings reveal that while Douyin's policies explicitly restrict sexually suggestive content and discourage tipping, its traffic-driven algorithms implicitly incentivize edge-ball content, and its interface prioritizes monetization features over risk warnings. This ambiguitance creates a space where users navigate between explicit restrictions and implicit incentives, enabling the production and consumption of controversial content. Furthermore, it fosters hierarchical, competitive relationships characterized by uneven risk distribution, where streamers can leverage ambiguity for monetary gain but face disproportionate consequences when audiences weaponize platform policies through reporting. Streamers experience platform affordances as simultaneously empowering and restrictive. This research contributes a novel analytical framework for understanding how platforms strategically engineer governance gaps that serve their interests while displacing responsibilities onto users, offering implications for platform studies and digital labor research.
“Happy Life”: Digital Ageism and Beauty Filter Use Among Older Content Creators on Douyin
The proliferation of beauty filters on digital platforms has transformed self-presentation practices, yet their prevalence and impact on older users remains underexplored. This study investigates why older content creators on Douyin engage with beauty filters, interrogating the emotional, social, and structural dynamics of digital ageism. Through in-depth interviews with twelve creators and participant observation of two individuals, the research reveals how older adults use filters to navigate algorithmic constraints, societal stigma, and self-perception. This research brings together work on visibility with aging and digital cultures to understand the role of filters in older content creator’s practices. Findings demonstrate that filters serve as tools for social recognition as well as emotional well-being and resistance against ageist invisibility, simultaneously reinforce youth-centric norms. By situating filter use within frameworks of digital ageism, this study highlights the paradox of digital visibility: older content creators balance authenticity with enhancement to negotiate their place in a youth-dominated ecosystem. The results advocate for inclusive design and algorithmic accountability to challenge systemic and aesthetic ageism in digital cultures.
CULTURE-CENTRED DIGITAL DESIGN: FOREGROUNDING CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE’S PERSPECTIVES
This pilot study employed a decolonised, youth-centred methodology to challenge dominant discourses and hierarchies in knowledge production. The Distributed Data Generation (DDG) approach facilitated participatory workshops across Australia, India, and Indonesia, involving collaboration with local research centres and a youth organisation. This cross-cultural partnership aimed to unsettle Western assumptions about research methodologies and knowledge representation. DDG prioritises marginalised perspectives and has been used to collaborate with global South organisations for rights-based youth research. It enables rich data collection through participatory, child-centred workshops conducted simultaneously in multiple countries. This approach supports the decolonisation of youth knowledge by co-producing it with children and young people, addressing child-adult power imbalances. The research engaged 128 participants aged 9 to 18 from diverse backgrounds, including urban and rural areas, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, migrants, and disadvantaged youth. Each participant attended a workshop to explore cultural expressions, ethics, responsibilities, and aspirations for culture-centred digital design. Findings reveal that digital technology influences and shapes the cultural practices of young people in Australia, India, and Indonesia. Indian participants view culture through nationalism and ideology, while Australian children associate culture with material practices and the environment. Digital technologies were found to strengthen cultural identity and cross-cultural understanding, though concerns about minority culture representation were expressed. Indian and Indonesian youth use digital platforms to learn about their own and other cultures, more so than Australian participants. Concerns about cultural exclusion, inappropriate content, and digital disharmony were highlighted, emphasising the need for inclusive digital design that reflects the lived experiences of diverse youth.
Advertising in the Age of Disinformation: Influencers and Natural Contraception
This paper discusses health disinformation, focusing on the example of disinformation about contraception on social media, to understand the context within which alternative contraceptives like $2 are advertised. $2 is a digital contraceptive app that uses body temperature data to predict and confirm ovulation in order to confirm fertility status. It has grown in popularity on social media alongside the increase in contraceptive disinformation. The paper presents a discussion of the context of disinformation along with a close reading of the visual and textual elements of the $2 influencer advertisements, drawing on work on influencers, platform economies and authenticity to show how lived experiences are co-opted for commercial purposes to promote products like $2 . I find that the context of contraceptive disinformation feeds into wider wellness and right-wing ‘tradwife’ trends, which are evoked by the influencer advertisements studied. As such, I contend that while $2 influencer advertisements do not directly contain disinformation, the techniques employed evoke similar messages as the trends that do contain disinformation. In so doing, the advertisements co-opt influencers’ lived experiences to present $2 as a superior alternative to hormonal contraception. Thus, $2 effectively promotes its product while avoiding the criticism levelled at contraceptive disinformation.
(POST-)DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF RUPTURE: THE CZECH MEDIA LANDSCAPE AND ITS THREATS
This study is grounded in a discursive-material framework, which enables us to pay attention to the material as well as the discursive dimensions of the current rupture in democracy and media. Empirically it focuses on threats to the media landscape from the perspectives of regulatory institutions, news media organizations, and citizens. To this end, twelve interviews with editors-in-chief and journalists from leading news media outlets (print, TV, radio, online, and community media) and four interviews with representatives of major national media authorities were conducted in the spring and summer of 2024. Additionally, four focus group discussions with citizens (n=38) from heterogeneous socio-demographic backgrounds were carried out. We identify five threats to news media and their possible implications for democracy from the perspective of citizens. These threats all have their discursive and material components. Conversely, journalists identify additional threats, which they describe as manifestations of an ongoing crisis: the business-model fragility, media ownership concentration in the hands of a small group of investors, and populist attacks on public-service media. Media authorities also point to the material resources of the media landscape, with a discussion about the role of technology and the organizational infrastructures that support them. Building on our findings, we argue that the material and discursive implications of datafication – exemplified by the biggest Czech platform Seznam.cz and AI-driven workflows, not only intensify these two processes but have become crucial for understanding the rupture between media and democracy.
The materiality of trust: Beauty consumption of young Chinese women through e-commerce live-streaming
Growing up with China’s rapid economic expansion and globalization, young Chinese women (aged under 35) living in urban cities found them facing an increasingly consumerist environment, with advanced media-commerce system that promotes certain ideas of womanhood and beauty ideals to incite beauty consumption. This study critically examines how young urban Chinese women negotiate consumerist beauty knowledge with needs of self-care and class-specific consumption. In this process, digital media plays a central in the circulation of beauty care information and gradually converge with retailing platforms. With multimodal analysis and in-depth interview, this study focuses on the followers of Li Jiaqi, China’s most influential beauty e-commerce streamer, to explores the gendered, consumerist Chinese beauty culture, which deeply integrates with media-commerce platforms. Findings from this study suggest that the social construction of "beauty care" is an important device for young women to imagine and practice maturity, personal safety, and class status, displaying a dialectic relationship between body anxiety and feminist awareness.
The Many-faced Fandom: _Cesuo_'s Collective Persona on Weibo
In the current era of greatly increased availability of media technology platforms, fans with their domains continue to expand, becoming a rapidly growing concept of our time (Scott, 2019; Stanfill, 2019). The study examines $2 [厕所, toilet], a type of social bot account on Weibo, differs from algorithm-driven bots as it’s manually managed by real users who set up site conventions, review and post users’ submissions, and promote opinion coordination. As an emerging mode of information exchange and group interaction in Chinese Internet culture, $2 is especially active in fandom. It serves as both an organizational structure and an information dissemination tool, offering insights into how individual fans regulate collective personas and providing a new organizational model for fan communities in the platform media era. $2 can be seen as a type of fan-create Nonhuman Online Persona (NHOP), a coherent digital assemblage with no direct connection to individual human identities. The research investigates how Cesuo operates, its role in fan community building, and the power dynamics it establishes. By analyzing two representative $2 accounts and conducting semi-structured interviews, the study identifies three key characteristics of $2 : its anonymity and collective identity performance, its usage of fan slang as a form of community regulation, and its paratextual production and emotional bonding. Ultimately, the study argues that $2 enables alternative forms of digital fandom, emphasizing emotional connection and shared agency over individualized fan identity.
DeepSeek AI Meets Divination: Algorithmic Syncretism, Data Consecration, and Accuracy Politics
Following DeepSeek AI’s release in early 2024, AI-powered fortune-telling rapidly gained popularity on Chinese digital platforms like Rednote, where users shared AI-generated divinations, refined prompts, and debated result accuracy. This phenomenon raises critical questions about how accuracy is understood when AI is repurposed for metaphysical insight rather than rational computation. Unlike conventional AI applications, where accuracy is defined through explainability and predictive efficiency, AI fortune-telling reconfigures accuracy as a subjective, relational, and ineffable construct. This study examines algorithmic syncretism, data consecration, and accuracy politics as three key dimensions that shape user experiences, highlighting how AI is framed as a mystical authority rather than a transparent tool. By centering explainable AI and ineffability as a theoretical framework, this in-progress paper argues that trust in AI divination does not rely on technical transparency but on the interpretative space it creates for users, where meaning emerges through engagement rather than explanation. The rise of AI-powered divination suggests a shift in algorithmic epistemology, where black-boxed AI systems are embraced not in spite of their opacity, but because of it.