Rationale

Like older alternative media, alternative social media (ASM) are social media sites built to challenge centralized media power (Gehl, 2017, p. 343). In the case of social media, “centralized media power” typically means the Meta properties (e.g., Facebook, Instagram), Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, or TikTok. It almost goes without saying that such platforms have gained incredible power over everything from democratic discourse, the political economy of the internet, and mediated subjectivity. They also have been implicated in terrible events, from the spread of disinformation (Van Dijck et al., 2021) to the normalization of ubiquitous surveillance (Zuboff, 2019) to ecological destruction (Hogan, 2015).

Critical scholarship, including work from the AoIR community, has been crucial in identifying the serious shortcomings of corporate social media (e.g. Gehl, 2017; Karppi, 2018; Lingel, 2017). But what do we know of active resistance to corporate social media? What alternatives have been developed, and what communities and practices have surfaced to challenge existing sociotechnical norms and values? Over the past decade, there have been many alternatives built in response to the problems and shortcomings of corporate social media. Some are long gone, such as Lorea, a system built by the indignados in Spain in the early 2010s, or Twister, a peer-to-peer Twitter alternative built by a Brazilian software developer in support of the Movimento Passe Livre protests. Some are gaining traction, such as Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse, which has been built in large part as a reaction to harassment and trolling on Twitter. In addition to left-leaning, progressive platforms, alternatives to centralized, corporate social media also also include right-wing social media as well, including far-right sites such as Gab, Parler and Truth Social. And there are no doubt some being built right now which will emerge before the upcoming AoIR conference.

Alternative social media is thus a complex area of inquiry, making for an exciting, challenging and interdisciplinary field of scholarship. This workshop is meant to accelerate alternative social media studies, not only as a topic but as a network of intellectual production. Scholars working in this area need to develop new theoretical, methodological, and ethical approaches outside of those developed in relation to study of corporate social media. We also need to get scholars in this field together to build and develop a robust, interdisciplinary research network. To these ends, we encourage and welcome research from different areas that address the need for and value of studying platforms, practices and communities that are often on the margins of the internet and internet studies.

Examples of research that would be of relevance are below (though this is by no means exclusive):

Narratives, analytical frameworks and ethnographies from alternative platforms

Comparative work analyzing platforms, whether between mainstream and alternative, or comparing alternative platforms

Dead and dying platforms, including alternatives that are no longer active (e.g., Twister, Lorea)

Analysis of the environmental impact of alternative social media

The relationship between alternative social media and social movements

Political mappings of alternatives, from right to left, or from libertarian to socialized

Content moderation and platform politics of alternative social media platforms

Provocations around regulation, community guidelines and industry norms

Because alternative social media are often developed or deployed outside the metropole, we are particularly interested in scholarship that examines platforms and communities in the Global South.

Participant guidelines

This workshop will adhere to AoIR’s Statement of Principles and Statement of Inclusivity, which is a commitment to academic freedom, equality of opportunity, and human dignity. This means that in this workshop, as in the rest of the AoIR conference, no harassment or discrimination will be permitted, and members must commit to the inclusion and recognition of all members.

Structure

This half-day (three hours including breaks) workshop will be organized into three blocks: introduction and networking; addressing the state of ASM as a field; and building an agenda for future scholarship.

References

Gehl, R. W. (2017). Alternative social media: From critique to code.In J. Burgess, A. E

Marwick, and T Poell (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Media, pp. 330–52.

Hogan, M. (2015). Data flows and water woes: The Utah Data Center. Big Data & Society, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715592429

Karppi, T. (2018). Disconnect: Facebook's affective bonds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Lingel, J. (2020). An Internet for the people: The politics and promise of Craigslist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Van Dijck, J., de Winkel, T., & Schäfer, M. T. (2021). Deplatformization and the governance of the platform ecosystem. New Media & Society, 14614448211045662. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211045662

Zuboff S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism : the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (First). PublicAffairs.

The number of AI projects aiming to serve the common good or a public interest is increasing rapidly. But often the information on these projects, their initiators, funders, methods and objectives is not transparent, hindering the goal of serving the public. Many AI applications touch upon sensitive areas with public wellbeing at stake, such as public health, mobility, and justice systems. In this interdisciplinary workshop we will connect public interest theory to the debate about AI projects and foster exchange amongst existing projects that use AI to serve the public interest to explore common challenges, methods, and standards.

Aim and Scope:

This workshop introduces the concept of public interest AI and aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in this field. We wish to host a discussion on the criteria, necessary processes and societal conditions for AI systems to serve the public interest. We invite submissions on case studies as well as broader research on this topic, including issues around data collection, data sharing, who audits public interest driven systems,and other aspects of the AI lifecycle.

The motivation to use AI for a common good is claimed widely. Aside from the popularity of the claim, the qualities that stand for the common good or public interest of AI are rather fuzzy. From a research perspective the lack of empirical data to analyze what kind of criteria and which actors define AI in the public interest is problematic.

We hope this workshop can contribute to an exchange of recent empirical and conceptual research findings on AI systems serving the public interest. We hope to spark an interdisciplinary discussion on public interest AI and the economic, organizational and technological conditions underpinning its success and sustainable impact.

Agenda, 9-12 am

9:00—9:10 Welcome

9:10—9:30 Introduction to public interest AI and overview of the global

landscape (Theresa Züger / Hadi Asghari) / Learnings from building

public interest AI prototypes

9:30—10:20 2 paper presentations of each 20 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A, cases of public interest AI from call for proposals

10:20—10:40 Break

10:40—11:30 2 paper presentations of each 20 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A, cases of public interest AI from call for proposals

11:30—12:00 Concluding discussion on patterns, conditions and learning for public

interest AI projects (moderated by Judith Faßbender)

This workshop addresses AI methods from an interdisciplinary perspective bringing the goal of serving public interest to the forefront. We encourage submissions that report on work in progress, case studies or present a synthesis of empirical insights on AI in the public interest. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

AI for public health and medicine

AI for sustainability

AI for mobility

AI for accessibility

AI for journalism

AI for equality & equitable AI

AI and fairness, transparency, and accountability questions

Submission: Submitted papers must

be between 3 and 10 'standard' pages in length;

contain your research question(s), the methodological approach and possible findings;

be written in English;

contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses; (

be submitted in PDF

submission deadlines: XXX (tbd)

submissions will be reviewed by XXX (tbd)

Workshop Organisers

Dr. Theresa Züger (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society) zueger@hiig.de (primary contact person)

Dr. Hadi Asghari (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society)

hadi.asghari@hiig.de

Expected number of participants: 40

To attract participants we aim to invite many of the proposals which reach us to the general discussion and for networking even if they cannot all present in the workshop.

Recommender systems are among the most ubiquitous automated systems in the digital environment. Using data and algorithms to connect users with content and each other, and found in everything from short-stay accommodation platforms to dating apps, news websites and social media, recommenders are a locus for social anxiety, pointed critique, and policy scrutiny -- as well as considerable ongoing research and innovation.

Through a combination of presentations, discussions, and exercises, this full-day workshop explores the technical, regulatory, economic and sociocultural aspects of recommenders, situating them in their historical and industry contexts, and articulating their future prospects.

The workshop is facilitated by an international group of leading researchers from law, communication and media, anthropology, and computer science. Participants new to this topic will gain a fundamental understanding of recommenders’ scope and significance; colleagues already actively engaged in recommender research will have the opportunity to contribute insights from their own work.

The workshop begins with presentations on the histories of recommenders, their contemporary scale and significance, and the broader regulatory environments that are sharpening critical attention on them.

Participants will engage in a group exercise designed to broaden and deepen their understanding of what recommender systems are, some ways of classifying them, and their commonalities and differences across environments and sectors. A series of lightning talks drawing on relevant qualitative, critical and experimental empirical projects follows.

We then discuss the ways that social values might align or conflict with the logics of recommender systems in common use today. An interactive small-group exercise examines the significance and complexity of ‘diversity’ in recommender system design, with a particular focus on music recommendations.

The final session explores the likely future directions and ongoing developments in recommender system design. We conclude with a speculative design experiment, in which participants develop ‘pretotypes’ of designs for more responsible recommender systems.

The workshop involves interactive small group exercises, and so we will need the room set up banquet style. There is no particular upper limit on participants but given this setup we anticipate that room capacity will constrain numbers.

1. Introduction and Overview: Jean Burgess

2. Histories, contexts and definitions - Julian Thomas, Natali Helberger and Jean Burgess

• Definitions, histories and prehistories
• Societal significance and regulation
• Recognising recommenders (group exercise)

3. Case studies - Sanne Vrigenhoek, Jeffrey Chan and Stanislaw Piasecki

• News and public service media
• Music streaming
• Multi-stakeholder, considerate recommenders for digital services
• Industry ethnographies

4. Values - Nick Seaver, Patrik Wikström, and Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández

• From accuracy to diversity, serendipity and commonality
• Dimensions of diversity in a popular streaming music service (group exercise)

5. Futures - Natali Helberger, Julian Thomas and Jean Burgess

• How could recommenders better explain themselves?
• The potential impacts of generative AI
• Pretotype a responsible recommender (group exercise)

Jean Burgess is Professor of Digital Media at QUT and Associate Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S Centre). She researches and publishes on the histories, cultures and technologies of digital media platforms.

Jeffrey Chan is Associate Professor in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University and Associate Investigator in the ADM+S Centre. His research focuses on the intersection of AI, machine learning, recommender systems, fairness and explainability.

Natali Helberger is Distinguished University Professor for law and digital technology, University of Amsterdam, and the director of the AI, Media & Democracy Lab. Natali’s research explores the role of law and regulation in realising public values and user rights in an algorithmic society.

Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at QUT and Associate Investigator in the ADM+S Centre. Her research focuses on the interplay between user practices and platform design and governance in (re)producing structural inequality.

Stanislaw Piasecki is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Information Law (University of Amsterdam). His research focuses on the use of AI in media and journalism from a legal and policy perspective.

Nick Seaver is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Program in Science, Technology & Society at Tufts University. He is the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation and has published on ethnographic methodologies for studying algorithmic systems.

Julian Thomas is Distinguished Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University and Director of the ADM+S Centre. He has written widely about automation and other topics relating to the pasts and futures of new communications and computing technologies.

Sanne Vrigenhoek is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the AI, Media and Democracy Lab. Her work focuses on translating normative notions of diversity into quantifiable concepts that can be incorporated in news recommender system design.

Patrik Wikström is Professor of Communication and Director of the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT, and Associate Investigator in the ADM+S Centre. His research examines how digital technologies shape music cultures and economies.

Facilitators: Matt Canute (Simon Fraser University), Mel Racho (York/Toronto Met U), Rory Sharp (York/Toronto Met U), Sasha Akhavi (York University), Ganaele Langlois (York University), Anthony Burton (Simon Fraser University), Cairg Fahner (York University). Matt Canute and Ganaele Langlois are co-principal investigators for the Digital Research Methods stream of the Data Fluencies Project (Mellon-funded), hosted at the Digital Democracies Institute (Simon Fraser University). All other facilitators are research assistants for the Digital Fluencies project. For this workshop, all software and data collected will be hosted on the CEDAR super-computer at Simon Fraser University.

Participants: 25 max

Length: 5 hours.

Though incredibly common, the circulation of images on social media platforms is difficult to study. The reasons for this are technical as well as conceptual. There is an urgent need to further explore the visceral and affective impacts of the endless flow of images users see online (Schlag, 2018). The many visual genres online, from photography to meme (McSwiney et al., 2021), from still to gif (Martinez, 2019), add complexity to researchers’ efforts to understanding role played by images in problematic informational environments, such as in mis/disinformation. And the growing capacity to automatically create visual content through AI only exacerbates this theoretical and methodological conundrum (Crawford and Paglen, 2021). However, image collection requires large storage capacity and specific scraping scripts.

This workshop will showcase open access software tools and methods to assist researchers in exploring the networked, cultural, and affective impacts of images on social media platforms (Dvorak and Parikka, 2021). We start from the premise that overall, images online articulate together new technical affordances with social and cultural impacts: they are mobilized to generate economies of attention and distraction, to cultivate, manage and in turn disorganize affects, defining horizons of existence, shaping interpretations of the worlds (Juris, 2008). This workshop will present a series of quantitative, qualitative, and exploratory software-assisted approaches to examine the role played by images on social media. These software-assisted methods can be used separately or in conjunction with each other. The objective of this workshop is to showcase multi-methodological strategies, from large scale scraping and visualization to the curation of smaller image samples, from formal visual analysis to participatory methods for exploring the relationships between images and affect. We will be teaching workshop participants to use the following tools, going through the steps of collecting images from social media platforms and exploring them using top-down and bottom-up approaches (Davila, 2019):

“Zeeschuimer ”. We have adapted this open-source web browser plugin created by the Digital Methods Initiative that allows for image and metadata scraping of Instagram and TikTok feeds. Participants will use this tool in conjunction with the research persona method (Bounegru et al., 2022), where fictitious user profiles are curated to elicit algorithmic recommendation processes.

“Image Flow” is an open-source tool with the ability to extract and collect images from social media websites such as reddit, twitter, 4chan, and Facebook public groups using varying degrees of search terms. This tool enables more thematic collecting of images.

Exploratory Image visualization: A key capacity of Image Flow is to enable the visualization of clusters of images (using an adapted version of PixPlot). Using images collected from both Zeeschuimer and Image Flow, we will visualize images clustered by semantic image similarity, comparing the spread of images. This tool allows for a view from the top, which we will contrast with a view from the bottom with the last tool below.

“Image and Affect” is an open-source and collaborative browser plugin tool that enables users to record their affective states while encountering images on their social media feeds. This exploratory approach responds to the immense importance of visual information in relation to affect production and circulation that is otherwise overlooked by strictly textual approaches to content analysis on the internet. Whether in the form of memes, infographics or photographs, images stand to have a greater impact on users’ affective states, transferring information while also producing potentially visceral responses during otherwise innocuous everyday browsing. By developing a tool that speaks directly to the significance of affectively charged images, we propose a conception of both affects and users that is the opposite of the kind of sentiment analysis and extractivism that dominates corporate social media platforms. Specifically, the tool makes it possible for users to understand affect as layered, ambiguous and changing, rather than dealing with systems that either pin down or provoke an affective response to produce personalized recommendations or shape responses and behaviours. This tool does not aim to capture or freeze affect, but rather help users record and understand complex affective responses that would not become otherwise conscious. Combined with Image Flow, this tool enables new critical, exploratory and participatory methods to engage users in understanding their entanglements with information flows on social media.

How can we study the social moving image on TikTok? To which extent can we repurpose TikTok metadata for the analysis of networked video cultures? Which new forms of memeification and templatability can we identify? While visual social media analysis can draw on a series of established methodological protocols for working with static images (Rose 2023), researching online video platforms raises new empirical questions.

During this six-hour workshop, we invite participants to explore and collaboratively develop TikTok methodologies by “metadating” and “metapicturing” collections of TikTok videos through their different networked characteristics—original and listed sounds, hashtags, effects, duets, emojis, and stickers. If metadata, according to Lev Manovich, is what allows computers to “connect data with other data” (2002), “metapicturing” (Rogers 2021) can be seen as an analytical technique for inventive, ethical, and contextual data remix. Presenting a set of ‘online-grounded’ possibilities for arranging content into “pictures of pictures” (Mitchell 1995), this hybrid approach allows for making sense of TikTok videos in their multimodality.

The workshop invites media and visual studies scholars to critically engage in practical tutorials and methodological discussions on the quali-quantitative analysis of TikTok video memes. Retaining sensitivity to the contextual nuance of memetic (sub)cultures, methodological affordances of digital research tools tested in a series of Digital Methods Initiative projects (Bainotti et al. 2022; Geboers et al. 2022; Pilipets et al. 2023) will be introduced in three parts:

00:00 - 00:15 Introduction

*00:15 - 01:45 Listed Sounds: Metapicturing Audiovisual Content with Lucia Bainotti and Stijn Peeters/UvA*

In this tutorial, we present how to analyze TikTok audio-visual content and detect the presence of memetic templates by “following the sound” and arranging audio-visual content in a specific type of metapicture—“video stripes”—with the 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit (Peeters & Hagen 2022). Video stripes are horizontal collages of selected sequential frames extracted from TikTok videos. By displaying dynamic video content statically, this technique is developed to highlight the visual patterns and gestural forms assumed by TikTok audio memes.

The entry point for the analysis is a specific platform affordance: the listed sounds indexed by TikTok, which users utilize as templates for their content (Abidin & Kaye 2021). Participants will learn how to repurpose this affordance and "follow" these sounds (cf. Rogers 2019) to investigate associated visual vernaculars and memetic practices of templatability, hijacking, and subversion.

01:45-02:00 Coffee Break

*02:00-03:30 Disguised speech templates: Video stacking and ethical fabrication with Elena Pilipets and Jason Chao/University of Siegen*

In this tutorial participants will learn how to analyze a TikTok video collection with particular attention to the interplay of video effects, duets, and embodied memetic production through speech. We will first learn how to extract static frames from videos using Video Frame Extractor (Chao 2022). With the aid of Speech-To-Text Converter (Chao 2022), we will then demonstrate how to recognize disguised speech templates in videos that were published with the polyphonic “original sound”. Finally, we will visualize a subset of selected videos by repurposing techniques of analytical display known as image stack and montage.

A stack here is not only “a sort of computationally generated moodboard” (Colombo 2018) but arguably also a method of “ethical fabrication” (Markham 2012) that allows for bricolage-style montage and transfiguration of the original images.

03:30-04:00 Lunch Break

*04:00-05:30 (Con)Textual analysis of co-hashtags, emojis and video stickers with Marloes Geboers/UvA*

Within soundscapes, we shift emphasis to the textual signifiers of meaning as provided by combinations of co-hashtags and stickers. The latter allows creators to embed texts and emojis within videos. They can align with the expressive meaning of the visual content and particular sounds, but they can also subvert, or infuse videos with ambiguity. We will discuss a series of methodological designs for contextualizing video content through the analysis of linkages between visual and textual elements.

Similar to part I and II, we will work with image montage outputs. Only this time, we sample videos using the textual data dimensions provided by co-hashtags and stickers. We follow research designs that attune to various research aims, ranging from detecting tactical activities to mapping discursive temporal dynamics. In this way, we repurpose discursive patterns for the interpretational work involved in assessing the meta-picture.

05:30-06:00 Wrap-up: What else can we do to study TikTok video memes?

*Aims and requirements*

Up to thirty participants will work together with workshop facilitators in an interdisciplinary setting, combining qualitative interpretative protocols of close- and cross-reading with data-intensive methods of visual design and storytelling. All participants are required to bring a laptop. TikTok datasets and step-by-step walkthrough documents will be provided as a basis for exploration and further methodological development. No technical knowledge is required.

Proposal

Last year Holly Kruse (Rogers State University) and Adrienne Shaw (Temple University) organized the second Undergraduate Teaching Workshop at AoIR in order to address a previously overlooked area at AoIR conferences that is of critical importance to many AoIR members. Building on the momentum of two successful workshops, one online in 2021 (with the third founding co-organizer, Emily van den Nagel of Monash University) and one in-person in 2022, this year we (Holly Kruse, and Kelly Boudreau of Harrisburg University of Science and Technology) are proposing another half-day undergraduate-teaching-focused workshop for the 2022 conference. Teaching is a big part of most of our academic lives, whether we are graduate teaching assistants or junior or senior faculty members; tenure-track, tenured, or contingent faculty; experienced educators or instructors relatively new to teaching. In the classroom (on campus or virtual), our students’ understandings of social media and internet use don’t always align with broader press or research narratives.

This workshop endeavors to bring educators together to discuss the difficulties and joys of teaching in, on, and around the internet. Questions for discussion will focus on (but not be limited to): What do we learn from our students about the internet, how are we using the internet to teach, and what’s the best way of bringing AoIR research into our classrooms? How do we use the internet in teaching when our students don’t have broadband access, aren’t digitally-savvy, and when our institutions do not offer robust technical infrastructures or support?

As professors with teaching experience that spans types of institutions, student populations, and institutional support, we understand that there are no one-size fits all solutions to teaching in ever-changing technological and social contexts. The experience of running two workshops has made us more aware of the ways in which teaching loads, expectations of service to students and administration, and institutional terminologies differ around the world. The workshop is therefore discussion/conversation-based so we can all learn from and with one another.

In terms of logistics, the main event will be held in-person in Philadelphia, with the workshop planned primarily as an in-person event, but virtual participation can be accommodated by allowing auditors to view the in-person conversation over Zoom and possibly participate via chat or video and audio as time and resources allow. All registered participants will be able to contribute their thoughts via a shared Google Doc. This will require no more than wifi access and ideally a room with a computer/projector system, and we manage any hybrid set-up entirely among ourselves.

Our session will begin with a welcome that emphasizes AoIR’s principles. Having this statement written in the shared Google doc and visible for all participants means that it’s in sight and front of mind: This workshop adheres to AoIR’s Statement of Principles and Statement of Inclusivity, which is a commitment to academic freedom, equality of opportunity, and human dignity. This means that in this workshop, just like in the rest of the AoIR conference, no harassment or discrimination will be permitted, and members must commit to the inclusion and recognition of all members. We appreciate the participants in this session arriving with a shared sense of purpose, community, and respect as we discuss teaching today. https://aoir.org/diversity-and-inclusivity/

We know from previous workshops that a minimum of 10 participants and a maximum of 25 is ideal for making the workshop both productive for participants and manageable for organizers. Prior to the workshop, participants will be asked to respond to a questionnaire so that we have a sense of the teaching contexts and expectations of those attending. We also intend to use the shared Google document as a resource that participants can use after the event, especially because we are asking participants to list helpful classroom resources as part of our session.

Regarding the workshop structure and goals, upon participant registration and completion of the questionnaire, we will tailor the workshop to focus on experiences and resources brought forth by the participants and expand on them through discussion. Broadly, the first hour will focus on introductions, outlining the key concerns, questions, and issues resulting from the questionnaire responses. The second hour will focus on participants sharing their strategies, assignments or techniques employed in their teaching practices that center around digital media and internet research in a pedagogical setting. During the third hour, if time allows, participants will work in smaller groups, the topics of which will be determined by workshop participants. Each participant can then join the group that best addresses their needs and expectations. The fourth and final hour will include summation of any group work and discussion of plans for documenting and sharing strategies and materials that were discussed throughout the workshop.

Conspiracy theories are increasingly present in mainstream American political discourse, from those around Covid-19 to the idea that Democrats conspired to “steal” the election from President Trump. While researchers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds (psychology, folklore, history, and so forth) have taken up conspiracy theories as an object of study, many contemporary scholars have focused on right-wing conspiracies, such as Stop the Steal (DeCook & Forestal, 2022), QAnon (Bloom & Moskalenko, 2021), and the Great Replacement Theory (Ekman, 2022). Most recently, researchers have interrogated the blurry boundaries between left- and right-leaning conspiracy adherents on topics like anti-vaccination and spirituality (Chia et al., 2021; Griera et al., 2022). A key element of current scholarship on conspiracies is the extent to which social media facilitates their spread (Enders et al., 2021; Theocharis et al., 2021) and/or allows conspiratorial knowledge-production to thrive (Marwick & Partin, 2022).

Although the stereotype of the “conspiracy theorist” is a “white, working-class, middle-aged man” (Drochon, 2018, p. 344) people from all identity groups believe in conspiracies (Bost, 2018). For American communities of color, though, conspiracy theories may be a natural reaction to the invalidation of their embodied experiences (Bogart et al., 2021; Dozono, 2021). The same could be said of other marginalized groups in America, such as queer folks and women (Ngai, 2001). In what ways is “conspiracy-believing” a legitimate response to feeling displaced in the public sphere, and perhaps even an attempt to reconfigure a sense of community and recognition (Parmigiani, 2021)? What might we learn by destigmatizing and rethinking conspiracism? What can researchers learn by examining conspiracies taken up by members of different marginalized groups?

This preconference workshop is a natural, important succession to recent contributions at AoIR on the topic of conspiracy. We build on the 2021 AoIR panel from Allena Chia and others focused on networked conspirituality and the 2022 panel chaired by Alice Marwick on feminist disinformation, but push the boundaries of conspiracy studies beyond extant work, which primarily focuses on the alt-right, health, and Western understandings of conspiracy (Halafoff et al., 2022; Mahl et al., 2022, 2022; Marwick et al., 2022). We thus answer calls to expand understandings of conspiracy beyond Western epistemology (Mahl et al., 2022) to contribute to a fuller conceptualization of “conspiracy-believing” (Parmigiani, 2021).

This workshop, then, explores these questions: _What new avenues of conspiracy are understudied when we prioritize the loudest conspiracy theories? What can we learn from other disciplines studying conspiracy? How do conspiracy theory beliefs stem from embodied experience? What are the boundaries of knowledge-production that we encounter when we demarcate conspiracy from disinformation and from embodied experience?_

Panelists will approach the topic of conspiracy theories from disparate fields of study, including communication, information studies, political science, religion, and African and African American studies; different methodologies; and address such topics as:

• Identity and epistemology on conspiracy TikTok,
• Gaia.com, a streaming video platform that features yoga classes alongside conspiracy content,
• How geopolitical and racial histories undergird particular narrative themes in justifications of ethnonationalist and right-wing discourse in Asian communities, and
• The overlap between conspiracy theory knowledge-production and feminist knowledge-production.

This half-day preconference workshop will be facilitated by Dr. Alice Marwick, Zelly Martin, Dr. Inga Trauthig, and Dr. Samuel Woolley, with presentations by:

- Dr. Alice Marwick (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

- Zelly Martin (University of Texas at Austin)

- Dr. Yvonne Eadon (Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life)

- Dr. Stephen Finley (Louisiana State University)

- Dr. Brooklyne Gipson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

- Dr. Rachel Kuo (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

We invite those interested in conspiracy as it applies to epistemology, knowledge production, technological artifacts, gender/race/class, and reception. This might include early career scholars who are delving into the study of conspiracy theories, established scholars interested in new avenues of research on conspiracy, and researchers at any stage interested in diverse approaches to the study of knowledge production. Attendees will be capped at 30 to allow everyone the option to participate in a robust discussion. The workshop will begin with a brief introduction by Dr. Inga Trauthig, followed by panelists’ presentations on working papers on the topic of conspiracy theories, which may include methodological approaches, topical differences, and interdisciplinary approaches (1 hour). The following hour will consist of questions, answers, and discussion between panelists and attendees. In the final hour, we will discuss our ideal output of the workshop—an edited volume about the future of conspiracy theory studies, with opportunities for attendees to be involved. We ask that interested attendees plan for a highly interactive event. We request active participation given the opportunity to be invited to submit to our planned volume on conspiracy theory futures.

Various schools of the interpretive, feminist, and posthuman turns have focused on the tensions and interplays of discourse and materiality, agency and structure. A key qualitative method that emerged from this debate is situational analysis (SA), proposed by Adele Clarke (2003; 2005) and further developed by other scholars (e.g. Clarke, Friese, and Washburn, 2015; Markham & Gammelby, 2018). SA proposes a series of methods for researchers to continuously and reflexively map situations. By centering situations, rather than restraining the analysis to particular pieces of text, situational analysis asks us to not only pay attention to, but repeatedly map, lay out, visualize, and connect relevant actors in a situation of concern. SA thus offers a useful toolset for interpretively considering how different agents interact, empowering researchers to systematically interpret complex situations.

This half-day pre-conference marks the anniversary of 20 years of SA by exploring and workshopping this valuable method for mapping and understanding information systems and the Internet across their varied human, more-than-human, and nonhuman interactions. The workshop will begin with a brief conceptual presentation of the core concepts and methods of SA. This will be followed by a showcase of three practical cases (health-related Facebook groups, TikTok's algorithm, and SA as a pedagogical tool), demonstrating SA in practice. Finally, a hands-on exercise will split workshop participants, giving time to experiment with and practice the techniques of SA.

This workshop offers a key opportunity for AoIR members to develop this method as a part of their practice and consider how it has helped to advance scientific practices in internet studies.

The program is as follows:

20 Years of Situational Analysis: Workshopping Methods for Mapping Complex Information Systems

Wednesday, 18/Oct/2023, 1pm to 4:30pm.

1—1:15 Welcome and brief introductions

1:15—2:00 Introduction to Situational Analysis by Annette Markham: "Situational mapping as a practical method for exploring invisible infrastructures"

2—2:15 Short break

2:15—2:40 Case 1: Sophie Toupin: "Situational Analysis in Practice: The Case of AI governance in Canada"

2:40—3:05 Case 2: Luke Heemsbergen & Anthony McCosker: "Situations of Mapping: The Ecosystems of COVID Apps & Digital Lives of Low Income Families”

3:05—3:15 Q&A

3:15—3:30 Short break

3:30—4:30 Hands-on Exercise on using Situational Analysis, led by Gabriel Pereira & Abel Guerra

Environmental media scholars have long drawn attention to the physicality of digital systems, situating their work as part of the infrastructural turn (Larkin, 2013; Parks & Starosielski, 2015; Star, 1999). Contrary to the prevailing “cultural imagination of dematerialization” (Starosielski, 2015), digital supply chains – from data centers to AI systems to consumer electronics – depend on minerals, water, land, labour, and energy (Crawford, 2021; Cubitt, 2016; Hogan et al., 2022). This growth-based model of digital technology is based on assumed access to resources, implicating it in the extractive global economy shaped by ongoing colonial violence (Liboiron, 2021; Spice, 2018).

Transdisciplinary scholarship on the intersection of digital technologies and the environment has looked at online organizing and digital climate change action (McLean & Fuller, 2016; Pearce et al., 2019), indigenous resistance and data sovereignty (Duarte, 2017; Kukutai & Taylor, 2016), the environmental impacts of large-scale data centers (Hogan, 2015; Velkova, 2016) and alternative social media (Laser et al., 2022), and what "responsible digitalization" could look like (Dwivedi et al., 2022). Building on already existing work that critically examines the material implications of digital infrastructures, this panel asks what environmental justice means in relation to digital technologies.

Turning against the language of revolution that too often gets leveraged by Big Tech to describe the latest "disruptive" technology that is allegedly going to solve the world's problems (Geiger, 2020; Tabel, 2022), we foreground subversive practices, regulatory interventions, and grassroots organizing and vision building as emancipatory alternatives to a for-profit, monopolized internet. From a theory of change that seeks to understand and challenge the extractive nature of digital technology production from all angles, we shed light on reform, repair, refusal, and resistance as paths for transformation.

Zooming in on Southeast Louisiana where hundreds of petrochemical processing and manufacturing facilities are located, the first paper examines how Internet access can be reimagined in landscapes shaped by extractive economies. The paper analyzes the challenges that activist and research groups face when using Internet of things (IoT) devices for real-time environmental sensing of air quality due to underdeveloped Internet infrastructures in a region that is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change.

The second paper engages with the material footprint and environmental implications of computing hardware production. It looks at the "Right to Repair" as one approach that challenges corporate control over design and obsolescence of electronic devices. By comparing examples of recent legislation in the EU, India, and the US, and analyzing them through the lens of design justice and discard studies frameworks, it argues that Right to Repair needs to be complemented by a substantial change in industry norms and practices rather than simply attempting to delay the disposal through repair by consumers.

The third paper examines community resistance to data centers in the United States. In the past years, activists have framed their resistance to data centers along three critiques, namely noise pollution, resource consumption, and lack of public input to permitting processes. The paper investigates how environmental justice activists use formal legal and regulatory processes such as public meetings, petitions, lawsuits, public records requests to organise against new data center developments, and the challenges they meet as part of their organising.

The fourth paper presents a "feminist principle of the internet on the environment" that was developed over several years in transnational collaborative work by practitioners. It addresses the interconnections between gendered online violence against land and environmental defenders on large social media platforms and on-the-ground resistance to extractive industries and outlines a new emancipatory vision for a different internet that centers planetary care and justice for communities and ecosystems.

The fifth paper presents an analysis of the Internet Architecture Board's (IAB) workshop on "Environmental Impact of Internet Applications and Systems", held online in December 2022. It uses an infrastructural lens to analyze which politics are embedded and missing from industry responses to the sector's environmental harms. While international regulatory bodies are slowly coming to terms with the environmental impacts of distributed digital networks, the paper argues that the proposed sustainability solutions are as of yet too narrow in scope.

This panel combines four papers which focus in different ways on the question of children’s data and privacy in the Australian context. All four are framed with children’s right to privacy as a core concern, consistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as updated via the General Comment 25 on Child Rights in the Digital Environment. We examine four arenas where children’s data is either extracted or occluded in ways that make it more difficult, if not impossible, for parents, carers and others to make informed choices about the data of very young children. As children begin to articulate their own ideas and privacy preferences, these studies highlight different understandings of privacy, and of trust in both people and technologies. The panel papers are titled: ‘Where Does Children’s Data Go? Mapping the Data Broker Industry’; ‘Data and Privacy as a Social Relation’; ‘Developing a Holistic Framework for Analysing Privacy Policies – A Child’s Rights and Data Justice Perspective’ and ‘Unboxing Data and Privacy Via Young Children’s Wearables’. Collectively, these papers can be read as arguing that we need nothing less than a revolution in the way children and responsible adults are informed about the way children’s data is generated, captured, stored, and owned, as well as explicitly regulating who can profit from children’s data, in which circumstances, and how transparent these processes must be.

For internet researchers, access to data has always been precarious (Freelon, 2018). Twitter’s recent decision to end support for their Academic API makes it the latest to drastically limit data access for many researchers, exemplifying the precarity of social media data. The unpredictability of data access, however, has a silver lining: researchers are seeking alternative, independent approaches to both collecting and sharing data.

In this context, we propose a roundtable session to discuss revolutionary efforts to build data archives that can be accessed by a variety of researchers. Thus far, collection efforts by researchers have been piecemeal, resulting in many researchers and teams collecting roughly similar data over and over again. This is exacerbated by obstacles to collaboration related to competition, privacy concerns, and legal restrictions, impacting both academic and non-academic researchers. But this does not need to be the case. Internet researchers, now more than ever, are seeing the benefits of collaborating on data collection and archiving efforts.

Our initial participants will consist of the following individuals: Megan Brown, Libby Hemphill, Cameron Hickey, J. Nathan Matias, and Kaiya Soorholtz; researchers who are working on collaborative data archives of varying levels of access and size. The roundtable will focus on existing data archives, challenges to collecting and making them accessible, and strategies for increasing access and cooperation. For instance, we will discuss legal challenges that platforms’ terms of services present for data sharing, ethical issues in both collecting and archiving data, and computational demands for preserving and provisioning social media data archives.

We anticipate the roundtable to be an exchange of ideas and suggestions, as well as a discussion of challenges to developing independent data archives. We look forward to sharing the latest in these archive developments and in hearing from AOIR researchers about their data needs and challenges.

Extant research demonstrated that the algorithms of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex, compared to those of its US-based counterpart Google, frequently produce results that are biased toward the interests of Russia’s ruling elites. Prior research, however, audited Yandex’s algorithms largely within Russia. In contrast, this study is the first to assess the role of Yandex’s web search algorithms as a resource for Russia’s informational influence abroad. To do so, we conduct a comparative algorithm audit of Google and Yandex in Belarus, examining the visibility and narratives of COVID-19-related conspiracy theories in their search results. By manually analysing the content of 1,320 search results collected in mid-April to mid-May 2020, we find that, compared with Google, (1) Yandex retrieves significantly more conspiratorial content (2) that close to exclusively suspects US plotters to be behind the pandemic, even though the virus spread from the Chinese city of Wuhan across the globe.

This article considers the politics and practicalities of responding to the COVID crisis with ‘an app for that’. It shows how seductive solutionism in times of crisis created political impetus to direct the public health response to contact tracing through Contact Tracing Apps (CTA). Rather than focus on user-based concerns (uptake, privacy, etc.), we’ve investigated how apps interface with complex systems and infrastructures of public health. Our 21 expert informants from five developed nations offered insight into the machinations of contact tracing from ‘the coal face’ up to executive technical and policy decisions including national CTA development and deployment. We learned that beneath the shiny veneer of an app is the messy certitude of Excel and tech-debt, politics, and mundane organizational technique that worked amidst each other to shape public health. Our approach provides a more nuanced understanding of the interfaces of CTA and digital epidemiology than current App narratives allow.

While a healthy and critical literature on digital app interventions into COVID-19 has developed, there has not been critical consideration of these apps informed by insights from those responsible for designing, implementing, and making use of these digital tools. We redress this research imbalance by considering how user-centric narratives of the platformization of public health can gloss over what situational analysis (Clarke et al., 2016) might better uncover. This paints a more nuanced picture of digital epidemiology than current App narratives provide to address the contingent promises and failures related to these digital technologies.

During COVID-19, countless dashboards have served as central media where people learn critical information about the pandemic. Varied actors, including news organizations, government agencies, universities, and NGOs created and maintained these dashboards, conducting the onerous labor of collecting, categorizing, and taking care of COVID data. This study uncovers different forms of data practices and labor behind the building of these dashboards, based on in-depth interviews with volunteers and practitioners across India and the United States who have participated in COVID dashboard projects.

Specifically, we are interested in projects that have focused on underrepresented or missing COVID data such as COVID cases in prisons and long-term care facilities, racial/ethnic breakdown of cases, as well as deaths due to COVID enforcement. These data builders employed sometimes creative, sometimes mundane and laborious data practices to not simply collect, but to produce these data that are often invisible in the official COVID dataset. In this process of data production, dashboard builders grappled with the questions of how certain data is collected, who/what is missing from the dataset, and how these data voids shape and manipulate our understanding of the pandemic. Interviewing 74 data builders who participated in COVID dashboard projects, this paper demonstrates the range of underrepresented and messy COVID data that these data builders have identified, fixed, and maintained to render them useful: disappearing data, lumped data, and absent data. Such critical engagement with messy COVID data reveals different data injustices that have tremendous potential to affect future pandemic preparation and management.

A mob assaulted the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020. Far from an isolated event, many actors paved the road that lead to the insurrection -- from media figures to politicians to mainstream social media platforms to smaller social media platforms geared toward the extreme right. In this paper, we focus on members of the U.S. Congress who contested and voted against the certification of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. We contrast their social media contrast their public posting activity on the alt-right social media platform Parler and the mainstream social media site Twitter.

We examined the social media presence of the 147 Congressional election objectors by studying their official Twitter accounts, deleted tweets from their official Twitter accounts, and compared that content with what they posted to their Parler in the lead-up to January 6. Using profile information from the Aliapoulios, et al. dataset (2021a, 2021b), we were able to find Parler accounts for 46 of the 147 objectors. Of those accounts, 34 did not have a post or comment history. What remained was a collection of 12 accounts where social media activity across platforms could be compared. We found significant differences in approaches to communication across tweets, deleted tweets, and Parler posts. These differences illustrate messaging strategies that were adaptive to the audience and affordances of the Parler platform.

In this paper we unpack the 2022 Brazilian Presidential campaign marked by multiple claims of electoral fraud and support for a coup d’état by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. We identify the narrative frames underpinning the insurrectionist playbook by analyzing Bolsonaro’s statements during the presidential campaign. We subsequently test the penetration of this playbook on members of the Brazilian National Congress during the campaign trail and the transition of power to the opposition candidate, when pro-Bolsonaro protesters attempted to overthrow the Federal Government. Our analyses lend support to the hypothesis that the coup d’état was not successful due to the dwindling support beyond the hard-core Bolsonaro base. Our results also show that the insurrectionist playbook, largely centered on the blueprint of false claims of electoral fraud, can be monitored through the public statements of elected officials. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for future research.

The “Alt-Right,” a white nationalist online coalition, has collapsed amidst a revolution in digital governance termed the “regulatory turn.” Nevertheless, the regulatory turn remains incomplete because white nationalists utilize graphical user interface (GUI) design to subvert public stewardship. Why have some former Alt-Right platforms collapsed while others have grown despite increased scrutiny? The field’s account is currently limited to social media networks and rooted in positivist methods, lending a static conception of white nationalist networks that is slow to recognize cultural shifts. This paper fills the gap by comparatively critiquing the interfacing affordances of Telegram, an instant messaging app that functions as an "ideological safe harbor" for U.S. white nationalists with content aggregation, blogging, and activist use-cases. I apply interface critique to index how the manipulation of graphical user interfaces allows white nationalists to frame their browsing as a technology of mastery over and against the regulatory turn. I argue that Telegram networks coopt the enclave public, exploiting an ideology of decentralization to mystify the leverage held by white nationalist developers over their users. This occlusion redirects white masculine anxieties against publicity to justify an intensified racist fanaticism and the exportation of violence against racial, religious, and gendered outsiders. White interfacing frames GUI design as a capitalist technology that weaponizes the racist and sexist logic of the “average user” to secure the reproduction of reactionary platforms. This project furthers Internet research by developing a theory of the interface as an ideological mirror of production.

Following the economic recession of 2008, news reports and media texts blamed individual consumers and their reckless and wasteful consumption on designer accessories and extravagant homes for contributing to the financial crisis. Within the current context of the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis has led to substantial increases in everyday necessities like groceries and rent. At the same time, social media influencers on platforms like Instagram and TikTok continue to promote excessive consumption of viral products that are often discarded upon purchase. In the latter half of 2022 and early 2023, “deinfluencing” has become a popular trend on TikTok. Influencers and everyday users alike post videos on the platform encouraging other users to purchase certain products and not others, advice that has become referred to as “deinfluencing.” This paper analyzes “deinfluencing” to understand how this TikTok trend reproduces cultural formations of consumer citizenship. Drawing upon the theoretical foundations of Zygmunt Bauman and Sarah Banet-Weiser, a multimodal discursive analysis on “deinfluencing” TikTok videos will reveal how the trend works to individualize the cost-of-living crisis in accordance with neoliberal logics. Particular attention is directed towards identifying the parallels between “deinfluencing” and previous cultural formations that emerged during other periods of economic and financial crisis.

Building on two case studies, this paper will discuss emerging healing, health and therapy cultures on social media and the role of (micro-)influencers within these cultures. While influencer cultures have become an important field of internet research over the last decade (see for example Abidin, 2015), scholars typically focus on commercial influencers in the context of fashion, beauty, travel, lifestyle genres, and adjacent genres. This paper contributes to extending how we imagine and theorise influencer practices and explores influencers and influencer practices that are motivated, arguably, by healing rather than financial or ideological ambitions. Theoretically, we consider how digital affect cultures enable influencers and followers to (re)create narratives about health, relate through resonance and engage with media rituals rather than merely seek information. As influencer practices and cultures continue to expand beyond popular or normative conceptualisations, this paper offers empirical accounts to open up the contexts and theories we use to explore influencer dynamics. Our paper is a starting point to invite conversation at the conference about the diversity of influencers and influencer cultures, how we might theorise their roles, and how care, healing, health and therapy is felt and communicated.

Sex education has historically been destabilised through moral panics and political agendas. Therefore, some content creators have taken to disseminating sexual health information on social media, including YouTube. Some content creators, who become influencers, mix sex education with entertainment tropes to create engaging sex edutainment about sex, relationships and sexual health. Peer-led knowledge sharing is often delivered in a shame-free way utilising direct-to-camera address, approachable language and networked friendship to build audience rapport and parasocial trust relationships. Whilst this trust relationship has been studied extensively in marketing, there is also a growing body of work considering how this trust can be applied to influence health.

 

This paper builds on existing scholarship around influencers in health by exploring the relationships formed between sex edutainment influencers on YouTube and their audiences. The paper asks the question ‘can social media influencers can act as a new form of digital peer-educators and sexual health influencers through the formation of parasocial trust relationships?’ and interrogates what the possibilities and problems of this might be. This paper draws on data from a three-phase digital mixed-methods study rooted in actor-network theory which utilised comment analysis, online surveys with young people, email interviews with influencers and a walkthrough method reading of YouTube.

 

The findings suggest that YouTube sex edutainment influencers act as health influencers and digital peer-educators to some of their followers, however they face an uphill battle due to the way the influencer/audience relationship is mediated through YouTube, its policies and algorithmic governance

In Western culture, wellness is often invoked as a catchall solution for myriad problems, especially within wellness discourse on social media. The wellness industry is largely portrayed online through personal experiences and anecdotal evidence where popular users promote products, services, and habits to digital audiences. However, influencers often lack credibility resulting in the spread of medical misinformation and disordered advice. Recently, wellness influencers have begun to promote wellness through tourism. Wellness tourism has experienced significant growth and researchers expect it to continue. To analyze how wellness tourism is communicated through influencers’ content created while at The Ranch Malibu, we analyzed the TikTok content of one influencer whose account grew in popularity throughout her time at The Ranch. The findings explicate how an influencer sharing her time at The Ranch Malibu on TikTok operationalizes wellness tourism in a way that encourages orthorexic behavior, furthers the moralization of health, and acts as virtue signaling toward online audiences. This project critically examines the rise of an industry that is tied up in appearance, self-presentation, privilege, and lifestyle norms of contemporary Western culture. We fill a gap in internet and wellness tourism research by examining what values wellness retreats communicate to attendees and the public especially when communicated through an influencer’s experience.

On-demand digital platforms have transformed labor relations by disclaiming their responsibilities as employers while retaining their control over workers. Underlying the exploitative labor regimes is what van Doorn (2020) terms “platform exceptionalism,” which is a socio-legal imaginary of platforms as unique and exceptional from the traditional model of employment, including state regulations. Accordingly, this study investigates how such imaginary is constructed and maintained by platforms in distinctive political regimes by comparing Meituan and Uber Eats, the two major food-delivery platforms in China and the US.

Based on critical discourse analysis of companies’ materials, news coverage, and official document, I uncover two distinctive forms of platform exceptionalisms. Uber’s strategy is to leverage its influence among drivers, mobilize grassroots activists and push for legal changes in their favor, which I characterize as “discursive exceptionalism” as it heavily relies on the discursive alignment with “gig workers” and framing them as dedicated independent contractors who highly value flexibility. In contrast, Meituan employs what I call “legal exceptionalism,” in which the company ostensibly comply with state regulation while exploiting legal gray zones to bypass legal obligation. As a complement, the discourse of familial value and care is frequently invoked by Meituan to glorify itself and conceal the structural problem needed to be addressed. This study contributes to our knowledge of platform capitalism in different political regimes by comparing different approaches to platform exceptionalisms and linking them to their distinctive regulatory and political regimes.

The refers to a common video trend we encountered as we set out to analyze how FDWs use TikTok to express personal and sexual sovereignty amid constraining structural surveillance at the level of policy, employer-employee dynamics, and social restrictions. Academic scholars from various disciplines have critiqued the nature of migration regimes in which foreign domestic workers (FDW) are hired, drawing from the fields of social, health, and economic justice. We focus on FDWs in Singapore, where these conditions are enforced and rationalized through laws and government-owned-media that entrench socially constructed divisions. These conditions are rationalized and perpetuated through rhetoric that stigmatizes, stereotypes, and enforces segregation. Intersecting layers of marginalization are created by a labor system that maximally extracts and exploits low-wage migrant workers. Discursive techniques used by state-owned media and legislation also portray FDW as ungovernable and promiscuous employer property that supersedes and eclipses their civil rights (Kaur-Gill, Pandi & Dutta, 2021).

Academic scholars from various disciplines have critiqued the nature of migration regimes in which foreign domestic workers (FDW) are hired, drawing from the fields of social, health, and economic justice. We focus on FDWs in Singapore, where these conditions are enforced and rationalized through laws and government-owned-media that entrench socially constructed divisions. This paper considers how the reality of “influencers” who are "unfree" challenges social media studies’ assumptions about what, and who, is a "content creator." The paper offers a walkthrough of the TikTok advertising interface, in order to understand how FDWs adapt to the platform’s environment of expected use (Light et al, 2018). How do TikTok’s platform norms guide and pressure users to adapt to its advertising goals? How do unfree subaltern users adapt to these limits? How, amidst multiple layers of restriction, do FDW influencers use the platform for building self-authored stories of social status and heightened visibility?

The informational disorder that sprawls through multiple state-nations, exacerbated by violent uprisings and coup attempts such as the US Capitol Storm on January 6th, 2021 and the Brazilian coup attempt on January 8th, 2023, has shed new light on the political economy of disinformation industries. In particular, it brings to the forefront the problem of economic incentives for creating and spreading disinformation. This paper builds on critical platform and infrastructure research literature for analyzing the multilateral infrastructural power of programmatic advertising networks. Our research questions are: how is power exercised by programmatic advertising infrastructures while managing its multilateral relationships? In terms of technicities, governance and business models, how does these infrastructures enable or reinforce desinformation disorder? This case study draws on a multi-methodological approach, combining digital methods research and critical analysis of platform documents. The empirical data obtained has 95.269 ads collected on the website (data scraped with a Python script developed by one of the authors) during the election month. Empirical data show that MGID, a native advertising platform, placed 54% of the advertisements on Terra Brasil Notícias. Google Ads was the second largest provider of digital ads on TBN, despite its policy`s restrictions on sellers that host unreliable or harmful content on issues such as health, climate, elections and democracy. Findings from the Brazilian case also contribute to understanding the infrastructural power of big tech governing the monetization of publishers in the Global South.

Misinformation has been described as one of the defining problems of our time (Freelon & Wells, 2020). There has been a rapid and global rise in action to address the problem, largely since the 2016 United States presidential election and the United Kingdom Brexit referendum (Kreiss, 2021). In Australia, there are fact-checking initiatives like ABC-RMIT Fact Check and a regulatory code incentivising major social media platforms to 'combat’ the problem. Media, health, and public sector organisations also take a variety of approaches to addressing the problem of misinformation, from pre-bunking strategies to media literacy initiatives. 

When observed together, these efforts indicate an increasingly stabilised and well-funded institutional environment around the problem of misinformation in Australia, elsewhere broadly defined as ‘fighting fakes’ (Bélair-Gagnon et al., 2022). This ‘anti-misinformation’ institutional landscape not only includes actors such as fact-checkers and news organisations, but also technology companies, government agencies, academic institutions, and community organisations working to address the problem, each with their own governing practices, professional spheres, institutional logics, and meso-level relationships. 

This paper seeks to critically examine different representations of the misinformation problem in Australia, across institutional actors and over time. It is guided by two research questions: 

1. How has the problem of misinformation been represented in Australia by key institutional actors (regulators, governments, companies, media, academia and community organisations) since 2016? 

2. What are the implications of certain problem representations, particularly those that have risen to prominence and asserted dominance in Australia?  

In the present study, we confront the problems of perspective and normative grounding that attend critical theory within the context of a research project on digital information seeking, conspiracy groups, and anti-trafficking and anti-child exploitation advocacy. In doing so, we seek highlight the necessity of self-reflexivity and self-critique for for emergent projects of critical mis/disinformation studies.

Coordinated online disinformation campaigns are by nature difficult to detect. In response, communication scholars have developed a range of methods and analytical frameworks to discover and analyse disinformation campaigns. The use of social network analysis (SNA) to find and map coordinated behavioural patterns has become increasingly popular and demonstrated effective results. However, these methods are designed for text and behavioural but miss an important aspect of disinformation campaigns: coordinated image-sharing. This paper examine this gap by analysing a large-scale dataset of tweets using advanced SNA to map coordinated retweeting behaviour and coordinated image-sharing. We show that coordinated image-sharing is both more widespread and different in structure to other forms of coordination. This is important because it highlights a major gap in research, where computational methods are not suited to detecting and analysing the scale and scope of visual disinformation on platforms like Twitter. To address this, we suggest new methods to complement existing approaches, using machine learning to detect image similarity. The paper concludes with a reflection of limitations and suggestions for the next steps.

This paper examines the rise of algo-design in the context of platformed book publishing. Building on conceptualizations of algospeak, a strategy that involves creating code words or phrases to create a brand-safe lexicon, the paper theorizes algo-design as a broader creative strategy used by online creators that involves using and avoiding specific language and visuals to evade content moderation by platforms. Specifically, this research explores the use of algo-design in the paratext of romance and erotica novels by authors of color and LGBTQIA authors who publish their fiction on digital publishing platforms, such as Amazon, and market them on social media platforms. This exploratory reseach is based on a qualitative multi-method research design, including interviews with authors and metadata analysis. In many cases, algo-design may be seen as a revolutionary creative tactic for BIPOC and LGBTQIA authors of romance fiction, who are disproportionately affected by content moderation systems (Monea, 2022) and often have their works flagged as adult material due to the genre’s tendency to include intimate relationships (Parnell, 2021). In this way, the use of algo-design by authors is a clear effort to push back against bluntly imposed content moderation interventions and subvert platform power.

TikTok wants to “inspire creativity” and “spark joy,” Meta aims to “bring the world closer together,” and YouTube aspires to “give everyone a voice and show them to the world.” Platforms claim that they want to do good. However, they regularly get international attention for being bad instead. Social media data scandals are a prominent point of research. Yet initiatives to counterbalance these backlashes, such as YouTube’s Black Voices Fund or TikTok for Good are rarely investigated. Although platform initiatives' content is often not on the top of your For You Page (FYP), such social initiatives can tell much about what values a platform aims to promote. Examining the values promoted through social initiatives of platform companies provides a way to understand what these companies try to center as important or worthwhile. This project investigates the promotion of platform values through “TikTok for Good,” based on an inductive and thematic analysis of TikTok for Good videos (n=180). With this study, I aim to explore how platform values can enhance our understanding of the construction of what a platform counts as good, what is worth being visible, and in turn, what is not.

Content moderation and the question of how to regulate speech on social media platforms is both an urgent as well as a complex topic that affects all forms of digital life. Yet, these questions are not a local but a global issue that pose significant challenges to social media companies such as YouTube which operate worldwide and in many different jurisdictions. YouTube does not only have to decide on its own policy guidelines but also how content should be moderated from country to country. However, it is not guaranteed that content will be moderated equally in all countries. As most social media companies are based in the United States, it is possible, for eample, that content moderation will be stricter for US content than for content elsewhere due to a higher public scrutiny. We thus argue that comparative work is sorely needed to shine a light on our understanding of how social media companies such as YouTube regulate speech not only on a national but a global level. In our analysis we investigate the question about the differences and similarities regarding content deletion on YouTube. To do so, we analyzed over 2 million YouTube channels from 68 countries over two years (2020-2022). We find both temporal trends that are consistent with YouTube’s global policy guideline changes as well as national patterns.

This paper examines the socio-technical ecosystems that shape the moderation of mental health content. To explore how care is formulated across and between different actors and automated systems, I focus on the experiences of moderators and users of three peer-based mental health support platforms. The analysis is framed by the notion of the 'digital care assemblage' to delineate the interactions between goal-oriented moderation policies, automated systems, human content moderators or platform managers, and users seeking or giving help in relation to mental ill-health. Each of these actors contribute to the supportive capacity of the platforms for addressing mental health issues in the community.

Digital technology conglomerates have long been interested in instrumentalizing users’ emotions to further their corporate goals. In this paper, we shed light on a rarely discussed way whereby these companies exploit human affects: the purported identification and measurement of sentiments so as to allegedly optimize automated processes of content moderation. These technologies of mood-eration, as we term them, represent a largely unknown but widely sought approach to defining and governing objectionable speech at scale, an increasingly central and politically fraught issue for these organizations. Through the analysis of patent applications from large tech companies, we demonstrate that mood-eration seems to be based on two main techniques: firstly, the inference of emotions conveyed by content so as to identify and control objectionable communication – moderation through moods; secondly, the inference of emotions from users so as to address their somehow negative affective experiences – moderation of moods. The paper contributes to critical scholarship on digital speech governance by arguing that, in addition to creating new avenues for the unfair suppression/enabling of users’ expressions, mood-eration technologies shift the foundations of content control by reconfiguring the very idea of what is objectionable. Instead of being founded on common moral principles that demand justification, objectionability becomes a function of subjective states that defy explanations – and deflect accountability. As such, mood-eration can naturalize and depoliticize speech governance. This might be appealing for corporations – but it is also concerning for the rest of us.

From “Twitter Revolutions” to “Black Lives Matter,” digital communication technology has changed political activism. On the one hand, technologies can help political activists stand up against oppressive governments and exploitative companies. On the other hand, when speaking up, these users face increasing challenges in protecting their online privacy. Critical scholars argue that in a digitized world, preemptive mass surveillance has become the new modus operandi ignoring the legal principle of probable cause. In such a surveillance society, political activists’ privacy is under high pressure. Political activists need considerable skills to navigate this tension, and these skills remain under-researched. We interviewed political activists in Germany, Switzerland, and France to explore how political activists use digital technology in their activism, how they experience surveillance, and how they protect their privacy online. Results show that digital technology has become crucial for political activists, but is attached to wide-ranging surveillance threats that are experienced as opaque, unlawful, and oppressive. The interviewed activists respond with sophisticated privacy protection, which is a time-consuming, complicated task that requires advanced internet skills. These skills and strategies they employ to counter surveillance have a wide range of social implications, such as lower transparency of social movements or activists' self-censorship in the form of chilling effects.

Yik Yak is a hyperlocal social media platform that allows users to post short messages anonymously and to upvote, downvote, and comment on the messages posted by others. Hyperlocal anonymous apps such as Yik Yak are popular on many college campuses, and critics of these apps often point out that the apps can frequently serve as sites for various forms of cyber-bullying (Liu and Sui 2016) and for the blatant expression of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other toxic attitudes (Martin and Sharp-Grier 2016). However, these apps also can function as a space for students to vent frustrations, call out problems, or create moments of connection and solidarity without the pressure of being immediately visible and recognizable. This form of online anonymity may be particularly valuable for students who are members of visibly minoritized, marginalized, and/or underrepresented groups in the context of small, rurally located, wealthy, and predominantly white institutions. My current research project is an ethnographic study on students’ use of Yik Yak at one such institution, Redacted University. The project focuses on the following questions: why and how do students choose to seek online anonymity? How does Yik Yak fit into the broader social media landscape and university context that students navigate on a daily basis? What are the benefits and drawbacks of online anonymity for underrepresented students in particular?

The growing deployment of automated facial recognition technology invites consideration of the broader implications of a world in which automated systems link automated mass-individualized recognition with automated and customized response. This paper draws on a case study of the marketing and deployment of facial recognition “solutions” during the COVID-19 pandemic to develop a theoretical approach to the prospect of the widespread deployment of automated real-time recognition “at-a-distance.” To do so it builds on and adapts the Foucault inspired work on “environmentality” – a form of governance that intervenes not at the ideological level, through the milieu of the surrounding environment. Drawing on data from several industry trade shows, we consider the forms of “environmental” governance envisioned by those developing and deploying the technology for the purposes of security, risk management, and profit. We argue that the “contactless culture” that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic anticipates the normalization of a form of mass customized biopolitics: the ability to operate on the population and the individual simultaneously via automated forms of passive identification. This form of governance relies not just on machinic recognition, but on the real-time reconfiguration of physical space via automated access controls and the channelling of both people and information.

This roundtable seeks to challenge and expand understandings of technology related to sex and gender by exploring new possibilities for research and design. Sextech is often understood in terms of technologies that enhance, intensify, or improve sexuality and sexual experiences in the name of sexual health and wellbeing (for example, when networked sex toys seek to measure, visualize and "optimize" orgasms).

Industry marketing narratives often focus on the opportunities for gendered empowerment afforded to sextech users and entrepreneurs alike. However, these opportunities are constrained by the chokepoints built into both global digital commerce platforms (Stardust et al 2023), and platform ‘community standards’ that restrict the marketing of products and services related to sexuality and reproductive health (Oversight Board 2023).

Participants will reflect on their own interdisciplinary research practices that have sought to reframe the ways that bodies, pleasures, and gender have been technologized and datafied via apps, platforms, devices and infrastructures. Building on recent accounts of community-based participatory research as well as theoretical discussions of sextech and a queer politics of pleasure, we invite the audience to imagine new possibilities for ethical technologies of sex and gender.

How can we envision future sextech and gender-related technologies that have space for curiosity, exploration, messiness, and indeed the elusive quality of desire? Trans people, sex workers, people of colour, and other members of marginalized and stigmatized groups often must rely on their own technological skills to address their individual and communal basic needs and challenges. What can we learn from these community-informed technologies, the people who create them, and the design processes that brought these technologies to life?

Roundtable presenters:

Kath Albury, Swinburne University of Technology (AU)

Oliver Haimson, University of Michigan (USA)

Jenny Kennedy, RMIT University (AU)

Maya Mundell, Cornell Tech/Cornell University (USA)

Jenny Sundén Södertörn University (Sweden)

Current research on credibility often focuses on measuring perceived credibility of certain news sources and the drivers of such public perceptions, using quantitative measures that sometimes over-simplify this complex phenomenon. Only recently has research focused on the nuanced ways people evaluate information credibility within their particular social and cultural contexts. Such investigation necessitates user-focused research that can attend to the situated and human contexts of digital media usage – a task for interpretive methods.

This panel brings together cutting edge research from Global South and Global North contexts to showcase the many advantages of interpretive methods for the study of how people evaluate the credibility of online information. Together, the papers in this panel demonstrate the ability of interpretive methods to tackle two key challenges in studying credibility evaluation. First, more and more digital social communications are taking place in private social media platforms, and restrictions on researcher access to data on these platforms severely limit the applicability of the “big data” approach in this area. Second, interpretive methods are well-positioned to capture the contexts related to credibility evaluation that computational or survey-based methods are ill-equipped to gather.

The four presentations in this panel foreground the meaning-making processes and contextual factors involved in online credibility assessment, exemplifying the strength of interpretive methods for studying digital news and information consumption. We hope they will generate discussion on how to advance research on digital media and misinformation through a user-centered, context-rich approach.

Recent scholarship on the intersections between digital media and political debate has taken on a decidedly pessimistic, even dystopian tone, and not without reason: from the effective use of social media platforms by populists and demagogues like Donald Trump to the expression of deepening ideological divides in online public debate, and from the emergence of partisan online communities and platforms to the intensification and exploitation of such partisanship by conspiracy theorists and state actors, there are substantial concerns about the way that extremist actors are utilising digital and social media logics to further their ideological agendas. The situation is further complicated by platform providers’ and regulators’ limited and unsystematic responses to these issues.

But while there is considerable research into the various issues and events that illustrate these developments, many of the central concepts that are used to describe these cases receive substantially less critical attention. Terms such as ‘influence’, ‘populism’, ‘partisanship’, and ‘polarisation’ are often deployed as if did not themselves require further qualification and definition – even in spite of the considerable volume of literature in political science and other ancillary disciplines that addresses the various facets that such concepts may have. Informed by and building on substantial empirical research, this panel therefore facilitates a conversation between methodological innovation at the coalface of digital trace data analysis and careful reflection on the definitions of key concepts, in order to explore the conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches that might illuminate the distinct features of our four key concepts in sharper focus.

Our first paper engages with the concept of influence, which it conceptualises as the power to affect others. Focussing especially on the spread of verified false content (VFC) through social media, it proposes a novel population-scale approach that both employs a bottom-up perspective for identifying the influential actors spreading such content, and highlights the exposure of ordinary citizens to these messages. It demonstrates this approach by drawing on the large-scale Facebook URL-sharing dataset available from Social Science One, developing an EU-wide perspective on VFC exposure at national levels.

Our second paper continues this approach by critiquing the concept of populism, highlighting the term as a weak analytical concept. It argues that, rather than focussing on their populist stance, populist politicians can be judged by the extent of their delegitimising rhetoric. Further, the paper asserts that such rhetoric is enabled by the decentralised communication environment of social media. The utility of the concept of delegitimisation is that enables the identification of political messages that are truly dangerous because they are meant to destabilise fundamental democratic principles, such as the integrity of the vote and the legitimacy of alternative policy perspectives. By situating this in the context of social media messaging, we can see how such messages are amplified by distributed network channels.

Our third paper shifts focus to the possible results of influence campaigns and populist demagoguery, and addresses the concept of partisanship. Taking as case study the 2022 Italian election, it introduces a novel combination of computationally informed analytical methods and applies them to social media data to gauge the level of partisan attention devoted to the different news sources and political topics in the election campaign, and distinguish between partisan and cross-partisan sources and themes. This provides new insights into the structures, intersections, and faultlines of partisanship, and enables the mapping of a broader multi-dimensional ideological space.

Our final paper continues this discussion by exploring the complexities of polarisation. It highlights the conceptual fluidity of this term, which is expressed in the multitude of adjectives and qualifiers that can be found in the relevant literature – from ideological through affective to interactive polarisation and beyond, and from benign and even beneficial to pernicious and destructive polarisation. Mapping these distinct forms of polarisation onto a diverse range of mixed-methods digital media research approaches, and outlining a number of criteria for assessing whether the dynamics of polarisation have turned destructive, it outlines new pathways for polarisation research in Internet studies.

In combination, then, these four papers offer a timely nudge for digital and social media research to revisit and reconsider some of the central concepts in online political communication studies, and to retrace and reaffirm the connections between the definitions of these concepts and the methodological frameworks that we use to study them.

Though a relative newcomer among social media platforms, social video-sharing platform TikTok is one of the largest social media platforms in the world, boasting over one billion monthly active users, which it garnered in just five years (Dellatto, 2021). While much of the early attention to the platform focused on more frivolous elements, such as its dances and challenges, the political weight of TikTok has become ever clearer. In the 2020 US election, Donald Trump’s plan to fill the 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa was stymied by young activists who reserved tickets with no intention of attending, organized largely on TikTok (Bandy & Diakopoulos, 2020). In the years since, political discourse on TikTok has continued to emerge from everyday users and political campaigns alike (see Newman, 2022), even as TikTok itself has become an object of political contention: calls for banning the app in the United States–citing security concerns influenced by xenophobia, given the app’s Chinese ownership–began in the Trump presidency (Allyn, 2020) and have recently culminated in state- and federal-level bans on the app for government-owned devices in the U.S. (Berman, 2023). While some studies have navigated limited data access and the platform’s relative infancy to offer an examination of political TikTok (see Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2019; Medina Serrano et al., 2020; Vijay & Gekker, 2021; Guinaudeau et al., 2022), there remains a significant need for more analysis and theorization of how TikTok can become both a site for political discourse and a feature caught up within political mobilization.

This panel seeks to bring together emerging work that deals with political participation on TikTok, in order to share current wisdom and forge future research directions. The presented works specifically focus on the relationship between political participation on TikTok and political identity for three primary reasons. First, as a video-based and thus embodied platform (Raun, 2012), creator identity is more prominent and easily perceptible in the visual and auditory elements of TikTok videos than in the primarily text-based posts on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Second, TikTok relies more heavily on its recommendation algorithm for content distribution than its competitors traditionally have (Kaye et al., 2022; Cotter et al., 2022; Zeng & Kaye, 2022; Zhang & Liu, 2021), leading to the creation of “refracted publics” (Abidin, 2021) or Gemeinschaft-style communities (Kaye et al., 2022) around users’ common interests, which may include and/or be heavily informed by identity. Third, TikTok has long prioritized and found success with Generation Z and younger users more broadly (Zeng et al., 2021; Vogels et al., 2022; Stahl & Literat, 2022), which has made generational identity extremely salient on the app, while also implicating political identity, as young people tend to hold political beliefs more cognizant and accepting of diverse identities than older generations (Parker et al., 2019).

The papers in this panel consider a wide range of identity characteristics of TikTok users and how these identities shape and are shaped by political discourse on TikTok. Paper 1 builds on TikTok’s targeting of Gen Z, considering the identities of age and generation through a content analysis of political remix on TikTok to uncover how younger users use TikTok for political activism as compared to their older counterparts, and finding evidence that TikTok is a powerful site of collective action. Also building from TikTok’s appeal to GenZ, Paper 2 presents a digital ethnographic analysis of the Trad-Wife phenomena on TikTok, offering that TikTok quietly (and thus insidiously) offers space for the cultivation of Christian Nationalist, ‘gentle fascisms’ within GenZ women, often without mention of ‘politics’ at all. Paper 3 offers a computational content analysis of political posts on TikTok with a focus on the interactions between identity and partisanship, and particularly the ways in which creators of marginalized identities on the right act as identity entrepreneurs, offering conservative critiques of their identity groups in ways which find popularity among conservative audiences of hegemonic identities. Finally, Paper 4 looks at differences in how TikTok users respond to male and female politicians’ TikTok videos using a combination of computational and qualitative methods, with exploratory analysis suggesting that male politicians receive more neutral and positive comments than female politicians. By focusing on identity and political discourse on TikTok, we recognize the wide range of political activity occurring on a platform often denigrated as frivolous, and foreground the importance of identity characteristics to the technological and social shaping of these dialogues.

As social media platforms face increasing complexity, severity, and pervasiveness of violent content, it is of utmost importance for researchers, educators, policymakers, and users alike to regard digital violence as an imminent threat. Indeed, violent content is widely acknowledged as an inseparable element of the continuum of violence, interlinked with various other types and embodiments of harm that transcend the archaic boundaries of online and offline realms. To adequately address the increasingly complex nature of violence on digital platforms, it is paramount to understand how digital platforms may modify and amplify violent behavior and content. The initial step in such efforts is to contextualize violence within its cultural and historical settings. Accordingly, this panel explores digital manifestations of violence as experienced and perceived within specific socio-cultural contexts. The papers presented delve into four case studies from diverse socio-cultural contexts (Colombia, Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and Syria), and touch upon pressing contemporary issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anti-religion protest in Iran, and the recent earthquakes in Syria. These case studies aim to explore the impact and reach of various forms of violence manifested on digital platforms. Panelists unpack ways of inciting, reproducing, expressing, and countering violence, enacted through a wide variety of media practices (such as memes, tweets and viral videos) across various platforms (including TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp). In this panel we seek to build bridges and deepen our understanding of the complex and multifaceted dynamics of digital violence by exploring possible solutions for mitigating its detrimental impact.

In this fishbowl session, we propose to debate the AoIR’s theme for 2023, “revolution”, from its connection to ways of knowing, research and methods. By starting this conversation with five digital ethnographers, we are going to discuss, with theories and practices, what ethnography is, does and promises for the future once the “digital” is added to it not as an inevitable move for the method, but as an opportunity that welcome problematization and inquiries in face of our works and the experiences shared by the AoIR community attending the session.

We are inspired by the response that sociologist and ethnographer Mario Small gave to an issue on digital ethnography organized by Jessa Lingel and Jeff Lane published last year. In an afterwards comment he states that “Digital ethnography, if the researchers are up to it, will be the site of the most important new social theory.” (Small, 2022). We understand this bold affirmation in two ways. First, if when looking from a “digital” standpoint, the material world looks different (Rosa, 2022), which new expressions of the “social” can be known through digital ethnography when instead of accepting the current “social” theories, we are also open to reimagine its configurations and possibilities (Latour, 2005)? Secondly, in “...embrac[ing] digital ethnographies that retain the inconveniences of ethnography: of meeting people where they’re at, doing the things that participants are doing on their time and not on our own...” (Lane & Lingel, 2022,p. 322) what is that that the “digital” adds not only to traditional ethnography but also to our understanding of social phenomena by including technology design and new dynamics and sociabilities in the explanation (Ferrari, 2022; Ross Arguedas, 2022)?

Open to attendants’ participation and contributions, this session is designed to be interactive, inclusive, and intellectually engaging.

This proposal is for an Experimental Session at AOIR 2023 that will be led by a hybrid collective of scholars and practitioners (some are one or the other or both) including digital artists, ethnographers, technologists, activists, hackers, and makers. We are Argentinian, British, and Mexican working across those countries the US and beyond. Some of us work at Higher Education Institutes and/or run civic technology spaces inside and outside of these institutions. Over the last 3-years we have been working together to think about the relationship between digital technologies and resistance—whether that is thinking about digital representations of gender inequities and violence (Ricaurte 2019, Benjamin 2019); who makes (Suchman 2007), has access to or agency over digital technology (Siles et al 2021, Matzner 2019); how to build more equitable technologies (Gray & Witt 2021, Davis et al. 2021) or how to layer on to existing infrastructures (D’Ignacio & Klein 2020). A central theme of this work has been how technologies and algorithms are felt at the site of the body, as lived, embodied, ‘convivial’ and what this means for decisions and decision making.

We propose a 2-hour workshop that will first explore algorithms through the body, drawing on experiments from our collaborations and our collective work in order to explore bodies not only as lived, embodied and affective, but also as gendered, raced, located: this exploration will involve movement, sound and playful engagement with algorithmic concepts. From this we will enter into a guided conversation as to how these algorithms emerge in digital culture and through infrastructures and systems (ML). We develop from this discussion to work in small groups to produce visual, sonic and tactile responses through practice led and participatory methods. These explorations and responses will be live documented through sound, video and photography and the material outcomes displayed through the remainder of the conference as an exhibition provisionally titled Algorithmic Resistance, Tactics and the Body.

The workshop and materials will be in English and Spanish. This proposal was originally written in English for the purpose of the word count, but its corresponding Spanish version is attached.

Benjamin, R. (2019) Race After Technology. Polity. London

Davis, Jenny, L.,Williams, Apryl, Yang, Michael W. (2021) ‘Algorithmic reparation’, Big Data & Society, pp. 1–12. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211044808.

D’Ignazio, C. and Klein, L. F. 2020. Data Feminism. Cambridge MA. MIT Press.

Gray, Joanne E. and Witt, Alice (2021) ‘A Feminist Data Ethics of Care Framework for Machine Learning: The what, why, who and how’, First Monday, 26(12). Available at: https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/11833/10528?inline=1#author.

Matzner, T. 2019. ‘The Human Is Dead – Long Live the Algorithm! Human- Algorithmic Ensembles and Liberal Subjectivity’ Theory, Culture and Society 36(2), 123-144

Ricaurte, P. 2019. ‘Data Epistemologies: The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance’ Television and New Media 20(4): 350-365

Siles, Ignacio, Gómez Cruz, Edgar, Ricaurte, Paula (2021) ‘Toward a popular theory of algorithms’, Popular Communication The International Journal of Media and Culture, online first, pp. 1–10. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2022.2103140.

Suchman, L. 2007. Agencies in Technology Design: Feminist Reconfigurations. Unpublished Manuscript.

Social media have changed the ways we communicate, meet others, and form intimate relationships. However, technology can also mediate intimate partner surveillance and abuse (Muise, 2009; Tokunaga, 2010). One of the most explicit ways to understand these shifts is through the transgressing of relationship boundaries, defined and enforced by settler-colonial notions of compulsory monogamy (TallBear, 2020). Anxieties around cheating have evolved along with our technologies, as evidenced by ambiguous new terms like “microcheating” and “emotional cheating” (Lusinski, 2018). In this in-progress, mixed-methods study, we examine new definitions of cheating through analyzing discussions about potential transgressions on Reddit. Specifically, we investigate 1) which behaviors cause uncertainty in emerging forms of social media-enabled infidelity and 2) the degree to which relationship discourse online naturalizes the extension of compulsory monogamy into online space. For our pilot analysis, we used computational techniques to elicit common subjects within subreddit posts to then analyze qualitatively. We began with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), an unsupervised natural language processing tool, to organize Reddit posts and comments by topic (Blei, 2012). Then we qualitatively analyzed Reddit discourse by using critical discourse analysis. Our pilot analysis suggested a belief that proof of (in)fidelity can be found on a partner’s smartphone, such as by reading texts. This orientation toward evidence then justifies surveillance and hacking of a partner’s phone and computer presence, construing the invasion of privacy as the right to truth. This preliminary finding suggests that discourse around transgressive behaviors on social media likely reiterates compulsory monogamy and settler sexuality.

Hinge to happily ever after is an arduous process in which dating apps place the burden of risk management on users. Women across the U.S. have joined regional “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” private Facebook groups to manage the ambiguities of dating, crowdsource information on men, and provide social support to other women experiencing the tribulations of modern dating. Using discourse analysis, this study analyzes the collective sensemaking practices of AWDTSG groups in relation to constructing knowledge, managing privacy boundaries, content moderation, and providing social support. Preliminary analysis reveals three major findings: Facebook groups provide a space of empowerment, however anticipated acts of moderation shape how knowledge claims are formed and legitimized. Second, group level moderation enacted by admins is understood by members as a means of community protection against platform interventions and interpersonal conflict with the outgroup. Third, social support is an integral part of knowledge creation, resisting cultural logics that socialize women to see each other as competitors in the dating sphere. These findings contribute to our understanding of how ICTs may be used in the service reclaiming gossip as a mode of resistance through the act of collective sensemaking.

While there is considerable research on the topic of trust when it comes to health information or news media, there is less work examining how trust and expertise are conceptualized for information that straddles both subjective and objective approaches to knowledge. “Skincare”, as it is engaged with on the subreddit r/SkincareAddiction, exists in such a space, occupying a liminal positioning between formalized bioscience and experiential/aesthetic knowledge. Depending on where a member places skin care on this spectrum influences who they view as credible experts, and in turn what information that member deems trustworthy. Using an STS/Feminist STS theoretical framing, this paper investigates how members of the subreddit r/SkincareAddiction identify, evaluate, and perform skincare expertise. These expressions of expertise provide valuable insight into how members negotiate community norms, personal experience, and scientific studies to not only discern skincare knowledge, but also construct an understanding of their own skin.

Social media applications are an important medium of crisis information exchange. Of growing importance and use is TikTok, an application with a multi-modal curation structure that enables users to share content of various interests. Previous TikTok scholarship on crisis research has not considered how the application sustains a cultural understanding of a crisis event. Using a semiotic analysis approach, this study explores TikTok’s role in crisis communication by examining the process of collective sensemaking of the Port of Beirut, Lebanon explosion on August 4th, 2020. The preliminary findings reveal intersemiotic dissonance obscuring crisis discourse, thus negatively influencing the process of collective sensemaking. The results of this study motivate further research that examines tacit guidelines for crisis communication on TikTok and similar applications.

This paper considers the growing user accounts and community on the Chinese lifestyle social media platform Xiaohongshu of women who work as English-language TikTok live shopping streamers. Among these live streamers, many were previously English teachers who experienced a significant decrease in their streams of income due to China’s government-led crackdown of the education industry in 2021. As TikTok wishes to globalize the success of integrating e-commerce with entertainment media, it launched live shopping in UK, US, and Southeast Asia, featuring sellers based in China. Sellers and intermediaries increasingly recruit women with English-speaking capacities to sell products targeting global female consumers. Many Chinese women working in English-language live shopping use Xiaohongshu to document their professional paths and share their experiences with those also interested in joining this profession, as Xiaohongshu becomes China’s biggest lifestyle platform with a female-dominant user base. This paper asks how women mobilize Xiaohongshu’s textual, audiovisual, and interactive functions for creating inspirational content based on their experiences with professionalization in platformed cultural and economic production, and for building a community of potential mutual aid. I propose to conceptualize the work of these live streamers in their cross-platform cultural production on Xiaohongshu as “inspirational labor,” which fosters communities for collectively navigating precarious labor realities. Furthermore, this research also situates the proliferation of this particular type of cultural production within the gendered division of labor in China’s platform economy and the broader social contexts of labor precarity that happens at the intersection of capitalism and authoritarianism in contemporary China.

This essay draws out the nuances of digital platform politics and community building through digital ethnographic field work and discourse analysis within the Twitch.TV (Twitch) content creator community. Throughout 2020 and 2021, as the pandemic continued to surge, people confined in their homes turned towards live streaming in record numbers. This influx of users in spaces like Twitch exacerbated moderation and algorithm issues that demanded attention. One phenomenon, the act of a “hate raid” is of particular interest in this analysis. Hate raiding is the act of a Twitch live streamer bringing over their audience to another content creator’s stream for the purposes of harassment and antagonism. For months throughout 2020, Twitch Inc., refused to make infrastructural changes to prevent these occurrences, which were disproportionately targeting Black, trans, and femme content creators on the platform. As a result, creators banded together to develop resources to help creators protect their streaming spaces through plugins, stream deck programs, and other infrastructure “hacks.”

To understand the social and political culture ramifications of Twitch during this time, I contend that the application of rhetorical theories around place and space illuminates how digital users are engaging with these platforms and galvanizing the communities they cultivate there for political action (Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011; Lefebvre, 1991).

On Tuesday, February 7th, 2023, a collective of trans activists, upset over J.K. Rowling’s embrace of trans-exclusionary ideologies, flocked to the livestreaming platform Twitch to express their opposition to the promotion of Hogwarts Legacy: a 3D open-world action role-playing game set in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. For the next 24 hours, channels featuring the game provided a staging ground for an explosion of political activity (and a level of player engagement that executives from Warner have described as spectacular), featuring protestors clashing with anti-protestors in frenetically scrolling chats with livestreamers (and their moderators) reacting disparagingly. By bringing research on livestreaming, affective labor, and platform studies into conversation with research on affective economies, media archaeology, and information capitalism this paper uses the events of February 7th to provide a critical media framework for understanding how livestreaming platforms use asynchronous chat as a mechanism for amplifying and filtering the tactical use of noise into metrics of engagement. In other words, this paper is not interested in arguing over the ethics of revolutionary tactics being used by trans activists as much as it is interested in the mechanisms that platforms (and corporations) are using to amplify, filter and extract value from the noise generated by these arguments, which are driven by an affective stew of anger and pain, on the one hand, and joy and nostalgia on the other.

From greenscreens in the bedroom to webcams on refrigerators, household surfaces underlie the broadcast of personality on Twitch.tv, Amazon’s $15 billion platform for live video entertainment. This paper examines how homemaking and visibility are co-conceptualized in the labour of gendered and racialized game live streamers. Drawing from a virtual ethnography of Twitch creators’ domestic spaces in North America (n=12), I document the staging of household visibility in relation to Twitch’s affordances of on-demand broadcast and play. Extending feminist and social reproduction theorizations of housework, I discuss how this convergence of house- and sight-making reifies the gaming industry’s historic reliance upon unremunerated spousal support.

How such marginalised Twitch streamers calibrate opacity between their broadcasts and their homes reveals the affinities between platform aggregation and domestic privatisation on local and global scales. The converging geographies of labour, leisure, and living demanded by Twitch represent more than ancillary sites where gameplay(ers) are visually recomposed as “web-ready” for live platform(ization). Rather, the management of a domestic timespace on Twitch represents a struggle for autonomy over the means of cultural production by workers across social media entertainment. This paper reframes “Bleed Purple” as more than Twitch’s company slogan, branded by emojis. Rather, it proffers Twitch as a vital case study on why social reproduction and feminist theories are integral to deepening our understanding of platform work, in and beyond the home.

Hackers, activists, and journalists have been throwing cryptoparties—crowdsourced skillshares for anti-surveillance and digital privacy tools—for over a decade. But the dream of cryptoparties creating "encryption for the masses" has passed, as surveillance capitalism becomes entrenched. Encrypted messaging apps like Whatsapp and Signal have done more to popularize end-to-end encryption than classical tools like Pretty Good Privacy, which require technical skill to use and a community to make them useful. How did a term like "crypto," which was a center of political organizing for privacy and free speech in the United States for decades, become so quickly hollowed out and exploited to sell blockchain products? I conducted an oral history of the cryptoparty movement, in New York City, and analyzed the recollections and perceptions of its organizers to unpick how existing activist spaces, open source culture, and information institutions like libraries were bound together and exhibited through cryptoparties. Existing media-studies literature has criticized cryptoparties as "reactive data activism," but this history shows how complicated a politics of populist encryption was, in practice. While open-source encryption tools met the privacy needs of the (mostly male) programmers that created them, cryptoparty organizers recognized the mismatch between the design of their tools and the diverse publics of their events (e.g., their limited options to prevent online harassment). Rather than providing "weapons of the weak," cryptoparties were a space of community infrastructure and discussion as people grappled with the uncomfortable idea that the Internet is a place of vulnerability rather than security.

During the Black Lives Matter protests, the Breonna Taylor case was another moment in which police brutality gained attention. Despite minimal coverage by mainstream media, activists utilized social media to raise awareness and engage with people worldwide.

TikTok, despite its perception as a platform for entertainment, was utilized as a means of political participation, allowing users to interact and perform new forms of activism (Medina Serrano et al., 2020).

The aim of this work is to explore how sound can influence political expression on TikTok, as well as the creators and the audience involved in. The research adopts the theoretical framework of networked participation (Boccia Artieri, 2021) and analyzes the relationship between music, politics, and TikTok, with a focus on sound's role in searchability, one of the platform's primary affordances. The study qualitatively evaluated 1644 videos produced between July 2020 and May 2022, collecting the top five comments for each.

The results indicate that TikTok's affordances, structure, and visibility logic can shape the political narrative and enhance participation.

The idea of the “metaverse” or virtual reality has recently exploded in national conversations about immersive technology. This project explores how Breonna’s Garden, a virtual reality experience, functions technologically as both a domestic and public space for communities to process grief, rage, and trauma privately. My research suggests that virtual reality spaces can allow Black counterpublics to transform private and collective grief into political activism through public remembrance. I draw upon Black feminist scholar bell hooks’ “homeplace” and Black digital theorist Catherine Squires’ “counterpupublic” to consider the messiness of virtual reality spaces as both private and public space for large groups to register and process collective grief. I argue for Breonna’s Garden as a liminal homeplace that reflects the revolutionary vision of the Say Her Name campaign by drawing upon past legacies of Black resistive strategies, oral stories, and discursive traditions. The framework of the liminal homeplace theorizes Breonna’s Garden as a personalized experience of witnessing who Taylor was, validating the audiences’ emotions of grief and outrage; calling for justice; dismantling oppression; and creating a counternarrative that celebrates Taylor’s full humanity.

On 3 October 2020, a 22 years young man, Joshua Ambrose, was shot dead by a team of the Nigerian Police Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in Delta State, Nigeria, on the allegation that he was an Internet fraudster (Dambo et al., 2021). The SARS was established in 1992 to curb crimes. However, the SARS has been accused of gross humanrights violations (Wada, 2021). Joshua's shooting was captured in a video. The audio in the video states that the Police just shot and killed the owner of a Lexus SUV and zoomed off with his car (Agbo, 2021). In a few days, the viral video generated outrage that transformed into vast decentralised street protests in major cities in Nigeria, mainly organised through social media. EndSARS Movement continues to construct memories across time, an area dominated by Western studies (Daphi & Zamponi, 2019). Researchers (Nwakanma, 2022; Dambo et al., 2021; Nwabunnia, 2021; Ajaegbu et al., 2022) have explored the EndSARS Movement from diverse perspectives. Nonetheless, the literature is devoid of studies from the memory study perspective, a critical area in social movement studies (Smit, 2020; Merill & Lindgren, 2020). Besides, considering the online feature of the Movement, the current literature on EndSARS needs to include the novelty and methodological rigour of virtual ethnography. Consequently, this study attempts to understand how protesters use Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram Stories (Ephemeral; 24 hours Story) to construct a memory of the EndSARS Movement in Nigeria from 2020 until its Anniversaries in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Digital platforms are increasingly conflicted spaces, where women, LGBTQ+ people, and members of various minorities are disproportionately targeted by hate actors. As a result, their everyday experiences of being and communicating on (overwhelmingly male-coded) platforms differ from those of (cisgender, white) men. Gender as an analytical category thus plays a significant role in understanding the dynamics of online misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Though some research has been done, there is a dearth of scholarship on gender as it relates to mis- and disinformation. Gender has been explored as a content category in misinformation narratives and campaigns, such as the notion of “gender ideology” in Russian propaganda in Europe (Sata 2021, Graff and Korolczuk 2021), and in conservative law and policymaking in the United States (Tripodi, 2022, 38). Attention has also been paid to the ways in which the production and reception of misinformation are gendered, for example how female influencers produce misinformation that targets their female audiences (Baker 2022) or how different types of narratives are perceived differently by men and women (Almenar et al 2021). This panel invites further research into gender and misinformation, broadly conceived, exploring what gendered misinformation and disinformation that targets cisgender women and gender minorities looks like in practice, in a variety of global contexts.

The papers included in this panel explore misinformation through the lens of gender in a variety of ways, including by introducing novel feminist methodological approaches; offering definitions of what “gendered misinformation,” might refer to, and how it functions distinctly; investigating the rhetorical and epistemic aspects of platformized neoliberal, white, and conservative feminisms; and asking what feminized mis- and disinformation looks like in practice. By covering examples from different geographical contexts (the United States, Central Europe, and the Middle East) and a wide range of topics (the anti-abortion movement, misogynistic deepfakes, gendered health misinformation, and feminized, fandom-adjacent conspiracy theories), this panel aspires to open a debate about defining gendered mis- and disinformation as an interdisciplinary research field.

The first paper, “The Use of Digital Audio and Visual Disinformation and Malinformation Weapons in Smear Campaigns Against Women,” explores the role of visual and auditory deepfakes in the spread of gendered misinformation. The paper addresses the phenomenon from multiple angles, using a framework of visual ethics to explore the perspectives and practices of both the creators of sexist deepfake videos, as well as the women affected by them. The second paper, “Affordances and visual misogyny: Towards feminist approaches in visual methods,” also focuses on the visual, introducing the notion of platformed visual misogyny through four case studies that illustrate a new, feminist affordance theory approach to visual methods, useful for addressing hate content in on various platforms. The third paper, “‘Having It All’ in the Absence of Abortion: Anti-Abortion Pop Feminism and the Pitfalls of Platformed Neoliberal Feminism,” explores the dynamics of multiple platformized feminisms, specifically the ways in which the anti-abortion movement has successfully appropriated neoliberal feminist rhetorical strategies The paper details how the meritocratic logics at the heart of neoliberal feminism have both enabled large-scale movements like #MeToo, and continually reified a corporatized, universalized experience of wealthy white cisgender womanhood. The fourth paper, “Are You a Gaylor or a Hetlor?: Epistemic Boundary Work, Conspiracy Theories of Queerness, and White Feminism in Online Taylor Swift Fan Cultures,” examines the fan cultures that have sprung up around a singular emblem of white neoliberal feminism, Taylor Swift. This paper questions whether the epistemic boundaries drawn by so-called “Gaylors” (fans who claim the singer is closeted) subvert Swift’s hyper-capitalist white feminism, or reinforce it through tacit endorsement of her unspoken and unconfirmed alleged queerness. The fifth and final paper, “My Body is My Sanctuary: Influencers and Gendered Health Disinformation,” investigates another example of the repackaging of neoliberal feminist logics: women Instagram influencers’ weaponization of the notion of female empowerment to create semi-closed spaces for political deliberation on the platform and, by doing so, successfully bridge the gap between fringe and mainstream disinformation and conspiracy content.

These papers demonstrate the breadth and depth of this new subfield of mis- and disinformation studies. Taken together, they demonstrate that gender is a necessary and often overlooked analytical category when considering the spread and staying power of disinformation and conspiracy theories. As papers on this panel variously introduce new concepts, including gendered misinformation, platformed visual misogyny, feminist affordance theory, feminized disinformation, platformized feminisms, and white feminist conspiracy theories in several global contexts, this panel will serve as a jumping off point for further work that is necessary to define these novel concepts fully and establish the state of the field.

Members of Latinx communities from across the Americas have a history of building technologies that span space and time, as Traqueros who built the U.S. transcontinental railroad, in the Mexican border maquiladoras, in the telecommunications sector, and in the development of Spanish language podcasting and radio systems (Jimenez 2016, 2019, 2020; Pena 1997; Villa-Nicholas 2022). Today, however, as the transnational gig work of the Americas is increasingly datafied (Posada 2022), as technology companies regularly contract with ICE and look to tech innovations for the securing of national borders, as the securing of borders has entered the popular imagination through first-person shooter games that target immigrants (Llamas-Rodriguez 2021), as misinformation campaigns impact Latinx communities’ trust in evidence-based health prevention (Rivera et al. 2021) and reshape older forms of authoritarianism in Latin America (Magalhães 2019), and new methodologies of mutuality are embraced to combat this distrust (Gonzales et al. 2021; Rivera 2018; Jimenez et al. 2021), issues of migration and human rights are at this field's forefront.

Scholars who identify with this area draw upon work in anti-Blackness and technology, digital Black feminism, and critical race and internet studies (Benjamin, 2019; Brock, 2020; Florini, 2019; Noble, 2018; Steele 2021). But of particular concern is the fact that Today, members of Latinx communities are acutely subjected to what Melissa Villa-Nicholas (2023) has termed ambiguous “data borders,” as they are increasingly denied the right to see, feel, or recognize the borders between their own bodies and the systems of surveillance and data extraction that track them.

Each roundtable member speaks for 5 minutes, describing a major theme in Latinx Internet studies that runs through their own work and offering a starting point for a robust discussion of how the field builds on past and current efforts and where it is going in the future.

This is one of two panels organized by the AoIR Ethics Working Committee. This panel on “Emergent Challenges” collects three papers exploring a broad range of emergent research practices and contexts that present ethical challenges for internet research, while also providing possible roadmaps towards addressing these concerns, including the need for a pluralistic view of research ethics in a global context.. Emergent challenges addressed by this collection of papers include: working through the obstacles and pressures that researchers experience when conducting research on technologies across a range of diverse constituencies; investigating the varying understandings of what constitutes “ethical” or “unethical” internet research practices across national, institutional, and disciplinary contexts; and exploring how human subjects research ethics is understood and applied in China, complicating “western” ethical guidelines as universal principles. These papers are among those under consideration for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society associated with the AoIR Ethics Working Committee and AoIR2023.

This panel charts disparate histories of early internet formations: building from and contributing to the growing body of work which operates across technical interfaces, infrastructures, and cultures of use to paint a more complete picture of how internet and computing cultures, as we now know them, came to be. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, these accounts work against hegemonic, top-down, “revolutionary” narratives of historical internet cultural and infrastructural development. Rather than revolutionary, this collection of papers views the development of new media as a sort of continual updating of technological norms through existing neoliberal logics. In case studies ranging from transgender identity to furry infrastructure, from German leftism to Canadian youth culture – this research offers new interventions, drawing from across geographies and temporalities and further problematizing the popular framing of any singular “internet.”

Over the last two decades, visibility has emerged as an organizing principle within internet studies research--from sociologies of digital labor and theories of surveillance capitalism to critical reappraisals of mediated identity politics. In commercial contexts, visibility has been defined as a valuable form of currency or capital--be it achieved, bestowed through an incentive system, or manipulated through so-called “gaming” practices (Bucher, 2012; Hearn, 2010; Gandini, 2016; Cotter, 2018). Visibility can also be understood as an expression of power, particularly when it is exerted by platforms and/or individuals in order to enable or thwart scrutiny and surveillance. These and other works foreground the role of algorithms in the allocation of visibility; indeed, algorithmic systems organize, select, and distribute different types of content, either revealing or concealing particular subjectivities, representations and values.

However, despite its rich analytical purchase, the concept of visibility calls for grounding in particular contexts and communities of practice. The four papers in this panel thus seek to explore how contemporary economies of visibility (Wiegman, 1995; Banet-Weiser, 2015) play out in particular platform labor markets. Drawing on distinctive case studies across cultures and platforms, we consider how visibility is defined, by whom, and to what ends for various social actors in the platform economy.

Writing from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, each panelist examines how visibility is constructed--and, in some cases, contested--within a particular context.

This panel presents research on web and information infrastructures used for manipulative purposes. In contrast to platform manipulation (Woolley & Howard, 2018; Benkler et al., 2018), where users such as bad actors seek to gamify and exploit the weaknesses of online social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok, the papers in the present panel describe studies where web or information infrastructures such as those involved in search and information retrieval are manipulated to alter or produce facts (rather than social commentary on facts). For example, studies have shown how infrastructures like Google Search are manipulated by conservative elites (Tripodi, 2022), how anonymous editors use Wikidata to revise the distribution of information related to political protest movements (Ford, 2022), and how administrators harness information schemas to improve the findability of their advertising content (Iliadis, 2022). In these areas and more, web and digital infrastructures are being manipulated to serve the interests of politically motivated actors (Acker, 2018; Acker & Donovan, 2019).

Infrastructures typically refer to shared public services like sewers, telephone poles, and electricity. According to Bowker et al. (2010, p. 98), information infrastructure refers to “digital facilities and services usually associated with the internet.” Information infrastructures are thus enabling resources, in network form, whose key role is that of a distributor, but rather than goods or services, information infrastructures distribute “knowledge, culture, and practice” (Bowker et al., 2010, p. 114). Such structures do this through their development of ontologies or classification schemes that enable dividing the world into categories or, through their application to large data sets, by offering an enormous, open store of data that can be used by others for a variety of purposes, such as retrieving facts and sharing information. Recently, several scholars have elaborated on the political nature of such infrastructural processes of digitization and datafication, including in the domains of archiving and preservation (Thylstrup, 2018, 2022), governance and management (Flyverbom & Murray, 2018), metrics and sorting (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2021), and the creation of global ontologies for things like web search (Iliadis et al., 2023) and surveillance services (Iliadis & Acker, 2022).

Manipulation of social media content and messaging is likewise a major research area over the last several years owing to the prevalence of online misinformation and disinformation campaigns (Reagle, 2016; Paris, 2021; Culloty & Suiter, 2021), particularly those associated with electoral politics (Tucker & Persily, 2020) and health misinformation (Keselman et al., 2022). Yet, online manipulation is not a new phenomenon and has long been discussed as a feature of the web in the context of the history of trolling, abuse, and hate (Phillips, 2015, 2019). Manipulation is thus a multivalent concept and is found in several domains which share the notion that manipulation is related to the altering, editing, treating, controlling, and influencing of content and messages for the purpose of misleading individuals. Historically, though, less attention has focused on manipulation as it has been mobilized infrastructurally, particularly with respect to the information infrastructures that transmit content and messages. Infrastructures should be understood here in a broad sense as undergirding the communication structures that transmit messages and content. Such infrastructures can be found in computer science, news and journalism, government, policy, and other areas where messaging is organized using some form of schema, whether it be technical, linguistic, financial, or otherwise.

The first paper uses interviews to highlight the “importance of abortion-related web search and whether or not that system has been manipulated by actors trying to prevent abortion access.” The paper “examines how people (users) search for information about abortion, how organizations (content providers) utilize search engine optimization to reach potential users, and how advertisers try to attract visitors.” The second paper uses autoethnography and process tracing with respect to “the AP African American Studies debacle in order to elucidate digitally mediated disinformation as a strategy for stoking moral panic and thereby gaining widespread public buy-in to the establishment of educational censorship infrastructure.” The third paper analyzes Palantir as a surveillance platform that shapes and is shaped by infrastructures of manipulation. The paper “provides a method for researching companies like Palantir and its surveillance infrastructures” through digital media archiving of “over 600+ documents which have been stored, cleaned, annotated, and uploaded into an online digital archive that will be publicly available for media researchers to study.” The fourth and final paper is “an ethnographic study of a single Wikipedia article and how it evolved over the course of a decade” in the context of political revolutons. The paper describes “a framework for understanding new methods of controlling facts in the context of automated knowledge products” and “the importance of semantic infrastructure to new methods of control and influence on Wikipedia and the wider knowledge infrastructures that are increasingly dependent on it.”

This paper explores what I call the digital bahdala, the colloquial Arabic word for the state or moment of humiliation or ridicule, in the context of what is framed as national collapse. It does so by turning to two sets of YouTubers in Egypt and Lebanon who rely on a steady stream of other users’ TikTok content to produce their own in the aftermath of national revolutions and economic crises. It shows how these YouTubers employ didactic performances of national repair, using not only the affordances but imaginaries of the Internet to juxtapose what is framed as embarrassing with what is framed as moral or respectable. It draws on the literature on respectability politics to show how these performances work to enforce an aspirational social and economic mobility, one which is under threat for postcolonial nations dependent on former colonizing countries and transnational capital regimes for their political and economic futures. By employing textual analysis of three YouTubers’ videos and political economic analysis of the relationship between Arab TikTok and YouTube, I offer that localized practices of respectability become global performances of nationalist identity when they take place on social media platforms, allowing audiences to take part by deciding what is cringey, immoral, or humiliating as a way of repairing threatened national codes. It is the aim of this paper to generate discussion about the intersections between empire and communication theory and offer alternative frameworks for theories of technology and power.

The condition of road infrastructure in New Orleans is recognized among citizens as unacceptably poor. This problem is situated in the context of a long list of problems with the municipal government and city services that have combined to create an atmosphere of distrust and deep frustration. On Instagram, ‘Look At This F*ckin’ Street’ exists to document failing local infrastructure and has nearly 100,000 followers and an active culture of crowdsourced user submissions and regular engagement in comments and reposts. In this paper, I utilize Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to explore all of the relevant discursive modalities seen in the account in order to uncover how they work to challenge and ultimately undermine power. Via an open coding process, I identify three main strategies employed by the anonymous account manager and the participating followers: Shaming, Mocking, and Exposing. Within each of these strategies, I explore the specific techniques observed within these discourses that contribute to the effectiveness of these strategies. I argue that LATFS is an effective and powerful participatory platform for exposing a broad range of systemic problems and their causes, allowing residents to take back the narrative of their city’s infrastructure challenges, diminish and demean the powerful interests responsible, and, ultimately attempt to reclaim the power lost to negligent or even bad-faith municipal authorities in New Orleans.

With the rise of feminist sentiment and the growing awareness of gender equity in China, social media has become an increasingly central space for Chinese feminist expression. However, the complex dynamics of feminist expression in these online spaces—and the role of popular culture in facilitating such discourse—are still to be fully elucidated. Here, focusing on the understudied social media platform Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), we analyze the online discussion sparked by the stand-up comedy acts of Chinese female comedians. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of Douyin videos and related comments, we demonstrate how users employed the platform’s creative features to challenge everyday sexism by echoing or building upon the stand-up comedians’ gags. At the same time, the analysis also uncovers how Douyin is used to insult and push back against these feminist voices. Our findings shed light on the sophisticated role of Douyin as a platform for digital feminist expression, and the ways in which it can amplify both feminist discourse or, conversely, give voice to misogynistic attacks.

Striving to advance our understanding of how social media is used by Sudanese people to engage in politics and continue their resistance against an authoritarian regime, this study examines how online humor facilitated political expression after the December Revolution. Using thematic analysis of user-generated content posted on the Shabab Hilween Facebook page, the main social media outlet of prominent Sudanese youth content creators, this research attempts to highlight how youth-created humorous videos prompted political expression among Sudanese social media users. The findings highlight the significance of proactive memefication and templatization as an act the page owners use to generate community user-generated content. Hundreds of memefied screenshots created or appropriated by users were observed in the comment section to address unfolding political events. This begs the question of what content is essentially popular culture for Sudanese people, especially youth, who, due to years of censorship and propaganda, have no interest in mainstream media? This study discusses the role of Sudanese content creators in addressing this cultural void. The analysis also reveals how Sudanese social media users sought political catharsis and collective relief from the Shabab Hilween page’s humorous videos and the comment section.

This paper is a case study of the organization The Trust Project, the global coalition of news media and publishers that emerged out of these round tables and these concerns, and their efforts to influence standards-making (including the categorization of media, as well as prioritization and recommendation) at the major platform companies. The Trust Project, founded by Sally Lehrman, is comprised of over 200 news media organizations around the world. The goals of The Trust Project were twofold: (1) To guide publishers on how to make ethical commitments more transparent and visible to potential readers; and (2) To make these commitments “machine-readable” in the hopes that platforms would use this information to differentiate them from other, including user-generated, information sources competitors (Smith, 2017).

This paper explores The Trust Project, and its relationships with platform companies, as a case study to examine how platform companies – as organizations and as technologies – do or do not adopt the values of other industries and professional communities. It uses institutional theory to make the case that specific inter-organizational dynamics can facilitate or inhibit how these values are or are not translated into specific technologies and media. This work demonstrates that organizational constraints and a lack of transparency/access into the operation of platforms, limit the effectiveness of these networked efforts, leading external organizations to make significant investments while still having limited influence.

Generic visuals – that is, images with standardized formats and appearances and which perform particular design functions, such as stock photos and simple data visualizations – circulate with increasing frequency, often on social media, given their ‘shareability’ (Hanusch and Bruns 2017). They populate digital journalism and other online information sources, across apps and platforms, yet unlike arresting, iconic photographs or award-winning data visualizations in the news, generic visuals have been the subject of little academic scrutiny.

To understand whether and how generic visuals play a role in assembling publics, we considered how audiences engage with and make sense of these image types. We carried out 35 interviews with demographically diverse digital news audiences in the UK to explore how they make sense of generic visuals. In this paper, we show how participants negotiated narratives about stock photos (as stereotyped and clichéd) and data visualisations (as truthful) and how these negotiations informed the constitution of mundane publics. Through diverse and multiple engagements with generic visuals shared or encountered online, participants felt connected to others in mundane and everyday ways. We argue that because of their abundance, networked circulation and flexibility, generic visuals can be seen as resources for people to think about their personal lives in relation to a greater whole, and therefore central to what Hariman (2016) defines as ‘public culture’, that is, ‘the envelope of communication practices within which public opinion is formed’.

In this work, we chart the multiple conflicts between stakeholders in the pursuit of a common standard for fact-checking outside Western Industrialized Educated Rich and Educated (WEIRD) countries, a problem that sits at the center of the institutional mission of fact-checkers as watchdogs of politicians and enforcers of content moderation. We apply reflexive thematic analysis to a set of interviews with 37 fact-checking experts from 35 organizations in 27 countries to catalogue the methods employed by fact-checkers and the pressures they contend with in non-WEIRD countries. In contrast to the one-size-fits-all approach to community guidelines implemented by social platforms worldwide, our results show that the asymmetric relationship with platform companies compels fact-checkers to adjust their methods and strategies to account for the political and cultural dimensions driving mis- and disinformation in their local contexts. Our findings detail three ways through which social platforms impinge on the scope, values, and institutional mission of non-WEIRD fact-checking organizations. As we argue, the platformization of non-WEIRD fact-checkers entails a convoluted process in which social media platforms gradually nudge fact-checkers into becoming part of the content moderation industry, a shift that runs counter to the democracy-building values underpinning the fact-checking movement. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for content moderation both in WEIRD and non-WEIRD contexts.

This paper examines crackdowns on queer content on TikTok and creative responses of content creators to circumvent biased content moderation and cisheteronormative censorship. The first portion of the paper demonstrates TikTok’s recurrent cisheteronormative biases in content moderation decisions and examines select instances of LGBTQ+ content that has been censored on the platform. It also works to situate this within a broader trend of LGBTQ+ censorship across internet platforms. The second portion of the paper examines how LGBTQ+ TikTok users have built up folk knowledges and intuitive understandings of TikTok’s blackboxed algorithms and opaque content moderation policies, situating this discussion within theories of the ‘algorithmic imaginary’. It catalogs the myriad ways that TikTok users work to circumvent LGBTQ+ censorship on the platform (e.g. by tactically obscuring key words in both speech and text and obscuring body parts and scenes). In the final portion of the paper, I draw on the concept of ‘cruising’ and other constitutive silences of LGBTQ+ existence to show how LGBTQ+ users are particularly well suited to producing folk knowledge about blackboxed algorithms. In closing, I examine the affordances and the limitations of LGBTQ+ users’ approach to navigating platform governance – and content moderation practices more specifically – as well as call for more organized and collective action in search of more permanent changes towards LGBTQ+-friendly platforms.

Before the millennium, finding other queer people often involved travelling to a queer venue in a city. Consequently, queer people have been at the forefront of internet technologies such as hook-up apps, namely Grindr. Rural hook-up app use is under-researched, and queer visibility may be more carefully negotiated in rural areas than in cities.

We carried out a qualitative study to establish whether location and/or technology use shaped social, sexual and romantic network creation and/or quality. Thirty-eight participants in cities and rural areas across the UK took part.

We found hook-up apps to be the only source of local queer connection for some rural participants. Users speak of being drawn to these technologies when lonely, yet find they can contribute to feelings of isolation. Being visible, which the pictorial logic of some hook-up apps demands, can be difficult in rurality due to partial ‘outness’ about sexuality. Some fear meeting other app users in public in rural areas due to potential homophobia, yet lack access to private spaces. Some users find innovative ways to meet goals of friendship and community beyond the perceived affordances of sexual hook-ups, such as forming friendship and community groups via or beyond apps.

This demonstrates that hook-up apps are inadequately-tailored tools for participants’ queerness, which extends beyond visible sexuality to negotiated communities and relationships of trust. This contributes to wider understanding of technology’s role in shaping social cohesion across diverse geographies and groups and the demands of visibility of such technologies on users.

Transgender people face substantial challenges in the world, such as discrimination, harassment, and lack of access to basic resources. Some of these challenges could be addressed to some extent with technology. In this paper I examine the world of trans technology design through interviews with 115 creators of trans technologies: apps, games, health resources, and other types of technology. I demonstrate that trans technology design processes are often deeply personal, and focus on the technology creator’s needs and desires. Thus, trans technology design can be empowering because technology creators have agency to create tools they need to navigate the world. However, in some cases when trans communities are not involved in design processes, this can lead to overly individualistic design that speaks primarily to more privileged trans people’s needs.

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study that examines the social implications that platform algorithms raise for LGBTQ+ communities. We share the preliminary results of our Phase 2 group interviews, which were conducted with Canadian social media managers of LGBTQ+ non-profit organizations and with Canada-based LGBTQ+ tech workers. Algorithmic controversies relating to LGBTQ+ communities identified in Phase 1 were used as prompts to elicit discussions among participants. In this paper, we pay close attention to how participants queered dominant algorithmic imaginaries. Our preliminary analysis highlights four main findings. First, participants questioned dominant discourses that depict AI technology as being inherently new, instead re-inscribing algorithmic controversies within a long-lasting history of gender and sexual oppression. Second, participants reconfigured the ideal-type user embedded in sociotechnical systems but also identified challenges with effecting sociotechnical change as LGBTQ+ stakeholders. Third, participants subverted the notion of algorithmic resistance by questioning whether effective technological resistance should rely on technological misuse or disuse. Fourth, participants translated algorithmic controversies via their positionality as LGBTQ+ stakeholders to move beyond purely technicist considerations. Finally, we highlight the importance of mobilizing stakeholders from marginalized communities to contest the dominant discourses through which society makes sense of AI technologies.

Previous studies show that random tweet collections that include more than one hashtag had relatively low rate of unavailable tweets while political related datasets have a higher rate of tweet decay (Almuhimedi et al., 2013; Bastos, 2021; Bhattacharya & Ganguly, 2016; McCammon, 2022; Zubiaga, 2018). For example, Zubiaga’s (2018) study indicates that 81.4% of their 30 randomly selected real-world events datasets remained available after 4 years, while Bastos’ (2021) study shows that only 67% of Brexit debate related tweets were available after the same amount of time. Our preliminary study looks at the #BlackLivesMatter discussion on Twitter and we find that only 63% tweets remain available after 2 years, which is significantly higher compared to the previous studies.

This preliminary work adds to the existing literature in two keyways. First, we broaden the kinds of discussion spaces where information decay has been studied by focusing on #BlackLivesMatter (hereafter, BLM), which in the U.S. has become a highly politicized movement (Stewart et al., 2018). Second, to our best knowledge, this is the first study looking at social movement tweets since Musk took over and it may highlight how the landscape on Twitter has shifted.

Solidarity has been cited as a necessary prerequisite for transformational structural change and therefore contains revolutionary potential (Featherstone, 2012). This paper examines the role and evolution of mediated solidarities, which have become increasingly central to an analysis of social movements with the advent of participatory technologies, by drawing on data from a project on anti-Islamophobic counter-narratives.

Online platforms have the affordances to contest Islamophobic hate speech as demonstrated by the dynamics of #stopIslam following the Brussels terror attack, 2016. In this instance, the hashtag gained its prominence through the contestations of users who sought to question, critique and undermine its original message (reference redacted). However, research has also shown the limitations of social media for online activism, in particular for creating meaningful debates or change (Schradie, 2019).

This paper examines data from a large-scale study that used methods of computational, quantitative, and qualitative analysis to examine the dynamics of discourse about Muslims on Twitter in the case of Brexit, the Christchurch terror attack and Covid. We will examine whether the high incidence of solidarity discourses in this dataset are limited to acts of counter-speech (and other acts of weak solidarity) or if they contribute to sustainable counter-narratives that have implications for wider discursive formations related to Islam. Rather than reinforce existing binary arguments regarding the potentials and limitations of Twitter as a platform for solidarity, we wish to demonstrate the contradictory dynamics of the solidarities that arise from the logics of Twitter which relies on and produces these entanglements.

Using survey data from a 2022 survey of fans that was distributed on Tumblr between February 22 and March 21, 2022, this paper speculatively maps the network of Tumblr. Tumblr is home to fandoms of all kinds, acting as a space where fans can gather, discuss theories, produce fan texts and media, and interact with fanworks, making them one of the key distinctive communities that use the site and a suitable community to investigate the shape of the network. First, we analyze the prevalence of particular demographic answers from the survey over time to find points at which a large number of responses have similar identities. Second, we use the baseline probability of any given answer within our data set to examine times when it becomes disproportionately prevalent compared to elsewhere in the data. Through looking at these correlations between time and probability in specific demographic answers, we can identify moments when the survey was traveling through a homophilic network within the platform, and therefore extract information about how homophily works on this platform. By mapping Tumblr through these survey homophiles, we can gain a greater understanding of how people gather and interact on the platform. This has implications both for questions of community and subcultural belonging, but also issues like the spread of mis- and disinformation.

This research intends to trace, examine and appraise the political economic architecture of social media manipulation using an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach. Our empirical study focuses on a broad category of social media influencers (i.e., microcelebrities, content creators, interest pages) engaged in manipulative work in the 2022 Philippine General Election given its recent history of endemic disinformation in politics, industrialized disinformation operations, and clandestine influencer engagement. We investigate influencers’ participation in covert political campaigning from the lens of political economy in three stages. First, we interrogate the political and economic conditions of disinformation work performed by influencers through digital ethnography and key informant interviews. Second, we map the influencers in their performance of social media manipulation work entangled within large socio-technical networks using computational methods. Thirdly, we integrate these political economic contexts on the ground and online to build an economic model that would estimate the true cost of disinformation campaigns in the Philippines. Our research covers the period of October 2021 to May 2022 across four major social media platforms in the Philippines, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok. By integrating qualitative social science, computational communication research, and economic modeling, the research intends to determine the scale and scope of the obscure political relations and economic transactions among political clients, social media influencers, and technology platforms that facilitate social media manipulation.

How do we challenge a streaming “golden age” characterized by the ceaseless production of expression that repeats and reinforces injustice and inequality? Our media and tech systems prioritize developing stories and platforms to target distinct audiences for profit, but our communities need to cultivate interdependence and solidarity. Healing these injustices, including racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, and other forms of hate, requires a specific method of repair: re-distributing power more equitably to the historically disempowered.

In the last decade in the U.S., what Aymar Jean Christian terms “reparative media,” responding to the social upheaval that political polarization, misinformation, and climate and racial reckoning has burgeoned. Christian writes, “[R]epairing our culture means healing how we make media, how we connect through technology, and how we generate knowledge.” This panel analyzes the concept of reparative media, examines case studies, and analyzes counterrevolutionary pushback. Grounded in U.S. experience, the panel is designed to open a conversation more widely, and create terms under which these issues can be engaged elsewhere.

Unlike previous eras, this era’s reparative media work is grounded in responses to the realities of a digital culture shaped by mega-platforms and instant reaction times. In audio-visual media, streamers (building upon past example in broadcast and cable) have funded or showcased extractive and exploitative programming, such as much of true crime, reality shows, and unapologetically offensive comedy. Scandals about ethics—Yazidi women protesting invasion of privacy in the documentary Sabaya, MENASA filmmakers protesting errors and putting participants at risk in Jihad Rehab, BIPOC filmmakers protesting the all-white, male production crew for a forthcoming film about BIPOC sports star Tiger Woods--have multiplied. The reparative media movement is also informed, in the U.S., by the tide of racial reckoning since 2014. This movement has also been joined by other minoritized voices, including those of people living with disabilities, gender-nonconforming makers, and those experiencing consequences of lacking appropriate immigration status.

However, the reparative work also builds upon efforts in previous eras in self-styled movements for alternative media, community media, public-service media, and activist media. These movements were accompanied by extensive communications research—much of it done in a collaborative way with practitioners—that allows us to understand today’s reparative media in context. These movements have shared common expectations that media produced by and for underheard members of society are essential parts of movements for social change.

The panel provides both theoretical and practice-oriented roads into the discussion, which we expect to be between a third and a half of the time allotted. Panelists also strive to provide examples and illustrations relevant to the conference venue of Philadelphia.

The first speaker will address the concepts of reparative media and reparative research and development. Reparative research is work that is not only about but with reparative media communities, using both quantitative and qualitative research. Reparative story development is about the practice of developing narratives that confront, challenge, and provide alternatives to systemically oppressive storytelling. Reparative platform development is the work of building training, distribution and showcasing alternatives to today’s digital mega-platforms. This presentation will use case studies to illustrate the three categories.

The second speaker will use a cultural-production analysis to focus upon reparative story development practices, looking closely at a two-year process to create standards for values-driven documentary production, a process triggered in part by alarm at streamer fecklessness. The process, which itself included reparative research, is analyzed for its challenges as well as its conclusions. Reception within the documentary community of the resulting document, a values-based framework for a six-part production process, is discussed, as is engagement by gatekeepers such as streamers, broadcasters and production companies. The presentation then focuses on attacks, benefiting from a veneer of legitimacy from centrist mainstream media, that leverage a conservative activists’ invocation on of “woke cancel culture,” to demonize the assertion of such values.

The third speaker will address reparative platform development. In the U.S., community media centers, based in cable systems and offering educational, governmental, and public access channels, have their origins in 1970s citizen activism. But CMCs have shown an ability not only to survive but to reinvent themselves both technologically and in terms of community reparative work. The paper focuses on one such example, in Philadelphia, where communities of color have been actively working to address systemic harms and bolster community strength with hyperlocal media. In discussing the work of creating content for such systems, the paper also reveals the infrastructural affordances and limitations mediamakers encounter. Such forces reveal the systemic forces that threaten the evolution of such media.

The discussant, with deep experience in reparative research in the Philadelphia media community and nationally, will infuse their commentary with location-specific references. Finally, panelists will provide in closing a brief, slideshow mini-tour of Philadelphia sites of reparative media work.

Introductory statement

The rise of digital technologies has brought about significant changes in revolutionary projects across Africa. The impact of these technologies on social movements and activism is complex and multi-faceted. This panel examines the role of technology in shaping African revolutionary projects, such as the use of social media platforms for mobilisation and coordination, and the challenges around issues like manipulation and exploitation. It also delves into the diverse goals and aspirations that drive these movements, from seeking social justice to reorganising social orders. By discussing these topics, the panel aims to provide attendees with a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between technology and revolution in Africa and the different discourses that shape these movements.

Relationship between the papers

The first paper focuses on Kenya and examines the role of digital technologies, specifically social media, in promoting socio-political change and revolution. The author notes that Kenya has been regarded as one of the technological hubs in Africa, and the increased use of internet technologies has become part of the everyday life of most citizens, especially in urban areas. Social media has become essential for political participation in Kenya, particularly among marginalised communities such as the youth and women. The author highlights the dynamics of protests and socio-political issues that shape socio-political movements, emphasising the use of social media in politically led and grassroots-led protests.

On the other hand, paper B looks at Nigeria and explores the forms of civic engagement and citizenship performance on Twitter spaces leading up to the country's 2023 national elections. The author uses the lens of digital citizenship to situate citizens as politically engaged subjects who gather and share information and make rights claims online, potentially altering the balance of power. The author acknowledges the need for contextual understanding when studying a country like Nigeria imbued with culture and diversity. The author also highlights how new media technologies facilitate African digital citizenship and the tacit and observable ways citizens experience their social and cultural context in digital environments that may be uniquely African.

Paper C examines the presence of influencers and grievances among the "soro soke" generation during Nigeria's 2023 election cycle. The study aims to show the significance of influencers in the core networks of "soro soke" election tweeters and how their grievances are expressed through personalized statements of hopes, frustrations, and lifestyles that lead to collective action. Additionally, the author explores the response of leading presidential candidates to the #EndSARS movement, highlighting how the movement connected the "soro soke" generation with like-minded politicians and how resources were mobilized to support them.

Paper D critiques the discourse of social media platforms driving political revolutions in Southern Africa. It rejects the technological determinism and solutionism approaches and favours theoretical toolkits such as social shaping of technologies, structuration theory and technological dramas. The paper explores digital technologies' complex roles in political struggles, acknowledging their potential for democratization, citizen participation and political voice, as well as negative impacts like digital surveillance, authoritarianism, disinformation campaigns, cyberbullying, and dark participation. It highlights the disruptive tendencies of hashtag movements in Southern Africa, examining digital technologies' positive and negative outcomes. This study contributes to understanding the relationship between digital technologies and political struggles in Southern Africa and challenges revolutionary technologies, actors, movements, and goals' rhetoric on social media.

This paper examines how African youth and first-generation young African diasporas in the USA, UK, and France use social media to contest and reframe global media narratives about Africa and its people. It analyzes subversive online narratives that challenge settler colonialism legacies and global north media control. Social media provides a new frontier for disrupting media hegemonies and challenging stereotypes. The study concludes that social media facilitates protests and increases opportunities for youth engagement in collective action. African youth and diasporic communities use social media to challenge negative stereotypes and reframe global media narratives about Africa, redefining identities in the process.

All 5 papers are related in that they all focus on the role of digital technologies in shaping political and social change. They explore how digital technologies are leveraged to challenge dominant narratives, amplify alternative voices, and mobilize collective action. The abstracts also share a critical perspective that seeks to move beyond deterministic and solutionist approaches to analyzing the relationship between society and technologies and instead highlight the complex and multifaceted ways in which digital technologies can enable or constrain political struggles. In addition, the abstracts focus on different geographic contexts, including Nigeria, Kenya, Southern Africa, and the diaspora in the USA, UK, and France, indicating the global reach of digital technologies in shaping political and social change. Overall, the abstracts highlight the potential of digital technologies as a tool for challenging dominant narratives and mobilizing collective action while also acknowledging the ambivalent and contested nature of their impact.

Internet-based communications, services, devices, and architectures have become integrated increasingly into the experience of everyday life for billions of human beings. At the same time, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and logic learning machines have been tasked with an ever greater role in the production of cultural knowledge, the arbitration of social relations, and the regulation of the human body itself. The confluence of these two trends requires us to address core questions at the nexus of human experience and machinic logic: namely, how are human subjectivities (re)shaped in relation to these automated processes, and what are the resulting implications for identity, cultural expression, and social justice?

The four papers on this panel apply different methods, theoretical approaches, and sites of research to address this set of questions from radically different, but intersecting, perspectives.

The first paper draws on cyborg theory and disability studies to investigate the role of biometric medical implants in the lives of disabled users, and to critique the design and development processes that exclude the participation of disabled individuals. As this author demonstrates through a performative investigation of their own device’s alert logs, the resulting user interfaces can contribute to exhaustion, confusion, and fear at the cost of the very health outcomes these devices are intended to promote.

Through its novel approach to “data physicalization,” using the tools of the art world to communicate the cyborgean subjectivities of disabled users of medical devices, this paper and the performative work it describes helps non-disabled users to understand better and more immediately how “technological fixes, innovations and imagined futures around disability require incredibly intensive regimes labor, maintenance and repair.”

The second paper focuses on travel reviews and the colonialist gaze. Using an empirical discourse analysis of thousands of TripAdvisor reviews centered on the historically African American, rapidly gentrifying community of Harlem, New York, the article demonstrates how Black and White reviewers occupy separate subjectivities regarding place and identity. Specifically, the author demonstrates how the role of digital databases in mediating discourse surrounding this neighborhood feeds back into sociocultural processes in ways that challenge human autonomy and cultural diversity.

In their words, “the collapsing effect of recursive discourse may threaten race’s habit of being fluidly formed through ‘sociohistorical processes’—with differing definitions and regimes across time and place—and instead help to create a more fixed set of racial- economic categories.”

The third paper uses the theoretical language of critical cultural studies to argue that there is a fundamental incompatibility between data practices and architectures and the human discursive practices immanent to cultural innovation and production. The author synthesizes perspectives such as Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” Keats’ “negative capability,” and Han’s “psychopolitics” to argue that the process of counterfactual reasoning is a crucial component of human subjectivity, and inherent to the shaping of human identity.

The author argues that these modalities of thought can’t be reproduced via current AI or ML models, because their architecture is purely synthetic, using training data sets to extrapolate affirmative cultural associations, rather than engaging in negative or lateral “thinking.” By contrast, the author points to the “psychedelic renaissance” and the integral role of negative dialectics in creative perspectives like surrealism as evidence that the inherent human negative capability is distinctly at odds with machinic intelligence. In their assessment, the digital cannot yield that which is truly novel.”

The fourth and final paper theorizes a new facet of human subjectivity informed by algorithmic logics, which the authors refer to as “algo-vision.” The authors argue that this subjectivity is formed dialectically in relation to the semi-obscure but nearly ubiquitous role that data surveillance and algorithmic decision-making processes play throughout networked society. As individuals and communities work to internalize the logic of these social arbiters, the resulting shifts in self-perception, lived experience, and communal identity can have negative consequences for health and justice, but can also provide new opportunities as a “super-power” to exercise organized resistance against the hegemonic forces encoded into these automated processes.

This panel submission identifies the contours of major shifts in mobile media and communication. Looking beyond the smartphone era, digital flows and configurations are increasingly spread throughout our environments and supported by complex layers of invisible infrastructures. The panel offers four papers that engage with the changing nature of mobile communication and the implications of these changes for everyday social life – as well as not-so-everyday moments of hardship and social unrest. The first paper revisits the original idea of “hybrid space,” as hybrid spaces 2.0, by updating the concept and expanding its theoretical utility. The second paper argues that the pervasive use of mobile technologies reconfigures the sociotechnical landscape, particularly by supporting the maintenance of complex weak and strong tie personal networks. The third paper re-examines the relationship between mobile communication and political protest, highlighting changes in technology and social practices. The fourth paper looks at the inclusion of mobile networks in rural regions, identifying three concurrent shifts with mobile connectivity within these regions: makeshift access, initial access, and hyperconnectivity. Collectively, the papers offer new ways of understanding how mobile communication is intertwined with revolutions in different components of society, including rural and urban, work and home, private life and civic life.

For decades, the internet has inspired visions of economic, as well as political, revolution. Indeed, these visions have long been deeply intertwined. The growth of the digital technology sector has lent legitimacy to regimes in crisis, at the same time that digital decentralization and participation have enabled citizens to contest sovereign power. In addition to shifting control over money and trade, tech firms have frequently described their disruption of legacy industries itself as revolutionary.

In this panel, we revisit and reevaluate key narratives and concepts that have shaped research on internet economies. These include the ascendancy of “Big Tech” and ubiquitous surveillance, as well as the opposition between tech firms and civil society and the state and the market. Drawing on historical and ethnographic studies of tech firms and technologically-mediated work conducted across the United States and China, our papers argue that, if digital technologies have revolutionized local, national, and global markets, they have done so in different ways than predicted or previously described. One key takeaway is that digital disruption looks different from different standpoints.

Our goal is not simply to add to existing critiques of the failed promises of techno-utopians to eliminate inequalities and other social ills. On the contrary, this “techlash,” and the reactions it inspired, are among the phenomena that we contextualize and critically examine. Instead, by drawing on comparative empirical research, we aim to develop new methods and concepts that might renovate, if not revolutionize, our understandings of the internet, its political economy, and power.

This research explores whether the co-design of provocative prototypes with older adults can scaffold critical thought concerning ethics, trustworthiness, security and privacy of age-oriented Internet of Things (IoT) products and services, and associated data-driven technologies (DDT). By inviting 15 adults defining themselves as ‘experiencing or anticipating old age’ to co-design IoT and DDT which addressed their hopes and fears for the future, we encouraged them to imagine a revolution in ‘technology for aging’. Three workshops utilized theatre and design research approaches including speculative design (Dunne, 2013) and co-design of provocative prototypes and social design fiction (Pilling, 2019),  to stimulate discussion around imagined futures for aging and technology. Participants modelled the internet as they understood and imagined it. They were then introduced to sensors, actuators and machine learning through interactive demonstrations. Four randomly formed groups ideated ways these technologies could be applied to earlier identified hopes and fears for the future of aging. Creative technologists then created prototypes of these ideas over two weeks of feedback and iteration with participants. Participants wrote and performed performances incorporating these prototypes, which explored cybersecurity and cyberharm (Agrafiotis, 2019). Six participants also partook in post-workshop semi-structured interviews. Methods developed in this research scaffolded critical thought concerning the ethics, trustworthiness, security and privacy of age oriented IoT, and associated DDT, regardless of experience or existing knowledge. Participants found it easy to interrogate the ethics, privacy and security of their speculations because, while they may not have been technically scalable or feasible, they understood them. 

In this paper, we explore how activists and human rights defenders deal with datafication. This work demonstrates how data can be a valuable resource in activism and campaign planning. In addition, data and lack of data also complicate daily life for people in vulnerable positions, for example, when contacting government agencies, schools, and medical facilities .

Data from four types of human rights activism formed the basis of our analysis. They include volunteers and employees of NGOs dealing with refugee and migrant issues, homelessness, poverty, sexual minorities, and women's shelters. The study was done in Sweden, where the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) laws limit the handling and storage of personal data.

The following five major themes emerge from the analysis of data from our interview study: Affording personal integrity, Data poverty, Protective data practices, Drawing attention to data, and Systems and data routines.

In addition, this study shows how activists and the organizations that they support are exposed to contradictory aspects of data; on one hand, deliberately exposing data about marginalized/minoritized groups, while on the other, making sure those groups, along with activists themselves, are not exposed. Most important, the data laws and regulations are not adjusted to the needs of the most vulnerable in society, and therefore, actions of civil disobedience are necessary to care for vulnerable populations through data.

The everyday nature of datafication, where daily experiences generate data that can be tracked, measured, and quantified, from social media posts to in-store purchases, has also led to the companies and platforms doing the tracking finding ways to represent this data back to users.One particularly prominent form of repackaged user data is the ‘year in review’, where a retrospective account of what the individual did over the calendar year is presented, often in ways that obscure the surveillant and capitalist underpinnings of the platform. One of the most prominent mass data drops is Spotify’s yearly ‘Wrapped’ feature, where users get their listening habits repackaged in an easily-shareable form that highlights their top songs and artists of the year. The release of Spotify’s yearly ‘Wrapped’ feature is an eagerly-awaited time in the digital media calendar, hyped further by pre-Wrapped notifications within the platform and the promotion through the #SpotifyWrapped hashtag. Using a historical analysis of Wrapped, corporate blog posts and other platform communication, and related press coverage since 2020, the paper traces how Wrapped offers aesthetic and affective representations of datafication, often using time and memory as hooks for reminding users of how they engage with the platform. Through the case of Spotify Wrapped, this research seeks to uncover new insight into how platforms repurpose user data, repackaged as memories and reviews, and what this says about how platforms work and how they engage with their users.

Big tech “exploits” us. This has become a common refrain among critics of digital platforms. It gives voice to a shared sense that technology firms are somehow mistreating people—taking advantage of us, extracting from us—in a way that other data-driven harms, such as surveillance and algorithmic bias, fail to capture. But what does “exploitation” entail, exactly, and how do platforms perpetrate it? What would a theory of digital exploitation add to existing discussions about platform governance?

In the first part of this paper, I draw from the philosophical literature to define exploitation and to show that this language is used to level two distinct, but related, allegations: one about “transactional exploitation,” the other about “structural exploitation.” Underneath debates about how to rein in big tech’s power are fundamental questions about the possibility of liberal reform vs the need for deeper structural change. Distinguishing between transactional and structural exploitation can shed light on the places where incremental reforms hold promise and the places where more radical transformation is necessary.

In the second part of the paper, I explore the roles platforms play in facilitating exploitation and show why viewing platform harms through this lens is a helpful guide for governance. I argue platforms can “enhance,” “transform,” or “invent” exploitative social relationships. Where platforms enhance exploitative practices, we may already have useful strategies that can be adapted to the digital context. Where platforms transform existing relationships into exploitative ones or invent new exploitative social relationships, off-the-shelf approaches are less likely to work.

The careers of social media content creators, or influencers, live or die by their ability to cultivate and maintain an invested audience-community. To this end, they are encouraged to practise relational labour (Baym, 2018) to build authentic self-brands and intimacy with audiences. Drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the London influencer industry (2017-2023), this paper examines relational labour through an intersectional feminist lens, foregrounding the ways in which structural inequalities shape relationships between creators and their audiences. This research found that the tolls of managing audience relationships are higher for marginalised creators—especially those who make critical leftist and feminist content—who find themselves on an uneven playing field in the challenges they face as well as the coping strategies at their disposal. Creators employed four key tactics to navigate relational labour and boundaries with audiences: (1) leaning into making rather than being content; (2) (dis)engagement with anti-fans through silence and digital self-harm; (3) retreating into private community spaces, away from the exposure of public platforms; and (4) turning off public comments. Marginalised creators find themselves in an intimacy triple bind, already at higher risk of trolling and harassment, yet under increased pressure to perform relational labour, adversely opening them up to further harms in the form of weaponised intimacy. Findings highlight the individualisation of risk and harm as a structural norm in the influencer industry, raising serious questions about the lack of accountability and responsibility that platforms show towards the creators who generate profit for them.

#Vladdydaddy is a popular internet meme that emerged during the 2016 elections in the United States on 4chan and Twitter to characterize the perceived submissive behavior of Donald Trump towards Vladimir Putin. The meme re-emerged on TikTok in the days leading to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, gaining a new meaning. This paper is part of a larger research project with the objective of identifying and scrutinizing various forms of social media memetic participation in response to human tragedies, such as the Russia-Ukraine war. In this paper we focus on "DM memes" as a creative sub-meme of #Vladdydaddy. Drawing from theories of memetic participation (Milner, 2016) and imagined intimacy (Greenwood & Long, 2011) for the analysis. The findings suggest that the DMing Putin meme emerges as a collective coping mechanism to fulfill an emotional need through the construction of imagined intimacy. The strict censorship laws within Russian borders underscores the significance of exploring seemingly trivial online discursive practices as courageous in a political context that can carry grave consequences offline. In doing so, we bring to the forefront the global community of creators who take a firm stance towards the current political climate in Russia.

This paper investigates the changes in digital practices of intimacy during the COVID-19 social distancing period in the UK, and whether these transformations have persisted in the ‘new normal’. The study employed a mixed-methods approach, collecting quantitative and qualitative data from 824 adults who used dating apps during the pandemic, and conducting 60 in-depth interviews. The study aimed to understand the digital intimate practices of heterosexual and LGBT+ communities during and after COVID-19.

First, we describe (using both descriptive statistics and excerpts from participant interviews) the changes to practices of digital intimacy during COVID-19. Second, we will explore the distribution of these changes among communities. In particular, we describe the differences between heterosexual and LGBT+ respondents, and between white and ethnic minority respondents. Third, we explore how these changes have endured after COVID-19. In particular, we will explore how changes to what people look for in their app use endured or returned to ‘pre-covid’

The paper concludes by arguing that dating app's increasing status as health actors, particularly during a pandemic, necessitates more research in this area. This study provides insights into how digital practices of intimacy have transformed during COVID-19 and whether these transformations have endured in the ‘new normal’. Understanding these changes is essential to adequately support people’s emotional and sexual well-being during and after a time of crisis.

For many, mapping platforms are enmeshed in everyday experiences. We navigate, locate, and move through the world with the help of their locative affordances. Consequently, these platforms have an intimate awareness of our movements and location history, and this information is valuable for advertisers. One way that platforms can track and share this information is through geofences, commonly used by companies to send targeted advertisements directly to platforms. Geofences are virtual perimeters established around target locations that act as a digital tripwire, marking who and what crosses its threshold. Digital mapping platforms like Google Maps broker this location data to third-parties (Bui, Chang, & McIlwain, 2022).

This paper examines two applications of geofences as intermediaries of locational data. The first is the use of geofences by the property platform, CIVVL, that applies geofences to facilitate and accelerate the tenant eviction process. The second is Hawk Analytics, a locational data broker that geofences abortion clinics and sells the locational data from the clinic’s clients to anti-choice organizations, in jurisdictions of the United States where such healthcare is illegal. In our analysis of locational data, we apply the concept of platform intimacies (Rambukkana and de Verteuil, 2021; Ley, & Rambukkana, 2021) to understand the techniques through which geofences access private locational details. This paper examines the spatial relations the geofence enforces and how this often-unregulated informational infrastructure can be applied to weaponize location data. We argue that the geofence enables an extractive relationship with intimate platform knowledge while it enforces hegemonic notions of trespass and belonging.

In 2020 TikTok saw an influx of new users, looking for a sense of relief in the face of overwhelming loneliness, and found some palliative comfort in the sense of intimacy entailed in engaging with the works of microcelebrities. At the same time many new users became creators on TikTok, saw incredible growth, and quickly found themselves navigating a larger scale of demands on their attention and on their affects than they’d ever experienced, or, usually, expected. The purpose of this paper is to examine and describe the specific demands on the affective labor and attention of content creators on TikTok, the ways in which those demands tend to exceed what the creators themselves are comfortable with or capable of sustaining, and the challenges and limitations that prevent creators from setting, communicating, or maintaining boundaries around their labor, relationships, or personal and professional lives. I investigated these questions by participant observation and a series of interviews and explore answers in an ethnographic and autoethnographic framework. Audience members treat the emotional experience of creators as an open resource in two ways: 1) externalization, placing difficult emotional experiences in the creator’s hands with the expectation that the creator will do something about it, and so the audience member doesn’t have to; and 2) extraction, soliciting the public performance of an emotional reaction to material of the audience member’s choice. The dehumanizing experience of being treated as vending machines for intimacy is an ongoing psychological harm that, to some extent, all microcelebrities endure.

This research discusses how TikTok’s adaptation to Russian war censorship laws after the invasion of Ukraine affected content accessibility and prioritization on the platform. The study uses a combination of scraping and sock-puppet algorithmic audits to understand the impact of platform policy on information flows during times of war. The first test found that TikTok restricted access to non-Russian content in Russia, resulting in a 95% reduction of available content in the country. The second test revealed that TikTok unevenly applied its content policies, allowing pro-war content to proliferate in Russia despite its claim of enforcing a ban on new content uploads in the country. The third test highlighted a case of “shadow-promotion,” i.e., the prioritization of content supposed to be banned. The study's findings emphasize the need to monitor the platform's policy decisions during times of conflict, as they can contribute to the creation of a 'Splinternet.' The study also underscores the significant power that social media companies wield in shaping information flows during times of war and highlights the need to closely monitor platform policy decisions during such times. The article also provides recommendations for implementing the DSA in the EU context, which could help avoid problems such as those encountered while monitoring the platform in Russia.

Growing international efforts to address the problematic consequences of expanding platformization—like increasing data privatization and concentrated market power—signal the emergence of new regulatory regimes governing digital platform markets. Accepting that regulatory oversight is inevitable, digital platform companies intervene in policymaking to strategically limit its scope. By examining their lobbying and PR efforts across policy domains related to media regulation, competition policy, and data protection, this paper examines how platforms’ ambitions of global scale and scope, entail an attendant politics of scaling that prioritizes removing friction that regulation imposes in response to the contradictions, negative externalities, and market failures characterizing platform capitalism. This pursuit of frictionless oversight has multiple related dimensions. First, platforms seek to remove friction through standardization strategies to increase policy modularity that enables international scaling. Second, platform companies lobby for “frictionless regulation,” namely light, narrow co-regulatory arrangements that establish baseline standards (e.g., around political content, basic data protections, etc.), while limiting states’ roles to coordinating this standard-setting to enable smooth platform business operations. Third, platform companies couch frictionless regulation in legitimating discourses primed to resonate with policymakers, including the coordination costs associated with regulating many over few platform services. They also invoke permissionless data-driven innovation, exploiting tensions in policymaker efforts to regulate data to maintain citizen participation in the digital economy while preserving the commercial nature of ongoing datafication. This analysis has implications for identifying key points of contestation of platform-defined regulatory politics.

Across the globe, lawmakers have enacted a range of reforms targeting the operation of large digital platforms. Within the United States, however, the push to regulate platform companies—specifically, social media—has faltered. Neither standard interest group politics, nor partisan deadlock, nor the clash of liberal versus conservative ideologies adequately account for this situation. Drawing upon historical sources, an examination of political-ideational foundations, and an empirical analysis of recent Congressional hearings, this paper argues that an “anemic” policy regime has emerged for governance of the social media sector in the United States over the past two decades. Key attributes of this regime—its boundary-spanning nature, competing issue definitions, lack of policy cohesion, and administrative fragmentation—combine to impede the capability for problem-solving on the topic of regulatory reform.

In 1994, U.S. President Clinton stated that the commercialization of the internet was a “top priority” for his administration. The domain name system (DNS), which was developed to deal with the growing unwieldiness of the commercial internet, was an early battleground in shaping the values of early internet governance policies. The system would include highly sought after addresses in generic top-level domains (gTLDS) that ended in .com, .gov, .org, .edu, and so on. Below this were second-level domains and country codes which ended web addresses in sequences like .uk, .jp, .ca, etc. This model raised legal and economic questions about trademarks, intellectual property, and the global distribution of addresses on top level domains. Technical experts were wary of the limitations of the proposed system, particularly given the potential to expand the number of gTLDs. While many groups responded to U.S. governance policy, a number of non-profit associations were particular vocal in their critique, most notably the Internet Council of Registrars (CORE), the International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC), and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) represented by Jon Postel. As the internet transitioned from a network used primarily by government and educational entities to a mass medium, there was a potential for revolutionary modes of communication, information sharing, education, creative expression, and a revolutionary, de-centralized structure of governance. The DNS debate resulted instead in support of predictable structures of power and a failure to realize that potential.

Community Notes (formerly named “Birdwatch”) is Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking program to combat mis- and dis-information. By signing up to be a Birdwatch contributor, a user can add contextual notes and commentary to other tweets as well as rate the contributions of others. User submissions to the Community Notes program also serve as metacommentary on the platform more generally. Beyond their fact-checking role, Birdwatch notes also illuminate how some users perceived Elon Musk’s recent purchase of the platform and how the subsequent changes aligned with their own understandings of what the platform ought to be.

This paper describes Birdwatch Archive, a project to archive Twitter’s Community Notes program by parsing the data that Twitter publicly releases from the Birdwatch program and displaying it in a searchable and organized fashion that is accessible and useful to researchers. Using the anonymous user identification strings from each TSV file, the website enables researchers to assess how frequently users contribute to the Community Notes program by grouping notes and ratings they have provided.

Even as Twitter continues to devolve and collapse, we can try to learn from how users described and understood the platform. When studying major platforms, we cannot rely solely upon the data made accessible by the platform itself. Instead, we must look for opportunities to create “rogue archives” of online settings, which includes turning sources that are not as frequently viewed by most users.

Li Wenliang, an eye doctor at Wuhan Central hospital and one of the first to raise alarm about the outbreak of COVID-19, was summoned by the local police and forced to sign a statement reprimanding his message as a groundless rumor as well as a disturbance to the public order in late December 2019. Two months later, Li died after contracting COVID-19 at his workplace, aged 33 years. This caused shock and outrage across China and Li’s Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) homepage soon became an online “wailing wall,” where people mourned, condoled, and commemorated the whistleblower and complained, questioned, and protested the overstrict government policies relevant to COVID-19 pandemic. This study shows that Weibo offers a place for users to see the mundane life of Li Wenliang, express grief and frustration, and interact with each other to remember Li, whereas another super-powerful Chinese social media, WeChat, allows users to synthesize information about Li, provide analysis and criticism, and circulate the memory of Li through their social networks. Together, these two platforms helped stabilize Chinese internet users’ memory of Li as a whistleblower, a civilian hero, a martyr, and a supporter of free speech and diverse voices, distinguished from the official version. This study contributes to recent scholarly interest in understanding how the technological affordances of social media shape memory work. It also shows that even in a politically constrictive environment, such as China’s media ecology, the space for questioning and protesting still exists, though more nuanced and precarious.

Over time, technocultural discourses around death have shifted from a focus on immortality (e.g, cryogenics) to the pragmatics of death in postdigital life. But if immortality is not the end goal for consumer-facing tech industries, what is? The digital afterlife industry (DAI) has emerged as a range of platformized services to manage the expired organic body as data. This paper extends established scholarly conversations by reframing the rise of the DAI explicitly through the problem of mortality as a solutionist practice. The glut of legacy avatars and digital executors now available are symptomatic of longevity and obsolescence braided together in an approach to posthuman life as a service for the living.

First, I argue that the commercialization of death as the “digital beyond” is a convergence of the overproduction of personal data, a global pandemic, and born-digital aging populations. I further argue for seeing the build-up of the DAI as an intersection of mundane software and datafied care that works to extend, suspend, and/or close the relationship between the living and the dead. Second, I apply the walkthrough method to two afterlife applications and their promotional surround, HereAfter A.I. and Empathy. These apps demonstrate different approaches to the 'digital beyond' as closure, but in both, software becomes the digital heir.

By 'revolutionizing death,' I articulate the fundamental change in a technocultural relationship to death to better fit a postcapitalist logic of "care" practices that are embedded in closure as a new mode of attending to platforms and their sustainability needs.

In the world of web archiving, a peculiar technical problem can result from the automated processes of web crawling bots: the leakage of live content into archived web “snapshots” (also called “mementos”). Programmers and web engineers refer to these files as “zombie resources” because users of platforms like The Wayback Machine or Memento expect web snapshots to be archived (“dead”) historical files available to “replay” the web of the past on demand; instead, they are compromised by code (usually JavaScript) that reaches into the current “live web” for content that is then plugged into the web snapshot. Using the concept of the figure as a critical and methodological device, this paper turns to the zombie in networked computing, specifically web archiving projects, in order to illuminate contemporary cultural anxieties around digital preservation and the perseverance of networked resources, but also more broadly, around the problem of fixing the past in relation to the present.

Examining technical documentation, developer blog posts, and web APIs like ServiceWorker and Reconstructive that are designed to prevent live-leaks, this paper figures zombies as more than just technical problems. In popular culture and online, zombies shore up and challenge boundaries around life and death, liveness and the record, vitality and waste, contingency and the archive. They are tangled up in the politics of citation and the production of historical knowledge and therefore lay bare some of the most important questions of preservation, access, authenticity, truth, trust and evidence in the digital age.

Depictions of romantic relationships between humans and computers/robots/AI systems are a common trope in science fiction. With recent advances in AI conversational chatbots and augmented reality avatars, applications such as Replika have started to enable everyday people to engage in romantic relationships with AI chatbots and talk to visual representations of their AI partners. While there has been a growing body of work exploring the motivations, practices, and benefits/risks of these conversational chatbots, the romantic side of things has been relatively underexplored. While much of the work has been about the why and the overall purpose of the romantic relationship, there has been less work that examines these from a relational stage perspective, and how these systems move in and across different relationship stages of development. This is especially important because communication scholars have long theorized that Romantic Relationships fall into a unique category of relationships, such that there are more discrete stages of coming together/apart, more risk/vulnerability in these relationships, and a wider range of interactions/negotiations over identity and interdependence. Through in-depth interviews with people who participate in an online forum ILoveMyReplika, this study aims to explore how people engage with the system romantically, how these systems craft messages that are indicative of different stages of relationships, and how people handle the movement and change across time with these systems. This piece will have important implications for our understanding of human machine relationships and human relationship stages generally, as well as implications for the design of social computing agents.

This paper examines a community called Subreddit Simulator on the social media platform Reddit. It is a digital space where human and social bot co-exist on an ontologically equal footing to co-create culture, community and a sense of 'play'. We recognize this community as a pioneer community against a larger backdrop of deep mediatization. With the recent attention given to bots such as Chat GPT it is imperative that we do not overlook communities in which progressive and revolutionary practice has been happening for years. This extended abstract proposes an ethnographic approach to viewing the Subreddit Simulator community while the longer form work will bring the ethnographic results to bear to discuss philosophically the opportunities and implications of reimagining networked spaces in a less human-centric manor.

In 1976, Joseph Weizenbaum argued that, because “[t]he achievements of the artificial intelligentsia [were] mainly triumphs of technique,” AI had not “contributed” to theory or “practical problem solving.” Weizenbaum highlighted the celebration of performance without deeper understanding, and in response, he articulated a theory mode for AI that could cultivate human responsibility and judgment. We suggest that, given access to Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots, Weizenbaum’s performance and theory modes offer urgently-needed vocabulary for public discourse about AI. Working from the perspective of digital rhetoric, we explain Weizenbaum’s theorization of each mode and perform a close textual analysis of two case studies of Open AI’s ChatGPT shared on Twitter to illustrate the contemporary relevance of his modes. We conclude by forecasting how theory mode may inform public accountability of AI.

Sexbots increasingly spread video material of the war in Ukraine or automate their social interactions to attract attention. In the caption aren’t any further information on the content but only a link to the profile of the spam bot often with nude profile pictures. What to do against spam bots? On the platform, there are many profiles named “bot-police” or, in the German version, “Bot-Polizei” to detect and report bots. The paper will depict how human Instagram users fight two types of Instabots detecting automated interactions as well as fake accounts addressing the following research questions: Are there patterns of actions, organizations, and locations of police bot accounts? How do human Instagram users try to engage in policing unwanted behavior by running bot police accounts? Adopting a platform studies approach using the connective visual mapping method (McCrow-Young, 2021), the paper will examine the practice of everyday Instagram users that try to detect, and report automated social interactions as well as fake accounts in fostering an idea of “good” digital human citizenship and society on Instagram. The method includes a macro and micro mapping approach which allows to involve the analysis of account tag data as well as profile connections. This paper investigates two specific bot police accounts: we_find_bots and bot_police which are exemplary for detecting automated interactions as well as fake accounts. The research contributes to the interdisciplinary research on bot detection and platform governance but highlights the efforts and role of everyday human Instagram users.

The contemporary Internet's "network of networks" has become infrastructural to our lives. The Internet is a stack of physical, data link, network, transport, and application layers which all have unique rules and roles. While many see Internet infrastructure as a foregone conclusion, Paris, Cath and Myers West (2023) write “Internet infrastructure is built slowly, over time, protocol by protocol, in response to many different technical, social, political, environmental, and economic imperatives”. Even as the particular model of the Internet we are all accustomed to has become the standard, other attempts proliferated and eventually failed, as did the Soviet Internet (Peters 2016), and as this panel highlights, the Internet is still ever-evolving.

The project of this panel is to trace alternative, parallel, and emergent network models, standards and protocols, theorize their impact as they appear in different places, spaces, and contexts, and gesture towards how the Internet might be different. As critical internet studies have since the early 2000s shown, computational standards, protocols, and network diagrams are more than technical details, they have the power to shape and structure the conditions for our socio-cultural lifeworlds (Galloway 2006; Chun 2008; Bratton 2016). As Gehl (2014) puts it: “interfaces, database structures, mechanisms of connection all shape social activities”. Change an element in the stack and a different connectivity, a different future becomes possible.

The papers of this panel introduce and discuss five different and potentially revolutionary network technologies that manage and organize our online lives.

The first paper represents a media genealogy of ActivityPub – a protocol that enables the Fediverse, a collection of social media sites that can communicate with one another. The author argues that ActivityPub was not produced through an instrumental process, but was the result of accidents and coincidences. The accidental nature of the protocol, coupled with its being authored by self-identified queer and trans developers, has put it on a collision course with both the “standard” approach to standards production as well as mainstream, corporate social media.

The second paper focuses on the design of the Interplanetary Internet and the idea of delay-tolerant networking fundamental to operating in outer space. The author maintains that when delays are central to a network model, we are forced to rethink how our connections are maintained and organized in the future. Delay-tolerant networking is thus not only a technical solution for a communications system but a control protocol through which interplanetary life can be managed.

The third paper is also focused on the temporality of networks. The third paper examines how time is enacted as a design ideology in the course of the development of a future internet architecture protocol project: named data networking (NDN). This work locates aspects of the sociomateriality of time in the processes of building Internet infrastructure and demonstrates how it binds together cultural, economic, and discursive power. The paper argues that thinking through time as a design ideology can be useful in projects imagining how the Internet might be built to engender and support different values than market ideology.

The fourth paper is about the organizational culture of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a key internet standards and protocol organization. The paper argues that the organization is guided by a culturally inflected anti-political engineering ethos, whose depoliticizing tendencies hampers the organization’s functioning and its ability to rise above narrow industry-interest and pursue a public interest internet.

The fifth paper looks to the Crypto Wars of the 1990s as a moment where things could have been otherwise; comparing the examples of PGP and RSA encryption software and how they shaped the nature of our networked systems. It argues that a combination of regulatory and commercial interests influenced the development and use of cryptography in ways that facilitated the development of e-commerce, but left private messaging in dubious legal status.

Collectively the papers investigate alternative and emergent trends behind the Internet and its network models, standards, and protocols. The protocols and rules for network connection, standards bodies, and modes of governance are critical to maintaining and upkeeping a network. Their impact, however, is not merely technical but potentially world-changing. The papers direct their critical gaze towards the development of these technologies and what their introduction to our world potentially entails. By focusing on projects of past, present, and future and by exploring the Internet’s deepest sociotechnical layers, the panel critically dismantles the commonly-held idea that the Internet is a monolith and illustrates that the history of the Internet is still being written.

On 18th May 2022, in an opinion piece for The New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg declared “the death of #MeToo” (Goldberg, 2022). The papers in this panel examine this claim and wrestle with its potential implications. Drawing on case studies and data from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, we evaluate the current state of play in the online push-and-pull between feminist speech about gender-based violence and its attendant misogynistic backlashes. Using a range of different qualitative methods, these papers unpack the orientations towards visibility and transparency that urge survivors into ever-increasing degrees of exposure online; the way that digital media are reconfiguring the gender and racial politics of doubt and believability; the algorithmic pathways through which boys and men are ushered towards increasingly more radical “manosphere” content and communities; and how the problem of “believability” as it relates to testimonies of assault is being complicated and compounded online by networked misogynoir. The result is an ambivalent portrait of the afterlife of #MeToo on the internet, and some important questions for networked feminist activism going forward.

In recent years, scholarly attention has indicated the increased enmeshment of the political and entertainment media spheres, a change that has happened so gradually that it has not been as remarked upon as it should be. This is perhaps most observable in studies of community dynamics around both political figures as fandom objects and media engagement as political signifiers. The backdrop of digital surveillance capitalism, and the specific platform affordances on which these communities exist and interact, exacerbates both. Furthermore, beyond these inverse scenarios whose distinctive boundaries grow blurrier by the day, there is a third domain in the overlap, of the exploitation – or compensation – of fans, fandoms, and fan labor for political and financial gain. This, too, exists in a reactive feedback loop with the always-on conditions of our contemporary digital political economy. As consequence, there are prominent recent streams of work explicating what exactly the fields of fan studies and political sociology can offer each other for researching communities online in such contexts.

Responding to both the current landscape and recent exemplary and novel scholarship in the field, our panel presents four papers which each delve into an intersection of identity, community, and their ideological and affective ties. They investigate online affective community practices in reaction to fractured sociopolitical polarization, and contribute to the expanding picture of interdisciplinary frameworks and methodologies available — and increasingly, required — to comprehend the motivations, justifications, and trajectories of community dynamics under such drivers.

Since the late 2000s, the focus on gathering and analyzing “big data” has helped humanities scholars develop significant insights about trends in human behavior. Yet “small data” can be useful as well. While many impacts of websites, social media, and social networking sites appear large in scale, others manifest in small ways, with capillary impacts that build over time. This panel brings together four case studies that examine the role and impact played by the “micro” among particular national and religious communities, considering micro politics, micro debates, micro networks, and micro publics. In doing so, they take seriously the specific affordances of the various platforms used for these “micro” engagements, from the hyper-visuality of Instagram to the intimacy of Facebook. They highlight both how individual platforms support particular online activities and how individuals and/or groups use multiple platforms to amplify and reinforce their credibility and/or community feeling: Twitter posts amplify YouTube video clips, or apps reinforce website messages. At the same time, they also complicate and nuance the micropolitical affordances of these platforms.

The first paper ethnographically examine the post-revolutionary Egyptian Facebook, delineating how the platform is collectively imagined and appropriated for various ends in an authoritarian postcolonial context. Caught in a prolonged post-revolutionary crisis and bereft of a future to look up to, growing groups of middle-class Egyptians adopt Facebook to mobilize vintage images of what they frame as the “good old days”. This paper examines these nostalgic online communities that, under the extreme depoliticization of the Egyptian public sphere which followed the return to military authoritarianism in 2014, decided to fashion themselves as “apolitical” spaces, refraining from defining their nostalgia with any historical periodisation or political regime. Instead, they define their nostalgia as directed towards a bygone moral and social order that once provided Egypt with stability and an authentic identity. The paper posits two interconnected questions. First, more broadly, how are nationalist nostalgic discourses formulated over social media platforms across the world? Second, more specifically to Egypt, how do these nostalgic discourses annihilate the dreams of the 2011 revolution?

The second paper investigates ongoing questions about how and whether pious Muslims can use emoticons, and on how continuing debates over emoticon usage illuminate the relationship between ordinary believer agency and contemporary religious authority. It describes them as micro debates because concerns over emoticon usage are not central in theological, ritual, or behavioral debates – but their impact ripples out as ordinary Muslims encounter, participate, and respond to clerical guidance on emoticon usage. The interplay between clerics and ordinary believers suggests a multi-directional approach to claiming, invoking, and deploying authority that helps give nuance to what some scholars have termed a “crisis of authority” in Sunni Islam.

The third paper explores how two Hindu ritual applications, parampara.app and VR Devotee, are incentivized to produce micronetworks of caste-privileged users while disrupting Hindu orthodox traditions which privilege the efficacy of physical sacred spaces. In this sense, the essay argues that while these applications inadvertently raise questions about the efficacy and authority of digital Hindu rituals, the demands of their user base necessitate a ritual inventory that inscribes Hindu caste hierarchies into their web-based applications.

The fourth paper examines the social media accounts of a Jain organization that the author argues constitutes a “globalized micro-public” within the transnational Jain community, with its targeted appeal to class-privileged Jain youths seeking connection to their religious and cultural heritage and finding it in their hyper-individualized spirituality combined with a nationalist approach to charitable service.

Together, these papers argue for the value of insights on the digital’s complex impact on culture, politics, and religion that can be gleaned from small-scale studies, suggesting the micro’s capacity to have a larger analytic impact.

This is one of two panels organized by the AoIR Ethics Working Committee. This panel on “Platform & Pragmatic Challenges” collects four papers exploring a set of unique research contexts and pragmatic challenges that confront the internet research community. These contributions provide systematic analyses of these growing research contexts and a review of the pragmatic challenges faced by internet researchers attempting to ensure compliance with ethical best practices. The platform and pragmatic challenges addressed by this collection of papers include: how the (mis)appropriation of social media ads in academia raises ethical concerns for participants and researchers in terms of safety, privacy, and right to self-determination; understanding the intrinsic relationship that exists between ethical “hurdles” and platform affordances when conducting research on Instagram; investigating how ethics has been addressed in the explosion of twitter-based research and the challenges around the use of public social media data for research; and an analysis of so-called research “safe spaces” where authorized researchers are able to directly access and analyse potentially sensitive and identifiable data. These papers are among those under consideration for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society associated with the AoIR Ethics Working Committee and AoIR2023.

This round table explores how the transformative internet research method, Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), has been taken up by a multi-disciplinary, international group of qualitative researchers. (CTDA) is a problem-oriented discourse analytic approach to digital (née internet) objects and phenomena. It integrates an analysis of the technological artifact and user discourse, framed by cultural theory, to unpack semiotic and material connections between form, function, belief, and meaning of information and communication technologies (ICTs). It is designed to be receptive to any critical cultural theory, with the only requirement being that said cultural theory be applied to both the technology under examination and the discourse community using that technology/encountering phenomena.

Since its 2012 introduction in a pioneering research article on Black Twitter (2012), CTDA has been cited thousands of times; moreover, the article of the same name which more fully explains the method has been cited over two hundred times. Brock’s (2020) monograph, /Distributed Blackness/, has provided additional depth to the method and also have been cited hundreds of times, suggesting that CTDA is both timely and quickly becoming essential to qualitative studies of internet phenomena. The scholars selected for this panel have used CTDA across languages, platforms, communities, and phenomena to create a growing body of work that has had a significant impact on how race and/or difference is integral to internet studies, new media studies, sociology, social work, information science, and communication studies.

* The session will begin with a brief presentation by the facilitators defining CTDA, followed by discussion on how CTDA has (or hasn’t) worked for inquiry between participants and the audience. Overall, this panel engages with race, queerness, disability, gender, language, nationality, and other categories of difference that inform internet research across disciplines and in the everyday world.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many studies have critiqued the care-less legal and technical aspects of governments’ data disclosure of COVID-19 patients’ information. Yet, while there were many reported cases of public shaming of COVID-19 patients, not many studies have examined citizens’ usage and engagement with publicized data. In our study, we direct attention to citizens’ care-less engagement with COVID-19 patients’ data through the case study of the “Itaewon outbreak.” In May 2020, the gay community in South Korea became the target of public surveillance after it was revealed that a person who tested positive had visited a gay club in Seoul’s multicultural district Itaewon. Using the anonymized demographic and location data disclosed by the government, the news media sensationally reported on the data by highlighting the visitors’ presumed gay sexuality. In response, citizens widely circulated the data across social media by drawing on social media's popular culture of surveillance and call-outs. We describe these processes of interpreting and shaping pandemic data through social media’s participatory culture as data pop culture. To analyze data pop culture, we first examine the dominant data imaginaries cultivated through news media and government reports on pandemic data disclosure and how they inform the public’s understanding of data. Then, we examine how these dominant data imaginaries create power relations between people on social media as data owners and data objects. Lastly, we illustrate how these data imaginaries and relations become reproduced through social media popular culture and their implications.

FemTech apps have billions of users globally. Yet, despite their popularity, we know little about these apps, often developed outside controlled and regulated healthcare. While these apps have been criticised for lacking privacy and for enforcing normative ideals on women, they are often marketed in terms of female empowerment. In this presentation, we present our analysis of the empowering potential of menstruation and pregnancy apps. We ask: How do these apps represent reproductive health? What kinds of empowering qualities are present in them? Are there any aspects of the technology that (inadvertently) counteract the empowering purpose? We investigate this through a comparative design investigation using what we call critical app-walkthrough methodology together with researcher use-diaries. We show in our analysis that there are three critical ways in which these apps represent reproductive health events to users through design. We analyze; 1) interface metaphors used to represent temporality, 2) datafication of reproductive health through input and output for intimate data tracking and 3) finally the ways predictions convey certainty over uncertainty and the implications of this. From our results, we present four design sensitivities meant to inspire designers to design for other types of period tracking experiences that might better empower bleeders; support lived temporalities, embrace uncertainty, empower the self, and design less.

After the leak of the Dobbs decision that ultimately overturned Roe v. Wade, technology companies made a series of public statements in support of user privacy: Apple released an advertisement showcasing privacy features; Google promised to delete location data of abortion clinic visitors; Meta announced testing of default end-to-end-encryption. Corporations like Meta once worked to convince users that their platforms were morally neutral. Now, they publicly “crack down” on manipulation and speak out for racial justice, despite privately subjecting activists to state surveillance. To bolster their authority and popularity, platforms engage in “commodity activism,” in which corporations take positions on social issues. Ultimately, this enhances corporate capital rather than enacting social change. Care, in its ideal, is opposed to neoliberalism: resisting individuality in favor of community and refusing to reduce humans to capital. Yet, paternalistic care can be a weapon – used to ensnare and to oppress. Through a critical technocultural discourse analysis of platforms’ public utterances and policy changes after the Dobbs leak, we find that platforms redefine care in three main ways. For users, care is neoliberal - platforms provide good privacy options, for which users are individually responsible. For employees, care is paternalistic - employees are offered money for healthcare, at the expense of free expression. Finally, ultimate care is for the platform - that company culture is protected, alliance with the state unthreatened, and above all, profit is promoted. Platform decisions are revealed to extend care in some ways, while also maintaining control over users and their data.

Examining the competing images, values, and purposes attached to digital health tracking platforms, this paper analyzes how platform imaginaries are constructed and negotiated in complex intersectional realities. It pursues this inquiry through a case study on how Fitbit and Apple Health have become involved in recent societal negotiations over female digital health tracking in the US. Female health tracking has a well-documented history of negotiation and contestation. Developing this case study, we build on and rethink the concept of socio-technical imaginaries. We propose to consider the articulation of platform imaginaries not as a one-sided sense-making process, but as negotiations between multiple stakeholders of which platforms are but one. This conceptual perspective allows us to analyze the construction of imaginaries as a dynamic process, open to constant renegotiation, shaped by power differences between stakeholders, and affected by the intersectional positioning of user groups within platforms. The research is operationalised through a combination of critical discourse analysis of user and platform content and walkthroughs of Fitbit and Apple Health. The analysis highlights how digital health tracking platforms have become centrally imbricated in crucial societal issues, such as female bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. And it shows how quickly platform imaginaries of female self-determination and autonomy, associated with health-tracking apps, can be overthrown and reversed.

In this project, we explore how the internal operational tensions of the YouTube platform impact and are reflected in the multi-platform behaviors of users engaged in the posting and viewing of bootleg Broadway recordings. This project uses digital traces of user behavior, including uploads, posts, comments, playlist construction, and posts on other platforms, as well as metadata that appears to have been provided by the platform itself, and other ephemera. We focus on a set of user behaviors intended to conceal the presence of bootleg recordings from nebulously defined platform enforcers while at the same time trying to make the same recordings accessible to or even promoting them to those looking to view them or discover new recordings. YouTube’s behavior regarding these bootlegs is inconsistent and opaque. Certain recordings disappear quickly, while others stay for years at a time. Some recordings are tagged with complete copyright holder and licensing information, even track listings, seemingly indicating an interaction with ContentID or another automated tagging system. Bootleg recordings may appear in the algorithmically-populated recommendations bar on the right side of the YouTube interface, only to be taken down within minutes of being recommended to users. The specific and sometimes contradictory behaviors, policies, and affordances of the YouTube platform have resulted in users adapting their behavior surrounding the exchange and sharing of these videos, resulting in new vocabularies, new standards and norms, and new derivative products.

This paper examines the development of digital subcultures and microtrends in a social media landscape increasingly driven by algorithms. We explore the increasing proliferation of subcultures defined by aesthetic categories which we refer to as “microtrends. In this paper we draw from a combined mixed-methods exploration– a visual discourse analysis taken in conjunction with critical technoculture analysis (CDTA) – of content shared to the popular hashtag #aesthetic across three different algorithmically driven social media platforms: TikTok, Instagram and Youtube. We aim to extend scholarship on digital subculture formation by examining the intersection of identity formation, algorithmic capitalism and user practices surrounding microtrends through the lens of user engagement and self identity guided by three central questions: (1) What tactics and practices constitute user participation in microtrends? (2) How does user engagement with microtrends function as an act of relational self expression? (3) What are user discourses surrounding microtrend participation? Three novel user practices are identified - aesthetic consistency, aesthetic anxiety, and aesthetic creation- which when taken together comprise of a process that we term “self-discretization” wherein users “do the work” of abstracting and fragmenting their identities for the sake of attaining visibility within a datafied digital environment. Ultimately this paper argues that in an increasingly algorithmic cultural landscape users begin to internalize not just the messaging, but also the logics of algorithmic capitalism and regimes of datafication.

A fast-growing international success, ByteDance’s short video platform TikTok is a relevant case study to examine how digital platforms expand infrastructurally and accumulate power. TikTok has achieved popularity comparable to major players, including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. It now grapples with balancing the diverse interests of its different user groups, chief among which content creators. We interrogate how TikTok manages this challenge via an exploratory study that studies the platform’s evolution through what we dub ‘platform tools,’ or, the software-based instruments for cultural production on social media platforms. Such software-based tools have been previously theorized using the ‘boundary resources’ framework, which emerged from information systems studies. This framework conceptualizes platform tools as interrelated, contextual, and dynamic, changing in response to variables internal and external to the platform ecosystem. Recognizing that platform tools are ever-changing, we conduct a ‘platform historiography’ to periodize three main trends: platform tools (1) have contributed to the formalization and professionalization of platform content; (2) have encouraged the standardization of platform-dependent cultural production; and (3) have furthered the platformization of TikTok both within, as well as outside the cultural industries. Our paper serves as a response to calls from media scholars to view platforms as contingent and ever-evolving, and to further social media historiography. More specifically, we contribute to the literature on platform studies because it focuses on an understudied aspect of platform governance: platform tools.

‘Social media’ represent a dynamic technological environment, in which emerging platforms make use of comparisons to existing apps to construct their own reputation. This is the case of BeReal – a platform that allows users to share pictures once a day, and only when triggered by a notification. In this paper, I combine digital technography and the platform walkthrough method to examine how BeReal deploys antagonistic discourse towards dominant media to promise a more authentic experience. In so doing, I frame the platform as evoking, appropriating, and remediating (Bolter and Grusin 2000) notions of mediated liveness – not only when it comes to a promised ‘real-time’ connection but also referring to particular ways of ‘being there’, sharing experiences, and having ‘real’ experiences through technological mediation. This discussion matters because it demonstrates how claims of immediacy and of a direct access to ‘reality’ are manifested and negotiated in contemporary sociotechnical practices. In this context, BeReal’s version for “platformized authenticity” – the co-option of ‘the authentic’ to advance platforms’ growth and commercial goals – is a process marked by a recursive, cyclical negotiation between technical mediation and claims of liveness.

To better understand what drives the public’s perception and acceptance of AI in different roles, we propose a study that looks at varying AI domains by occupational status and individual differences across ontological perceptions, automation anxiety, perceived status, and identity threat. As a first step, we conducted a representative survey of the US population (N = 1,005) that looked into the public's perceptions of AI replacement of high-status jobs. Results indicate that a majority of participants hold negative attitudes about AI replacement in all domains presented. However, participants were more open to AI replacement in lower-status roles such as journalist and hiring manager compared to higher-status roles of spiritual leader and trial judge. Contrary to our expectations, participants believed that trial judge was a slightly worse idea than AI spiritual advisor. This finding suggests that the associated machine heuristic of the judge role as being a more rational and objective occupation was not triggered in our sample. Our results also suggest that more vulnerable populations are more reluctant to accept AI in the majority of jobs. These findings are in line with previous public opinion surveys and demonstrate that individuals with lower levels of power and status are more likely to be reluctant to accept new technology and potentially perceive it as a threat. Our next step will be to include more occupations that can be potentially automated and look for explanatory mechanisms driving the public’s view of AI integration.

Internet users face privacy threats when using online services. Privacy protection behaviors, such as adjusting privacy settings, can alleviate some of these threats. Research shows that individuals’ privacy protection behaviors (PPBs) depend on their socio-demographics characteristics, digital engagement, privacy concerns, and online privacy literacy (OPL). In addition, it has been suggested that due to the complexity of privacy issues online, an adequate level of OPL is required to translate privacy concerns into protective actions. Although previous research examined the antecedents of PPBs at a general level, it has rarely made a clear distinction and comparison between PPBs aimed toward the practices of institutions (vertical level) and those aimed toward other internet users (horizontal level). This is somewhat surprising given that many scholars underscored the importance of context in online privacy-related matters. Therefore, this study compared the antecedents of PPBs at the general, vertical, and horizontal levels. To this end, we tested three models to examine how socio-demographic characteristics, digital engagement, privacy concerns, and OPL influence PPBs at the general, vertical, and horizontal levels, and assessed whether OPL moderates the relationship between privacy concerns and PPBs at different levels. The models were tested using linear regression on a nation-wide sample of 1,015 internet users aged 18+ from Slovenia. The analysis revealed important differences between the levels in case of gender, age, and privacy concerns, but not OPL.

The following paper engages with citizen attitudes towards automated decision-making (ADM) in the public sector. Based on three domain specific scenarios, we explore differences in attitudes towards algorithmic automation in three welfare regimes, namely Estonia, Germany, and Sweden. It is notoriously different for citizens exposed to algorithmic automation by public sector institutions to evaluate the implications of these technologies. First, only a minority of citizens is aware of automated decision-making in the public sector, second the lack of transparency in the implementation process makes it difficult for citizens to develop an informed position. In order to explore the welfare regime and domain specific attitudes of citizens, we have worked with three scenarios that provide a concrete and empirical entry point for the respondents. The three scenarios include the use of ADM to sort job seekers into different categories, the use of risk scoring for child welfare and the use of facial recognition for predictive policing. Here, we present preliminary findings of the comparative analysis presenting first descriptive findings from the cross-regime comparison of attitudes towards ADM in the three scenarios and second a regression analysis including individual variables (age, gender, education) combined with awareness, enthusiasm, and trust for ADM systems to explain differences between the three welfare regimes.

In this paper, I provide the most comprehensive longitudinal survey of social media and elections so far, spanning across 15 years and covering five Danish national elections. Denmark is used as a critical case study as the country has a high Internet penetration, widespread use of digital media in public administration and citizen services, and a traditional high willingness to employ digital media in daily life. Thus, Denmark forms an exemplary case for longer trends for media use in election campaigns.

The uniqueness of this study is that is based on five repetitive survey questionnaires among Danish citizens across a time span of 15 years. By replicating questions across elections, one gets a comprehensive and fully comparable analysis of changing uses and attitudes towards social media in election campaigns.

Besides giving a statistical overview of social media use and attitudes across five elections, the paper addresses the following research questions:

To what extent have social media been “normalized” as an integrated part of election campaigns, as one media type among many?

Can we identify changing patterns of social media participation, from “clicktivism” (Halupka, 2017) to more formalized political participation or vice versa?

How do social media, over time, contribute to political interest, motivation, and competence among citizens?

In sum, the paper provides a longitudinal study across five elections of voters’ social media use in a digitally advanced country.

This paper examines how Latin American third-party sellers internalize and manage risk in their work. Building on Neff’s (2012) concept of “venture labor,” we analyze the strategies and resources that 17 third-party sellers based in Chile employ to deal with risk on Mercado Libre, Latin America’s largest online marketplace. We situate this process of risk privatization within the broader context of recent transformations in labor markets associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our study shows that sellers internalize risk through three interconnected sets of strategies: financial, creative, and actuarial. We then consider the resources they draw on to build networks with other sellers and intermediaries to share knowledge about the platform and its algorithms. By examining venture labor dynamics in a Global South context, we offer new perspectives on risk privatization as a constitutive process of the platform economy.

With the rise of Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs), Chinese digital creative industries are no longer a realm of self-entrepreneurship but are dominated by professional service agencies and platforms. At the same time, the Chinese-style market economy and state-led platformization have spawned a unique platform ecology, shaping Chinese digital creative industries and labor subjectivity in its own unique way.

This study contributes to digital entrepreneurship in a non-Western context by exploring the characteristics and risks of Chinese digital laborers amid state-led platformization. Through a qualitative analysis of 203 recruitment advertisements of major MCNs in China, the finding reveals that Chinese digital laborers are trapped in a state/capitalist duopoly. On the surface, recruitment advertisements posted by MCNs create a low-threshold, flexible working environment. But in essence, they reflect the precarious working conditions of contemporary digital laborers under MCNs’ systematic business model. In a crude way, MCNs transformed digital entrepreneurs who previously relied on self-promotion into aesthetic laborers in front of the camera. At the same time, laborers behind the camera are a group of playful workaholics at great risk of being exploited for free. They are compelled to involuntarily internalize the pressures of hyper-productivity and undertake trivial emotional labor. Beyond the risks of the platformed digital economy, I argue that digital laborers of MCNs have become a form of state labor that is expected to contribute to national development agendas while embodying the national character that the state promotes.

This paper explores how high-skilled technology professionals navigate liminal and unequal experiences of migration and settlement on a question and answer website Expatriates Stack Exchange. It sees their place-making practices as complex, unequal, and shaped by political and societal factors, and yet endowed with a precarious cosmopolitan agency embodying an idea of moral openness, responsibility to distant others, and freedom of movement.

Focusing on narrative aspect of the communicative practices of information technology professionals, we identify the dominant themes in the discussion around the topic of migration and settlement by the members of Expatriates Stack Exchange to further consider power relations underlying these practices, and their connection to online performances of cosmopolitanism as an idea of freedom of movement, moral openness, and responsibility towards distant others.

To do so, we undertake a mixed-method analysis, incorporating a novel computational approach to interactive topic modelling, and a close reading of the identified topical clusters of interest. We identify such narrative tendencies as awareness of constrained mobility, "othering" of locals co-existing with cosmopolitan sensitivities, and prominence of masculine perspective.

This analysis will help us understand whether and how Expatriates Stack Exchange itself emerges as an unequal and restricted place, open for entry and engagement in practices of place-making for some but restricted for others. It will also offer insights into any potential possibilities digital spaces may have for transforming experiences of communities constrained in their transnational mobility.

Global technology startups have followed closely in Silicon Valley’s image, adopting and adapting its norms, values, and practices across oceans and continental divides. As a nascent, geographically distant, and tightly regulated sector, Australia holds the potential to develop into something different. This is particularly the case given Australia’s late emergence, maturing at a time of waning adulation for Silicon Valley and increased public scrutiny of the Valley’s culture and societal effects. Based on three years of ethnographic research (2019-2022) I show how, despite these conditions, prevailing cultural standards infuse and drive the Australian startup domain. This is anchored by a specific value-set—the failure-speed ethos. I delineate and illustrate the failure-speed ethos, trace its path through migration and institutional enculturation, and examine how the demands and costs of failure and speed distribute unevenly between positions within the startup ecosystem. Findings have implications for the nature of innovation work in a globalized society, the context of technological development, and the sociological processes by which culture spreads.

The subreddit r/Antiwork and the eponymous movement it launched has introduced phrases like ‘Quiet Quitting’ and ‘Act your Wage’ into the media lexicon and garnered the attention of businesses from Goldman Sachs to Kellogg’s for its threat to labor force participation. Heralded by some as the successor to #OccupyWallSt, Antiwork is the other side of the Great Resignation for those who cannot afford to leave their livelihood. Yet it differs from #OccupyWallSt in its scope, which critiques capitalism as a whole rather than money in politics; its scale, with 2.7M members globally on Reddit alone; its longevity, ongoing for ten years; and its varied demographics whereas Occupy protesters tended to be educated white men. As Occupy sought collective mobilizations at government buildings, Antiwork fosters individual, less public forms of resistance to capitalism. James Scott referred to such ‘infrapolitics’ as weapons of the weak, as the lack of capital of the oppressed in all its forms often precludes more direct forms of protest. In this paper, drawing from digital ethnography and interviews, I examine the potency of r/Antiwork for impacting workplace behaviors among community members who are managers in their professional lives. In doing so, I explore the possibility of a broader class consciousness with an historically unlikely ally that transcends the traditional Marxist proletariat-capitalist binary and portends greater efficacy for the American labor movement than in the past 50 years.

This roundtable is an interdisciplinary exchange on four forthcoming monographs examining datafication, privacy, and surveillance. The authors will present their core arguments and identify common threads and important research avenues; Natasha Tusikov will moderate the session.

Natasha Tusikov and Blayne Haggart’s The New Knowledge. From the global geopolitical arena to the smart city, control over data and intellectual property have become a key political and economic priority, leading to a redistribution of power, including from individuals to companies and states. It explores how control over knowledge affects economic growth, creative expression, personal freedom and privacy, and offers suggestions for a humane path forward.

Alice Marwick’s The Private is Political. Networked privacy violations disproportionately affect members of marginalized communities. Drawing from 125 interviews, the book argues that Americans care deeply about privacy and engage in extensive “privacy work” to protect it—but are stymied by a focus on individual, rather than collective, solutions.

Ariane Ollier-Malaterre’s Living with Digital Surveillance in China. Digital surveillance is a daily reality of life in China. Drawing from 58 qualitative interviews and observations in China, the book situates participants’ accounts of digital surveillance within the Chinese socio-political system. It sheds light on the cohesive system of anguishing and redeeming narratives that cast digital surveillance as indispensable in China, and depicts the mental and emotional weight carried by those exposed to all-encompassing surveillance.

Aram Sinnreich’s The Secret Life of Data. Based on interviews with 29 domain experts and hundreds of case studies, the book demonstrates the downstream consequences of ubiquitous data surveillance and algorithms in major social institutions. It aims to give casual readers a sense of the second-order effects of networked technology in their lives, and to empower people who are typically excluded from these conversations to shape the future of policy and technological innovation.

This roundtable will open discussions around the ethical, political, regulatory and technological dimensions of consent in an environment of synthetic and generative media. We suggest that consent is emerging as a defining theme in the altered media environment enabled by deep-learning techniques. Deepfake videos have been used in satirising the powerful, in reimagining histories, in conscripting women into non-consensual pornography, and in resurrecting the dead (Ajder & Glick 2021, Chesney & Citron 2019, Gregory 2022, Paris & Donovan 2019). Synthetic media are not just about new ways of making meanings, but about challenges to settled understandings of how both meanings and media get made (Winger-Bearskin et al 2022), and these processes are tied to new forms of contested data practices (McCosker 2022).

In every case the first line of critique is about the lack of consent from those depicted (Meikle 2023). Generative media tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E raise questions of intellectual property, and the consent of those who created the model-training content or who may be represented within it. From the harvesting of personal photos as AI training data, to art and style imitation, to the involuntary participants in deepfake porn — each of these issues centres consent. Yet consent is a contested concept. While predominantly linked to notions of justice and agency, its limits are increasingly interrogated by feminist, queer and critical scholars who point to moments when consent becomes an alibi or is assumed by default (e.g. the tech industry small print ‘effective consent’ model, cf Tiidenberg 2018).

Initial participants will offer introductory ideas and provocations on the intersection of generative media and consent from their own research before opening the discussion up to establish connections between diverse digital developments that elide, demand or challenge issues of consent, and to consider possible solutions.

Social media platforms allow for free expression and speech, but also open possibilities for online misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, harm, and conspiracy theories (Nadim and Fladmoe, 2019). Here, gender as an analytical category plays a significant role in understanding how women, LGBTQ+ people, and members of various minorities, in particular, are disproportionately targeted by hate actors. In fact, through gendered violence and online hate, social media serves to promote structural inequality where gender minorities become the target of harassment (Jane 2014a; Jane 2017). Gendered violence and cyberhate have consequences that negatively impact women and queer groups and pose a threat to political goals through victimization and reinforcement of patriarchy (Jane, 2014b). Though anonymous in nature, mobilized and networked hate becomes a product of what Castells (1986) refers to as the culture of real virtuality where is a flow of capital, information, technology, images as well as organizational interaction. In particular, gendered cyberhate targets women in longstanding discourses that view men as superior to women (Jane, 2014b). Misogyny exists as a connective tissue that legitimizes the subjugation of feminine and othered identities in relation to heteronormative patriarchy (Kaul, 2021).

In particular, online violence against women in politics poses a deepening challenge to democracy, serving as a key tool of illiberalism and democratic backsliding across the globe. Hate speech against women in politics, female journalists and other public figures encompasses all forms of aggression, coercion, and intimidation seeking to exclude women from the digital public sphere simply because they are women. Gender misinformation here itself becomes a form of violence that undermines women and othered identities and weaponizes gendered narratives to promote political, social, or economic objectives. This online behavior seeks to achieve political outcomes: targeting individual women to harm them or drive them out of public life, while also sending a message that women in general should not be involved in politics. It is important to note that digital misogyny may not be overt at all times but benign and subtle - involving “everyday, seemingly innocent slights, comments, overgeneralizations, othering, and denigration of marginalized groups” (Anderson, 2010; Anderson, 2015) that although unintentional is insidious and dangerous.

Despite growing concerns about the increasing prevalence of misogynistic or sexist hate speech on different popular digital platforms, research in this field and the attention directed at ways to combat hate online is relatively recent. At this juncture, this panel on Gender Misinformation: Hate and Harassment will provide a forum to discuss how women in politics, journalism, and the film industry are perceived, and what the hate that targets these women looks like in practice in a global context. We bring together scholars whose interdisciplinary and comparative work in Germany, Azerbaijan, the Philippines, India, and Brazil focuses on prominent women in the digital public sphere and political leaders from racial, ethnic, religious, or other minority groups to demonstrate how misogynistic speech acts to exacerbate patriarchal norms and operationalize a relationship between gender and power. In addition to the focus on digital hate and harassment in the Global South, this panel also brings together a diversity of methodological interventions

References

Anderson Kristin J. (2015). Modern Misogyny: Anti-Feminism in a Post-Feminist Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Anderson Kristin J. (2010). Benign Bigotry: The Psychology of Subtle Prejudice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Castells, Manuel. (2000). The rise of the network society. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Jane Emma A. (2017). Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History. London: Sage.

Kaul, Nitasha. (2021). The Misogyny of Authoritarians in Contemporary Democracies, International Studies Review, Volume 23, Issue 4, Pages 1619–1645, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viab028.

Nadim, M., & Fladmoe, A. (2019). Silencing Women? Gender and Online Harassment. Social Science Computer Review, 39, 245 - 258.

Historically-situated accounts of the Web have a long history within the field of internet studies. Drawing on diverse methodologies and forms of data, web histories of platforms, cultures and communities of practice have illuminated the rich, but often transient and shifting nature of life online. Many web histories rely upon researchers capturing, collecting, and generating their own data through time, though some have also engaged with web archives as a means for studying the past online. However, web archive data have never fulfilled the requirements of positivist ideals such as ‘representativeness’ or objectivity, and the methodological consequences of this observation currently do not go far enough.

This panel aims to shift and reframe current discussions of the ‘promise’ of web archives for web historiography, towards identifying what underlying logics or ideals drive and motivate various actors engaged in this work. We argue that not only do the logics underpinning the practices of collecting and archiving the Web deserve further attention, but also the practices of internet researchers who aim to use these materials for studying the Web. Each paper contribution in this panel builds on web archive criticism by situating archived web material as fundamentally tied to the logics of practice. These underpinnings affect not only the formation of web archives, but also the methodological approaches researchers take. We therefore suggest new ways for conceptualising the ‘doing’ of web histories, tying them to an assemblage of people, practice and data that shape how we can come to understand the Web.

Globally, governments are considering policies regarding transparency and data sharing requirements for online platforms. One popular proposal includes mandating that platforms provide data sets of high reach content (content that reaches a large audience or comes from an account with a large following) disclosures similar to CrowdTangle (Platform Transparency: Understanding the Impact of Social Media, 2022). Proposals vary between making this data completely public versus keeping it available to certified researchers. Policy makers must consider the context (Nissenbaum, 2009) in which the data is shared and amplified, the account’s expectations of privacy and important notions regarding universal access to data and newsworthiness (Bezanson; 1992). These proposals pose important questions regarding when social media data officially crosses into the public domain and how AoIR’s ethical frameworks may be implicated (franzke et al, 2020; Buchanan & Markham, 2012).

This round table will convene experts in platform regulation, privacy and research ethics to discuss:

• What subset of online platforms should be responsible for providing high reach content/accounts? What contextual aspects of a platform’s design or the high-profile accounts on a platform should be considered?

• What are the privacy expectations of an account that is consistently reaching a large audience? Do these expectations vary based on the mechanism that results in those audiences (large subscriber base, algorithmic amplification)?

• In the case of public content, should the academic community and/or regulators consider use restrictions?

• How would such data sets implicate deletion rights?

• How should the international community think about the geographical jurisdiction of such data sets? Are they globally accessible? Do they include data belonging to high profile accounts regardless of the individual’s nationality?

• How should ethical principles be applied in the case of bystanders?

With the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic in Italy, as in the rest of the world, there was the growth of numerous protest groups, within which conspiracy theories circulated and developed. Doubts about the vaccine and the rejection of the legitimacy of the Green Pass (the certificate of vaccination, used to gain access to almost all public places), to the creation of sophisticated narratives that saw the total rejection of the plausibility of the pandemic, led to the need to counter and refute the mainstream media and the main actors raising awareness about those themes. The exceptional nature of the pandemic situation and the need to find radical solutions to keep the contagion under control has heightened tensions and distance with the so-called "anti-vaxxers". In fact, in 2021 in Italy, there have been demonstrations organized by these individuals, sometimes resulting in acts of violence. In addition, due to the introduction of the Green Pass, the possibility to obtain fake certifications or other solutions to circumvent the law, sparkled among such radicalized groups, especially through Telegram.

Although vaccine controversies are nothing new (Jolley, Douglas 2014), this paper focuses on visuality in conspiracy culture, a topic that seems to be still under-researched (Eklund, Alteveer 2018) despite being recognized as a powerful tool for the diffusion of ideas (Caumanns, Önnerfors 2020). In order to do so, it was carried out a qualitative content analysis of screenshotted images, collected within Italian Telegram conspiracy channels.

In the wake of fears over rising disinformation and conspiracy theories on the internet, YouTube cracked down on a diverse range of 'disinformation" channels. Since then, deplatforming, or the removal of one's social media account for violating platform rules, has sparked much societal and academic debate. While deplatforming may curb the popularity of social media figures, there is increasing concern that it may pose unintended consequences, like facilitating the growth of alternative media outlets and even inciting violence. However, previous published studies are limited to evaluating the effectiveness of deplatforming and the movement of individuals online. To date, no study has investigated how deplatformed conspiracy producers make sense of and manage their exclusion from mainstream social media platforms. This is what this study sets out to investigate. The study relies on qualitative data, including twenty-two interviews and fifteen profiles of prominent U.S. conspiracy producers. The paper makes a major contribution to research on deplatforming and conspiracy theories by demonstrating that YouTube “conspiracy theorists” do not accept their exclusion as just, and in turn counter it by re-platforming and finding new outlets, taking offline action and counter-othering. Deplatforming confirms their collective identity as the “outsiders ”.

Entering “best online yoga classes,” into Google Search returns lists from fitness websites like VeryWell Fit, Yogi Times, Prevention, Self, and Shape—most of these sites will include Gaia.com, a subscription-based streaming video platform, in their recommendation lists, labeling it variously as “best for the whole family,” “best intermediate/advanced,” and, most notably, “best for delving into yogic philosophy.” None of the blurbs written about Gaia in these articles mention its thousands of videos about conspiracy theories. These articles also fail to mention the connection between Gaia and Gaiam, one of the largest global yoga equipment brands. Formerly GaiamTV, Gaia.com offers videos and articles about yoga alongside videos and articles about UFOs, extraterrestrials, alternative archaeology, and universal consciousness, among a variety of other topics related to conspiracy theories, the paranormal, and new age spirituality. This paper examines Gaia, Inc., as a case study in conspirituality capitalism. The blatant obfuscation of the connection between Gaiam yoga equipment and the Gaia media empire functions to strengthen the mechanisms of conspirituality capitalism: not only are supporters of conspiratorial and alternative content financially contributing to its production through subscriptions to Gaia, but yoga practitioners who purchase Gaiam equipment may be unknowingly supporting Gaia’s conspiritual content. Using qualitative, grounded-theory-informed content analysis of video and textual content hosted on the site, as well as participant observation at two Gaia conferences held at the GaiaSphere Event Center outside Denver, Colorado, this paper, which is exploratory in nature, will introduce the term conspirituality capitalism and examine Gaia as a case study in it.

Soon after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned the federal right to abortion in the United States, an investigation revealed a disinformation campaign against birth control, driven by anti-abortion influencers. Disinformation targeting abortion and birth control is partially rooted in conspiracy, particularly the Great Replacement Theory, which plays on fears of white people being “replaced” by people of color. This notion is a long-standing issue of the anti-abortion movement, as early successes in banning abortion were partially motivated by fears of white people having fewer babies than people of color. Studies have shown that Black Americans believe in conspiracy theories about birth control, e.g., that it is deployed by the government as a form of genocide against Black people. Unfortunately, though, these beliefs are not entirely unfounded. This problematizes definitions of conspiracy theories as inherently false and unjustified—Black Americans, for instance, have long undergone inhumane experimentation by the American medical system. This illuminates a troubling connection—that between embodied oppression and conspiracy-believing. We query whether this overlap is weaponized by the anti-abortion community to spread disinformation campaigns. Through a critical technocultural discourse analysis of 14 hours of Instagram stories and posts from 154 members of the anti-abortion collected between February 14, 2023 and February 27, 2023, we find that the anti-abortion movement has weaponized feminist knowledge-production and relies on grains of embodied experience to spread disinformation campaigns, which at times snowball into racially-motivated conspiracy theories for political and/or financial gain.

As the podcast industry continues to mature and develop, a reflection on Black podcasts and how they are situated within the industry is useful, through the lens of Stuart Hall’s infamous query about the Blackness in Black popular culture. Returning to Hall’s question, what is the utility of exploring the Blackness in Black podcasting, and in this particular cultural moment? Using Moya Bailey’s (2021) concept of digital alchemy, this paper seeks to explore the ways that Black podcasts intervene in oppressive media systems to imagine new possibilities for and reframing of representations of those whose identities lie at “the margins of the margins” (Bailey, 2021). Thinking through the utility of the “Black” in Black podcasts speaks to the ways that marginalized folks create podcasts that center “the margins of the margin” while also using the platform to create different sounds and formats steeped in Black cultures and aesthetics. This paper does not insist that all Black podcasts do this but instead considers the larger implications for the audiences, creators and industry at large of the podcasts that do. Together, these Black podcasts practice generative digital alchemy by “creating new media that appeals to the community from which they come” (Bailey, 2021, p.24). These Black podcasts reframe narratives of victimhood, community and physical health while centering Black women. In turn, they fashion audio spaces where the Blackness of the intended subjects is used to address their specific tensions, needs and futures, showing the possibilities inherent in making bread from crumbs.

In this paper, I build on existing critical analyses of the social media uses of the term "whitexican" and extend these insights to propose that it acts as a heuristic to examine more widespread struggles over class, race, and indigeneity present in new media platforms in Mexico. My approach uses discourse analysis of press and promotional materials and close textual analysis of memes, social media posts, and YouTube videos. As a socio-digital invention, whitexican proves to be a plastic concept that reveals much about the class politics of its users and detractors. The simplicity and virality of this digital neologism prompts different publics to take it up as a way to articulate a series of interconnected critiques about twenty-first century Mexican media: matters of representation, the influx and influence of international platforms, social media’s affordances for resistant viewing practices. The popular lives of whitexican both signal new cosmopolitan formations for Mexican identity in the digital age and, at the same time, reveal potential avenues for disrupting the hegemonic formations of this national identity.

Amy, a white American who moved to Korea as an English teacher, made her TikTok account about Korean culture. Erin, a Korean American content creator made the series “Emily in Korea” on TikTok to criticize Amy for using Korean culture. Both content creators actively utilize their identities, white American and Korean American respectively, to showcase various ‘differences.’ Amy establishes a unique account as a white American in Korea by emphasizing the differences between her and Korean society; Erin emphasizes her Korean identity to call out Amy’s content by presenting the difference between her experience as an immigrant and Amy’s experience as a white American. Using the TikTok video series "Emily in Korea" as a case study, this study proposes a conceptualization of identity-based content within the field of digital content creation. I argue the complexity of identity-based content, which has various implications even though they are ultimately digital content that aims to attract more views and audience engagements. This case study thus casts the complex question of the murkiness between commodification, the power dynamic between nations, and identity in the digital content creation field.

This paper analyzes genetic ancestry test (GAT) result reveal videos, user comments, and the role of YouTube in hosting these videos, to capture the popular discourse around the relationship between genetics and racial identity. I explore this space to articulate the construction, deconstruction, and performance of racial authenticity. By employing Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), I seek to answer the following questions:

1. How do YouTubers use their videos on GAT test results to further discourses of race that codify notions of authenticity?

2. What role does the affordances of comments and validation play in the ongoing project of YouTube creators’ own racial identity?

I focus on videos made by creators who specifically identify as racially ‘ambiguous.’ By using Stuart Hall’s conception of race as a floating signifier, I discuss how content creators and audiences discourse around racial identities coalesce into a new project of “racial formation” (Omi & Winant, 2015). I unpack how racial authenticity is being reconstructed and deconstructed in digital spaces and interrogate the ways in which the conceptualization and mobilization of authenticity are intertwined with white supremacy. Finally, I offer that YouTube’s digital subaltern counterpublic is a site of contestation (Squires, 2002). This contestation reclaims agency for people of color in crafting liberatory understandings of racial identity.

Beauty vlogs – a lucrative and highly popular YouTube genre (Banet-Weiser, 2017) – offer a unique area of study for exploring the ways that Asian Australian identity is performed and negotiated, given their attention to the Asian faces of vloggers (which is often a focus of beauty content) and the inclusion of speech, with accent being one of the key distinguishing features of Australian national identity to a global audience. However, the study of Asian diaspora in the beauty vlogosphere has generally been limited to the Asian American experience (Kim, 2021; Tomkins, 2020; Tran, 2020). This project responds to the need to build on contemporary representation work in Asian Australian studies, and the current lack of scholarship on Asian Australian representation on social media, with a study of three young Asian Australian beauty vloggers: Vietnamese Australian Tina Yong, Filipino Australian Rachel Tee Tyler, and South Asian Australian Rowi Singh. Drawing on ideological and thematic analyses of these content creators’ vlogs, associated YouTube comments, branded social media accounts, and mainstream media coverage, I explore how national, transnational, cultural and diasporic identities are negotiated through the practices of YouTube beauty vloggers, the commercialized landscape in which their work is made legible, and within their respective audiences and online cultures. In turn, this question and its resulting analysis is oriented towards an understanding of the potential and limitations of negotiating a hybrid Asian Australian cultural identity through social media.

Educational inequality is prevalent in Germany and depends on different levels of social, economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1987). Yet, non-formal and informal educational arrangements are increasingly considered relevant to tackle those inequalities, specifically when it comes digitalised societies (Jeong et al. 2018). Non-formal educational providers increasingly target marginalised youth to reduce educational inequalities.

However, those programmes have scarcely been researched. The question emerges, whether non-formal digitialised educational arrangements succeed at enabling educational participation of marginalised youth.

In comparing two non-formal educational institutions, the research project “DILABoration” identifies conditions under which marginalised youth are able to profit off of those providers’ programmes and reconstructs them on a subjective level. In an ethnographic and reconstructive approach, a) different conditions in non-formal educational arrangements, b) learning and educational processes, specifically respective digital media use as well as c) the accessibility of participation within those arrangements are being investigated from a marginalised youths’ perspective.

In order to empirically reconstruct the mechanisms of educational participation, the participants’ and employees’ practices within those arrangements are examined through participatory observation and videography. The data is analysed through Grounded Theory Methodology (Strauss/Corbin) as well as Artefact Analysis (Lueger / Froschauer 2018). Situational Analysis (Clarke/Washburn/Friese 2018) is applied in order to visualise constellations and relations between different human and non-human entities. Additionally, group discussions with non-participants of the programmes help identifying conditions that enable or constrain participation.

Age-related digital inequalities have been one of the key aspects to understand and enable better ageing in the digitalized world. Although there is a large body of literature on direct forms and determinants of digital engagement among older internet users and non-users, only a few studies have focused on determinants of indirect internet uses among older non-users. To address this gap, this study investigates how the unequal distribution of resources among older non-users affects the availability and activation of supportive relationships, which enable them to ask other internet users to perform internet activities on their behalf—a practice known as use-by-proxy (UBP). Drawing on van Dijk’s (2005) resources and appropriation theory, we build a conceptual model with seven hypotheses. These hypotheses specify sequential pathways between categorical inequalities and differences in social and material resources as determinants of the heterogeneity of UBP availability and activation of networks. In turn, availability and activation affect the breadth of UBP engagement among older non-users. The model is tested on a representative survey sample of 241 respondents aged 65+ from Slovenia. Results from path analysis partly support the model and demonstrate the importance of investigating the sequential paths between social and age-related digital inequalities with respect to indirect forms of internet uses. The results also suggest that interventions aimed at supporting older non-users in their access to online services can be targeted at different levels, from addressing categorical and resource inequalities to providing UBP services.

Coding bootcamps are intensive training programs that aim to turn adults with no computer programming experience into professional software developers in as little as 12 to 16 weeks. In both the US and the UK, coding bootcamps are positioned as an alternative pathway into the tech “pipeline” for groups who are traditionally excluded from computing careers (Schnell, 2019; UK Digital Strategy, 2022). Framed as a form of “coding equity”, bootcamps are said to provide “transformative access” for participants and have even been characterized as a form of social justice activism (Rea, 2022). However, our ongoing comparative study about coding bootcamps in the US and UK indicates that the benefits of attending a coding bootcamp accrue disproportionately across different groups. Drawing upon ethnographic, interview, and survey data, this work-in-progress paper focuses on the bootcamp experiences of people with disabilities, who were more likely to experience unfair bias and/or exclusion and are less likely to have experienced employment-related benefits than people without disabilities. This paper discusses some of the contributing factors to these outcomes and explores the impact that these experiences have on bootcamp students with disabilities. In doing so, it casts some doubt on the “transformative” possibilities of bootcamps for marginalized groups. Although some bootcamps declare their “support” for “people with disabilities and neurodiversities” (Northcoders, n.d.), our study indicates that even if and when this support exists, it falls short of what people with disabilities need to thrive in a bootcamp setting.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2014 murder of 18-year Michael Brown in Missouri, hashtags like #ferguson, #justiceformikebrown, and #handsupdontshoot begin trending on Twitter. At the same time, Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown University Professor of History and American Studies, began crowdsourcing materials for educators trying to address what happened in their classrooms using the hashtag #fergusonsyllabus. What resulted was a list of highly interdisciplinary and multimedia sources including scholarly texts, news stories, songs, poems, films, public addresses, and children’s books. Chatelain’s call spoke both to the present crisis, the murder of a Black teenager by police, and to the historical and cultural context in which this shooting happened. The efforts of Chatelain and the community that came together around this hashtag expanded our understanding of information production and curation and the function of a syllabus beyond the college classroom. In introducing our undergraduate classes to the idea of the hashtag syllabus, we attempt to engage our students in practices of information literacy with the hope of providing them tools to look critically at the inequities that permeate academic and non-academic spaces. Here, we explore the ways in which this format operates in interdisciplinary social science programs and the ways in which it supports unique learning objectives in both introductory and upper-level courses. In doing so, we hope to engage in pedagogical praxis that connects our fields and our students with questions of social justice and to do so in a way that prepares them for meaningful civic engagement.

In the age of AI, when models like DALL-E and ChatGPT impact countless aspects of our lives, the dehumanizing and harmful features of AI that have plagued data science since its inception continue resulting in the routine erasure, exploitation, and subjugation of people of color, Indigenous people, women, queer, non-binary, immigrant, dis/abled, and non-Western people. Far from a “glitch” or unintentional error, these endemic issues are a function of the systemic oppression upon which the global AI industry is built. Rooted in colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism, this perpetual oppression shows that we live not simply in the Age of AI but in the Age of AI Empire. Since Big Data and algorithms only further reinforce the logics of hegemony, extractivism, surveillance, and subjugation which drive AI Empire, we argue that reforming AI from within the same oppressive system that created it can do little beyond providing band-aid solutions.

Instead, to advance justice, we must radically transform our ideas about data and technology and develop them from the ground-up, from the perspectives of those who stand the most risk of being harmed. Rather than being perceived as “vulnerable,” the people and communities most directly impacted by AI are more properly understood as demonstrating technological ingenuity and sustained resistances against AI Empire – revolutionary tactics we call Data Resurgence. Through the lessons learned from Indigenous, decolonial, and queer communities, we show that data resurgence can be a powerful collective response to AI Empire based on Anti-coloniality, Relationality, Sovereignty, and Liberatory Praxis.

This paper reflects on the role of ideology in the development of artificial intelligence and potential alternatives to dominant discourses in the technology industry. Besides widely documented ideologies such as White supremacy, techno-libertarianism, and techno-universalism, longtermism has become more prominent in recent years. As another horizon, this paper contrasts these ideologies with lessons from Latin American struggles, presenting ideas from vivir bien (to live well) philosophy that emerged from indigenous and afro grassroots organizations and has influenced progressive politics in the region for the past decades. Instead of focusing on the individual and utilitarian approaches to technology development, living well philosophy centers on communities and their relationship with their territories. The paper concludes with an invitation to imagine a future where communities can live well with technology.

Cloud infrastructure platforms underpin most of today’s internet, functioning as the operating system of the internet and representing the most important source of revenue for Big Tech companies. While most of the current hype around (“generative”) AI is focused on specific successful products and initiatives like OpenAI (ChatGPT, DALL·E 2) and Stability AI (Stable Diffusion), they would not have been possible without the significant infrastructural support and investments from Big Tech companies. This paper critically examines what we call Big AI, or those types and deployments of AI that simply would not be feasible or even possible without the infrastructural support, partnerships, or investments provided by Big Tech companies. To account for this, we articulate the key components of AI and how they are connected. By focusing on Big Tech’s own products and service offerings, third-party applications, and models, we gain a more comprehensive understanding of what Big AI is, or looks like today, and what it may become in the years to come—for which the infrastructure is being made right now. Further, we make a distinction between the cloud platform products and service offerings from Big Tech (i.e. the cloud as an infrastructure for AI) and Big Tech as the host or provided of marketplaces for diverse (AI-based) products and services from third-party businesses and developers (i.e. the cloud as a marketplace for AI). Overall, this research provides the basis for a better understanding of the critical political economy of (Big) AI.

How does monetization complicate efforts toward social justice in online communities? For knitters, whose online community emerged on monetizable social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram, a years-long internal controversy about problematic creator content has become a springboard into leveraging monetization toward social justice. Yet although this effort has been largely successful, it continues to spark questions about how platformization and its logic of monetization – predicated on values like competition, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, and self-discipline – constrain possibilities for collective solidarity and mutual support. This paper examines the controversy by performing a rhetorical analysis on representative media objects including Instagram posts and Stories, YouTube videos and comment fields, and supporting materials such as blogs and website content. Situating my analysis in a theoretical context of affect and rhetorical circulation, I argue that participants use the concept of “authenticity” as a tool to negotiate the tensions between the platformization values that constrain them and the social justice values toward which they strive.

BeReal, the latest social media app to gain popularity, explicitly frames itself as a more “authentic” alternative to dominant platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Users can post only once per day, in a random two-minute window controlled by the app. Posts consist of an image that combines photos from a smartphone’s front- and back-facing cameras. While these individual features aren’t novel, the app packages them as an overt response to current cultural frustration with fake-ness. How persuasive is this marketing tactic, especially among a generation that has grown up with social media? To explore this question, we are interviewing young adult BeReal users about how they use the app and to what extent they experience BeReal as a space for authenticity. Our ongoing analysis suggests that while participants find BeReal to offer forms of real-time and spontaneous authenticity, on a deeper level, they question whether social platforms can ever act as vessels for authenticity. These initial findings indicate that young adults may recognize social media claims to authenticity as the marketing tactics they often are.

To achieve success in the industry, wellness influencers must master both authenticity and credibility to ensure longevity. Within internet research, authenticity has been explored extensively as it relates to influencer culture, yet credibility is understudied. Through an analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews with wellness influencers in the United States, supplemented by 378 Instagram images and videos, I apply source credibility theory to the wellness influencer industry on Instagram to evaluate credibility in relation to authenticity. In the findings I detail how these two concepts work together, and sometimes against one another, as influencers attempt to build and maintain their online brands, I also present and explicate the “authoritative share” - a content creation technique employed by wellness influencers to balance their authenticity with credibility presentation on Instagram. This study suggests the boundary between influencer and expert is muddling and future studies may interrogate how the social media landscape is changing based on creators flocking to social media to share their personal and professional lives.

What happens when an influencer’s real life interferes with the expectations created around their branded persona? When, for example, a vegan vlogger who has touted their healthy lifestyle is diagnosed with cancer and must now explain how their diet could not prevent the disease? Or when a pair of #VanLifers ditch their vehicle to move back into a home? What happens when an influencer makes choices to prioritize their circumstances, at the expense of the audience’s demands for entertainment and its expectations of a brand narrative?

In this paper, we perform a rhetorical analysis of the confessional rhetoric of three prominent YouTube travel vloggers, Kara and Nate (US), Eamon and Bec (CA), and Elena and Riley, or Sailing La Vagabonde (AUS), over a period of two years. We consider the role of the confessional in influencer communication as a means of maintaining a constitutive (brand) relationship with an audience and argue that the “confessional” is a reaction to a perceived need to apologize for real life events that interfere with the “authenticity” of an influencer’s brand. We suggest that this perception is created through what we call a “reverse parasocial relationship,” in which the influencer feels beholden to the maintenance of a perceived relationship with an unseen audience. The confessional acts as a re-constitutive rhetoric that allows an influencer to refashion themselves as a credible speaker to an assumed existing audience and realign the realities of their lives with the expectations of their branded personas.

Through the case of the technologically augmented K-pop idol group Mad Monster, this article explores the participatory culture in the supposedly revolutionary proliferation of “humanlike, realistic” digital technologies by drawing on the concept of meta-authenticity, loosely defined as the desire or achievement of authenticity in practices of inauthenticity. I focus on the implications of the social integration of artificial agents and augmentative tools for humans, not to re-establish the human-nonhuman binary but to illuminate the persisting human presence and involvement. Mad Monster’s authenticity was achieved through—not despite—their blatantly “inauthentic” technological augmentations like extreme facial and voice filters. They were co-managed to perform as per “human” authenticity expectations while drawing on the presumption of inauthenticity: by the comedy duo, their fans, existing institutions, and commercial interests—the locus of their authenticity was in collaborative performances. Mad Monster is a case of contemporary meta-authenticity that demands a shift of focus from technological states to collaborative performances around it: how “humanlike” or technologically augmented cyborgs are involved in social spheres matters more than what they are. Their success as “fake but/thus real” AR-filtered, autotuned celebrities also warns of how diverse humans’ crucial contributions can be easily hidden in cyborg phenomena that stress their technological components, and how accountability can be diverted. The revolutionary potential of cyborgs rests not in technical achievements but in the collaborations of the actors involved: questioning, shaking, and breaking the standards.

This fishbowl invites the AoIR community to discuss the issues and challenges involved in studying humor in online exchanges. Despite the ubiquity of humor online – from snark, irony and sarcasm to pranks, slapstick and plain absurdity; from Twitter burns to memes and strategically used emojis – its forms and dynamics are not means easy to account for in analytical work. These challenges are connected to both methodological choices and the very slipperiness of humor itself: who is laughing at what or whom and in what contexts; what is understood as funny; what laughter effects and sets in motion.

Humor is a means of crafting distances and proximities, hierarchies and alliances, from forms of “kicking down” targeting racialised, gendered, and sexualized others (Askanius 2021; Hakoköngäs et al. 2020; Marwick 2014; Kanai 2016; Phillips 2019) to resistances towards online hate (Rentschler & Thrift 2015; Ringrose & Lawrence 2018; Sundén & Paasonen 2020). Meanwhile, humor fuels mundane sociality in myriad and ambiguous ways (Phillips & Milner 2017) as something of a default.

This fishbowl welcomes people to discuss their experiences in, and solutions for studying online humor and to address the forms and social meanings of “fun” across case studies. Our overall aim is to bring different forms of inquiry together, address the political stakes involved, and further develop the field of inquiry which currently has limited visibility as one. We are interested in what happens when interdisciplinary Internet research meets the field of humor studies operating with a classificational logic, and when the messy realities of online platforms meet the affordances of qualitative textual and visual methods, digital methods and big data analysis.’

The discussion is kicked off by the “fishes” Mahli-Ann Butt, Chris Muller, Benjamin Nickl, Susanna Paasonen and Jenny Sundén.

Digital technology has played a crucial role in democratisation, enabling the propagation of progressive ideas, voices, and movements. However, the internet is also a space in which reactionary political expressions, like those of the far-right, have come to thrive. Part of the digital success of the contemporary far-right can be attributed to the structure of the internet itself, which effectively links global, heterogenous far-right actors, and provides them with a sense of community across various social and geographical settings. The papers in this panel address different aspects of far-right efforts across Big Tech and alt-right platforms. The first and second papers both speak to this issue, although in different ways, by illustrating how the US far-right leverages imaginaries of Sweden, in both legacy and alternative media outlets, to build transnational alliances. The third paper studies how users of a notorious global white nationalist web forum develop a collective white identity that has been described as a network of translocal whiteness. The fourth and fifth papers, in turn, through different focuses, address the role that tech companies play in responding to, and at times perpetuate, far-right content, as well as responses from civil society to counter this threat.

This roundtable will seek to foster cross-disciplinary conversation about possible lines of inquiry that might emerge at the intersection of critical internet studies and sound studies. AoIR has long been established as the primary scholarly organization devoted to critical analysis of the Internet, yet a cursory examination of past conference programs reveals relatively scant attention to the role of sound and aurality within the cultural imaginaries or socio-technical materialities of the internet. Accordingly, this roundtable will explore how sound studies suggest ways in which the relative ‘deafness’ of critical internet studies can be literally “remediated”. Within sound studies, there are two broad approaches to the study of sound and aurality: the first draws upon a sociologically oriented cultural studies tradition and foregrounds the phenomenology of sound, music, noise, and silence as they have been instantiated in discrete social practices (cf. Sterne, 2012); the second is an STS approach that focuses on “technologies for storing, manipulating, and transferring sound and music . . . and new ways of measuring, conceptualizing, and controlling sound.” (Pinch and Bjisterveld, 2012: 5; Grimshaw-Aagaard, 2019: 17). Drawing upon their current research projects, the roundtable participants will engage these approaches with an ear towards articulating them with critical internet studies. Andrew Bottomley will reflect upon the failures of audio-based social media platforms/tools including Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces; Andrew Herman will explore the ambivalent instantiation of listening publics in the internet radio assemblage and the possibilities of using aural methodologies of media archaeological resonance; Holly Kruse will consider the cultural valences of "liveness" on music video platforms such as YouTube; Anne MacLennan will reflect upon understandings of sonic “authenticity” that animate podcasting in comparison with early radio broadcasting; and Aram Sinnreich will discuss the liberatory capacity of AI-generated music that drives an ontological wedge between music-as-commodity and musicking-as-social-praxis.

In recent years, thousands of university faculty, staff, and students have been targeted with networked harassment, especially groups under-represented in higher education. In this form of harassment, a network of actors organize to remove scholars from public discourse by causing psychological, physical, and organizational harm (Marwick, 2021). Prior social science research on networked harassment has focused on the experience of individuals and short-term incidents (Veletsianos et al., 2018) rather than institutional vulnerabilities to harassment campaigns that can stretch for months or years (Marwick, 2021). Even though online threats are increasingly interconnected and coordinated, more is needed to know about the relationships between responsible academic institutions, their current prevention mechanisms, and the effectiveness of their responses. To investigate the relationship between the targets of harassment and their organizations, this study starts by looking at public media to create a U.S.-based dataset on networked harassment of scholars from 2016 through 2022. To do so, we are datamining the Media Cloud archive of news reports for cases of networked harassment that escalated to coverage in the news media. By performing a content analysis in the queried news articles, we record common characteristics of harassment cases, including the nature, duration, outcomes, and institutions involved. There's a need for greater discussion and coordination among academic institutions to protect their workers. Given how academic prestige is becoming intertwined, in part, with maintaining an online presence to make oneself discoverable in digital mediums, preventing harassment is increasingly "part of the job."

Online harassment is a public health concern, and social media algorithms are often proposed as a solution by social media companies. As online harassment grows, there are concerns that algorithms as content moderators fail to achieve their desired effect because of inabilities to contextualize social issues. This research contributes to the intersection of algorithms and online harassment by investigating the algorithmic folk theories of the victims, perpetrators, and bystanders of online harassment. Strategically sampling the experiences of marginalized identity categories who experienced harassment, we conducted grounded theory interviews and found that people theorize that algorithmic failures fuel online harassment and isolate victims. We describe four folk theories that victims, perpetrators, and witnesses utilize to make sense of their experiences of online harassment. The critical mass intervention theory asserts algorithms only pay attention to harassment incidents with a large number of flags. The harassment amplifier theory describes perceptions of how algorithms amplify harassment content to increase engagement. The algorithmic virus theory refers to perceptions that algorithms seek to form new audiences for content, which networks harassers together. The biased protection theory finds victims perceive that algorithms fail to contextualize the harassment of marginalized communities. Victims, bystanders, and perpetrators each described using their folk theories to instigate, push back, or succumb to the culture of online harassment. Understanding these algorithmic online harassment folk theories highlights how social media algorithms perpetuate harassment and fail to support victims.

Keywords: algorithmic folk theories, online harassment, networked harassment, social media, content moderation.

Stories about the impacts of online research harassment on graduate students are rarely acknowledged or gathered. Students are left alone to carry the burden of having their research derailed by a barrage of constant hatred and became yet another decontextualized statistic regarding Ph.D. completion rates. Even as aggression and toxicity increasingly proliferate on social media platforms the personal experiences of graduate students who have encountered hate while conducting or sharing their research online remain untold and uncounted.

We will present the process and artistic outputs of research creation project Bearing Witness, that begins to gather and share stories of research harassment, to bring visibility to the issue.

Our project has three components that we will present.

1: Storytelling. We captured the stories from graduate students who have experienced online hate and harassment in response to sharing their research in public forums.

2: Creative Interpretation and Illumination

We have commissioned three graduate student artists to use the transcripts from these stories as a material source to create three individual pieces that capture these student’s experiences. The artists were commissioned with explicit goal of rendering and making visible the stories of harassment experienced by graduate students.

3: Exhibition and Amplification

The final creative works will be exhibited on York University campus during the 2023 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (May 27-June 2), an event expected to draw approximately 8,000 scholars and students. We will have an opportunity for visitors to comment on the exhibit.

In October 2017, Raya Sarkar, a 24-year-old law student from India, posted a crowdsourced list on Facebook of male Indian academics who allegedly harassed women. This led to the start of the #MeToo revolution in India, where universities became key spaces of discussion, debate and activism. Due to failures of both the criminal justice system and the described capitalist, patriarchal, casteist structures of Indian academia, hundreds of survivors who had experienced sexual violence at universities came forward online, disclosing their stories of harassment and abuse. Drawing from interviews with seven sexual violence survivors who disclosed their experiences online, this paper provides insight into reasons why survivors choose to bypass formal reporting mechanisms in HEIs, and instead turn to online spaces in their search for justice and healing. We argue that students are wary of university processes and often seek alternative forms of justice beyond the ‘punishment’ that HEIs are often unable or unwilling to provide. As such, this article provides compelling empirical evidence of the urgent need for universities to adopt survivor-centred approaches in their processes and conceptualization of justice, as well as how online spaces enable healing, catharsis and new means of informal justice.

From the earliest stages of the pandemic, the mediatisation of performing arts have become visible to a broad and non-specialist audience. During this time, the internet and social media became the only interface between the theatre sector and its audience for many months. Digital performance leapt from niche artistic consumption to the mainstream during that moment. Art residencies are also among the practices affected by that migration. Some initiatives tried to rethink the residency idea beyond the physical space. Digital residencies have therefore represented a threefold state of liminality: the work in progress status inherent to residency, the suspended time of the pandemic, and the (for many) exceptional space of digital performance.

Even though the restrictions on attending theatre are gone, some of these experiences have continued. Our study asks what happens to digital residencies beyond the “temporary disruption” of the pandemic? How do theatre artists and audiences address the exceptionality of digital residencies during and after the pandemic?

To answer these questions, we analysed the Italian case of Residenze Digitali. The project was born in 2020 with the intent to stimulate performing artists to explore the digital space as a further declination of their research. Our research compares two years: 2021, when some restrictions were still in place, and 2022 when these restrictions were lifted entirely. Through 42 in-depth interviews conducted with spectators, artists and organisers, we will explore the different meanings associated with the digital threshold for theatre at the two different times.

Standardized manual content analysis is an important methodology to capture the messages in journalistic and social media. Specifically, for supervised machine learning aproaches, human-generated training data is needed. The process of coding as well as the selection of suitable coders is crucial for obtaining good data quality. However, little research has been done on how the coding process should be designed and how personal characteristics of the coders might influence data quality. This blind spot becomes even more crucial because coding is nowadays increasingly performed with the help of crowdworkers. When working with such anonymous coders, the process of coding can then be less controlled by the researchers, which can lead to loss of quality.

In our comparative mixed-methods study we compare data from a content analysis on the topic of legalizing abortion (n = 300 tweets). We conducted this in two ways: Firstly, with a team of four student coders who also received training and secondly with 150 crowdworkers. All coders had to complete a short survey on their socio-demographics and personality traits.

The results show that both validity and reliability are higher for the student coders, especially for tricky coding tasks. Further, multivariate (logistic) regression analysis reveals that personal characteristics such as formal education and emotional sensitivity also have an impact on coding quality. Hence, with a reflective selection of coders as well as a thoughtful design of the coding process and the codebook, the quality of data collection can be increased—even when relying on crowdworkers.

In a cultural context where high school-aged youth spend almost as much of their time online as they do sleeping – or participating in any other daily activity – debates have emerged regarding the effects of cellphone and social media use on the well-being of young people today. COVID-19 further transformed cellphones and social media into a few of the only tools with which some youth can stay socially connected and fueled contemporary moral panics surrounding young people’s online engagement. These considerations should be taken seriously in research, where the roles of cellphones and social media are carefully thought of in parallel to ethical social inquiry design with youth. Accordingly, this paper provides a reflexive review of my experience interviewing 30 Ontario-based, high school-aged youth with Jørgensen’s (2016) “media-infused” interview method, the media go-along, where interviewees respond to thematized questions while they scroll through, interact with, and talk about an app on their cellphone. By applying youth studies and critical Internet studies to my one-on-one interviews, I discuss my preliminary insights on in-progress research to consider how the participant-led media go-along resists positivist understandings of data and empowers young research participants, thereby challenging long-lasting understandings of youth as vulnerable and “at-risk.” I ask: What insights can the media go-along provide interviewers as a method that challenges the online/offline binary of data collection? As a participatory and collaborative method that critically integrates both participants and digital technologies, how is the media go-along revolutionary to youth, feminist, and Internet research projects alike?

The rise of the Internet brought about a revolution in the ethnographic method, one which decades later remains ongoing and lively as ever. In this paper, I offer a detailed description of the creative, multi-modal, multi-sited ethnographic practice I employed in my dissertation research on the slow fashion movement. To do this, I outline the three key ethnographic practices I employed across the digital and in-person spheres of my research: (1) scrolling, (2) shopping, and (3) sewing. My method builds on one of digital anthropology’s most recent and exciting methodological transformations: ‘immersive cohabitation’ (Bluteau 2021). Further, my discussion examines the methodological tensions the use of the internet brought up during my fieldwork through the exploration of three questions: (1) What happens when your fieldsite is algorithmically designed to addict you? (2) What happens when your fieldsite encourages overconsumption? (3) What happens when your ethnographic practice becomes a performance? In pursuing answers to these questions, this piece offers a critical reflection on the possibilities and the complexities facing internet ethnographers in the present moment.

This paper draws on qualitative empirical research 24 teens from a British Sixth Form College (described in-depth in the paper) to demonstrate the popularity of anonymous apps in school-based settings, particularly for the circulation of comments about female students’ gendered and sexual identities. Anonymous apps allow users to send messages to others without revealing information that may identify them, like their legal name. They are either 'tie-based' (allowing you to send anonymous messages to people you already know) or 'proximity-based' (showing you anonymised posts from a wider range of people based within a certain radius, or who belong to a certain network, like a University campus) (Ma et al, 2017).

Contrary to popular belief, I show how the ‘harms’ of anonymous apps do not always lie in anonymity itself, and can instead emerge from already-existing cultures relating to gender and sexuality in their location of use.

The #metoo movement has been one of the key social movements which has ushered in a change in structural relations in the society. In the Indian context, the movement has meant giving a powerful platform to women address generations of sexual assault in the Indian society. However, the #metoo movement has also witnessed a counter-response from the growing online ‘men’s rights activists’ (MRA) community.

This study focuses on the online presence of MRA movement in India and the practice of everyday visual misogyny on their Facebook pages. I specifically focus on the public Facebook page of Save Indian Family Movement. The paper focuses on visual posts like images in form of memes and distorted news clips shared on their public page with the aim of capturing visual misogyny.

The selection criteria were to manually collect all posts with an image for a duration of three months (17 October, 2022 – 21 January, 2023). I focus on this timeframe to cover the three months after Justice Chandrachud--who is not seen favourably amongst the MRA community for his progressive judgements --was appointed as the new Chief Justice of India.

The dataset of images only contains either memes or cartoons or news clips. I employ an iterative multimodal critical discourse analysis approach to analyse the visual posts and categorise them based on the schema of explicit and implicit misogyny developed by Strathern and Pfeffer (2022). The findings suggest majority of the visual posts fall within the implicit misogyny category.

This paper discussed categories of violent discourses and toxicity against Brazilian women deputies on Twitter through a mixed-methods (corpus linguistics approach/discursive analysis) on a dataset of 1400 tweets. Results suggest that toxic discourse in this case is largely based on violence connected to women's behavior and abilities in the political realm, rather than ideology or propositions. Ideological affiliation, while may influence the amount of toxicity created, doesn’t influence the types of toxic discourses.

This paper examines the manifestation of 'everyday' online misogyny. Social media platforms are often deeply unsafe spaces for women, particularly women who speak publicly about feminist issues. In response to a number of public controversies over the last decade, platforms have introduced a range of different design interventions and policy changes. However, these interventions have predominantly focused on the most extreme, unambiguous manifestations of online misogyny. Current literature on gender-based violence emphasises that ‘everyday’ expressions of misogyny play a significant role in normalising violence against women and reinforcing the beliefs that underpin the more exceptional misogynistic attacks.

This paper presents the initial findings of a case study of everyday misogyny on Twitter in discourses about the Depp v Heard trial. It aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how everyday misogyny manifests in ordinary language and debates on social media platforms, as a step towards developing better mechanisms for identifying and responding to online misogyny. Our preliminary findings challenge platforms' traditional reliance on counterspeech-based approaches to addressing the harms of everyday misogyny. Rather than serving as a remedy, this study suggests that online debate about women's experiences of violence can instead, in some circumstances, become a vehicle for oppression, a manifestation of everyday online misogyny.

This paper examines the role of platformization in nation branding processes. Drawing on user guides produced by platforms like Instagram and TikTok for official government accounts, as well as the content posted to the accounts of nations like Perú (@Peru), the United States (@VisittheUSA), Norway (@VisitNorway), and more, this paper examines how governments and nations themselves have begun to produce content optimized for social media entertainment platforms in order to position themselves as interactive media brands. I argue that the use of social media entertainment in nation branding processes positions platforms as a locus of power in the machinations of national and transnational networks of cultural production and capital accumulation within the global cultural economy more broadly. This paper seeks to contribute an understanding of how platforms like Instagram and TikTok (and their associated parent companies) engage directly in struggles over ideological and technological forms of power at the same time that nation-states attempt to harness and benefit from platformized forms of cultural production through a constellation of regulatory, governance, and policy regimes.

Existing scholarship on platform urbanism has largely focused on how digital platforms are remediating the socioeconomic and spatial structures of day-time activities. Few have examined how digital platforms are reconfiguring the rhythms and patterns of the urban nightscape. Yet, as a caricature of the day, the night allows us to observe the social tensions caught between surveillance and pleasure, tensions that are core to the study of “the growing presence and power of digital platforms in cities” (Sadowski, 2020, p. 448). Underground electronic/dance music culture (EDMC), in particular, epitomize such tensions between surveillance and pleasure. From social media (e.g., Instagram), messaging platforms (e.g., Telegram), to community forums (e.g., Resident Advisor), the advent of mobile digital platforms complicates these communities’ commitment to a shared culture of secrecy by re-configuring the rhythms of sociality.

This paper explores how the architecture and design of these platforms are reconfiguring the rhythms of scene participation in underground EDMC. To do so, I conducted a multi-sited ethnography from 2020 to 2022 that traces the uses of digital platforms among event promoters and event joiners in Berlin, Taipei, and New York. This paper offers a timely examination of the shifting relationships between media technologies and urban nightlife and bridges such analysis with the recent debates on platform urbanism.

Gambling games are composed of risk and contingency - the gambler stakes their bet on the spin or a reel or a roulette wheel completely dependent on forces outside of their control, uncertain of the outcome. This potent combination is not only being used to fuel the nearly $500 billion USD global gambling industry, but also to organise the current app economy. Digital platforms, their complementors, and their users are brought together by risk and contingency into a dynamic political economy, with the platform accruing the most advantage (Poell et al., 2021). Unpacking these unequal and sometimes precarious relations requires studying a “representative commodity” (Kline et al., 2003). Social casino apps, a niche, but still significant digital game commodity, embody how risk and contingency manifests in the app economy (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Zittrain, 2008). In particular, when other industries interface with digital platforms, they become subject to their institutional imperatives (Gorwa, 2019). Social casino apps are representative of how platforms have been able to influence and shape even niche genres of digital leisure, but also the constraints and resistance to these techniques. In this paper, as a political economist of communication, I conduct a structural and critical analysis of the social casino industry, using institutional analysis as my methodology.

Dating applications represent a paradox: on the one hand, they provide a monetized platform for people to form relationships, yet on the other hand, the more people who find partners, the less revenue goes to the company. With this paradox as a backdrop, this extended abstract examines the business model of dating applications by address the following research question: What characterizes the business models of dating applications? To provide a nuanced picture of this, we conducted a 2022-study combining data about dating apps and app users: (A) 22 in-depth interviews with current and previous users (aged 24–49 years) of Norwegian dating applications users; (B) a systematic analysis of 30 serious dating apps in Google Play and Apple’s App Store; and (C) a diary study of four of the 30 dating applications. The findings reveals that dating apps follows a business model that creates revenue through a mix of an in-app purchase-model and subscription fees. The apps typically market themselves as free, yet they use several dark design and gamification features to create and spark emotional curiosity and engagement that in turn brings in revenue to dating app companies. Several of the users stated that they have experienced the apps as manipulative, emotionally exhausting and that they created the same kind of “addiction” or “cravings” they experienced in social media. Clearly, design is not only power, design gives the dating app companies power where designing for emotional engagement is a key value-creating element in their business models.

“Super apps” are on the rise and gaining popularity worldwide, especially in Southeast Asia, India and Africa. These are “do-everything apps” that offer a wide range of services in a single interface, making them more integrated into people's lives. Super apps thus highlight the organisation, political economy and geopolitics of the platformisation process in the app economy. While most studies on super apps focus on Chinese and Southeast Asian apps, this paper examines super apps from around the world to better understand and discuss the phenomenon. Specifically, it examines and discusses (1) what “super apps” are, (2) by whom they were developed, (3) when they were created or how they evolved over time, and (4) where—in which countries or regions or parts of the world—they emerged. We provide a typology of super-app constellations based on the different characteristics identified in a global collection of 40 super-apps. We discuss the local or regional differences between apps, their historical emergence, modes of capital accumulation and the challenges and implications arising from them for critical research. The rise of super-apps and their integration into people's daily lives in general invites us to delve deeper into the relatedness and situatedness of apps, and focus in particular on the unique conglomeration processes currently taking place in the mobile ecosystem.

Pornography platforms are increasingly required by payment processor business partners to mitigate harm in their content management systems through algorithmic moderation. Demands that adult merchants incorporate these tools are not proportional to instances of harmful content, but a response to the widespread conflation of pornography with harm and risk online. This paper explores co-governance by payment processors calling for algorithmic tools through the case of Pornhub, asking: what standards are required by financial firms, how are these enforced on platforms, and what effects does this arrangement have on porn content?

I open with key context regarding the deplatforming of sex, antiporn campaigning and constructions of harm through 'reputational risk’. Following this, I detail financial firms infrastructural influence in platform co-governance. Next, a close reading of adult merchant terms identifies specific clauses calling for algorithmic moderation. Concluding this issue mapping, I provide a taxonomy of moderation tools in place on Pornhub.

I close with an issue discussion to consider AI's positioning as a regulatory solution, CSAM data ethics, moderator labour, and the many technical problems obscured by promises of safety through automated content management systems. The resulting review of algorithmic measures enforced by financial firms offers a detailed case of the opaque governance conditions imperilling sexual expression across porn platforms.

This paper conducts a survey of the term “privacy” in mainstream media usage. This

paper finds that "internet privacy" is mistakenly promoted as a civil right. Although real

civil rights privacy infractions are accelerating at an unprecedented rate due to the rise

of algorithmic governance in the carceral system, healthcare and welfare, these issues

are not the focus of mainstream “privacy” concerns, which instead focus on consumer

entitlements. This paper conducted a discourse analysis of fourteen left and right-wing newspapers in 3 countries over 2019 to trace the rise of privacy as a civil right. A set of keywords was used in order to build the universe of articles whose main focus concerned privacy.

This paper builds on queer and anti-colonial scholars to take up the genealogy of

“privacy” as a homophobic construct that can only reproduce violent hierarchies. This

paper combines Lisa Lowe’s discourse analysis of the British East India Company and

with the telecommunications observations of James Carey and John Quirk to argue that

privacy is a heteronormative cis-phobic myth that inevitably represses a larger

ontological crisis.

In the digital age, OnlyFans is suggested to be a new form of sexual empowerment, financial autonomy and social agency for Black women working as strippers, backup dancers and video models, particularly those ancillaries to the rap music industry. Through interviews and participant observation, I examine the everyday labor of Black women who work as sexually explicit content creators on OnlyFans while also building a public persona as artists in Hip-Hop culture. Findings suggested that despite financial opportunities, respondents felt ambivalent by the monetization opportunities afforded by this digital space. Even so, respondents enjoyed the affordances of promoting their OnlyFans content on social media to gain digital clout - a form of Hip-Hop influenced cultural capital that follows the logic of likes, followers, and re-shares of one’s social media content. Ultimately, this study introduces insights on the evolution of Hip-Hop culture’s relationship with sex work, digital Black feminism and the attention economy.

Within a history of moral politics, cultural, social and legal boundaries continue to differentiate between sex work and other types of feminized care labor (Duffy, 2016) and art production on platforms. Even though these have always been contested boundaries, the rise in participation in online sex platforms due to the popularization of OnlyFans has offered an opening for researchers, and content creators, to redefine the boundaries of where sex work begins and ends. In this paper, we explore the experiences of non binary and queer tattoo artist and Instagram influencer Jamie Avakian. Our investigation in this paper focusses on how some young influencers are making content about bodies across Instagram and OnlyFans, and we ask whether blurring the boundaries between cross platform created ‘body content’ is a safe and positive political strategy for creators?

Through a digital ethnographic approach, the authors conducted a private and Instagram Live interview with the participant as part of a five-year ethnographic study. The findings in this paper contribute to a discussion around how sex workers balance visibility and surveillance risks, as well as recent research on content creators as political producers, which engage in cultural and feminized care labor, as well as art work. The analysis in this paper explores how Jamie narrate’s their trajectory and corresponding labor practices within white-western cultural boundaries on sex work/art work/content creation and platform mediated moderation. We argue that the production of body content on platforms needs to be seen as a socially significant, creative labor practice.

This paper addresses the everyday strategies designed by Brazilian erotic content creators to contest the platform authority over their working conditions, questioning the rationale of such oppositional actions and their meaning for antagonisms online. Scholarly literature has highlighted the multifarious ways platform workers have made use of the digital to resist platform power over their working conditions. However, those studies overlook modes of opposition developed by workers in marginalised and frequently stigmatised labour, as is the case of platform-based sex work. This paper aims to fill this gap. The discussed results rely on an ongoing ethnography in the Brazilian erotic content creation landscape and 16 in-depth interviews with cisgender and transgender workers. The sole Brazilian patronage platform, Privacy, was observed as the tactics developed by erotic creators are employed there. Sex labourers employ two tactics to antagonise the platform politics of visibility: "drops" and "shout-for-shout." They consist of recommending the handles of fellow workers on the Privacy feed several times a day and a week, using a scheme of one-to-one or one-to-many recommendations. The idea is to create a big spam on the feed, thus overcoming Privacy's recommending system. Although drops and shout-for-shout intend to be oppositional acts, they also comprise the commercial interests of creators, being set up as deeply ambivalent strategies. The argument thus states that sex workers in Brazil make use of a "circumstantial antagonism", wherein online oppositional practices are highly ambivalent and constantly switch from resistance to survival to co-optation.

Online creators need their content to be ‘seen’; visibility on platforms can provide financial, social, and representational benefits. A lot of vital research has been done on how creators try to enhance their visibility on platforms and struggle with the threat of invisibility. But, especially for marginalised creators, platformised visibility is not without risks. This paper attends to these risks and creators' tactical use of (in)visibility to manage these. Drawing on 27 interviews with creators - online sex workers, LGBTQ+ activists, sex educators - we outline the harms of hypervisibility and users’ tactics for strategic invisibility. These interviews showcase how hegemonic norms hyper- and invisibilise marginalised groups, and how these dynamics are reproduced and institutionalised on platforms. We find that marginalised creators face serious risks from their platformised hypervisibility, not just their invisibilisation. Yet within the structures of platforms these creators still find ways to manage these risks and engage with strategic invisibility. Tactics of resistance exist across groups of marginalised creators. As such, our analysis shows the need to not just gain insight into how creators maximise visibility, but also into how they seek particular types of visibility, as well as strategic invisibility.

Creators on the online platform OnlyFans must navigate the precarious intersection of privacy and publicity to succeed financially. The historic position of sex work as a hidden economy and the recent notoriety of OnlyFans as synonymous with digital sex work in the popular press has shaped conditions so that OnlyFans creators must use unique communication practices online to remain safe and make money. We conducted a rhetorical analysis of OnlyFans creators posting about their work on the popular social media site TikTok and found that creators engage in platform-specific social steganography, utilize platform affordances, and reference other platforms to maintain their precarious position as public figures who work in a gray area of the contemporary gig economy. These practices of “hiding in plain sight” provide important insight into how OnlyFans creators navigate the publicity/privacy paradox inherent to conducting illegal labor in the digital sphere.

Silicon Valley is entering middle age. For all of its efforts to disrupt existing industries, platform companies, like Google and Facebook, have become institutions in their own right. But, as van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal (2018) have noted, platforms have been less engaged in revolution than they have in replacement, “gradually infiltrating in, and converging with” legacy institutions and practices (p.2). This roundtable considers platforms, and their use, within this context of replacement rather than revolution. Though platforms have been averse to being considered “media companies,” (Napoli & Caplan, 2017), this roundtable explores how to locate platforms within longer histories of media, and resist the fetishization of ‘newness,’ particularly in critique.

The roundtable will take on a case study approach, with each scholar responsible for a 5-minute lightning talk focused on one aspect of platforms within the context of the cultural industries, to facilitate a broader discussion of how scholars can trace (what we think of recent) phenomenon backward within history. Participants will discuss topics such as historical antecedents to the Facebook Oversight Board (Dr. Robyn Caplan), how advertisers have shaped public discourse and media industries throughout history (Dr. Sophie Bishop), historical precedents for the integration of contextual expertise into technology industries (Dr. Elena Maris), the cyclical resurfacing of moral panics around youth and media technologies (Dr. Ysabel Gerrard), and continuity and change between historic research on creative labor in legacy cultural industries and current formations of platformized creative labor (Zoe Glatt).

Within this context of replacement, rather than revolution, we hope to open a discussion with our colleagues at AoIR about how to consider platforms within the context of media history, as well as how platforms do/do not produce the conditions of their own historicity (Gitelman, 2008) through controlling availability to data, access, and corporate archives.

This roundtable session that includes scholars of colonialism and Indigeneity, digital religion and online hate politics, digital and public activism, and social interaction and identity online offers a multivalent discussion of anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) that considers how it shapes/is shaped within digital and institutional contexts. The discussion will consider how “critical race theory” becomes a catch-all term that encompasses a broad range of discourses, ideologies, ideas, and positions. The panelists examine CRT as it is characterized and defined by internet memes, tweets, posts, and web applications. Tekobbe will discuss anti-CRT memes and platform posts as settler colonialism’s values reconstituted in social media discourses. Using examples from a study of Hindu nationalist Facebook groups, Sundaram will discuss the neocolonial futurism of Hindu nationalism and why some proponents of Hindu nationalism see “woke” politics and CRT as a US-exported threat to India. Buck, who lives and teaches in a conservative region of the United States, will describe online activism and responses to anti-CRT rhetoric in local progressive and academic circles. Martey will draw from her experience as her college’s DEI Coordinator and discuss a variety of institutional efforts to tackle the tensions around anti-CRT rhetoric which may serve as models for AoIR responses to this social, political, and cultural movement. Together they will moderate a discussion about how CRT operates as a broad-based symbol of liberation for marginalized communities and recognizes their oppression by recovering their histories. This holds for both those who seek to deploy it progressively as well as those who seek to use it to abrogate social justice movements. The panelists consider how to understand and support the use of CRT in internet research and writing and resist anti-CRT movements that would erase historically marginalized peoples and identities.

Screening Surveillance (https://www.screeningsurveillance.com/) is a series of short near future fiction films that aims to raise awareness about how different inter-operating surveillance systems -- educational technology, social media, wearable devices, smart cities -- use our data to analyze, shape, and often disrupt our lives in different ways. We need to consider the implications of these systems on society and critically examine the logics and practices within big data systems that underpin, enable, and accelerate surveillance.

Intended as public education resources to spark discussion and extend understandings of surveillance, trust, and privacy in the digital age, each film focuses on a different aspect of big data surveillance and the tensions that manifest when the human is interpreted by the machine.

- #tresdancing (22 mins, 2021) speculates the effects of escalating surveillance and control through educational technology.

- Blaxites (12 mins, 2018) imagines what would happen if our access to much needed healthcare is dictated by our healthcare provider’s surveillance of our social media activities.

- A Model Employee (16 mins, 2018) tackles the issues of workplace surveillance through wearable devices.

- Frames (11 mins, 2018) imagines an all-knowing smart city as it fails to understand the actions of one of its citizens.

The films speak to the AoIR2023 theme, Revolution, in that the films highlight the ways in which surveillant systems of control oppress marginalized communities, and encourage us to come together to resist these systems. It is important to note that each of the protagonists in the films is a woman of colour, further highlighting how interconnected systems of surveillance often fall hardest on people of colour.

In this session creator of the Screening Surveillance project will screen the films and engage in conversations about:

• technologically mediated surveillance in the contexts of each of the films,
• speculative pedagogies and speculative methods
• the filmmaking process -- film as research creation and knowledge mobilization, collaborating with non-academic partners, translating scholarly work into creative works.

Half a decade ago, social media platforms were widely perceived as revolutionary devices for maximizing political expression around the world. By opening the floodgates to expression, however, the same platforms were also accused of opening the floodgates of hate – allowing, for example, the self-claimed “revolutionary” return of ideas, speech and actors long thought to be relegated to the dustbins of history. This panel examines a three-fold revolution, namely: populist revolutions (on the right) facilitated by agnostic content moderation philosophies; the internal revolutions that platform content moderation underwent to address the political violence of the former; and the adjustments that digital methods research needs to adopt to facilitate content moderation research in a “post-API” environment. The first paper of this panel examines how Twitter’s content moderation has undergone several arbitrary changes before reaching a form of “normative plasticity”, with reinforcement techniques such as demotion and other forms of conditional content obfuscation. The second paper looks at how, despite making profound changes to prevent furthering political violence during elections, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram have tended to moderate the Brazilian elections in a dislocated fashion, turning a blind eye to Brazilian militaristic content and focusing instead on what it primarily moderates in a US context. Finally, the third paper offers a set of methods for empirical researchers to capture and study content moderation metadata over time. All three papers aim to contribute to attempts at archiving and studying speech moderation as a public good, in an international context.

While social media platforms continue to dominate the ways in which people connect using computational devices and digital media, a transition towards more immersive platforms and experiences is underway. Extended reality (XR) is the umbrella term for media that enable experiences in augmented, mixed, and virtual reality. Through XR technologies, new digital spaces are being developed that combine features of existing digital platforms with elements of the immersiveness of gaming, sometimes referred to informally as ‘the metaverse’. Notably, many of the corporations behind the dominant social media platforms are active in the XR economy. Meta has garnered much attention in this regard, but Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Sony have all either entered the market or have been reported as having XR/metaverse ambitions. Through a multiple-case study of three companies—Meta, Epic Games/Unity Engine and ROBLOX—this paper maps out key dimensions of the emerging metaverse economy and shows how the platform characteristics of XR providers, similar to the current social media economy, can enable the concentration of social and economic power around a few actors. We propose that in the transition to a more immersive digital era, to enable a competitive, vibrant and fair XR economy, policymaking and governance must proactively address the issue of concentrated platform power. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential policy and regulatory pathways for taking up this challenge.

In recent research, video games have been implicated as vehicles for feelings of nostalgia. Retrogames present a unique context in which to explore the elicitation of nostalgia, especially historical nostalgia among younger gamers who may lack first-hand experience with older games and gaming technologies. As part of a larger study investigating nostalgia and retrogames, n = 102 younger individuals wrote briefly about their thoughts and feelings after playing the game Double Dragon II, a video game representative of the “Beat ‘em Up” genre popular in the 1990s. Via a thematic analysis, we identified eight themes clustered into three groups: retrogames as unique experiences, retrogames and important others, and retrogames and the self. Players connected their feelings of nostalgia to distinctive features of retrogames and the experience of playing them, social thoughts, and recollections (mostly involving close friends and family), and their own personal identities via autobiographical memory. The present findings align with previous research on nostalgia more broadly and illustrate some unique aspects of nostalgic experiences evoked by retrogames. Our data have implications for how younger players take up and experience video game history through replaying retrogames of yesteryear, and might explain the enduring and increasing popularity of retrogames among myriad gaming cohorts. Furthermore, this research adds conceptual refinement to historical nostalgia (nostalgia for bygone eras), and introduces the notion of vicarious nostalgia as a perception of how others (such as parents and older siblings) would experience and make sense of older media content from their respective generations.

In the post-gamergate era, much has been written about the toxicity of online multiplayer video gamespaces. Yet, game scholars agree that the actual definition of the term ‘toxic’ is slippery. There is also consensus that toxicity is a highly context-dependent phenomenon reliant on the relation of players to one another but extending further to include the technical elements of the game (Canossa et al., 2021; Hilvert-Bruce & Neill, 2020; Kou, 2020; Kowert, 2020). Past scholarship in this area also illustrates that these spaces are deeply gendered and center masculine normativity (Cote, 2020; Gray, 2020; Ruberg, 2019; Shaw, 2015). Players from various positionalities may enter conflict when there is dissent over the definition and norms of the space. In these instances of conflict there is the potential for agonism (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). We employed cultural probes in tandem with focus groups and interviews to better understand how players experience toxicity in online gaming spaces. Emerging from participants’ conversations, this paper explores performative behaviours which are emblematic of performing toxicity or ‘counterplay’. We propose three common instances of counterplay: antagonistic counterattack, when a player reciprocates or matches the toxic behaviour of an antagonist; ludic mithridatism, when a player develops a threshold for tolerating toxicity in a gamespace; and playful transgression, when a player or group of players performs counter-hegemonic identity-work.

This research uses a content analysis approach to analyze the nature of Critical Role in the spectrum of tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) and role-playing fandoms. Critical Role is a vanguard to the actual play genre; while streamers of video games have been common on services such as Twitch and YouTube Live, the fact of a tabletop role-playing session attracting the vast audience enjoyed by this production has helped to evolve the image and nature of Dungeons & Dragons itself. Actual play involves centering the tabletop game, allowing individuals to view the scaffolding work occurring at the game table. Initially, it was believed by most that tabletop play was an interaction of engagement, and that very few who were watching the endeavor would be interested in it from the perspective of an audience. However, actual play (AP) has exploded, led in many ways by the popularity of Critical Role, which springboards off the keen interest involved in watching skilled players on Twitch.

This paper argues that the production of ‘infrastructural insecurity’ is an inherent part of the standardization of information networks. Infrastructural insecurity is the outcome of an intentional process within infrastructural production, standardization, and maintenance that leaves end-users of the infrastructure vulnerable to attacks that benefit a particular actor. We ground this analysis in an interrogation of the responses to the disclosure of three security vulnerabilities in telecommunications networks, namely (1) a security flaw in Signaling System No. 7 (SS7) that allows for the data interception and surveillance, SMS interception and location tracking by third parties, (2) the lack of encryption of permanent identifiers that allowed for the deployment of rogue base stations, which allowed for man-in-the-middle attacks, resulting in interception of all voice and data traffic in a physical signal vicinity, and (3) the lack of forward secrecy between user-equipment and the home network, which allows for the decryption of current encrypted data stream if credentials were obtained in the past. To research the shaping of communication and infrastructure architectures in the face of insecurities, we develop a novel approach to the study of Internet governance and standard-setting processes that leverages web scraping and computer-assisted document set discovery software tools combined with document analysis. We bring these methods into conversation with theoretical approaches from material media studies, science and technology studies, and critical security studies. This is an important contribution because it asks fundamental questions about the adequacy and legitimacy of standardization processes.

Unsatisfied with the black-boxing of algorithmic governance and platform governance on YouTube more generally, creators have begun to seek accountability through other means, deploying their skills, audiences, and situated knowledge to investigate the platform’s operations. This paper examines a phenomenon we term user-generated accountability, or the use of publicity via content creation to reveal failures, oversights, or harmful policies on a platform. We analyzed 250 videos featuring issues of platform accountability following a grounded theory approach. Our results revealed that most videos calling out the platform took the form of vlogs that were negative in tone towards YouTube, or a mix of negative and positive. YouTube itself was the actor most targeted for accountability, but automated systems, other creators, YouTube employees, and even former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki were all prominently cited. Most complaints were aimed at YouTube’s policies, lack of communication, or perceived bias against creators of certain demographics or who made undesirable types of content. Claims of censorship were also prominent, as were frustrations with YouTube’s appeals process and the cultural disconnect between YouTube users and YouTube corporate. Publicizing problems with the platform in a way that draws attention from audiences, news media, and fellow creators represents one of the most important ways YouTubers can participate in platform governance. Our study outlines the primary methods they use to do so and the reasons that motivate them to engage in user-generated accountability.

A growing body of academic work on internet governance focuses on the “deplatforming of sex,” or the removal and suppression of sexual expression from the internet. Often, this is linked to the 2018 passing of FOSTA/SESTA – much-criticized twin bills that make internet intermediaries liable for content that promotes or facilitates prostitution or sex trafficking. We suggest analyzing both internet governance and the deplatforming of sex in conjunction with long-term agendas of conservative lobbying groups. Specifically, we combine media historiography, policy analysis, and thematic and discourse analysis of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s (NCOSE, formerly Morality in Media) press releases and media texts to show how conservative moral entrepreneurs weaponize ideas of morality, obscenity, and harm in internet governance. We illustrate how NCOSE has, directly and indirectly, interfered in internet governance, first by lobbying for rigorous enforcement of obscenity laws and then for creating internet-specific obscenity laws (which we argue CDA, COPA, and FOSTA/SESTA all were for NCOSE). We show how NCOSE adjusted their rhetoric to first link pornography to addiction and pedophilia and later to trafficking and exploitation; how they took advantage of the #metoo momentum; mastered legal language, and incorporated an explicit anti-internet stance.

Researching on platforms through platforms poses challenges to researchers, particularly when observing subcultures and content at the margins. Inspired by Massanari’s essay on researching under the “alt-right” gaze, this paper uses autoethnography to address the impact the system of platform governance has on researcher vulnerability in data collection, persona management and results dissemination, particularly for researchers gathering data censored by platforms and for early-career researchers constructing their personae through digital media. My goal is to examine how the intersection of platform power, academic precarity and the creator economy affects early-career researchers and academics. At the heart of this are the questions: How can researchers gather data, disseminate results and establish a professional profile under platforms’ all-encompassing gaze? What does platform governance and its focus on specific areas of control mean for researching content and users at the margins? What risks do platforms themselves pose to researchers’ work? And how does the broader precarity of particularly early-career academic work intersect with the effects of platform power? To this end, this paper starts with personal experiences of censorship in research to define ‘platform’s gaze’ as gendered, raced, heteronormative and puritan surveillance, constructing a social reality where marginalised individuals and dissent are both hyper-visible and vulnerable to harassment and silencing. It continues by discussing the increasing digital labour required by the ‘impact agenda’ and the difficulty of managing a researcher online persona in an age of growing digital censorship, concluding with considerations on activist interventions in the platform governance field.

Xiaohongshu (Red), the Chinese biggest lifestyle sharing platform, as a collaborator and partner with China’s national cultural and political project (Wang, 2021), aligns with multiple strategies of governing, shaping and guiding citizens through lifestyle practices. In this article, I propose the term ‘lifestyle governmentality’ to capture Red as a cultural technology of citizenship that directs self-managing subjects toward the desired outcomes sought by the institutions of the official government. This research project combines a systematic document analysis of regulations, notices, and guidelines related to platform governance, discourse analysis of Red's content, with walk-through method, and in-depth interviews with Red influencers (n=12) and users (n=35). I suggest that the inducement offered by Red to facilitate and improve users’ personal life, fulfillment and success through lifestyle sharing is distinctly tied to a hybrid model of governmentality that combines neoliberal and socialist political reasoning about governance, enterprise, and social welfare.

Women were excluded from financial independence historically, causing a significant gender gap in financial literacy. Financial decision-making was based on households where women were deprived of contribution, as they were not allowed to act as the main account holder and were seen as dependents in the formal financial system. However, informal communities were formed, sharing intimate knowledge in alternative ways of personal finance. In the online Web 2.0 environments, social media platforms, namely Instagram, could serve as new forms of learning environments for financial literacy through informal peer-to-peer learning and therefore become a virtual extension of existing 'saving communities' in real life. The paper highlights the existence of a small but thriving personal finance community on Instagram and provides evidence of the volume of content related to personal finance, debt, and saving money on the platform.

The emergence of female financial influencers created a sense of virtual togetherness where women felt safe to seek peer support and share personal stories. This paper proposes four-phase research using netnographic immersion journals (Kozinets, 2022), an online survey, and semi-structured interviews and will present the early findings from data collection beginning in March 2023. It proposes a networked perspective addressing technical, social, and cultural components (Selbst et al., 2019) in relation to the formation, expansion, and evolution of female financial influencing on Instagram. This study responds to the wider conference themes of revolutions by examining social barriers to seeking financial support at the intersection of feminist studies, the digital divide, and financial literacy.

To “unlock the potential” of influencer marketing, industry literature suggests that companies need to find the “right” influencer at the “right” price. Without these good matches, they say, influencer marketing loses its authenticity and its effectiveness. In this paper, I examine a growing group of algorithmic intermediaries known as Influencer Marketing Platforms (IMPs) which position themselves as a technological solution to this need. How do these platforms’ technical infrastructures construct markets for influencer labour, and what are their consequences for the life chances of workers? I argue that the sociotechnical infrastructures of gig economy platforms bound, segment, stratify and moralize gig labour markets. To capture how sociotechnical infrastructures shape the life-chances of workers in the gig economy, I propose the concept of “judgment infrastructures”: a constellation of sociotechnical devices which platform organizations employ to facilitate and automate judgment about the monetary and social worth of work and workers in the gig economy. Drawing on ethnographic walkthroughs, platform documentation, interviews and walkthroughs with influencers who use IMPs, I demonstrate how IMPs construct and stratify the market for influence through (1) gatekeeping and differentiated inclusion, (2) matching and differentiated visibilities, and (3) valuation and differential pricing. With this framework, I hope to provide useful tools for understanding how sociotechnical infrastructures produce and automate economic inequalities in digital labour markets.

Numerous studies have shown digital platforms commodify social reproduction labor. How social media platforms and the influencers’ activities intersect with the field of social reproduction has received scant academic attention. This study explores platform capitalism's expansion to the domestic sphere in the semi-peripheral socio-economic context. Fifty semi-structured interviews with influencers, their business partners, and other stakeholders in Slovenia were conducted. Results show that social media influencing intersects with the social reproduction sphere in two different ways, depending on whether the household is time- or money-poor. Time-poor households employ influencing to find an optimal temporal equilibrium between influencer activities and household responsibilities. Money-poor households employ influencing as a side hustle besides regular employment to have one household expense less. These two groups converge as they all create content "on the go" while completing social reproduction tasks. Influencing is peering into the cracks between work and leisure, creating a novel dimension of time: monetized leisure. Under the traditional 8-8-8 rule (work, leisure, sleep), only 8 hours were paid. With influencing activities on social media, leisure gets monetized, resulting in more hours of work and passive income. Our study shows that influencing activities on social media in Slovenia are less about getting paid to do what you love, as demonstrated by Duffy (2017) and more about getting paid to care for those you love. The study contributes to the varieties of platform capitalism and to the de-westernization of platform and creator studies.

This study examines how MCNs (Multi-Channel Networks) intervene in the platform economy by manufacturing influencers. Previous studies have explored the emergence of influencers and creators from various perspectives, including platformization, creative labor, and algorithmic power. However, little attention has been paid to another crucial player – MCNs which incubate and train influencers on an industrial scale. MCNs are firms and organizations that collaborate with influencers to facilitate the production, promotion, and monetization of creative content. They serve not only as incubators for micro-entrepreneurs and influencers looking to establish their businesses, but also as a key intermediary between influencers and other stakeholders on platforms. This study combines in-depth interviews with documented lawsuits to explore the role of MCNs in the platform economy, as well as their relationships with influencers. The findings suggest that MCNs significantly shape the platform economy through three strategies: manufacturing influencers, spreading industry lore, and exploiting creativity. On one hand, MCNs help established influencers maintain their success and reduce the risk of creativity while exploiting the labor of aspirants who struggle to enter the platform economy. As such, they constitute a power imbalance by providing business for successful influencers and increasing precarity for ordinary influencers. On the other hand, MCNs continue to expand their business scopes to meet the needs of various stakeholders, mainly platforms, advertisers, and brands. Consequently, MCNs have the ability to facilitate the relationship between these actors, industrialize aspiring influencers, and determine who can participate in creative labor.

Building on previous analysis of the “gangsta” identity on social media, this paper investigates the criminal persona as a visibility strategy in influencer culture, observing how the deviant online celebrity is framed and leveraged by different media in the current cross-platform ecology. To this end, we look at the cases of two Italian influencers with criminal backgrounds whose fame exploded during the lockdown: Algero Corretini, aka “1727WrldStar” and Massimiliano Minnocci, aka “Er Brasile”. These personalities are examples of what we identify as “bandito influencers”, where the Italian word “bandito” has the double meaning of “street thug” and “banned” from a specific site or group. Combining literature from criminology, celebrity studies, and internet studies, this chapter aims to fill a range of gaps: on the one hand, from a cultural criminology perspective, the online dynamics of celebrification and the link between crime and influencer culture have been scarcely investigated; on the other, celebrity studies and media studies addressed the theme of criminal deviance labelling primarily in relation to legacy media. With our account, we also wish to contribute a more localised perspective on the Italian context, which appears to be understudied from some of these perspectives.

This paper offers an overview of the vernaculars of radical political subcultures online as expressed through a shared vocabulary of memes, notably the ‘political compass’ meme which is used to portray political ideologies across two axes: left/right and authoritarian/libertarian. The paper’s objective is thus to assess and to update the conceptual toolkit of classic subculture for internet research, with a focus in this case on a (largely Anglo-American) genre of memes that playfully thematize revolutionary political ideologies. The classic literature contended that subcultures sought to solve unresolvable problems in ‘imaginary’ ways, using style as a proxy for politics (Clarke et al 1975, Hebdige 1979). While recognizing a clear continuity, the paper looks at how (by contrast) contemporary online subcultures seem to imagine themselves as engaging directly with politics, as opposed to by way of style. The paper asks what difference has the internet made to the concept of subculture? Empirically we conduct a visual and discursive content analysis of a selection of political compass memes and starter pack memes collected from the PoliticalCompassMemes subreddit and other sources including tweets tagged with #PoliticalCompass. While a smaller section of the paper will describe the criteria for selection and analysis of the corpus, the primary objective is however theoretical. Referencing Lev Manovich’s concepts of ‘modularity’ and ‘remixability’ as formal digital ‘principles’, the paper analyzes these communities’ images as constructing new ‘modular ideologies’ from the bricolage of older ones (Manovich 2001, Manovich 2005: 1)

This circulation study explores how Pepe, a prominent example of memes, and its remix, transformation and circulation become rhetorical and agentive in 2019-20 Hong Kong protests as Pepe travels through various digital and physical modalities, serves as an actant in various socio-political contexts with diverse ideologies and cultures, and evokes controversies over its own ideological and cultural implications, amasses discursive publics of Pepe and nurtures rhetorical ecologies of its own, totally out of the control from Pepe's original creator during its circulation. Situating under Edbauer's rhetorical ecology model and informed by Hawk’s sphere publics framework, I employ and adapt Gries' iconographic tracking method to capture, track, and assemble Pepe's various presences across modalities throughout the protests in the form of images; paratexts around these images (e.g. captions, news reports, threads on forum, etc.) are also collected and close-read as qualitative data to comprehend the contexts within which Pepe reside and how Pepe interact with other actants and actors in this context. This presentation will focus on one finding: the structure of the rhetorical ecologies of Pepe resembles networked sphere publics that resist universal synthesis of Pepe’s implications.

Leading up to, during, and immediately following the 2016 US election of Donald Trump, there was buzz about magic on the internet. From the meme magic of the cult of Kek to liberal witches performing binding spells, magic seemed to emerge out of thin air. However, while technology and the occult may seem like strange bedfellows, they have a cozier historical relationship then we often acknowledge. For instance, it has been well-documented that there was a synergetic relationship between telegraphy and spiritualism (Sconce, 2000) and we can consider ciphers used to construct grimoires as an antecedent to modern techno-cryptography (Reeds, 1998). In this paper, I historicize internet magic situating the recent online magical wars within the broader context of both digital and occult histories. Just as spiritualist séances articulated hopes and anxieties of mass communication, meme magic speaks to contemporary concerns and desires about information spread.

Memes are an important facet of current online communication on social media, with rich social, political, and cultural significance and power. This present work focuses on developing computational frameworks to support textual and visual content analysis of online memes, assisting the profiling of the unique contents and interrelationships of different meme characteristics. The framework focusses on decomposing the multimodal subcomponents of online memes to support accurate sorting and classification of meme exploitable and other rich textual materials. We showcase the development of a multimodal meme classification toolbox with the capability to utilize more abundant information from those multimodal components, with a view towards bolstering and extending existing meme analysis methods for cultural and media studies.

This research investigates practices and routines of farmers in Austria and southern Germany and their interrelationships with digital media and communication technologies as well as automation and artificial intelligence. Combining practice theory and actor-network theory, we conducted 16 farm studies to examine how digital technologies are used to perform tasks, and how objects, things and ideas have the equal ontological status of actants capable of modifying human practices. Our results show how automated technologies and smart applications are perceived as objects that facilitate work while creating new tasks and responsibilities. Everyday technologies such as WhatsApp, in contrast, are being used for various purposes on the farm, with sometimes revolutionary consequences in the sense that whole areas of work are undergoing comprehensive change and are being redesigned to take account of digital possibilities. We conclude that the use of mostly 'top-down' introduced AI and automation technology brings new actors into play, resulting in a redistribution of agency, while everyday technologies also generate considerable dynamics and can thus be said to have a high transformational potential.

There is a deepening need for dialogue between (digital) urbanists and Internet Studies scholarship. In this paper we are interested in "urbanizing" Internet Studies by thinking about how digital infrastructures create and control circulations, movement, flows, and streams within urban contexts. More specifically, we think about circulations and concentrations of natural, human, and digital resources by way of Urban Political Ecology to better understand smart cities, digital urban labor, and Anthropocene literatures.

As data, infrastructures, apps, capital, and natural phenomena concentrate in cities, and are instantiated to create and constrain flows and circulations, we contend that Internet Studies can play a key role in analyzing and understanding these new socio-technical entanglements. Drawing on Nost and Goldstein's notion of "data infrastructures", we think about how the materiality of data and digital technologies shape cities, and cities shape data and technologies. We suggest several conceptual and methodological overlaps with Urban Political Ecology, to signal what an urbanized Internet Studies, concentrated on circulations and flows, might look like.

Blunt and Sheringham (2019) call for home-city geographies but do not consider the role of digital technologies in mediating these relations (Koch and Miles, 2021). Digital geographers have largely examined manifestations of the digital city (smart city, platform urbanism, etc.) and the digital home separately. This paper explores the question of the smart home/city by reading it through a series of established analytical frames for reflecting on the relationship between domestic and urban space, namely: governance, domestication, thresholds, and dwelling. The first two call attention to the movement of certain activities, relations, or processes across traditionally understood boundaries between domestic and urban spaces. The third lens, thresholds, considers the ways boundaries between domestic and urban space are not simply transgressed but are actively re-negotiated through the new digital mediations. The fourth lens, dwelling, moves beyond a focus on such boundaries or divisions to instead highlight the ambiguity and indeterminacy of everyday life. Each lens opens a distinct set of questions about the evolving spatialities of digital life and the ways they are enacted, negotiated, and potentially contested.

Smart city platforms–encompassing mobile apps, cameras, sensors, algorithms, and predictive analytics—function as surveillance tools. Specifically, these Internet-connected devices and services generate troves of data on residents, including real-time geolocation, energy consumption habits, travel patterns, mobile device identifiers, Internet browsing history, phone contacts, credit card numbers, and much more. The proposed project is focused on the City of Long Beach’s vision to use data in ethical ways that avoid reinforcing existing racial biases and discriminatory decision-making. When fully implemented, this digital rights platform will operationalize both privacy and racial equity as priorities for all deployments of smart city technology.

First, the platform will feature text and the open-source iconography that visually conveys how the City of Long Beach uses specific technologies, what data the devices collect and how the City utilizes that data. We plan to strategically deploy these information points across Long Beach, physically adjacent to or digitally embedded within civic technologies, e.g., sensors, cameras, small cells, mobile payment kiosks, and a 311 app. The platform will include a feedback application consisting of access (via QR code or hyperlink) to an online dashboard where users may learn additional details, update data collection preferences, and share comments/concerns with local government officials. The ultimate goal is to develop a backend solution that enables residents to opt-out of data collection.

The platform will provide residents with a clear understanding of how local government applies predictive and diagnostic analytics to personal data, and will also empower community members by granting them agency.

Data quality facilitates data interoperability for optimal decision-making in smart cities datafication. But there are few studies on how technologists (e.g., data scientists), governance people (e.g., municipal workers), and third-party collaborators (e.g., smart city services vendors) assess data quality together in smart cities datafication. This paper offers a response to this knowledge gap, using interviews (n=10) with municipal workers, data scientists and smart city services vendors, and data structure documents (n=8) in a situated case, the Stavanger (Norway) smart city. Implicit the paper’s results is that data quality is a floating signifier – comprising the different articulations of data scientists, municipal workers and services vendors in assessment. This generates friction with implications on data interoperability. This paper therefore posits that assessing data quality in smart cities datafication is ambiguous, but not empty. It fluctuates between the articulations of data scientists, municipal workers, and services vendors, with implications on data interoperability through the friction this generates.

Keywords: data quality, data interoperability, floating signifier, frictions, smart city datafication

The recent rise in popularity of children’s podcasts (aka ‘kidcasts’) presents a new avenue through which the multibillion-dollar advertising industry can target children. Young children are especially vulnerable to advertising, which is also associated with negative effects on children. While scholars and policymakers have addressed the effects of advertising on children in relation to television, research and regulations have not been updated and applied to digital technologies, including podcasts and their hosting streaming services. This study aims to address these gaps by examining the nature and prevalence of advertising in kidcasts. A content analysis was conducted on a sample of 100 kidcasts collected in November 2022. Due to the specific vulnerability of school-aged children to advertising, we chose to focus on podcasts meant for children between the ages of 0-10. Our preliminary findings bring up multiple concerns regarding advertising in kidcasts. The level of exposure to advertisements is worrisome due to the possibility of children being unable to differentiate between ad content and programmatic content, due to age or the lack of visual aids and cues, and their effects should be examined. Considering the limited attention span of children, these are significant time periods that may cause children to lose interest in the kidcast and impact their continued listening. Lastly, the fact that kidcasts mostly feature adult-targeted advertisements raises concern that children may be at risk of exposure to age-inappropriate content.

The KidTech industry is radically changing the landscape of children’s entertainment as companies like Roblox build converged digital spaces that brands and IPs scramble to join. In this paper we use a critical digital studies lens to understand the affordances and economies of KidTech. Using Roblox as an example, we explore ways that the KidTech industry discursively frames policies, play and content. We employ a political economy analysis primarily based on field notes from the 2023 KidScreen Summit. In this paper we present three main findings:

1) The KidTech industry builds its platforms and policies upon a shifting regulatory landscape and an emphasis on industry self-regulation. Responsibility is offloaded onto parents through the use of parental controls and an understanding that children are not left alone with devices and screen media.

2) Children are framed as using IP content to meet their social and emotional needs, exploring and reaffirming their identity through fan engagement. Companies frame fans’ actions, knowledge and opinions as valuable commodities. Children are potential ‘evangelizers’, with the power to ‘make or break’ a company. Companies position children as having a hypercritical awareness of authenticity.

3) Media content is being redefined as experiences in a convergence of communication and entertainment. Linear media is no longer considered to be a sole and reliable way of engaging with children, instead companies employ complex multimodal strategies to engage young people with the hope that fans will “evangelize” the IP by creating their own content.

While artificial intelligence (AI) enabled systems have shown impressive accuracy in detecting harmful content online, they are still not perfect and do not take into account the perspective of children in their design. The development of AI systems heavily relies on large datasets for training, and creating such datasets involves annotating vast amounts of data. Studies that involve children in dataset development also have their challenges, such as the possibility of re-traumatisation. Therefore, ethical considerations must be taken into account, such as obtaining informed consent, conducting design sessions with children and young people, and addressing implicit and explicit biases in AI filtering, profiling, and surveillance systems. It is crucial to involve children and young people in the design of AI systems that filter content to ensure ethical considerations are met. In this article we discuss the ethical concerns in AI development with children and young people, and also possible techniques that help mitigate such concerns.

Dark design (also known as deceptive design; Colin et al., 2018 and dark patterns; Mathur et al., 2019) is evidenced by “a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do” (Brignull, 2022; page 1). Much dark design is constructed with monetization as the primary goal- even in spaces without ecommerce design (e.g., free-to-play apps representing >95% of all mobile apps; Fitton et al. 2021). Many recent dark design strategies are also oriented towards collecting user information. Concerns about children’s vulnerability to inappropriate online marketing and economic fraud, and the impact of organisational data collection upon children’s privacy are increasing (European Commission, 2022; OECD, 2011; OFCOM, 2022). Regulators have begun to recognize, challenge, and fine deceptive design practices aimed at children (e.g., $245 million Epic Games settlement; FTC 2022), however, the scope and extent of dark design practices is such that regulators alone cannot safeguard children from such practices. Parents, who are widely understood to be primarily responsible for children’s online experiences, and children themselves, need to be mindful of and resistant to dark design practices in online spaces. With this in mind, this paper explores the following questions:

(a) What is the influence of dark design (1) across mediums (e.g., apps, video games, social media platforms, websites) and (2) across differently-aged children?

(b) To what extent are parents aware of their children’s exposure to dark design and the risks such exposure poses?

(c) How effective are marketplace and regulatory controls?

This panel investigates the networked soundscapes of memetic warfare on TikTok, a platform crucial in mediating the ongoing war in Ukraine since February 2022. Introduced to the public as a unique form of war programming during the first week of Russia's full-scale military invasion (Mobilio 2022), WarTok—a portmanteau of ‘TikTok’ and ‘war’—signifies "the war of super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones" (Friedmann 2022). Producing headlines such as "TikTok's Amazing Russian-Ukraine War Videos," (Figure 1) the term necessitates critical and ethical scrutiny, not only for its sensationalist stance but also for the collapse of contexts it entails. Integrated into a platform that thrives on remixing, WarTok seamlessly intertwines on-the-ground war reporting with war propaganda—an aspect explored across all panel contributions through the lens of music.

Networked Soundscapes

The choice for sound as the primary step in our exploration not only derives from the platform’s logic of content creation, it also acknowledges music’s affective impact and its historical role in propaganda (Thompson & Biddle 2013). Music on TikTok serves as both an affective mediator and a highly templatable networker. Recent studies highlight the templatability of TikTok sounds, offering insights into content creators' attention-grabbing techniques (Abidin & Kaye 2021), logics of trend dilution (Bainotti et al., 2022), issue-specific remix cultures (Primig et al. 2023), and infrastructural meme collection (Rogers & Giorgi 2023).

Aural linkages between templates can intersect with other platform-native modalities of expression, producing networked soundscapes. A soundscape, as we approach it by leaning into TikTok’s logic of indexing “listed” and “original” sounds, foregrounds audio as the main memetic stratifier, opening up different paths for navigating content (Geboers et al., forthcoming). Hashtags and sounds, for example, can turn into a source of mutual amplification or may remain disengaged even when united through technical means (Pilipets 2023). Feeding into contested attentional dynamics of digital media (Boler & Davis 2021), propaganda by means of TikTok sharing takes on a new dimension in a highly contested space, which is said to “raise memes to the level of infrastructure” (Zulli & Zulli 2021).

Memetic Warfare

Often driven by a cynical hunt for eyeballs, memetic warfare on social media taps into humor and mockery, inviting playful participation (Divon 2022), channeling disinformation (Bösch 2023), and using agitainment to captivate publics beyond the explicitly political (Tuters and Noordenbos forthcoming). In the context of war propaganda, memes become central agents of partisan bonding through recognizable templates and inscribed in-group cues (Arkenbout & Scherz 2022). TikTok music expands the toolbox of crafting memes, opening up new venues of boundary work and populist instrumentalization (Boichak & Hoskins 2022).

TikTok is renowned for its ability to implant short video earworms, perceived as stickier than complete songs (Vizcaíno-Verdú & Abidin 2022). Some attribute this phenomenon to the cognitive principle that human memory retains unfinished tasks more effectively than completed ones, generating affective tension (Carson 2022). Walter J. Ong’s “secondary orality”, a concept revived by Venturini (2022), is one way to address this tension in online spaces where written words often become spoken words and where evanescence is ingrained into the logic of engagement. Foregrounding the memetic function of TikTok, the panel sets out to explore how the ultra-nationalist landscape of Russian WarTok and the tactics of pro-Ukrainian hijacking intertwine in a complex ecology of imitation and attention hijacking.

THE SOUND OF DISINFORMATION: TIKTOK, COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA AND THE INVASION OF UKRAINE

Tom Divon and Marcus Bösch

“ДОБРОГО ВЕЧОРА WHERE ARE YOU FROM”: MEMETIC REVERSAL, CULTURAL APPROPRIATION, AND SOUND HIJACKING

Daria Delavar-Kasmai

AMBIENT PROPAGANDA: THE DARK REFRAIN OF WARTOK

Marc Tuters and Boris Noordenbos

WHAT IF THEY ATTACK? КАТЮША AND THE COUNTERMOBILIZATION OF SOUND ON WARTOK

Elena Pilipets and Marloes Geboers

AMBIGUOUS STANCE-TAKING AND OPPOSITIONAL SOUND PUBLICS ON DOUYIN DURING THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR

Richard Rogers and Xiaoke Zhang

Visualising Attitudes to Data: A Lego-based exploration

This workshop employs the methods of our ongoing collaborative research project for the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) conducted in collaboration with the Universities of Liverpool, Exeter, and Surrey. Our workshops are designed to visualise how organisations can improve their understanding of data. This analysis is framed around principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability (See Von Solms & Van Niekerk, 2013 & Samonas & Coss, 2014). Employing Lego as a creative tool has been used in previous studies such as Coles-Kemp, Jensen, & Heath (2020) who held workshops for participants to outline their perceived cyber (in)securities. Other studies have focused on risk visualisation (Hall, Heath, & Coles-Kemp, 2015) and everyday data security (Coles-Kemp & Hansen, 2017). Asprion et al. (2020) similarly utilised Lego Serious Play as an educational tool for visualisation and Rashid et al (2020) have used Lego as a tool for wargaming cyberattacks. Our research emphasises the importance of sociotechnical factors in decision-making within organisations, highlighting attitudes to the use of data, data awareness levels, and perceived security threats.

Our workshop involves participants mapping data use in their personal and professional lives using Lego. Along with a colour-coded guide and annotation, the goal is for each group to produce their own personal/professional visualisation, highlighting attitudes to data with explicit reference to its confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Groups are asked to share and discuss their models, which serves as a reflective process while also providing rich, ethnographic data for the research team. The workshop length is two hours, and all necessary equipment is provided. The goals of the workshop are to explore the role of data among research participants. It poses the question of what the main challenges and risks are to utilising data effectively.

Participants are given an introductory skill-building task, and then volunteers are sought to narrate their model, exploring the meaning behind key components. From this, groups of 2 to 4 people are assigned to work together on building a shared-task model that focuses on the research questions. Time is allowed for brainstorming, and participants will be asked to reflect on a series of prompts to assist with what can seem like an abstract task. Participants are provided with a colour-coding guide to help visualise positive or negative attitudes towards confidentiality, integrity, and data availability. The exercise demonstrates how these attitudes can vary based on the context of a particular data flow. While our ongoing research is focused on British attitudes to data in the workplace - with a view to informing future policy direction in the UK government - our workshop has a wider conceptual value. We aim to offer key contributions to debates around the flow and interactions between personal and professional data; use of data in the workplace; surveillance concerns; everyday security dilemmas, accessibility and availability of data for innovation and beyond. Furthermore, we aim to demonstrate the value of creative methodologies in exploring complex phenomena.

A museum patron awkwardly calls for “security!” as JustStopOil activists cover a famous painting in soup; an eco-influencer explains all the U.S. 2022 Inflation Reduction Act climate policies in 60 seconds in a funny voice; a very sweaty man gives a tour of his makeshift apartment cooling devices amid the record-breaking 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave. TikTok has become a repository for first-person video recordings of moments in climate history, often posted in real-time and tinged with a distinct style of audiovisual memetic humor—a “platform vernacular” (Gibbs, 2015) that TikTok videos should abide by if they want to go viral. The platform’s vernacular, which emphasizes authenticity and lightheartedness, poses challenges to the dissemination of serious information about climate change, and legacy news organizations have struggled to adapt. A slate of young eco-influencers has risen to fill this gap, but the quality of their climate communications remains unexamined. This research project examines the fundamental mismatch between TikTok’s designed affordances, resultant vernacular, and generally agreed-upon principles of effective climate communication by performing a multimodal analysis of videos posted within three different climate discourses: protest, policy, and disaster. Preliminary results suggest an overwhelming favoring of climate-friendly individual lifestyle changes over systemic change arguments, an increased presence of lighthearted ‘newsy’ content, and a shift toward the promotion of educational content rather than the bite-sized imitative memes that continue to dominate other ecologies within the platform.

In recent years, different voices have denounced the significant environmental costs of digital technologies. However, less emphasis has been put on exploring the impacts of such technologies from an environmental justice perspective. As the extraction of lithium in Chile or the dump of e-waste in Kenya illustrate, there are relevant asymmetries to attend in this regard. Against this backdrop, in this paper we develop the concept of eco-imperialism to unpack the planetary asymmetries underpinning the environmental impacts of digital technologies. Applying the thought of Rosa Luxemburg, we show that the expansion of digital technologies relies on a violent and opaque outsourcing of environmental damage to regions that are not at the core of technological design and development. As of today, both liberal market and state-led market societies (mainly the US and China) are involved in digital eco-imperialism. In particular, we explore three facets underpinning the lifecycle of digital eco-imperialism: land exploitation, infrastructural growth and electronic waste dumping. Our empirical insights stem from interviews and participant observation conducted with industry actors in Europe (panels and conferences held in the UK and Spain) and communities in resistance in Chile (groups opposing a Google data centre and lithium extraction).

In 2023, the world faced a humanitarian tragedy in Brazil involving the Yanomami people. In addition to the result of criminal conduct of public policies aimed at indigenous peoples in the last four years, the case highlights a culture of erasure of Brazilian native peoples that permeates society, institutions, and the mainstream press. In this work, we discuss how mining in indigenous lands has been approached discursively in Brazil. For this, we analyze the conversations on Twitter related to #AtoPelaTerra, a protest in defense of the environment and against the bill that authorizes mining in indigenous lands, held in Brasília in March 2022. To understand the conversation dynamics of the publications collected, we performed a network analysis (WASSERMAN & FAUST, 1994) and to analyze the speeches produced by the subjects who participated in the debate, we adopted the Analysis of Connected Concepts (LINDGREEN 2016). Our results demonstrate that the conversation about the indigenous agenda has been polarized and with a strong misinformation content, especially in the field of the extreme right. In addition, the defense of native peoples and environmental preservation has a limited scope to its most active militancy. In the mainstream media, both the environmental agenda and the indigenous agenda are softened by replacing the term “mining” with “mineral exploration”, which ends up normalizing (FOUCAULT, 2003) practices that are harmful to the environment and indigenous peoples, as an effect of a crossing of the economic and supposedly developmentalist debate that prevails in these spaces.

In colonial and postcolonial Ireland, boglands were seen as "wastelands" to be "improved" by large-scale enterprise. Today, they are strategic landscapes for carbon sequestration and climate solutions, both for the state and multinationals located in Ireland. Various contemporary projects, co-funded by industry and state partners, have facilitated the expansion and proliferation of sensing, monitoring, and mapping technologies across Ireland's bogs to measure and maximize their value in these economies. However, by doing so, they are laying the foundations for a "green grab" of Ireland's land resources by tech companies.

This paper situates the historical resource and conservation landscape of Ireland’s peat boglands within their emerging role in datafied “green” revolutions. Emphasizing the stakes of land, resources, technologies, and research institutions within green transitions, the paper theorizes peat bogs an emerging site of digital climate solutionism. In doing so, I offer a framework for understanding resource landscapes in so-called “post-extractive” contexts where networked forms of extraction are innovated through public/private technoscientific research at the intersections of digital technology and ecosystemic interactions between geologies, atmospheres, and cultures. Bringing together literature from environmental media studies, STS, and geography, and performing participant observation and discourse analysis on emerging projects of peatland science in academic and industry settings, I theorize how “environmental mediation” offers an aperture for understanding how digital technologies network landscapes towards “ecosystem services” and other capital-driven climate projects.

What happens to internet communities after a global media event puts them in the public spotlight? Does the flood of new members change a given community's practices, structures, and discussions? Do things go back to normal? These questions lie at the heart of our research project, which examines how a local subcommunity on the popular website Reddit changed as its matter of focus became a global discussion subject.

Specifically, this study analyses changing posting practices on /r/hongkong, a local subreddit whose popularity skyrocketed in 2019, with the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement garnering worldwide media coverage. Now, with global attention shifting away from the protests and the 2020 Hong Kong National Security law, the subreddit no longer exhibits the same level of activity. But what can be learnt beyond simply looking at the numbers? Can a qualitative change be observed on /r/hongkong?

In this extended abstract, we examine the existing research on subreddits as a community, consider the potential significance of media events and subsequent influxes of new users for community practice, outline our methodological approach, and highlight some preliminary findings.

Clubhouse has attracted roughly 10 million users to its platform since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as an invite-only, drop-in audio social network app. Yet, few studies examine Clubhouse as a new platform for conducting social media research, and even fewer examine the early invite-only growth of social audio apps. This study theorizes Clubhouse as an emerging social media platform during the COVID pandemic, and empirically investigates its communicative capacity, networked connections, and social dynamics. The primary contribution is a social network analysis of Clubhouse’s early users, wherein segmented networked publics based on invite links emerge. While some researchers explain that the growth of invite-only social networks is often attributed to a platform’s ‘cool factor,’ the growth of the early Clubhouse network reveals a hierarchy of social exclusivity among the networked publics, which indicates an embedded capitalist social structure and connection that grants more access to those with more social and economic power. These networked relationships provide insights into how invite-based emerging viral social media platforms are formed.

The “fediverse”–a collection of decentralized social networks grounded in open source protocols such as ActivityPub–has garnered ever-greater attention over the past year with rising backlash against Twitter and other commercial platforms and ascendance of Mastodon. But the origins of the fediverse long predate this moment, and are grounded in longstanding concerns about the deep structure of our communication platforms. This paper mines those antecedents and conversations to advance an historically-informed discussion of the fediverse’s possible futures, with a focus on developing strategies to avoid the pitfalls that have plagued other potential “digital public spheres” in the past.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, many users sought a place of refuge, and Mastodon was seen as an early candidate. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, a decentralized network of social media services. But people arriving in this network were confused, a problem that many chalked up to a clunky interface and a confusing user experience. Such a reading of the situation misses something much more fundamental. This reaction to Mastodon signals something important about a narrowed network imagination amongst some users, a narrowed imagination that is not shared by all. On Mastodon, users engage in labor-intensive federating practices – they manage both the internal dynamics of their home server and that server’s relations to other servers. Groups are relatively easy to create, but federation can be quite difficult. Federation faces a number of obstacles, but some groups, including far-right political activists, have effectively responded to those obstacles. Researchers should study not only federated social media but also the federating practices used by groups both online and offline, practices that move past the easy labor of group formation into the more difficult work of federation.

This conference paper addresses gaps in scholarship and pedagogy surrounding the phenomenon of “dark patterns” in digital marketing and interface design by showcasing three curriculum-building projects. Dark patterns refer to a set of design strategies that co-opt the human-centred values advocated for in the fields of user experience (UX) design and human-computer interaction (HCI) to manipulate users into taking actions contrary to their personal interests. Recent dark patterns research has clustered within the fields of HCI, media studies, and game studies, with a focus on e-commerce and online gambling platforms. The presented projects put this established research into conversation with scholarship from business and marketing, science and technology studies, cognitive neuroscience, and disability studies to both create a more holistic definition of dark patterns and implement this expanded definition into university course curricula. These include Dark Patterns: Where Marketing Meets UX Design, focused on contextualizing dark patterns within historical market segmentation and merchandising strategies; Dark Patterns: Manipulative UX Design, on broadening the definition of dark patterns to include non-screen interfaces; and Designing for Normal and Failing Ethically, on analyzing how dark patterns have a disproportionate effect on individuals with certain cognitive disabilities. Collectively, these projects aimed to grant a greater historicity and social context to the phenomenon of dark patterns and introduce them as a utilizable pedagogical concept within the disciplines of communications, technology, and design. The findings of these projects are presented through the sharing of pedagogical materials, informal and formal feedback, and planned curriculum revisions.

As children grow up immersed in digital environments, scholars and policymakers emphasize the importance of helping children learn how to navigate privacy online. Prior work has found that educators recognize this need for privacy lessons but do not always feel equipped to teach them. Indeed, the term “privacy” has many meanings and the concept of privacy does not easily fit in a specific subject, intersecting with social studies, computer science, media literacy, digital literacy, and digital citizenship. Scholars have begun developing frameworks for privacy education, but such efforts will have a higher chance of success if they can be integrated into existing educational standards. Thus, in this study we are analyzing U.S. K-12 educational standards to understand whether and how they address privacy literacy. Our initial analysis has found that 44 of the 50 U.S. states have implemented educational standards related to privacy, largely as part of library, computer science, or social studies. The main privacy-related topics in state standards include being careful about posting information online and managing passwords. These preliminary findings suggest that while privacy is part of many state education standards, there are opportunities to help educators bring a more nuanced approach to privacy into their classrooms.

This paper draws on our research into the cultures of production surrounding the development of deepfakes and use of other forms of generative AI across public sites such as GitHub and YouTube, and subsequent reflective classroom experimentation and learning. Expanding on the notion of ‘vernacular pedagogies’ – informal and in situ education and relational literacy work – we propose a set of approaches for widening participation and involvement in AI and its underlying data practices. We reflect on the kinds of public vernacular pedagogy available on YouTube, GitHub and elsewhere online, and the kinds of experimental project work and learning environments that can be created with higher education students that can widen critical forms of AI participation and literacy.

Internet entrepreneurs, EdTech companies, AI enthusiasts, and other powerful stakeholders around the world have promoted the idea that big data and learning analytics (LA) have the potential to revolutionise education. LA, defined as the continuous measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their context (Gašević et al., 2015, p. 1), is increasingly being used to track and evaluate what students do in internet-mediated environments. A growing body of literature has questioned the benefits attributed to the use of AI-based solutions and raised a number of concerns about the current developments in the education sector. Despite this growing interest among researchers, we know little about how the beliefs, values and feelings of different groups of educational practitioners shape how they engage with AI-driven learning analytics technologies and influence the evolution of the cultures of practice shaping the adoption of learning analytics. In this paper, we report on research that asks: how do culturally situated beliefs, values and emotions shape practitioners’ engagements with narrow AI in different contexts of practice? The research project as a whole examines these cultures of practice across three contrasting contexts. Here we will discuss early findings from one of these contexts – learning analytics in higher education. With insights from this research, we aim to contribute to empower practitioners in higher education and relevant stakeholders to foster the development of critical and reflective data cultures that are able to exploit the possibilities of learning analytics while being critically responsive to their societal implications and limitations.

This project examines luxury fashion brands’ use of digital media regarding the LGBTQIA+ communities. Luxury brands promote their products or services on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, and a host of other social media services (Yu & Ko, 2021; Zhang, Liu, & Lang, 2022). While Luxury brands consciously decide to promote and advertise to LGBTQIA+ members, the same luxury brands tend to exclude LGBTQIA+ members from the imagery on their digital platforms.

In this project, we examine how four luxury brands represent LGBTQIA+ members, and how these representations align with the brands’ stated policies. News articles, press releases, organizational policies, and related Instagram posts from 2020-2023 were collected for Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hermes, and Savage. Our analysis points to several key findings: The impact of “cancel culture” on luxury brands; a distinction between reactive versus active engagement with LGBTQIA+ communities; a tension between brands’ policies and social media representation; and the importance of authenticity when branding to diverse audiences.

The podcasting landscape has been reshaped in the past several years by acquisitions and mergers among players in the industry. Major platform services like Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeartMedia, Google, and Apple have all attempted to more closely bind consumers to their proprietary services, threatening the open architecture of distribution via RSS. While control and monetization of intellectual property is one key driver of platformization in podcasting, another key institutional shift is being accelerated these changes: the datafication of the audience. In short, datafication involves the quantification of human activity to enable surveillance, prediction, and mass customization of advertising.

In this paper, I explore one significant impact of widescale platformization within podcasting: the emergence of programmatic advertising markets. By essentially “listening in” to these industry discourses about podcast advertising (in podcasts and in the Podcast Upfront presentations from Spring 2022), this essay outlines the importance of platform-to-platform data transactions and highlights the resulting shifts in the podcasting ecosystem: away from the intimate, relationship-driven ethos of the medium and toward a quantitative, surveillance-driven ecosystem.

This paper examines how dominant institutional actors exercise power and control over the digital advertising ecosystem. It pursues this inquiry through a case study on the 2021 introduction of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature—a privacy setting newly integrated in the operating system of iOS mobile devices. Developing this case study, we ask: How do dominant market actors exercise control over the infrastructural layers of the ‘mobile ad stack’ and how do they gain access to end-user data? These questions are addressed through a mix-methods approach that involves (A) analysis of developer documentation provided by Apple, (B) a review of ongoing litigation, and (C) analysis of financial disclosure forms of two ad-driven platforms Meta and Snapchat. This inquiry shows, first, how and why Facebook and Google, each in their own way, have been highly successful in their ability to aggregate both ad inventory and accurate, real-time user data. Second, it demonstrates how ATT blocked the access of advertising platforms to a key part of this real-time user data, while, simultaneously, enabling Apple to gain control over end-users’ mobile data. Thus, the rollout of ATT and its subsequent shifts in revenue and data demonstrate the relational and constantly evolving nature of institutional power in the mobile advertising ecosystem.

The digital advertising industry is bracing itself for a world where the third-party and cross-context tracking it has relied on may be restricted by design or by law. Companies like Google and Meta are reacting to regulatory headwinds, infrastructural changes, cultural shifts, and economic turmoil by publicizing a range of technological solutions that promise to preserve existing optimization capabilities without flouting users’ expectations or data governance laws. The adtech sector is becoming resigned to a new privacy imperative.

The concept of digital resignation typically refers to how companies make individuals feel a sense of powerlessness about privacy, leaving data subjects exposed to unwanted tracking and exploitation. Our paper looks through this optic from the other end of the lens: How is the digital advertising industry coping with the increasing salience of privacy as a policy and public-relations issue?

Our paper shows that companies are performing “privacy” without making meaningful change. We argue that adtech's pivot to privacy, while including some good-faith attempts at progress, ultimately amount to a form of privacy cynicism. We characterize some key strategic maneuvers being executed by means of these privacy solutions: magic tech-washing (using computational techniques to obfuscate data flows and sanitize surveillance or discrimination); party hopping (pursuing more invasive first-party tracking, or turning third-party data into first-party data via partnerships and acquisitions); and sabotage (using “privacy” to disadvantage rivals and increase market power).

For more than a decade, digital advertising has been the primary means of funding online content and services. The evolution of digital advertising towards algorithmically targeted advertising, believed to be highly personalized and tailored to the individual, has presented new challenges for public oversight. Whereas previously, public concern centred on the content of ads and their exposure to audiences, the rise of platform-based advertising means focus has shifted to the distribution of ads and how they reach us. In response to public concerns and regulatory pressures, companies such as Meta (the parent of Facebook) have introduced transparency tools for researchers and consumers to ‘explain’ the function of advertising on the platform, including the Ad Library and the “Why Am I Seeing This Ad” feature. Despite being a central feature of Meta’s response towards increasing external scrutiny, little is known about how the WAIST feature works, or how it operates at a population level. In response we offer a description of WAIST data collected at scale, informed from a nationwide citizen data donation project of Facebook advertising. We analyse this data with a view to better understand Meta’s algorithmic advertising system, and to inform questions regarding the sufficiency of WAIST as an algorithmic explanatory mechanism for users.

This paper thus aims to contribute to media, communication, and digital technology studies by proposing a more systematic conceptualization of digital resistance. While the notion of resistance in relation to technology is often connoted negatively and associated the rejection of innovation of change, our approach to digital resistance takes here a new meaning: political and critical. Indeed, the notion of digital resistance is often used in academia and public discourse to describe practices of using, subverting, and creating technologies, usually in a progressive and anti-oppressive perspective (Russell, 2005).

However, the term is still relatively undefined, and many practices could be categorized as digital resistance if the term was better defined. We propose in this paper a preliminary but formal conceptualization of digital resistance. Our theorization takes place in the context of a research project on the cartography of digital resistance. Different data collection and analysis activities will be implemented to have a wide and panoramic empirical view of the phenomenon of digital resistance. In this project, the cartographic approach takes on a dual meaning, namely a broad and systematic description of a phenomenon, and the implementation of an original digital device allowing its visualization and potentially participatory enrichment. Our preliminary empirical mapping identified six dimensions to analyze digital resistance that we will present in this paper.

Over the last two decades quantitative data representation has moved from a specialization of the sciences, economics, and statistics, to becoming commonplace in settings of democratic governance and community decision making. The dominant norms of those fields of origin are not connected to the governance and activism settings data is now used in, where practices emphasize empowerment, efficacy, and engagement. This has created ongoing harms and exclusion in a variety of well-documented settings. In this paper I critique the singular way of knowing embodied and charts and graphs, and apply the theories of epistemological pluralism and extended epistemology to argue for a larger toolbox of data representation. Through three concrete case studies of data representations created by activists I argue that social justice movements can embrace a broader set of approaches, practicing creative data representation as epistemological resistance. Through learning from these ongoing examples the fields of data literacy, open data, and data visualization can help create a broader toolbox for data representation. This is necessary to create a pluralistic practice of bringing people together around data in social justice settings.

Amidst calls for public accountability over large data-driven systems, feminist and indigenous scholars have developed refusal as a practice that challenges the authority of data collectors. However, because data affects so many aspects of daily life, it can be hard to see seemingly different refusal strategies as part of the same repertoire. Furthermore, conversations about refusal often happen from the standpoint of designers and policymakers rather than the people and communities most affected by data collection. In this paper, we introduce a framework for data refusal from below—writing from the standpoint of people who refuse, rather than the institutions that seek their compliance. We characterize refusal strategies across four constituent facets common to all refusal, whatever tactics are used: autonomy, or how refusal accounts for individual and collective interests; time, or whether refusal reacts to past harm or proactively prevents future harm; power, or the extent to which refusal makes change possible; and cost, or whether or not refusal can reduce or redistribute penalties experienced by refusers. We illustrate each facet by drawing on cases of people and collectives that have refused data systems. Together, the four facets of our framework are designed to help scholars and activists describe, evaluate, and imagine new forms of refusal.

The essay brings together Black feminist theory, critical disability studies, and feminist science and technology studies together through the concept of technological practices of refusal. The concept of technological practices of refusal describes how disabled people engage in everyday, often communal technological practices as means to challenge normative logics and engage in collective world-making practices toward collective liberation and societal transformation. Technological practices of refusal extends Schalk & Kim’s (2020) feminist-of-color disability studies and Campt's (2017) practices of refusal to highlight the interrelations between ableism and white supremacy and the ways in which systems of domination operate to dehumanize individuals based on deviations from white supremacist configurations of race, class, gender and ability. The concept therefore not only underscores how disabled people reimagine and enact new social formations despite the foreclosure of subjectivity and futurity, but maps out new points of affinity for solidarity and collective action.

Since the release of sex robots in 2017 by RealDoll, they have been marketed as companions and sexual fantasies. Social media platforms provide RealDoll and its affiliates the opportunity to justify and celebrate the creation of a responsive sex robot directly to the public and potential consumers. To expand the fourth level of abstraction of mass media within the social construction of technology theory, this paper investigates the Instagram and Twitter pages of the technological segment of RealDoll, Realbotix, and the most prevalent RealDoll affiliate, Brickdollbanger. Framed by Fairclough’s (2012) perspective of critical discourse analysis, I reviewed a combined 1,016 Tweets and Instagram posts to analyze the process of enrollment by key actors in relation to the design of sex robots and the sex robot industry. Results indicate humor and explicit images are utilized to market the sexual capabilities of the sex robots versus ideas of love and companionship. This paper adds to human-machine communication literature on the design of sex robots by exploring the sex-forward messaging not fully present in other marketing materials of Realbotix.

”Edge-ball reaction videos“ are newly popularized digital content on Chinese video-sharing platforms that feature creators reacting to sexually explicit digital content, or “edge-balls”. In mainland China, the production and dissemination of pornography is criminalized and subjected to strict censorships by the state-platform, with said censorship heavily reliant on mobilizing peer surveillance. Rooted in such political and historical context, edge-ball reaction videos show characteristics of surveillance cultural practice in the digital age. Drawing the frameworks of surveillance culture and platform governance, this study qualitatively examines edge-ball reaction videos and ask: what role does this form of cultural production play in the state-platform-sanctioned surveillance of sexual content and gendered bodies? What does it mean for the public sex culture in Chinese digital spaces? With preliminary analysis, I argue that: firstly, most edge-ball reaction videos comply with the state-platform-centered surveillance culture targeting sexual content through reinforcing the state-sanctioned surveillance imaginaries, encouraging surveillance practices, and adding the layer of affect to surveillance; Secondly, surveillance practice is commodified as entertainment in these videos through dramatizing and creators’ partaking in the platform visibility game; Finally, by positioning women as desiring subjects who freely express their sexuality, some edge-ball reaction videos show feminist sensibility and subversive potentials. This project sheds light on the sexual expression and reproduction of gendered and sexualized bodies in platformized Chinese cultural production. In addition, it also complicates our understanding of contemporary surveillance systems by examining the actual practices of the surveillance subjects and their interactions with the state-platform configuration.

This paper makes an argument for the value of including sexual sites in definitions and analyses of social media. Building on interview data (four developer interviews and 56 user interviews) from three North European sexual platforms (Darkside, Alastonsuomi and Libertine.Center) devoted to nudity, sex, and kink, it examines the implications of defining sex platforms as social media and the analytical avenues that the inclusion of sexual sites opens up for understanding forms of sociability within them.

We start by mapping the studied platforms as built infrastructures that shape and constrain sociality, with a particular focus on developer dialogue with the broader social media ecosystem. We then discuss how these built spaces are used and experienced as “socio-sexual silos” with a particular focus on notions of safety. Finally, we consider what this means for sociality on social media and propose “context promiscuity” as a conceptual aid for unpacking this.

This project examines the emergence of the virtual sexual cultures of disabled people. I theorize the virtual as a condition of possibility for disabled sexuality by engaging a textual and discourse analysis of an emblematic case study—Andrew Gurza’s podcast Disability After Dark, as well as his pornographic persona and social media presence to understand the political and cultural ramifications, affordances, and limitations of expressing virtual sexual culture of disability on the internet. There is no singular sexual culture of disability. Rather, I argue that by attending to the discourses of desire embedded in Gurza’s virtual milieu as a queer, nonbinary, power wheelchair user with Cerebral Palsy, we might imagine more emancipatory futures for all.

Moreover, I am interested in the tactics that disabled people like Andrew Gurza use to enunciate their sexualities in virtual spaces as a politics and a mode of being in the world. Additionally, Gurza’s pornographic performance adds a compelling dimension to this discussion of the “real.”

In claiming disabled sexual cultures as “revolutionary,” I mean to suggest that discourses of desirable disability are resistant tactics to oppressive sociopolitical regimes that work to surveil, curtail, and litigate disabled lives, and especially to a medical model of disability which seeks to “cure” disability, sometimes violently, and to erase or otherwise elide vibrant epistemological cultures of sexual expression. Gurza is one such figure. However, he is far from the only one. Ultimately, to paraphrase Neil Marcus, “Disability is not tragedy… it is a [virtually] ingenious way to live.”

This paper contributes to the growing body of literature that interrogates the modalities of nostalgia afforded in, by, and through digital media technologies with a focus on its performative dimension within one social formation of nostalgia – the TikTok aesthetic. Drawing on a fine-grained, qualitative artifact analysis of the most viewed video in #nostalgicore on TikTok, this paper asks how the platform’s socio-technical affordances enable and/or constrain Boym’s “restorative” (regressive) and “reflective” (progressive) modalities of nostalgia as a basis for action. Drawing on performance studies and emotion theory, I conceptualize nostalgia as “emotive” to foreground its performative dynamics and allow for further study of nostalgia as a performance or “narrative event” that articulates time, space, and affective feeling. Through the interplay of TikTok’s temporal and spatial affordances, I find that TikTok permits the feeling of the "thick present" to emerge, encouraging liminal, fever dream-like performances of nostalgia in which young people imaginatively construct nostalgic worlds. I argue that this practice constitutes a form of digital placemaking that resists normative assumptions of nostalgia operating on a linear temporal horizon of action (i.e., backward/past vs. forward/future) as it is made, remade, and algorithmically circulated. Contributing to recent work on “algorithmic nostalgia,” these findings suggest that creative and mnemonic practices are entangled in algorithmically structured aesthetic social formations of nostalgia and invite further consideration to how TikTok encourages the “mnemonic imagination” through performance.

Keywords: nostalgia, TikTok, performance, temporality, affect, social media affordances

This paper examines the critical importance of Nigerian contemporary activisms as activists oscillate between designated whisper networks, offline spaces and networked counterpublics. It adopts a multi-method approach to understanding two hashtag activisms in the Nigerian context, #SayHerNameNigeria and #QueerNigerianLivesMatter, and draws on methods and theories from network science and data feminism. With these two hashtags, Nigerian activists retool hyper-visible hashtags to make powerful connections to transnational movements producing visibility for feminized experiences of police brutality and the insistence on dignity for queer lives. This paper approaches these activisms as networked activities relaying the connections between and beyond users and contexts that directly feed into the material flows of offline groundwork. Therefore, I explore these hashtag activisms from the perspective of "transplatform" in that they not only occur in offline and online spaces but also constitute Nigerian activists' revisions of Global North policy-rooted demands and actions.

This paper further examines what doing this research groundwork means for a Nigerian activist-scholar/ hashtag archivist. As my location as a feminist activist and scholar further extends my perspective of transplatform affordances, I argue that doing this groundwork means taking part in all stages of data engagement, including participant observation, data scrapping and visualization through the access offered by the currently precariously fated Twitter application programming interface (API), and data analysis and interpretation. Finally, I explore how my process of data engagement must become triangulated as I must create ethical standards for myself as I chronicle hashtag data, contextual interviews and African feminist biographical narratives.

User biography sections on digital social platforms (hereafter described as “user bios” or “bios”) are spaces for account holders to take narrative ownership in communicating their identities to other users and interlocutors. Online platforms, such as social media, are increasingly used as community hubs for disabled groups, and especially for autistic people (Author; Author; Sins Invalid, 2019). We focus on #Autisktok, one of many enclaves for autistic community building and cultural production on TikTok. Through a critical/cultural qualitative thematic analysis of #Autisktok user bios, we assess how the user bio mediates self-advocacy, agency, and autistic-centered knowledges on #Autisktok. To investigate how autistic TikTokers use their profile’s bio section as a space for “restorying” mainstream discourses about autism and agency, we draw upon M. Remi Yergeau’s (2018) work on autism and neuroqueer rhetorics and Arseli Dokumacı’s (2023) theory of micro-activist affordances, extending these frameworks toward the digital. We pose the following research questions: How do autistic youth use the bio section on TikTok to (re)story autism diagnosis? What is the user bio’s role in creating a supportive enclave for other autistic creators, users, and activists on the TikTok platform? Three themes emerged from our analysis: the explicit use of autism in the user bio, autism and intersecting identities, and the bio as a space for asserting agentic autistic selfhood.

Like, Comment, and Share are ubiquitous features and central elements of engagement on social media platforms. Yet the values promoted by such features remain an open question. We propose the concept of value affordances, defined as the set of ethical, aesthetic, and relational principles that emerge from the interaction between different stakeholders and technological infrastructures. We develop a novel method for studying value affordances through focus groups to explore the engagement features of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Across platforms, our participants agreed that engagement features promote expression, care, and community, aligning with how companies promote their platforms. They also agreed that engagement features hinder privacy, mindfulness, peace, and safety, echoing public concerns about the harmful consequences of social media. Their accounts typically downplayed the role of technology, instead emphasizing user agency and responsibility. We discuss how users navigate tradeoffs in the value affordances of social media through creative strategies to negotiate, downplay, or even resolve these tensions. These include using features antagonistically, avoiding using specific features, or using features in more limited contexts like groups or direct messages. Users also negotiate value tradeoffs through how they assign responsibility for promoting or hindering particular values. While our participants consistently emphasized the agency of users, they differentiated responsibility into categories of "us" and "them," identifying with positive actions that promote values and blaming others for negative actions that hinder values.

The non-centralised Mastodon, which is part of the larger ‘fediverse’ has been hailed as a Twitter alternative ever since the change in leadership. Mastodon’s non-centralisation is a matter of architecture, not just policy, and is described as “content moderation subsidiarity”. There is a large degree of consensus on codes of conducts between the differing instances in the fediverse, yet a diversity in its distinct communities that have their own local norms and moderation policies. The fediverse’s architecture provides an opportunity for ‘agonistic pluralism’ where multiple competing norms can coexist side-by-side, yet the defederation of some instances with the large default instances of mastodon.social and mastodon.online calls into question whether such a model of deliberation is what users of the platform want to strive for.

To investigate how moderators deal with norm conflicts, we ask ourselves what role architecture plays in moderators’ agency in norm contestation and how Mastodon’s affordances shape such defederation decisions.

We map the fediverse to provide a quantitative view of the scale of this defederation with large instances. We perform 20 in-depth interviews with moderators who have and haven’t defederated from either mastodon.social or mastodon.online and investigate how their tactics and strategies in dealing with norm conflict are shaped by the platform’s affordances.

Contemporary digital health research, policy and practice often engage young people in voicing their opinions with a participatory approach. Simultaneously, young people organise themselves on peer-led platforms like Reddit to talk about health without adults. Peer-led discussions on platforms like Reddit gives us access to a new perspective on how young people understand and experience health. This study investigates youth voices on health in teenagers’ subreddits on Reddit and responds to three research questions: how youth voices about health matters are represented in peer-led discussions; how the platform supports plural voices; and how the Bakhtinian dialogical account of voice can offer an alternative of non-unified, heterogeneous voices of young people to shortcomings of some participatory research, service, and policymaking. This study used unobtrusive digital ethnography and extant data collection methods to sample 50 posts related to physical, mental, and sexual health. Thematic analysis was conducted with grounded theory principles. Youth plural voices revealed different conceptualisations of health and diverse narratives about actors like parents, teachers, healthcare professionals and technologies involved in health experiences. Redditors engage in humorous and factual discussions equally and share both positive and negative health experiences. There is no unity in youth health meanings, but plurality and heterogeneity deserve more recognition and support. Analysing Reddit allows us to know what and how young people talk about health with their peers. Learning from the Reddit environment, adults may redefine their ideas of youth health to be more youth-centred and better align with young people’s needs.

What is it like to be a teen today? To live in a time when on and offline worlds are increasingly blurred, especially for young people who are navigating relationships both online and at school? Misogyny, racism, homophobia, and misinformation spread in and through digital technologies and practices such as sexual name calling, the non-consensual distribution of intimate images, grooming, online harassment, catfishing, and receiving unwanted sexual messages are seemingly ubiquitous. Increasingly conceptualized as technology facilitated forms of gender-based sexual violence, (TFGBSV) (Powell and Henry 2017), these forms of harm are a significant global public concern.

In this paper, we draw from two collaborative projects that collected surveys with 557 teens, 47 teachers, and 72 parents; 17 focus groups with 65 young people, 4 focus groups with 9 parents; and 29 interviews with teens and 17 teachers. We also gathered data through arts-based methodologies, observation, and exploring educational interventions to answer the following questions:

• What is it like being a teen in this postdigital context?

• How do teens navigate their gender and sexual identities, and the intimacies, relationships, violence, and resistance that accompanies them?

• What challenges do parents and teachers face when teaching, talking about, or supporting young people in a postdigital context?

Our data casts light into what it is like to be a teen in an era in which digital technologies play such an important role in their lives - and how they experience, navigate, and challenge violence, harassment, and abuse facilitated by these technologies.

This paper stems from a chapter of my Doctoral dissertation. It borrows from the work of boyd (2014) on the experiences of teenagers in social media. In this paper I will present the different usages of the internet and social media by teenagers that live in a context of exclusion. I will focus on teenagers that are placed in care institutions in Brazil, and their struggle with everyday forms of stigma and oppression.

To live in a care institution, a.k.a shelters, is a unique experience that is the consequence of rights violations against children and teenagers (Brazilian Statute of the Child and of the Adolescent, 1990). The placement in a shelter is an extreme measure that remove children from their families and communities. To legitimate the state intervention and highlighting the exceptionality and temporality of that measure, the law prioritises family and community conviviality. This is not the case for most of teenagers, as it is unlikely they will be adopted or return, and they will spent most of their teen years there.

I will present the narratives of institution and especially teenagers, with which I highlight the link between their experiences of exclusion, the formation of identity and their digital personas. For such, I will use the concept of reflexive identity (Giddens, 1991) and the script approach (Akrich, 1992) to portray how their actions show some kind accomodation and appropriation of the affordances of social media to seek stability in a context of high uncertainty.

Climate anxiety—the feeling of dread and distress associated with worrying about the future of the planet—has been posited as a defining feature of Gen Z. This study examines youth communication around climate anxiety on YouTube, through a qualitative content analysis of 146 youth-created videos about climate anxiety, as well as the over 20,000 comments posted on them. Illustrating an emphasis on content rather than form, the videos in our corpus showed an in-depth engagement with the topic at hand, coupled with a simple, low-key aesthetic. The vast majority of videos assumed an imagined audience of young people who are concerned about the climate; thus, the goal was to provide information and advice rather than persuade about climate change. Our analysis illustrates the significance of insider conversations among youth, and the centrality of YouTube’s expressivity and connectivity affordances in allowing young people to engage with these topics on a personal and intimate level. At the same time, our research illuminates the mental toll of political expression for young people, and further highlights this connection between the affective and the political drive. On a theoretical level, our research offers and tests a broadly applicable model that explains how different social media platforms (in this case, YouTube) enable—as well as constrain—certain forms of political expression, through the interaction between their affordances, norms, and contents.

A central objective of a Portuguese research project on Young people, News and Digital citizenship – YouNDigital (PTDC/COM-OUT/0243/2021) is to grab news definitions and their connection with youth’s (aged 15-24) democratic needs. The project relies on complementary methods to approach the senses of what news is and how young people get in touch with the world. We developed a representative online survey in Portugal (N=1300) where we explored how young people reach their notion of the world. The survey reflected the existence of several nationalities, such as Angolan, Cape Verdeans, Mozambican and Brazilian (official Portuguese-speaking countries), and also Ukrainian. It also included two open research questions about how respondents build their views of the world and how they see the future of news. In this presentation, we will rely on these identified nationalities and their answers to these questions. Data points to the envision that technology will continue to have a paramount sophistication and intervention in the production of news in the coming future (they predict evolutions such as a futuristic technology in the form of an intraocular device for searching news), but they also reveal negative feelings towards the speed at which information is produced and circulates, opening way for the increasing of manipulative, and untrusty information production (they claim for more trustworthy news while at the same time they see a pathway for the news that has no salvation).

Digital memory studies is a field deeply attuned to social transformations, including the often abrupt and destabilizing impact of crisis events. It is also a field attuned to the role of time and temporalities in shaping how digital media propels experiences and interpretations of the past into the present and future. This panel is dedicated to bringing these two significant threads of digital memory studies research into concerted conversation by drawing on complementary case studies of the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, these projects examine how networked digital media interface with experiences of temporality, playing a fundamental role in shaping how the COVID-19 crisis is remembered and researched over time. This panel incorporates four projects that examine the relationship between crisis, memory, and digital media across complementary temporal and structural considerations. In conversation, these projects present reflections spanning personal and institutional pandemic memories; crisis time scales; and visual, sonic, and infrastructural media. Ultimately, this panel underscores the interconnectedness of crisis and temporality in digital memory studies, inviting conversation on mediated memories of disruptive events constructed research participants and researchers themselves.

In keeping with this year’s conference theme – Revolutions – this Fishbowl seeks to name and examine one of the dominant power structures against which revolutions of all types have been waged: whiteness. White racial grievance has played a central role in global resurgence of fascism (Felbab-Brown et al 2022). This makes interrogating technology’s role in the reproduction and maintenance of whiteness one of the most pressing intellectual tasks for contemporary internet research. This Fishbowl brings together internationally recognized scholars of race and technology to facilitate a discussion about how whiteness – in its various global iterations – intersects with the research agendas of AoIR members.

Whiteness is a contingent and ever-shifting set of social locations, discursive formations, practices, and epistemes that are irrevocably imbricated with capitalism and a constellation of interlocking oppressions along axes of gender, sexuality, and class (Robinson 1983; Hartman 1997; Spillers 1987; Lugones 2007). Globally, whiteness serves as an axis of power and identity and functions as an “index of the traces of colonial legacies that yet lie latent (but not dormant) in the postcolonial world” (López 2005; Rasmussen et al. 2007). This “deep and malleable global whiteness” produces varied and contextually specific iterations of whiteness that range from the “terribly ordinary” to the violently extremist (Christian 2019; Hill 1997).

From the centrality of social media and messaging platforms to global white supremacist extremism ways that algorithms, database structures, and AI reinforce white normativity and epistemologies, whiteness looms large across internet studies (Katz 2020; Noble 2018; Stevens, Hoffmann, and Florini 2021). This Fishbowl will 1) focus on generating productive ways for AoIR members to engage with whiteness in their research and 2) draw on the collective knowledge of the AoIR community to identify future research trajectories related to whiteness and technology.

The Ugandan LGBT+ community - arguably one of the most marginalized in the world given domestic homo-hostile legislations - is understudied when it comes to their own agency. This is particularly interesting when it comes to their use of digital media, given that they are also systematically excluded from Ugandan mainstream media. We therefore zoom in on Ugandan LGBT+ organizations themselves, and their self-controlled digital media.

Analytically the research departs from theories of rationalities of participation, suggesting that with whom a user relates, may tell us something about how this user negotiates (political) meaning and identity. We therefore map with whom Ugandan LGBT+ organizations relate online (here Twitter) and through this mapping discuss – not only who/what is deemed important/ listened to/ poke-worthy – but also how these organizations negotiate themselves and how they understand the LGBT+ struggle in Uganda. Careully selecting 46 accounts, tweets from these accounts were downloaded and then mapped and visualized using the Gephi software.

Our preliminary conclusion is that the LGBT+ community understands themselves and their struggle as deeply connected to international funding and addressing an international audience rather than domestic one.

At the time of AoIR2023 the preliminary conclusion will be complemented by a retweet analysis, a Facebook analysis, qualitative readings of the tweets/ posts (also given authors extensive knowledge, having conducted studies of the Ugandan LGBT+ community for over 10 years) and qualitative interviews (on the ground in Kampala, scheduled for April 2023).

After the Arab Spring in 2011, digital engagement increased in the whole Middle East, including the rich Arab Gulf States. Consequently, security and surveillance increased. As a result, many people decided to flee their homeland country and migrate to other countries. This study examines the digital activism of people who migrated from the Arab Gulf States to London. It shows how people use different social networking sites for digital activism. The method of this paper is an ethnographic study based in London in 2019. The polymedia theory is applied for the study

This paper shows that Twitter is the most common digital platform used for digital activism. While Youtube is used by activists as an archival platform. Facebook was less popular because it closed many accounts for the opposition. Telegram was preferred more than WhatsApp because it is more secure. A major finding is that activists in London do not trust American social networking sites and believe that American firms are colluding with the governments of the Arab Gulf states.

This study analyzed over 1 million tweets emanating from the #defundthepolice movement during the June to December 2020 time period to examine how the publics advanced the goals of the movement. Digital publics advanced a message that was largely abolitionist by fully embracing abolishing and defunding the police. The #defundthepolice movement framed the movement alongside protests uprising in various US cities, with associated hashtag assemblages that included efforts by protesters to defund the local police departments. The movement took on a global appeal when protest movements died down in the summer 2020, with spotlights being shone on human rights abuses by army, police, and military in Chile, Columbia and Nigeria, but also Canada and France. Reimaging policing to other structures in society led to policy emphasis on criminal justice reform through abolishing ice, environmental justice through the Green New Deal and health care justice with medicare for all, to name the most prominent reimaginings. Data is still being analyzed for the links, images, and sources of viral elevated content in tweets and in exploring the relationship between #defundthepolice and other black digital collectives like #blacktwitter and #blacklivesmatter.

This paper investigates how social media users advocate for women's issues in China, focusing on the activism against menstrual shaming on the social media platform Xiaohongshu, a culturally significant but understudied platform used primarily by women. With women accounting for 90.41% of active users, Xiaohongshu provides a unique social media environment that shapes the way users engage with feminist issues. However, despite the growing literature on digital feminism in China and the surging popularity and significance of Xiaohongshu in the Chinese social media ecosystem, no studies so far have examined the feminist activism on this platform.

Our study contributes to this gap by exploring the discourse around menstrual shaming on Xiaohongshu, as a lens into the dynamics of activism on this female-oriented platform. Analyzing 329 posts and 10,336 comments under the hashtag #StopMenstrualShaming on Xiaohongshu, our study foregrounds the salient role of Xiaohongshu in helping women express their feminist values in an online space that they perceive as safe and intimate. In doing so, we employ the conceptual framework of hashtag activism, which refers to the development and spread of online activism with tangible results in the physical and digital worlds. Shining a spotlight on this significant but understudied platform, we illuminate the dynamics of Chinese digital feminism, especially the formation of solidarity, relatability and collective identity on a female-oriented social media platform.

Through semi-structured qualitative interviews with 14 Lebanese journalists, activists, as well as digital rights experts, this paper showcases the central ways in which WhatsApp is used to perpetuate gendered forms of harassment and violence. We draw on and extend Ahmed’s (2021) work on complaint, which argues that complaints and their procedures can show how organizations and institution’ “mechanics” uphold whiteness and violence (p. 99). Through our findings, we argue that platform companies such as Meta fail to address harms propagated on and reported via their platforms against marginalized populations. We connect this to Costanza-Chock’s (2020) work on design justice, which suggests that when new technologies are created and launched, it is imperative to first think of and involve the communities affected by it. Furthermore, Lebanese women and queer journalists/activists, having experienced gendered violence and harassment, have informed their techno-pessimistic imaginaries (Savolainen, 2022) of what platform governance at WhatsApp and other encrypted apps could look like and change toward.

The growing concentration of power and dependence on few platforms in the media sector necessitate regulatory measures to counter the potential threats to media pluralism and editorial independence stemming from this concentration. While some legal initiatives aim to address the imbalanced power dynamics between platforms and news media, such as the efforts at the EU level through the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) to establish a fair playing field in digital markets, it is crucial to empower countervailing forces. This article explores the concept of "counterpower" within the context of media concentration and platform dependence, delving into its theoretical and practical implications. The practical analysis is grounded in 12 semi-structured interviews conducted with news organisations of various sizes in the UK and the Netherlands, revealing a heightened awareness of the necessity to reduce dependences and promote more direct and engaged journalism. The interviews identified specific strategies, albeit with some limitations, highlighting the need for additional support, especially for local news organisations striving for autonomy in reducing dependences. In a nutshell, the article examines the legal prerequisites for news organisations to establish a "counterpower," serving as a complementary piece of the larger puzzle in addressing the broader challenges of media concentration and platform dependence. Finally, alongside the evolving EU regulatory framework, encompassing the DSA, DMA, and EMFA, there is a growing demand for enabling “counterpower” and developing robust media (concentration) laws in Europe, particularly focusing on safeguarding local journalism.

Russia has been employing a multi-level strategy of spreading digital propaganda and disinformation to legitimize its aggression against Ukraine. Given their unique international position, the role of Russian diplomats in this propaganda system has been of particular interest. This study examines the changes in Russia's digital diplomatic practices following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 by analyzing Russian diplomats' communication on Twitter. The study employs a two-fold analytical approach combining network and frame analysis to investigate the communication's content and structure comprehensively. Given the context-specific nature of digital diplomacy, the study concentrates on a sample of all active Twitter accounts of Russian embassies and consulates located in Germany, analyzing their tweets from three critical time periods: three months before the invasion (23.11.2021-23.02.2022), three months after the invasion (24.02.2022-24.05.2022), and three months before the anniversary of the full-scale war (24.11.2022-24.02.2023). The study identifies several practices utilized by diplomatic accounts that involve distorting, omitting, and misdirecting narratives, evident in both the content and the specific strategies and linking practices employed by the accounts in the sample. Furthermore, the study reveals significant changes in the networks of these accounts after the full-scale invasion. Against this backdrop, the study discusses the role of Twiplomacy in an armed conflict and the conceptual distinction between diplomacy and propaganda, providing novel insights into the involvement of state officials in propaganda dissemination and emphasizing the significance of authoritarian regimes' networks on Twitter.

The rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies come with the promise of decentralizing transactions and disrupting the power of market intermediaries. Despite these promises, scholars argue that the risks associated with cryptocurrencies are still unclear.

Some preliminary works investigate the manipulative role played by the circulation of problematic content on platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, Discord, or Telegram. Nonetheless, the research still lacks a clear and comprehensive picture of how widespread the phenomenon is across the whole ecosystem. Despite its prominence, Facebook is understudied in this context. To fill this gap, this work focuses on the role played by Meta’s main platform, as a venue employed to reach a wide audience prone to potential manipulative practices or scams related to cryptocurrencies. As part of a broader investigation on coordinated disinformation in Africa, we have come across a cluster of Facebook groups sharing content related to cryptocurrencies. The links shared by these networks revealed a very prolific cluster of 152 groups dedicated to Airdrop and Bounty initiatives for new cryptocurrencies. We collected a list of recent posts created by these groups between November 2021 and January 2022 (378,513 URLs). A preliminary analysis of these URLs pointed out an overwhelming presence of links to Telegram (47%) that highlights the central role played by this platform in this specific ecosystem. This paper explores the overlap between the cryptocurrency community and social media, analyzing how crypto-related projects are disseminated as a new type of problematic content on Facebook and Telegram.

The U.S. defamation trial between celebrities Johnny Depp and Amber Heard has fueled unprecedented viral online misogyny due to media spotlighting, as well as strategic disinformation leveraged by the Depp team. As the first high-profile defamation case of its kind to be livestreamed on social media—a decision Professor Michelle Dauber of Stanford Law called “the single worst decision I can think of in the context of intimate partner violence and sexual violence in recent history" (Maddaus, 2022)–-it resulted in widespread viewership and active commentary. Our work uses the Depp v. Heard defamation trial as a case study to examine the impacts of gendered mis- and disinformation using a trauma-informed approach. This study is not interested in the facticity of details of the case itself, but seeks to center the experiences of survivors of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and domestic violence (SV/IPV/DV) and those who work with them. Our interview study asks: (1) What online claims or narratives related to gender and/or SV/IPV/DV were most prominent or impactful for survivors and those who work with them?; (2) How have these narratives impacted survivors’ emotional, psychological, and physical well-being, and/or their access to resources?; (3) What interventions might be appropriate to counter harms and/or provide support for survivors as similar cases emerge? We intend for this project to be one of the first of many in centering women and gender/sexual minority individuals’ lived experiences in the context of mis-/disinformation about and perpetuated in relation to high-profile defamation cases.

In recent years, major technology companies have taken much of the public blame for this reality, given their algorithms facilitate the sharing of—and sometimes even promote—falsehoods. This, however, misses a key reality; social media, search engines, and messaging services are not fully automated technologies. Rather, they are heteromated: they are reliant on participatory humans to serve their economic goals. Focusing on users, and on the sharing, rather than the origination, of disinformation, we connect theories of heteromation with those surrounding the Human Infrastructure of Misinformation (HIM) with the express purpose of contributing to a more holistic understanding of how and why misinformation is so prevalent online.

Digital technologies have reshaped how politics are understood and carried out, providing diverse imaginaries and possibilities for contesting power. Digital technologies have not only catalyzed the challenge of state power in authoritarian contexts, but also helped reconfigure political action and redefine the sphere of politics itself. In the Middle East, it is essential to distinguish between the promises of digital technologies and the imaginaries underpinning them, and the tangible reality of a region that seeks to change, but is hindered by the enduring legacy of the modern state. Despite the contentious politics and powerful revolutionary momentum, the Middle East continues to face challenges that impede its ability to alter its course. This paper traces a particular imaginary of the digital as instrument for socio-political revolutions. Based on rich archival material, industry reports, and trade publications, this research traces the emergence of networked publics and the development of digital imaginaries to offer a locally-anchored, theoretically-grounded analysis of the Digital Middle East’s revolutionary ebbs and flows. The dynamics that animate the region’s digital transformation are traced through technological milestones. At the start, the paper identifies various digital moments associated with the term ‘revolution’ to trace the emergence of networked publics. The paper then examines the different digital imaginaries associated with the ‘digital era.’ The paper concludes by addressing how revolutionary logics provide a rationale for digital engagement, what political and sociocultural processes are ignored when assessing the role of revolutions, and how digital imaginaries empower networked publics beyond revolutions.

In order to hinder attacks on democratic norms and processes in digital public venues, designing strategies of exclusion is a pressing concern. Nevertheless, we lack systematic studies of how digital public venues should be governed to protect – rather than undermine – democratic values through exclusion. The purpose of this contribution is to offer a systematic theorization of the concept of democratic exclusion in the context of digital public venues. I will in particular draw on two strands of literature within democratic theory which have contributed greatly to the normative theorization of democratic exclusion, but have done so in relation to other types of political settings: the works within feminist political theory on exclusion of dominant groups within parliaments (e.g. Dovi 2009; Murray 2014) and the literature on hate speech regulation and democratic self-defence against (primarily) antidemocratic parties (e.g. Müller 2016; Invernizzi Accetti and Zuckerman 2017; Malkopoulou and Kirshner 2019). First, I will analyze if and how these previous contributions can be applied to the specific context of digital public venues, where special conditions of access and visibility apply. I will then assess to what extent the platforms’ existing governing strategies and policies concerning the exclusion of problematic content or accounts are compatible with the relevant exclusion principles formulated in these works. Building on this analysis, in its final parts the study will move on to carve out more specific suggestions for how exclusion on digital venues should be governed, and what principles should guide this governance.

Online media platforms have become an arena for activists to engage with political discourses. Since COVID-19, an increasing number of citizens have begun to actively participate online to express their ideas towards political issues. Various types of user-generated content were circulated on various social media platforms: they wrote textual content on Wechat with various metaphors and created user-generated videos on video-streaming platforms to express their opinions. In this context, this study examines how citizens express democratic opinions against ideological discourse, what role social media platforms play as an arena for activists’ participation, and what social media factors facilitate active online civic participation. Adopting a cross-platform perspective, this study compares how Douyin and Wechat facilitate civic participation differently and how people engage with political content differently on these two different media platforms. I employed digital ethnography, augmented by the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018), and qualitative content analysis to examine how WeChat and Douyin play different roles in civic participation. This study argues that the social networking platform WeChat provides more in-depth participation and has more resistant forms than Douyin, especially for expressing counter-ideas to mainstream discourses. Among the various forms of resistance, sharing WeChat articles is one of the most visible and effective ways to express democratic opinions in mainstream discourse.

On March 15, 2019, a far-right gunman entered the Al Noor Mosque during Friday afternoon prayers and began a shooting spree, killing 51 people. It was later discovered that the shooter had been influenced by extremist ideas he found on YouTube. For example, he donated money to self-described philosopher Stefan Molyneux, who the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a cult leader spreading white supremacist ideas to millions of YouTube users. The spread of far-right conspiracy theories, such as the Great Replacement, resulted in Molyneux's removal from YouTube in 2020.

Our study utilizes a unique historical dataset to explore the radicalization of Molyneux’s YouTube community from 2008 to 2018. Adopting the lens of "reactionary fandoms," we use a digital hermeneutics method with the computational toolkit 4CAT to study engagement, alternating between a macro and micro perspective. On the macro, we map general engagement patterns, such as the most commented videos and most discussed topics from 2008 to 2018. On the micro, we use an open coding method to analyze the comment history of six highly engaged, long-term audiences (6 years) to understand the core community.

Contributing to the increasing research on the influence of YouTube’s comment section on processes of radicalization, our study explores how Molyneux’s audience used the comments section to co-construct a community that values "logic," "facts," and "truth" to justify their race realist beliefs. Our research thus adds an essential historical perspective to the development of the "deep stories" that radical communities use to build their worldview.

The various communities of the manosphere and, in particular, the incel subculture position themselves as responses to the perceived excesses of the feminist and sexual revolutions. The spread of digital men’s rights rhetoric has been heavily dependent on memes, symbolism and the use of visual motifs such as the Red Pill. This is especially true of the incel community, whose imageries perform multiple ideological, cultural and affective functions that are often highly context-dependent and require complex subcultural knowledge. However, despite the central role played by memes and other images in propagating the incel worldview, most scholarship on the community is language-based. Moreover, research into the visual cultures of extremist groups online is relatively new, and most of it is focused on the far-right or on factions of Salafi-jihadism. This paper reports on the findings of the first and largest systematic analysis to date of incel memes and avatars across seven major incel platforms. The study used a combination of codebook-guided quantitative analysis on a dataset of 3,500 memes and 1,000 avatars, as well as closer qualitative analysis of representative images from each platform. This methodological approach seeks to bridge the gap between large-scale machine classification, which is necessarily crude and lacking in contextual cultural knowledge, with purely qualitative methods, which tell us little about broader trends and patterns in the communities analysed. Our findings indicate that such large-scale, visual analysis yields significant new knowledge about the communicative, rhetorical and ideological characteristics and functioning of the incel subculture across different platforms.

While the advent of the Internet can be seen as a “revolution” in how social movements communicate and organize, digital methods and materials do not necessarily constitute a “revolution” in how we study movements or their histories. My paper enters this discussion by suggesting a "small data" approach for studying the early digital presence of the men’s rights movement, and its transition from print to digital media. I compare two unique data sets involving print and digital archives to map out the geographical locations of men's rights groups and adherents in the early 1990s. I demonstrate how: 1) there is significant overlap between the print organizations and early digital spaces for men's rights activists; and 2) men’s rights communities in North America were often concentrated in areas like Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, and the North Eastern Seaboard. Ultimately, I argue that print materials, “small data,” and non-computational methods are still valuable tools to study social movements and their early digital histories.

Recent research on the new formation in US politics of the red-pilled right has noted the movement's strategic creation of alternative digital ecosystems (referred to as Alt-Tech) through building parallel internet infrastructures. Current explanations of this structure’s rise, while useful, are overly narrow in their focus on platforms and their structural frames. In order to address these limitations and better understand the foundations of the Alt-Tech landscape, this work conducts a critical discourse analysis on a red-pilled institution that’s risen to prominence in recent years: the domain registrar Epik. Specifically, this paper analyzes a corpus of 178 blog posts created by Epik since the company’s founding in 2009 through January 2021. From this, three discursive patterns are identified: digital liberty, domain name as asset, and digital sovereignty. This study argues that these discourses emerge out of and are united through the symbolic relationships established by one section of the red-pilled coalition in particular: right-wing libertarianism. Additionally, both the threats to the red-pilled right and the solution of a parallel internet infrastructure are shown to be constructed through the use of these overlapping discursive frames. This conclusion indicates the importance of the conservative libertarian ideology to the development and success of the Alt-Tech ecosystem. It also suggests a synergy between this movement strategy and the commercial internet in particular, as the libertarian frames identified in Epik’s blog are commonly found in the utopian discourse that was infused in early visions of the technology.

Whilst the internet’s development can be traced back to the 1940s (Turner, 2006; Flichy 2015), the rhetoric of a digital revolution primarily emerged during the early 1990s and mid-00s and was often produced by the US-based academic community which has been intrinsically involved with the advancement of the internet. The dominant conceptualizations put forward in their popular, scholarly writings about the technology’s past and future, became authoritative in our academic understanding of the internet’s social impact and significance. Subsequently, notions like ‘the electronic highway’ were adopted in legislative and popular discourse which, in turn, influenced how the internet was understood, designed, and used on a broader, societal level.

Notable authors of these influential texts - Howard Rheingold, Nicholas Negroponte, Sherry Turkle, and Geert Lovink - wrote their findings based on their own experiences with internet initiatives and from their particular theoretical backgrounds and positionality. Most importantly, these texts present valuable information as if coming from a time capsule; often framed with a rhetoric of transformation, the writers themselves contribute to the idea of a revolutionary internet following optimistic notions of digital utopianism and technological solutionism, situated in a particular Zeitgeist. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of how these revolutionary notions developed over time and what their grander impact was on our contemporary conceptions, in and outside the influential American context. This is achieved by conducting a critical, historiographical analysis of canonical, intellectual literature about the early internet and thus re-contextualizes it as historical traces itself.

Digital labor has become an umbrella term for describing a range of digitally mediated practices from paid work in the gig economy (Srnicek 2017) to cultivating a personal brand online (Scolere, Pruchniewska, and Duffy 2018). This wellspring of activities now referred to as labor has muddied the waters, making digital labor an ambiguous concept at best (Gandini 2021; Goodwin 2022). This framing of user activity as labor also has limitations, as it necessarily produces reformist, rather than revolutionary, political ends.

Following Sadowski (2020), this paper challenges the conceptual framework of digital labor by re-theorizing the user/platform relation as rentier capitalism. Engels (1970) explained how tenants confront landlords not as sellers of labor-power but buyers of a commodity, and we argue that typical social media users confront platforms in an analogous way. Platforms thus only circulate existing value rather than create it, and this distinction matters in understanding their role in economic crises.

Because the digital labor concept misidentifies the user/platform relationship and concedes the commoditization of communication, reformist demands emerge from this discourse, like “Wages for Facebook” (Ptak 2014 as cited in Jung 2014) or data ownership as compensation (Chakravorti 2020). Capitalist data relations (Couldry and Mejias 2020) and the profit motive of corporate platforms cannot be addressed by renumerating users. As platforms attain infrastructural status (Plantin et al. 2018), our politics must reflect the need for their transformation into public utilities with democratic accountability, a revolutionary demand that has been displaced in the turn towards digital labor.

Despite pushback from regulatory and non-governmental entities, Meta’s control over the public narrative remains consistent. Using a method of corpus analysis, this paper investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (n=428) responding to Zuckerberg’s 2021 Metaverse announcement. Analysis of how these artifacts respond to issues related to identity, privacy, security, and connectivity revealed that the majority amplify Meta’s corporate messaging, empowering its elite discourse and solidifying its social power. While certain artifacts attempt to confront the prevailing narrative related to privacy, such discourse is often ineffectively rooted in cyber-libertarian ideology. In order to more effectively challenge Meta’s social power, future critical discourse should be 1) more holistically deployed and 2) cognizant of the logics of surveillance capitalism and user exploitation. Ultimately, this paper considers the rhetorical strategies and functions deployed in the circulation of elite discourse, while also acknowledging the dynamism of sociotechnical imaginaries.

Starting from January 2023, a new trend gained momentum on TikTok: It is called #deinfluencing, and it collects a series of videos which criticise the consumerist logic of the influencer industry and its tendency to overconsumption, as well as the platforms’ architectures that further fuel these processes. This contribution aims at investigating the #deinfluencing trend on TikTok to analyse to what extent it represents a form of resistance to issues of overconsumption and consumerism. I argue that the deinfluencing phenomenon is an example of how forms of resistance are becoming “trending”, that is, not only currently popular or widely discussed online, but also increasingly intertwined with the affordances and algorithmic nature of TikTok. The empirical research is based on a digital method approach and qualitative data analysis techniques. After collecting data from hashtags such as “#deinfluencing” and “#antihaul”, a content analysis aimed at highlighting the emerging themes in the trend has been performed. The results show that the deinfluencing trend is composed of three main categories of content: resistance; consumerist reappropriation; and trend-surfing. Ultimately, the analysis of the deinfluencing trend shows the different ways in which resistance becomes “trending”, meaning intertwined and progressively mitigated by the logic and architecture of TikTok. It is exactly in the trending nature of these forms of resistance that lies the highly controversial and potentially problematic nature of deinfluencing: a form of resistance to and through the platform’s logic, as well as to and through consumption.

Since February 2022, TikTok has been flooded with images depicting the travesties of the war in Ukraine, such as bombed apartment complexes, food shortages, and casualties. War-related content has been gaining widespread reach on TikTok, garnering worldwide attention and propelling content creators to unprecedented heights of celebrity. As a result, a new type of content creator emerged – war influencers. This study connects the practices of war influencers and historical and contextual developments of war photography (Patrick, 2015), citizen journalism (Allan and Thorsen, 2009), and influencer culture (Gómez, 2019). We analyzed 800 videos created by eight Ukrainian users over the span of one year, starting from the full invasion of Ukraine using mixed methods. This study finds the emergence of two forms of war influencers: the first is celebrities as war influencers who pivoted their digital labour into advocacy in times of war. The second is war influencers as ordinary users who grow into fame out of anonymity in times of war. Those users are politically motivated to attract public notice to their sites of trauma, injustice, or struggle by leveraging the powerful mechanism of exposure and dissemination of platforms. While celebrity-war influencers are privileged with crowd attention that migrates from their offline legacy, user-war influencers depend solely on algorithmic amplification to make their testimony visible. Focusing on the second, we identify several platform vernaculars utilized by war influencers to share content and gain popularity: memetic forms of content creation and feature-based interactivity (i.e., Q&As and live sessions).

In speaking of subcultures that exist on TikTok, the term “side” has emerged to describe different communities on the app. One side in particular, BookTok, is the center for all things reading and book fandom. BookTok has had immense implications for the publishing industry, from a recent Barnes & Noble Booksellers BookTok creator convention, to tables found in all major retailers and indie shops advertising books that are “popular on BookTok.” This work draws on Actor-Network Theory, which emphasizes the importance of non-human technological entities (such as platform infrastructure, algorithms, and governing policies) in cultural interactions and human activity. Studying BookTok from an Actor-Network Theory perspective also means considering how human culture and non-human technological agents on TikTok may have implications for the publishing industry and the types of content produced on the app. To examine how BookTok functions as a node within Actor-Network Theory, and how its tastes are created, circulated, and negotiated, we analyzed the top 150 videos hashtagged #BookTok in September 2022. Four themes emerged: the dominance of the recommendation video; a hierarchy of users; varied genres of books; and the interpolation of a young, white, woman user.

The present paper showcases a research tool that makes data for a global, cross-national analysis of TikTok available to and navigable by the research community. Next to justifying the necessity for this approach and providing an overview of to the tool, the paper illustrates its potential by presenting the analysis of a dataset comprised of daily snapshots of TikTok’s homepage collected over 4 months from 197 countries and territories in the world. Our results shed light on which content is prioritized by TikTok on a global scale, and introduces the notion of ‘platform-mediated proximity’ - i.e., the clustering of countries according to patterns of co-recommendations promoted by the platform. Preliminary results obtained on a subset of the data suggest that TikTok’s cross-national content prioritization patterns generate forms of platform-mediated proximities that, in most cases, follow geographical lines of clustering at the regional level, with notable and interesting exceptions.

Much scholarship and public discourse alike focus on TikTok’s widespread uptake by young people, including LGBTQ+ youth. However, LGBTQ+ people on the platform often experience challenges relating to visibility and censorship. As users of a variety of ages have joined TikTok’s youthful population, this paper explores the sociotechnical practices of older LGBTQ+ TikTok users as they emerge from, and are shaped by, the platform and its user cultures. It does so through an analysis of older LGBTQ+ TikTokers’ videos and metadata, gathered through novel methods for configuring research accounts to serve up this content to the For You page. Once the accounts were trained to deliver this content through TikTok’s personalized algorithmic curation, videos were collected for one hour per day over a duration of approximately 4 weeks for each account. Preliminary visual and textual analysis of videos indicates recurrent themes related to constructing identities that intersect age with sexual identity, giving advice, sharing about personal experiences and queer history, and circulating counter-discourses against homophobia and transphobia as well as messages of solidarity with targets of discrimination. Analysis of how these users negotiate TikTok’s affordances also indicates that platform’s features, policies, and dominant user practices permeate and shape older LGBTQ+ TikTokers’ self-representations, such that the platform and modes of paying attention to it have become a central element of their content.

This paper asks two questions: what do we mean when using the adjective “algorithmic” to describe the quality or nature of control or management at work? And what do we miss about the daily operations of platform power when focusing on algorithms as the culprit behind exacerbated subordination and precarity in the workplace? By answering these questions, the paper contributes to debates on the impact of algorithms in platform-mediated workplaces and, by extension, on the location and nature of platform power.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the app-based food delivery markets of Berlin, Amsterdam and New York, as well as a comparative analysis of the institutional and regulatory settings in which these markets are embedded, I will advance two empirically substantiated arguments. First, I will argue that we need to better situate our analyses of algorithms at work by attending to what I call the “para-algorithmic”, or that which simultaneous exceeds and frames algorithmic operations. Second, I will contend that, in the context of the gig economy, the most significant resources of power actually reside beyond the platform itself. This invites a critical reassessment of the notion of platform power, one that decenters the algorithm and indeed the digital platform itself.

How has the platformization of neighborhood restaurants and electrification of bicycles reconstituted food delivery work? What work problems have emerged and how have they been addressed by delivery riders within their local and digital storytelling networks? To address these questions, we use digital ethnography of public social media accounts of the two, largest delivery worker communities in New York City combined with in-person observations of these communities and neighborhood fieldwork with food delivery workers, restaurant owners, ebike mechanics, and other stakeholders in the NYC delivery world. We find that the operational costs that platform companies pass onto individual workers are shouldered collectively by delivery workers and their networks. We also find that in the absence of an urban infrastructure that can sustain this industry, crime victimization and occupational injuries have proliferated among this already vulnerable migrant worker population. To meet these conditions of 'liminal precarity' (van Doorn, 2023), delivery workers have developed new forms of DIY urbanism (Douglas, 2018) and vigilance, and a kind of civil society has emerged around migrant delivery work. This study holds theoretical applications for urban communication scholars interested in how local communication ecologies impact politics/civil society, infrastructure, and other aspects of “communicative cities” (Gumpert & Drucker, 2008), as well as practical implications for understanding post-pandemic organizing and mutual aid practices.

The existing literature on algorithmic management mainly focuses on its external consequences for workers. Drawing upon the case of Meituan Waimai, China’s dominant food-delivery platform, this article examines the internal mechanisms that constitute the design of algorithmic management. Grounding my analysis in actual systems and narratives from the production side, I argue that human choices move the development of labor control despite the seeming automaticity of algorithmic management. Three tenets consistently guide the design of algorithmic management at Meituan: the optimal mindset, labor as mechanical resources, and labor as repair. Characterized by a mix of central planning and improvisation, algorithmic management is designed to standardize the labor process without sacrificing the space for flexible production. By highlighting human choices behind the technical surface, the article provides theoretical and methodological lessons for scholars researching algorithmic management and algorithmic power in general.

How can the conditions of computational labor be improved? Studies of digital labor platforms demonstrate how regulations and platform design shape workers’ outcomes. However, prior research tends to overlook how organizational design can influence workers’ experiences. This article draws on 19 months of participant-observation research inside a tech startup that employed 200 computational workers as long-term “team members” integrated into the company’s organizational structure. I first examine how this arrangement ameliorated some of the problems commonly associated with computational labor while leaving others unaddressed. I then turn to the team’s organizational culture of familial love, which strengthened ties between workers and the firm while simultaneously obscuring how the company’s labor practices perpetuated vast inequalities. Although this study suggests how computational labor can be structured in ways that advance organizational goals while simultaneously supporting the dignity of workers, it also reveals the durability of the disparities that characterize tech companies.

The existing literature on the data annotation labor behind artificial intelligence (AI) tends to presume the digital platforms to be the organizational form of the data labor for AI, albeit a geographically dispersed one. In this paper, I revisit this presumption and intend to destabilize the platform-centric understanding of the organization of data work. Taking data annotation labor in China as a point of departure, the paper tackles these questions: 1) What are the organizational forms involved in the labor process of data annotation? 2) What contributes and shapes these organizing practices? The study expands on the organization studies approach and is based on an analysis of the industry reports, ethnographic observations, and interviews. Examining a multiplicity of organizational forms and practices that enable the circulation of data labor, I will make two points. First, the assortment and graft of organizational forms and practices decenter the annotation platforms as the dominant organizing force in the labor process of data annotation. Second, friction and incongruence between different organizational contexts intensify the demand of worker’s communicative labor to ensure the accuracy and quality of the annotation work. Consequently, a series of communication technology, management strategy, and social relations is mobilized to meet the respective communicative and transactional needs, which shapes the organizational practices. There is hardly a platform logic that controls the labor process. This understanding rescues the analytic fixation on the digital platforms and their socio-technical configuration and propels the researchers to examine the organizing logics beyond the platform.