Facial recognition (FR) has been promoted worldwide as a modern security solution. In Brazil, its expansion has taken place experimentally, through unregulated pilot projects and opaque public-private partnerships. With its widespread, fast implementation, errors and failures became evident: wrongful arrests, technical flaws, systemic biases. These failures are advocated as integral to the bettering of the technology and thus tolerated. Our work explores the critical spaces that these failures produce. Inspired by biometrics artworks, we show that grappling with the failures of FR allows for a mode of experimentation that privileges both critique and alternative modes of interrogating and imagining the world.

This study explores the theoretical potential of combining feminist scholarship on glitch with digital visibility research. It looks at two cases of distinctive communicative practices on the Chinese platform Xiaohongshu: a collective identity performance of “momo” and the hashtagging of #babyfood. First, I outline theories of visibility in current media and communication research, with a specific focus on the widely applied metaphor of “playing the visibility game.” Next, I introduce current theories of glitch into the dialogue between digital visibility and its game analogies, mapping further potential connections among these three fields.

Drawing on interviews with 11 Xiaohongshu users and an analysis of these two female-dominated digital communities, I conceptualize these practices as platform glitching and introduce its three enactments: glitch as riddles, glitch as collectivism, and glitch as playfulness. It firstly emphasizes that invisibility could not be perceived as something neutral, fixed, and predefined, but as something elastic influenced by the gendered experiences of women negotiating with their social media presence. Glitching, in both communities, is not a passive means to shield, but an effective tactical negotiation that can disrupt, reimagine, and reconfigure the platform’s visibility structure and normative codes of conduct. By using glitch as an epistemological tool, this study recognizes the glitch as the unavoidable nature of all human-computer interactions. Besides, glitch is helpful in articulating users’ alternative appropriations of technology, especially trivial practices, while sheering away from the dichotomy of resistance and surveillance.

Sex is not a seamless experience. It involves moments of rupture, disconnection and failure. Even more so when it is digitally mediated. Sexting, phone sex, or long-distance intimacy via cameras and tele-dildonics all intertwine pleasure with the quirks of technology—unpredictable internet connections, lag, latency, glitches. Yet in mainstream depictions, sex is stripped of these interruptions and is portrayed as an effortless choreography: bodies meeting flawlessly, fluids exchanged with precision at the right moment, the penis always erect… Today, in social VR platforms such as VRChat, thousands of users put on their VR headsets and body trackers to engage in what is called “erotic role play” through 3D avatars. They don different avatars ranging in aesthetics from the anime and animals to objects like toothbrushes. Drawing on the author’s digital ethnography in VRChat, this paper will examine how users negotiate desire, intimacy and sex during these immersive encounters. Central to this examination will be the moments of rupture, disconnection and glitches that users often experience in their avatarial embodiments. For example, when tracking fails, the user might end up having their avatarial body parts dislocated or see their partner slower than usual in case of latency. Building on queer theory and glitch feminism (Russell, 2020; Sundén, 2015), this paper will argue that these ruptures might subvert cis-heteronormative and ableist frameworks around sex and intimacy. By embracing imperfection and subverting normative assumptions around pleasure, these disruptions can open possibilities for reimagining intimacy in playful, experimental, and non-normative ways.

Fake news detection has become an acutely important goal in both academic studies and editorial practice, creating a research area that comprises journalistic debunking of fakes, interdisciplinary fact-checking projects, and automated efforts of fake news detection. However, with the growth of these industries, an epistemological gap between ‘traditional’ and computational detection of fakes has been deepening.

Employing scoping reviewing of 45 papers that conceptualize journalistic and automated fake news detection, we describe the rupture between the two divergent logics of fake definition and detection. In particular, international regulation, industrial fake detection, and most media studies all insist on the legitimacy of the ‘blurred border’ between fact and interpretation and warn against too strict elimination of fakes, valuing freedom of expression. Computational methods, in their turn, are ‘yes/no’-oriented, often ignoring the variety of interpretive forms in public communication. Rooted deeper than just in individual research designs, the divergence of logics arises when the pressing public need of clear-cut fake detection runs into freedom of interpretation that results from centuries of struggle for standards in public speech and journalism.

Thus, we outline the major shortcomings of the lack of clear textual markers for fake news in ‘traditional’ media studies, on one hand, and of the ‘yes/no’ logic in computational fake detection, on the other. We suggest an epistemological framework for detection of fakes that would incorporate the true/false and fact/interpretation differentiation. Finally, we discuss the democratic implications of properly addressing the ‘blurred border’ between falsehood and interpretation by computational communication science.