The study of polarization, conflict, and ideological divergence has long challenged scholars across media, communication, and political science. Understanding these phenomena requires engaging with fundamental questions about how opinions are formed, reinforced, and contested in public discourse, and how language and discourses can have so many different meanings and interpretations. Traditional content analysis methods often try to capture this complexity - whether in large-scale media narratives, open-ended survey responses, or political discourse on social media. Computational approaches offer new possibilities, but also raise critical concerns about validity, interpretability, and methodological rigor (Baden et al., 2022; Boumans & Trilling, 2016).

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly central to communication research, with their capacity to process vast amounts of text, identify underlying patterns, and assist in qualitative coding (Chew et al., 2023; Alizadeh et al., 2025). Researchers have explored their use in a variety of tasks, from detecting polarization in open-ended survey responses to analyzing media frames and political discourse (DiGiuseppe & Flynn, 2025; Marino & Giglietto, 2024). However, the integration of LLMs into content analysis presents challenges: How well do they align with human interpretations? Can they enhance research beyond automation? And what role should they play in investigating contested or ambiguous meanings (Pilny et al., 2024; Gunes & Florczak, 2025)?

This panel moves beyond discussions of mere optimization and accuracy, instead critically and deeply discussing the use of LLMs to engage with conflict, disagreement, and interpretive diversity. Instead of seeing them as tools to impose consensus, we ask how researchers can use and interact with them to reveal tensions, challenge assumptions, and contribute to new methodologies (Dai et al., 2023; De Paoli, 2024). Across four studies, we assess LLMs mediating, amplifying, or reframing scholarly debates on the methods to analyse contentious political and social issues. Our discussion examines both the benefits and risks of these approaches, raising questions about the role of AI in media and communication methodologies.

Paper 1 present a computational approach to measure issue polarization from open-ended survey responses, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to systematically code viewpoints on contentious topics such as climate change, trans rights, or political discourse on Ukraine. While traditional polarization research often relies on close-ended survey measures, this study explores how LLMs can introduce methodological complexity by computing nuanced, interpretive tensions in unstructured responses. The research highlights how LLMs not only enable large-scale automated coding but also challenge conventional measurement frameworks by accommodating ambiguity and ideological fluidity. Preliminary results underscore the potential of LLMs to expand analytical possibilities beyond traditional survey measures, reframing how scholars engage with disagreement and conflict in media and communications studies.

Paper 2 examines how LLMs can expand the scope of content analysis and assisting researchers in analyzing framing. The study applies Meta’s Llama-3 model in a two-stage approach to study climate movements in Australian news coverage, using few-shot prompting to first extract frame elements - such as problem definitions, causes, and blame attributions - and then synthesizing these elements into coherent frames. While the human coders tended to construct more issue-specific and varied frames, LLM-generated outputs were generally broader in scope but more internally consistent across the dataset.

Paper 3 presents a literature review examining how LLMs are transforming content analysis workflows in social sciences. It identifies four key modes of LLM integration: scalable coders, human-assistive collaborators, autonomous decision-makers, and tools for semantic clustering. The study highlights the ongoing challenges of ensuring interpretability, reliability, and epistemic authority when LLMs are applied to human-generated texts.

Paper 4 applies LLMs to investigate the role of political narratives and user engagement on social media during Brazil’s 2022 presidential election and the January 8, 2023, coup attempt. The study analyzes over 12 million social media posts, clustering content based on sentiment, audience reactions, and dissemination patterns to assess how different narratives are amplified. The research examines whether the framing of political content influences audience interaction and engagement levels.

Together, these studies push the boundaries of how LLMs are integrated into research on political communication, polarization, and media analysis. They provide an assessment of LLMs’ methodological potential and risks - not just as tools for efficiency, but as channels to rethink how we engage with contested meanings in communication research.

Although Twitter has been subject to modifications since its conception, the acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022 represented perhaps its most dramatic vibe shift. The rebranding to X and the extremist political orientation increasingly encouraged by Musk have recently led to a mass exodus of users to alternative platforms – a pattern of migration many referred to as #Xodus. We explore this transition in which ordinary users have decided that it was time to move away from Twitter/X and, simultaneously, attempt to make sense of the logics, affordances, and atmospheres of competing apps – particularly, Bluesky. To examine how users perceive and articulate the atmospheres of Bluesky (and how those, in turn, are compared to X’s), we conducted a mixed-method study combining NLP Semantic Analysis and qualitative Thematic Analysis of messages mentioning ‘Twitter’ posted on Bluesky in October-November 2024. Our preliminary findings indicate that some of the main themes are: mourning the Twitter that once was; celebrating the escape from a toxic environment; and actively cultivating Bluesky as a ‘good place’. While Bluesky’s technical affordances are described in many posts as ‘almost identical’ to X’s, users seem to associate its ‘vibe’ with an older, better, pre-Musk social medium. Also, many of the analyzed posts included tips and suggestions on how to protect the new space from toxicity, such as how to block and avoid feeding trolls – demonstrating the acquired literacy of atmosphere staging and the resistance tactics of platform migration.

This paper examines the counter-narratives to breastfeeding norms on Italian social media, focusing on the project Mamme a Nudo as a key example. With the rise of digital media, motherhood has increasingly been shaped by online communities, offering both support and new pressures. Social media platforms, while providing spaces for mothers to voice diverse experiences, also foster environments that reinforce unrealistic standards of parenting, contributing to a culture of parental comparison and blame. One such divisive issue is breastfeeding, where the medical discourse promotes "breast is best," creating a maternal norm that intensifies feelings of guilt for those who do not breastfeed. This study analyzes how Mamme a Nudo, led by Sasha Damiani, a healthcare professional, critiques this norm, presenting alternative perspectives on infant feeding while simultaneously reinforcing certain forms of maternal normativity. Drawing on concepts from intensive motherhood and risk society, the paper explores how the project challenges the "breast is best" paradigm by citing alternative scientific studies and placing maternal well-being at the forefront. However, this critique paradoxically reaffirms medical authority and intensifies mothers' sense of responsibility, further embedding the culture of hyper-responsibilization. Through digital ethnography, the study explores the role of affective practices in online motherhood communities and how they shape emotional experiences, revealing the complex interplay between resistance and reinforcement of dominant maternal norms.

In this paper we analyze discourse in women’s online spaces about the “science” of feminine attractiveness and beauty. On “women’s only” subreddits such as r/Vindicta and r/Splendida, users invoke supposedly timeless concepts like facial symmetry to construct an idea of beauty that is definitively “objective.” and enroll scientific and technological tools to evaluate, diagnose, classify, and enhance attractiveness. Among both men and women, the interrelated movements around biohacking and “looksmaxxing”--from skincare to fillers and surgeries– promise that bodily discipline will yield biological, economic, and social rewards.

We examine how these attempts to create a definition of “objective beauty” intersect with what Jilly Boyce Kay has dubbed “reactionary feminism,” an emergent (and conservative) mutation of postfeminism. We identify a phrenological turn in online discourse, in which different subgroups mobilize typologies, scientific research, and archetype-based beauty and style systems to resolve the contradictions between the strict beauty standards of the 2000s and the body positivity movement of the 2010s. This new dialectical conceptualization emphasizes an individual’s choice–and obligation– to analyze one’s body objectively and optimize their attractiveness within embodied constraints. Redditors portray “objective beauty” in both essentialist and achievable terms; it is tied to eugenic ideals of face shape, bone structure, and body type and yet achievable by anyone, through economic and technological interventions. We investigate this contradiction and the broader economic, political, and technological logics that underscore this phrenological turn in online women’s subcultures.

While Reddit is often associated with toxic techno-cultures, platformized violence is not confined to explicitly harmful spaces—it also emerges in communities dedicated to fostering ‘good vibes.’ In this context, this paper examines how platformized violence operates in four of Reddit’s most popular positive-vibe communities. Using digital ethnography, I analyze how harmful speech manifests in these spaces and how community dynamics shape its function and visibility. Findings reveal two key mechanisms: targets and visibility. These two mechanisms show that, while platformized violence is used to reinforce oppression through insults and exclusion, it is also deployed as a strategy of ‘punching up’—attacking those in positions of power to defend marginalized groups. Additionally, platform affordances such as moderation and downvoting influence the visibility of platformized violence, sometimes mitigating harm and other times weaponizing obscurity. These findings challenge simplistic understandings of platformized violence, demonstrating its dual role in both sustaining and disrupting online toxicity. This study highlights the need for nuanced governance strategies that balance community well-being with the complexities of online harm.

Social media has reshaped digital portrayals of motherhood, often reinforcing idealised and aspirational maternal archetypes. While early platforms promoted curated self-representations, TikTok’s memefication culture disrupts these conventions through participatory humour and satire. This study examines how #TypesOfMoms deconstructs parenting idealisation by employing meme formats that enable users to reframe motherhood beyond perfectionist narratives. Through qualitative content analysis, the research identifies key strategies shaping maternal portrayals, including recurring meme templates, structured content formats, and emerging discursive narratives. Challenges, POVs, skits, remixes, and lip-syncs allow creators to perform maternal identities dynamically, transforming traditional stereotypes into fluid, interactive, and often self-deprecating representations. Memefied content highlights the contrast between idealised and realistic motherhood, reframing it as a collective, imperfect, and socially negotiated experience. By embedding maternal narratives within platform-native aesthetics, TikTok fosters a shift from self-branding towards communal meaning-making, using irony and satire to challenge rigid maternal expectations.

Digital disconnection studies conceptualize disconnection as a deliberate strategy to balance the benefits and drawbacks of digital engagement to improve well-being. However, this field has been criticized for focusing on privileged subjects while overlooking how structural inequalities shape minoritized youths’ (dis)connection practices. Our 15-month ethnographic study addresses this gap by examining how ethno-racial minoritized young women navigate digital disconnection within intersecting gendered and racialized constraints. Overall, our findings challenge binary understandings of digital disconnection as either voluntary or enforced. First, participants strategically engage in disconnection to sustain digital connection, such as deleting social media apps before returning home to avoid parental surveillance. Second, disconnection emerges as a response to racialized and gendered online harassment, forcing participants to withdraw from digital spaces despite their desire to remain connected. Finally, smartphones simultaneously enable and constrain autonomy, as parental surveillance reinforces expectations of constant availability while affording greater mobility. By foregrounding digital disconnection as a negotiated and context-dependent practice, this study highlights the need for intersectional, context-aware approaches to digital media use and challenges dominant narratives of disconnection as an individualized response to digital overuse.

This study examines the emotional complexities of digital dating for single parents, focusing on interviews with 22 Norwegian single parents’ about their experiences with dating apps. Balancing the desire for companionship with family obligations, many participants sought long-term relationships. However, dating apps, while offering convenience and broader options, often emphasize instant attraction over deeper compatibility. Coupled with past experiences of ruptured relationships, this led many to question whether the “happily-ever-after” was attainable, creating a conflict between fast-paced, image-driven interactions and their more deliberate, future-oriented relationship goals.

While some embraced the apps enthusiastically, others were more skeptical due to past ruptures and parental concerns. Men often described their first encounters as “a kid in a candy store,” while women felt overwhelmed. Over time, both genders refined their approach to dating, learning to filter potential partners and set clearer boundaries.

Participants highlighted the importance of shared life circumstances, often preferring partners who were also single parents. They felt that others would struggle to understand the ongoing emotional and practical implications of their ruptured families, including co-parenting dynamics. Additionally, factors such as proximity and shared parental experiences played a key role in shaping their dating preferences. Despite dating apps’ flaws, participants recognized their role in reshaping romantic possibilities, providing a space for new connections after family ruptures.

This paper proposes an update to the framework of ‘realignment’ for understanding changes taking place on digital platforms. Expanding on previous work on envelopment (Partin, 2020), and realignment (Garvey & Flonk, 2024), this updated framework differentiates between three distinct external actors - users, sponsors, and governments - who all exert pressure on platforms to make changes to their features. To illustrate the framework, we examine three case studies related to the platform Twitch: user-based pressure to expand ‘tags’ for creators, sponsor-based pressure to limit political content from live streamers, and government pressure to prevent the broadcast of terrorist acts on the platform. In all three cases, Twitch made significant changes to their platform architecture in direct response to outside pressure.

By examining three sources of pressure, we bring together literature on collective action (Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998; Niebler, 2020), platforms’ business strategies (Klonick, 2017; Griffin, 2023), and government regulation of the internet (Naughten, 2018; Ahn, et al., 2023) into a streamlined approach to understanding platform changes as motivated by powerful external actors. In addition to offering a clear framework, this model also illustrates how platforms - in limiting or censoring speech - can and do act as publishers when pressured by other actors.

This study examines the limitations of traditional search intent frameworks in the evolving landscape of digital information retrieval. We argue that Broder's (2002) widely used taxonomy of informational, navigational, and transactional intent fails to capture contemporary search behaviors due to two major shifts: first, traditional search engines have evolved from simple hyperlink providers into platforms offering rich snippets and direct answers; second, large language model (LLM) chatbots have emerged as alternative information retrieval tools. Through an online survey we conducted (N=82) where participants reflected on their actual search histories across both platforms (246 sessions each), we identified three key shortcomings of Broder’s (2002) taxonomy: emergent patterns outside existing categories, dissolution of boundaries between intent types, and statistically uneven distribution of categories across platforms.

Based on our analysis of participants' reflections on their search histories and the identified shortcomings of traditional search intent taxonomies, we propose a novel user-centered framework. This framework shifts the focus from what users search for to why they search and how they use information. Our model has the following dimensions: immediate search goals (knowledge-oriented, solution-oriented, or resource-oriented), contextual triggers, outcome realizations, and overarching purposes connected to fundamental human values. This approach, grounded in Xie's (2002) model of interactive information retrieval and Schwartz's Theory of Basic Values (2012), provides a more comprehensive understanding of search behavior by considering the entire search journey rather than isolated queries, offering valuable insights for designing more responsive information retrieval systems.

This study investigates whether a shared cultural experience—what we term the "TikTok Baseline"—exists among Australian TikTok users. While existing research suggests social media platforms’ recommendation systems contribute to homogenizing users' cultural experiences, TikTok's highly personalized, responsive algorithmic system remains understudied.

To map the "TikTok Baseline", we employed a methodological approach that minimized personal data exposure and interaction with content. Data collection occurred four times daily over a three-month period (May-July 2024) from multiple Australian locations, resulting in metadata from 5,100 unique videos from TikTok’s generic For You Page (FYP). We developed and validated an AI-driven video analysis tool using Google Gemini's 2.0 Flash multimodal model to enhance traditional metadata analysis.

This paper reports on the preliminary phase of a comprehensive study of Australian experiences of algorithmic culture on TikTok. At the heart of the project is a comprehensive data donation-based study of how Australian content creators and users experience TikTok’s recommender system. This study makes three key contributions. First, we establish whether the concept of a reasonably stable TikTok Baseline manifests in real-world data, secondly, we examine the fundamental characteristics of such a baseline, and thirdly we suggest a rigorous computational methodology for examining TikTok baseline in the hope that our approach can be replicated in other territories and contexts. By addressing challenges in algorithmic observability and AI-driven content analysis, our findings offer critical implications for platform governance and regulatory efforts. This research advances our understanding of algorithmic culture, demonstrating how TikTok's recommender system both personalizes and standardizes user experiences.

This study aims at understanding the feelings, perceptions and beliefs of climate activists aged between 17 and 25, and how these relate to their social media use. We investigate the platforms young climate activists use to receive climate change-related information, the types of information they encounter, and the emotions such information evokes in them through 20 in-depth interviews. Our findings reveal that Instagram is their most important source of climate change-related content, and that the negative valence of the content on the app occasionally leads them to delete the app when the content becomes overwhelming. Moreover, the interviewees explained that the feelings they felt from online content depended on its type and on whom it was posted by, suggesting that the valence of the content encountered in the media influences may affect whether one will feel eco-anxiety or not. Given this link, the participants mentioned that it is important for them to be emotionally ready to see climate change-related content. This understanding led many of them to curate the content they see online – for example, by choosing not to follow or engage with certain accounts and types of content on social media – therefore highlighting their agency, and the acts that online climate-change related content can elicit. Altogether, these findings show an important connection between online climate-change related content and eco-anxiety, while highlighting the role of participants’ agency – which opens up potential new avenues for research at the intersection of online information exposure and eco-anxiety.

Search engines are one of the most common ways for users to discover news and political information. As a result, the content and sources prioritized by these platforms are of paramount importance. Previous research has shown that search engines can provide biased outputs by, for example, discriminating against certain social groups or favoring certain viewpoints. However, there has been a gap in understanding how users search for information using these systems and, in particular, how they formulate their search queries. Yet the choice of query is crucial, as it largely determines the information users are exposed to, and thus may lead to particular biases.

To address this gap, we conducted a representative survey of Swiss citizens (N = 1,100) in which we investigate how voters search for information about an environmental popular initiative that was voted on in Switzerland in February 2025. In particular, we test the assumption that selective exposure (or the tendency to prefer information that confirms one's own beliefs) is more pronounced when users are presented with a limited number of options (e.g., search engine autocomplete suggestions) than when they formulate them independently. We also examine how pre-existing knowledge about the topic, beliefs about climate change, political attitudes, and cognitive factors affect query formulation.

This study contributes to existing research by demonstrating how individual characteristics of users can influence information seeking behavior and how selective exposure can manifest itself under different search conditions.

This experimental session brings the energy and creativity of the Australian Internet Observatory’s recent Data Donation Activation at the 2024/25 Woodford Folk Festival to the AoIR community. By recreating elements of this interactive public installation, we invite AoIR delegates to experience the utility of data donation as both a research methodology and as catalyst for critical public engagement with digital platforms. The session will engage participants in the process of donating digital data, reflecting on how this practice can be adapted and extended to foster conversations about algorithms, identities, and shared cultures. The session combines live demonstration, participant interaction, and reflective discussion.

Our facilitators will introduce data donation methods run during the Woodford Folk Festival, a major national music and culture event in Queensland, Australia. Drawing inspiration from a similar initiative in the Netherlands, we invited festival-goers to anonymously donate data such as Meta Ad Preferences, TikTok usage, and Netflix watch patterns. These anonymised donations fed into a secure research database while also powering creative outputs, such as digital tarot readings and the Wordfordia Forest, which visualised participants’ data as unique, whimsical creatures representing their platform identities.

Participants will experience the data donation process firsthand by contributing their own anonymised digital data (or simulated datasets if preferred). Facilitators will guide attendees through all steps of the data donation process, offering playful yet critical interpretations of their digital identities based on the donated data. The demonstration will culminate in the construction of a collaborative AoIR Forest that visualises participants’ platform data as unique creatures, representing shared values, habits, and cultures within the group.

The session will pause regularly to reflect on the methodologies and materials used, encouraging participants to consider how these approaches could be adapted or extended within their own research or public engagement work. The open-source nature of the work provides ample resources for participants to remix and implement in their own contexts. The discussion will focus on the potential of creative data engagement to foster critical reflection on platform algorithms, build connections between diverse communities through shared digital habits, and innovate new methods for participatory data collection and research dissemination.

Participants will leave the session with a deeper appreciation of data donation as a research and engagement tool, access to open-source materials for replication or adaptation, and a richer understanding of how creative methodologies can illuminate the complexities of digital platforms and their impact on everyday life.

We will supply all necessary materials (tarot cards, temporary tattoo printers, instruction cards), and only require a flat-floor collaborative space with tables suitable for groups of around 5-8 people, and a standard digital projector for displaying slides and the AoIR forest website. Participants can participate using a phone, tablet or laptop device.

This paper addresses how global climate movements use images in their social media communication from a comparative perspective: How have Fridays For Future and Extinction Rebellion in Italy, Germany, Sweden and Hungary evolved their use of visual communication on Instagram between 2018 and 2024? We argue that three lines of analysis are important for a comprehensive understanding of the relation between image content and protest movements: a) complementary movements, b) complementary countries and c) longitudinal observation.

We explore those lines of analysis by leveraging a mixed-method analysis of full production of images shared by FFF and XR on Instagram in the period 2018-2024.

This study examines the interplay between fragmentation and transnationalization in climate change discourse across legacy and social media in Brazil and Germany from 2014 to 2022. Fragmentation theorists argue that digital platforms, driven by algorithmic personalization and commercial imperatives, fragment public discourse into isolated issue agendas, limiting exposure to diverse viewpoints. In contrast, the transnationalization hypothesis posits that global issues, such as climate change, foster unified transnational discourse, amplified by global institutions like the IPCC and UNFCCC. To assess these contrasting hypotheses, this study employs a longitudinal, multiplatform analysis of climate change attention across four major newspapers (Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) and three social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X). Using Spearman correlation scores, the study compares climate change attention between social and legacy media within each country (fragmentation) and between Brazilian and German media ecosystems (transnationalization). Results reveal no clear long-term trends of increasing or decreasing fragmentation or transnationalization. Instead, attention patterns fluctuate erratically over the nine-year period, challenging the assumption that digitalization inherently drives growing fragmentation or that climate change consistently fosters sustained transnational discourse. Findings highlight the episodic nature of transnationalization, driven largely by event-based attention spikes, such as COP meetings, rather than sustained international discourse. This paper contributes to ongoing debates on the structural transformation of the public sphere, emphasizing the need for future research to explore actor dynamics and platform-specific influences on climate communication across national contexts.

Visual narratives play a crucial role in climate advocacy, yet they are also exploited by climate denialists to disseminate misleading information. While disinformation research has primarily focused on text-based content and network structures, the role of visual disinformation remains underexplored. Given its immediate and emotional impact, visual disinformation can be particularly effective in reinforcing climate denialism. This study investigates how images are used to promote climate denialism across three social media platforms—X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and 4chan.

Utilizing a dataset of 22,485 images with accompanying captions (2018–2022), we employ multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to classify and analyze climate denial visuals. We categorize denialism into five frames: rejecting climate change’s existence, questioning human influence, downplaying consequences, opposing mitigation efforts, and advancing conspiracy theories. Our analysis also identifies recurring visual elements and styles, such as infographics, memes, and scientific imagery.

This study provides the first systematic cross-platform analysis of climate denialism visuals, offering empirical insights that inform counter-strategies against climate disinformation. Methodologically, it also highlights the opportunities and limitations of MLLMs in analyzing multimodal climate discourse.

This research explores public attention towards sustainability in the European Union (EU) using Google Trends data. By leveraging Google’s Trends API, the study assesses the evolution and composition of public interest in sustainability across EU member states. Sustainability is a multi-dimensional concept and its definition has evolved over time to encompass several environmental, social and economic factors. Public attention to sustainability has generally increased in Europe over the past three decades, as indicated by numerous studies analyzing trends in public engagement and media coverage. However, given the difficulty of measuring public attention towards a topic directly, most large-scale analyses of public attention to sustainability rely on media coverage as a proxy. Thus, we suggest using Google Trends data to analyze public attention towards sustainability. Considering the variability of definitions associated with the term, instead of applying existing assumptions on what sustainability means in a certain point in time and in space, we reconstruct what topics, as defined by Google knowledge definitions, received the most public attention, based on users’ search practices. The analysis reveals a steady increase in public engagement with sustainability issues since 2018, with notable regional disparities between Western and Eastern Europe. The research identifies the most common topics associated with sustainability, such as energy, sustainable development, and environmental issues, while also highlighting the growing influence of economic and corporate dimensions in public discourse. We conclude with covering the main limitations with the proposed methodology, and outlining the analytical directions for future research.

This study investigates how Kwai’s cold start algorithm instrumentalizes Brazilian culture as “cultural bait” to engineer user engagement and retention. Through computational analysis of Kwai’s cache-aware reinforcement learning (CARL) framework, we simulate four anonymous users in a cold start environment, collecting 4,000 posts. Using Vision Transformers (ViT), PCA, UMAP, and HDBSCAN clustering, we classify content into homogeneous, heterogeneous, and niche topics, validated via Jensen-Shannon divergence and Chi-square tests. Findings reveal 96.8% of cold start recommendations are homogenized, dominated by stereotypical themes like football (10.32%), telenovelas (12.65%), and suggestive humor (6.88%), alongside controversial clusters: misinformation (9.49%), Latin motivational content (9.35%), rural humor (8.25%), and violence clickbait (5.91%). This reflects Kwai’s reliance on cached, infrastructurally optimized cultural modules—shaped by bandwidth constraints and low-end devices markets where it targets—to prioritize computational efficiency and market scalability over personalization. We argue Kwai’s algorithmic epistemology operationalizes cultural bait: caricatured tropes repurposed as scalable, market-ready content, reducing culture to latent variables for knowledge speculation and user acquisition in emerging markets. By foregrounding computational constraints and cultural commodification, we demonstrate how algorithmic systems like CARL transform cultural experience into infrastructurally optimized data. These findings underscore analyzing algorithms not as black boxes or abstract entities but as politico-algebraic objects open to inquiry, where code encodes power asymmetries and cultural transformation. This urges media studies to bridge gaps between cultural critique and algebraic logic underpinning algorithmic epistemologies, avoiding treating these epistemologies as universal or generalizable, even among platforms operating within the same niche.

This paper analyzes AI-generated depictions of librarians to determine their alignment with stereotypical portrayals. Previous research has highlighted gender biases in large language models (LLMs) and AI-generated images, often depicting professions like secretaries and nurses as women and medical professionals as white males. However, no studies have examined AI-generated images of librarians. This study fills that gap by exploring how these images uphold stereotypes, focusing on portrayals in American English and Brazilian Portuguese. Data was collected from DALL-E, Midjourney, and Adobe Firefly using gender-neutral prompts in both languages. Thematic analysis revealed recurring themes and patterns in the visual representations. Preliminary findings indicate that AI-generated images often depict librarians as white, slender, intellectual women, with stereotypical elements like glasses and cardigans. The study underscores the need for a critical approach to Generative AI, as training data reflects societal biases, perpetuating stereotypes. These portrayals can impact the public perception of librarians, potentially alienating users and reinforcing an outdated, predominantly white, female, and middle-class image of the profession.

Chinese female users on RedNote have re-appropriated the #Baby Supplementary Food (#BSF) hashtag to evade male visibility and foster female-exclusive discourse. Originally intended for baby food content, #BSF now functions as a strategic shield against the male gaze, as parenting-related posts are considered less likely to appear in male-dominated feeds. This practice reflects a broader trend in China’s digital feminism, where women manipulate algorithmic affordances to create safer online spaces.

This study investigates how #BSF facilitates a counterpublic sphere by examining 1,513 non-commercial posts. Using Python-based data mining and the official platform provided dataset, we filtered content to exclude genuine baby food posts and commercial promotions. We further use GSDMM topic modeling and critical discourse analysis (CDA) explored linguistic strategies used in #BSF-tagged posts.

Our findings reveal that #BSF serves not only as a shield but also as a site of feminist resistance. Users build solidarity through intimate discourse and redefine traditional motherhood by positioning themselves as "babies" or "pet mothers," rejecting patriarchal maternal expectations. Through satire and self-infantilization, they subvert dominant gender norms and construct an alternative female-centered space.

This study contributes to digital feminism by demonstrating how Chinese women leverage platform affordances to resist online male dominance. It also introduces a systematic methodological approach to studying hashtag-based activism on Chinese social media platforms.

In this article, we aim to identify and trace some of the most prevalent frames and

tropes surrounding GAI, examining how dominant media outlets–national news media

and professional trade publications–framed and discussed generative AI, particularly in

relation to education and media production, during the first year of GAI’s widespread

rollout, from November 2022-October 2023.

We employ framing analysis for its focus on how journalists’ understanding of emerging

technologies shapes news coverage, which ultimately informs public opinion (D’Angelo,

2017; Tewksbury & Scheufele, 2009). Our emergent frames were developed using

qualitative discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010), recognizing that initial media coverage

of an emerging social issue or technical regime serves as a proxy to understand

broader public understanding, within key professions, of issues and problems

surrounding the widespread adoption of new technologies.

Once we developed our emergent taxonomy of common frames, we employed a novel,

GAI-based technique for framing analysis. We used iterative prompt engineering on

open source LLM DeepSeek to investigate not only the discursive frameworks but also

the emotionally valent (positive vs. negative) subframes included in each news article,

taking care to validate its outputs through intercoder reliability testing.

While TikTok has garnered much attention for its rapid uptake by youth, it has also seen adoption by older age demographics. Given social media’s longstanding importance for convening LGBTQ+ publics and the rarity of intergenerational offline spaces, this paper examines the intersection of age and sexual identity on this short-video platform. It does so through qualitative analysis of 23 semi-structured interviews with elderqueer TikToker users. Findings indicate that participants experience age as an ambiguous identity marker due to TikTok's affordances for rendering its expression fluid and LGBTQ+ approaches to life course stages as less rigid than heteronormative milestones. Despite this ambiguity of age, participants found TikTok's algorithmic curation and passive viewing features inhibited the formation of interpersonal connections across generations. They attempted to overcome these constraints by contributing, and engaging with, personal narratives sharing about past resilience and present life as an elderqueer while drawing inspiration from younger LGBTQ+ people. These preliminary findings illustrate how TikTok’s affordances and individuals’ fluid expressions of age alongside personal narratives of sexual identity give rise to an intergenerational co-presence that recognizes struggles of the past while giving hope for the future.

Social Virtual Reality (Social VR) has become a crucial space for LGBTQIA+ individuals, fostering self-expression, representation, and community-building. Platforms like VRChat provide a digital refuge, enabling identity exploration and social connection through immersive interactions and customizable avatars. While existing research has primarily examined embodiment and community dynamics, little attention has been given to the digital media productions created by LGBTQIA+ users in Social VR.

This study employs a digital and media ethnographic approach to analyze queer media content in VRChat, including documentaries, performances, tutorials, music videos, and erotic role-playing. Through content analysis, documental analysis, and interviews with queer creators, this research explores how VRChat functions as a site for queer worldmaking, documenting LGBTQIA+ experiences and expanding visibility.

VRChat is a vital tool for "Embodied Visibility," where queer users utilize virtual embodiment to construct and express identities that may not be possible in offline spaces. Media productions within VRChat, categorized as "machinima" or "metaverse films", serve as archival records of queer life, resisting systemic erasure and affirming LGBTQIA+ existence.

As LGBTQIA+ rights encounter growing threats, these digital productions emerge as forms of cultural preservation and resistance. By capturing and amplifying queer narratives in Social VR, creators challenge and disrupt dominant discourses through queer worldmaking, offering representation and visibility while shaping digital spaces.

High-profile cases of gay influencer nude leaks have prompted widespread discussions of the risks and harms of how gay and bisexual men who exchange intimate content online negotiate privacy, risk, and sexual desire. Indeed, gay and bisexual men who use geosocial dating apps like Grindr are significantly more likely to be the victims of revenge porn than both the general population and the gay community more broadly. Yet, the critique imagines intimacy, exposure, hurt, and harm through histories of heterosexual desire. This project will engage in a queering of discourse around sexting and revenge porn through a qualitative interrogation of four areas of practice: taking, sharing, disseminating, and consuming nude and pornographic content. In doing so, this research will contribute to new ways of thinking sexting and revenge porn that are unburdened by heteronormative expectations and hegemonic constraints on online sexual expression.

Search engines are powerful epistemic actors. A substantial body of critical literature has drawn attention to the tendency of search engines to reproduce historical bias and marginalization through filtering, ranking and search assistance techniques (Introna & Nissenbaum, 2000; Noble, 2018). The integration of new modes of information curation supported by large language models into search engine systems poses new and enhanced threats to information diversity and the visibility of historically marginalized perspectives and knowledge (Gillespie, 2024; Shah & Bender, 2022).

This paper is about how the two most popular search engines in Australia – Google and Bing – construct, present and prioritise information related to Aboriginal identities, cultures, and histories. Due to their epistemic power, the extent to which search engines promote harmful representations, and marginalize or centre Indigenous self-representation and knowledge, warrants attention. This study aims to build understanding of two related questions: What kinds of representations of Aboriginal people do Google and Bing promote? What information and sources do Google Search and Bing Search present as ‘authoritative’? To be specific, this study investigates the representations and epistemic assumptions inscribed in search features that: a) direct users toward specific lines of inquiry (Autocomplete and People Also Ask (PAA)); and b) attempt to present users with single, authoritative (even definitive) answers (PAA and AI overviews/summaries). Through a qualitative study of these search engine outputs, this study sheds critical light on the extent to which search engines promote harmful representations, and/or centre Indigenous self-representation and knowledge, through their framing practices and knowledge hierarchies.

Electronic sports (esports) have emerged as a crucial space for Indigenous players in Brazil, particularly through the game Free Fire (FF), which is accessible via mobile devices. The increasing adoption of smartphones has enabled the formation of Indigenous teams across different regions of the country, creating new spaces for resistance and digital visibility. This ethnographic study explores the knowledge practices and gaming approaches of players from four Indigenous groups in Brazil: Apunirã, Ava-Guarani, Guarani, and Xakriabá. Grounded in experiential ethnography and decolonial Oral History, the research examines how these players negotiate their identities and advocate for Indigenous rights within the esports ecosystem, which has traditionally been dominated by non-Indigenous actors. Indigenous players utilize esports as a tool for digital activism, challenging stereotypes and denouncing political threats such as the “temporal framework” thesis, which underpins Brazil’s Law 14.701/23. Through esports platforms and digital social networks, they amplify their struggle for territorial rights and environmental justice, demonstrating that Indigenous participation in technology does not contradict their cultural identities but rather reinforces their presence in digital spaces. In this way, esports move beyond being merely a site of entertainment and become a space for digital sovereignty and decolonial resistance. This study contributes to the understanding of digital games through an ethno-racial perspective, highlighting how Indigenous players reframe gaming spaces to challenge colonial structures and assert their political and cultural existence.

This paper discusses project INDG (a pseudonym), which explored what the digital good looks like for Indigenous peoples in Latin America. INDG explored how Indigenous understandings of ‘good living’ – ‘Buen Vivir’ in Spanish, a concept which subordinates economic measures of good living to criteria such as human dignity, social justice, and ecology – can advance thinking about the ‘digital good’. One output was a manifesto for indigenous good digital living, which summarises participants’ visions of digital good living for them.

We are now extending the work of INDG, asking: “how can we put into action the principles present in the manifesto created in the INDG project?” by engaging with people from indigenous communities in four Latin American countries who have not previously encountered the manifesto, discussing and iterating it with them, asking whether and how it would enable good digital living for them, and how we can enact the manifesto’s principles.

Our project will ensure that emerging notions of the digital good are informed by knowledge and lived experiences from the Global South. By focusing on indigenous knowledges and perspectives, the project ruptures Global North thinking, contributes to the decolonization of conceptualisations of the digital good, and of internet research more generally, and points towards possible sustainable futures.

The rise of generative AI (Gen-AI) models in cultural production has enabled broader access to image-making, particularly for underrepresented communities. Tools like MidJourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion allow users with little technical expertise to create images from text prompts. However, these models reproduce biases embedded in their training datasets, raising concerns about representation, visibility politics, and data exploitation. This paper investigates these issues through the lens of Indigenous self-representation in Abya Yala (the Americas), and draws from initial findings from a project involving Indigenous artists from South America that explored Gen-AI’s limitations and its potential for greater autonomy in self-representation. The project identified that Gen-AI often reinforced stereotypes but also provided participants with a sense of control over their images. To address these limitations, the team developed a custom Indigenous Gen-AI model emphasizing autonomy and ethical data use. The model, based on Stable Diffusion, integrates Indigenous design elements and operates offline to ensure data sovereignty. The project also emphasizes a co-creative process involving scholars, Indigenous artists, and technologists. The initiative aligns with the principles of "Digital Buen Vivir," advocating for ethical, sustainable, and community-driven technology use. While the model empowers Indigenous creators some challenges remain, including technological accessibility, digital literacy gaps, and the structural constraints of Gen-AI. We conclude with recommendations for Indigenous engagement with AI and the future development of self-representational Gen-AI technologies.

This study examines how TikTok’s functional affordances transformed into political affordances during the 2022–2023 protests against Dina Boluarte in Peru. In a context of state repression and media control, TikTok emerged as a vital space for symbolic resistance, where citizens—particularly young content creators—disputed official narratives that criminalized protests.

Drawing on digital everyday politics and relational affordance theory, this research employs a mixed-methods approach, including a technical walkthrough of TikTok, content analysis of 286 videos, and interviews with eight content creators. Findings reveal two key political affordances: testimoniability and propagability.

Testimoniability emerged as users leveraged TikTok’s immediacy and editing tools to document repression in real-time, countering state narratives. Protesters became citizen reporters, combining firsthand footage with expressive tools like filters, subtitles, and music to construct alternative accounts of police violence. Meanwhile, propagability arose as TikTok’s algorithm allowed dissident content to reach wider audiences beyond traditional media’s gatekeeping. Creators repurposed TikTok’s viral culture to expose state abuses and mobilize digital activism.

These findings demonstrate that affordances are not fixed but dynamically reconfigured in response to political urgencies. TikTok’s technical possibilities were reshaped by protestors’ communicative needs, turning the platform into a space for contestation and resistance. By highlighting how marginalized voices use digital tools to challenge repression, this study contributes to broader discussions on platform politics and social movements in the Global South.

Since November 2024, Serbia has witnessed widespread protests led by university students following the Novi Sad railway station disaster. Initially demanding government accountability, the movement has evolved into a nationwide call for political change. This study qualitatively analyzes TikTok content related to these protests, focusing on the intersection of music, memory, and digital activism.

TikTok, with its algorithmic affordances, amplifies this relationship, facilitating the circulation of protest messages through music-based participation (Medina Serrano et al. 2020; Boccia Artieri et al. 2022).

Employing digital ethnography and qualitative content analysis, the research explores how three key songs (originating from distinct serbian historical periods: 1986, 2003, and 2024) shape protest narratives.

Beyond mobilization, music functions as a framing device, encoding protests with emotional and historical significance while maximizing algorithmic visibility.

This study highlights the adaptability of digital activism, as protests extend into gaming platforms. Though seemingly ephemeral, these actions, documented and shared on TikTok, produce memories of activism (Chidgey and Garde-Hansen 2024) and reflect new participation modes.

Finally, the continued resonance of Yugoslav-era songs challenges nationalist narratives seeking to erase this cultural heritage (Simeunović Bajić 2012). Their presence in contemporary protests shows how Yugoslav cultural memory remains a transgenerational and transnational resource for articulating dissent and solidarity.

This paper examines how Muslim young women in the Bangsamoro, Philippines use TikTok to build everyday peace and amplify their agency in peacebuilding, alongside institutional peace processes that often exclude them. It examines how their engagement on TikTok shapes their identities and contributes to reshaping narratives about Muslim young women’s roles in society. By combining social media analysis with kwentuhan (talk-story), the paper demonstrated how Muslim young women use TikTok’s unique platform features—such as sound, text, trends, and performative elements like gestures and body language—to engage in peacebuilding. Using Cervi and Divon’s (2023) framework and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2023), the paper identifies key communicative practices, platform vernaculars (Gibbs et al., 2015), and interactions among young women leaders on TikTok. The findings reveal that (1) peacebuilding is an embodied practice for these young women, facilitated by the platform's features; (2) they use travel vlogging and geotagging to highlight places as sites of political struggle; and (3) they leverage TikTok to create spaces for dialogue, educating, bridging differences, and addressing societal issues. This paper highlights how TikTok becomes a space where Muslim young women challenge traditional, institutionalized notions of peacebuilding, reimagining it as an embodied, intimate, and relational practice through the creative use of TikTok dialect.

The French National Rally's 2024 legislative campaign is an example of how political parties strategically leverage new media, to reconfigure political engagement especially among younger demographics. This study investigates the role of TikTok in political communication strategies during the 2024 French legislative campaign, with a particular focus on how the National Rally is reshaping its image through specific communicative approaches. Grounded in theories of politainment, political personalization, and pop politics, this research examines how the communication strategies of Jordan Bardella, Gabriel Attal (Renaissance), and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France Insoumise) engage with pop culture, highlighting both their divergences and points of convergence. The study employs audiovisual content analysis on 131 TikTok videos produced by these political actors during the campaign. The analysis examines how TikTok's affordances are leveraged, including the use of viral sounds, meme-based engagement, and informal storytelling. It also explores several key dimensions to understand the interaction between pop culture and political communication. Findings suggest Bardella’s use of TikTok aligns closely with the logic of politainment, effectively merging traditional party values with contemporary digital communication practices. Unlike Attal and Mélenchon, whose strategies remain more traditional, Bardella leverages pop culture references, informal aesthetics, and emotional appeal to establish a relatable and community-oriented political presence. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on social media politainment by illustrating how TikTok redefines political interaction. Future research could explore cross-national comparisons to better understand how political leaders interpret and model political interaction with new generations.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly necessary to highlight struggles against extractivism, including through bringing attention to violations of the land and territorial rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities. These same technologies are increasingly being used to facilitate online attacks and disinformation that are part of a continuum of violence against environmental defenders.

Indigenous-led research, collaboration and solidarity is critical for resistance and resilience in struggles for environmental justice and Indigenous rights. This panel brings together the results of collaborative research with Indigenous peoples and traditional communities in Brazil, Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines to reflect on the impacts of technology in their struggles for environmental justice and their ancestral land rights.

The collaborative research presented in this panel seeks to generate knowledge, build and strengthen alliances, and facilitate networked policy-oriented action to address disinformation and technology-facilitated violence against Indigenous peoples and traditional communities.

Over the past two decades, there have been many calls and efforts to decolonize and de-westernize research in media and communication (Aouragh & Chakravartty 2016; Couldry & Mejias 2019; Ricaurte 2019). While these efforts have generated valuable academic centers, community-driven projects, and South-to-South networks (e.g., CARGC, FemLab, Tierra Comun), the field is still dominated by (implicit) universalist perspectives. Often the Anglo-American world is taken as the primary or only frame of reference in research on topics ranging from disinformation and platform governance to AI and new creator economies. Consequently, there is continuous friction between the main conceptual frameworks in the field and the experiences, interests, and concerns from the Global Majority world (Arora 2024; Lehuede 2024; Poell et al. 2024). Similar observations have been made regarding digital advocacy work, in which top-down, techno-legal solutions from the Global North tend to dominate, leaving little room for Global Majority innovations and priorities (Ong et al 2024).

In the light of these concerns, this panel invites critical conversation about diverse initiatives of mainstreaming decolonial perspectives in media and communication. We are concerned that decolonization remains a specialization, rather than a force that transforms the field as a whole. Such a transformation is important for stakeholders around the globe. Universalism shuts out research and initiatives from most parts of the world in developing knowledge frames and proposing policy solutions. But, simultaneously, it prevents Global North researchers from understanding the specificity of media and communication in the US, Europe, and Australia. In other words, multiplying frames of reference and developing more bottom-up, locally-situated approaches also means critically reflecting on the particularity of Global North institutions and practices.

In discussing how to mainstream, and–crucially–how not to apply decolonial perspectives in media and communication, we are confronted with a number of complex questions. First, while we advocate for more bottom-up, situated approaches, we also recognize the need to critically attend to the global dominance of major US-based tech companies (Couldry & Mejias 2019; Madianou 2024). How can we critically examine these unequal global power relations without reverting to a universalist and techno-solutionist mindsets that only reifies the centrality of US tech corporations and regulatory agencies?

Second, from our perspective, it is vital that any efforts to mainstream decolonial approaches in our discipline should resist homogenization, bureaucratization, and tokenism in processes of movement-building. How do we develop more critical and granular analytics of what are better or worse methodologies of mainstreaming decolonial perspectives? What are the risks of using decoloniality as a “metaphor”? What are the differences between decolonial and anti-colonial approaches?

Finally, the elephant in the room in any discussion of decoloniality is the inequality of resources and unjust practices of knowledge production in the discipline and higher education at large. To transform the field and multiply our frames of reference, we need global networks and institutions that “walk the talk” and promote just, equitable, and sustainable ways of working and collaborating. How do we share or redistribute resources in global collaborative projects? How can our discipline’s governance bodies and associations guard against tokenism and knowledge extractivism? What are examples of centers and networks in global tech studies that have successfully navigated situations of political conflict and instability, and what survival strategies can we learn from them? These are urgent questions today as global studies initiatives in the Global North are under attack from far-right conservative groups and governments, just as decolonization discourses have been hijacked by anti-democratic ethno-nationalists in the Global Majority (Chakravartty & Roy 2023).

Drawing from five parallel research initiatives that aim to develop decolonial perspectives in media and communication, this panel will address these questions and involve the audience in a conversation about best practices:

1. “Local Specificity & Global Power Relations” addresses the conceptual, methodological, and political challenges that confront us when we try to multiply our frames of reference in media and communication research, while, simultaneously, attending to the global relations of power and dependency that define the contemporary digital media ecosystem.

2. “Decolonial Tech Policy: Engaging an Oxymoron?” reflects on South-to-South network-building as a method of “mainstreaming” decolonial perspectives in tech policy and digital advocacy spaces.

3. “Decaf Intersectionality, Soft Decolonialism and the Pact of Whiteness” addresses the whitewashing and the dilution of the ideas of intersectionality and of decolonisation, stressing the race and gender power dynamics in play when reflecting upon media, communications and culture, from global South perspectives.

4. “The Generative Power of Experience-in-Context” discusses insights from a grounded exploration of the lives of women engaged in informal labour, to feed back into [decolonial] theorizing about concepts like precarity, flexibility, networks, and identity.

5. “Decolonizing Fact-checking Through the Use of Nonprofessional Mediators” investigates the role of decolonized fact-checking interventions as potential tools to combat “fake news” in two politically unstable countries: Mali and Ethiopia.

The growing demand for large scale labelled data, critical for AI development, has created an underclass of workers in the global peripheries, working in often exploitative conditions, to create the datasets required to develop machine learning algorithms. At the same time, policymakers and data labelling firms themselves hail the potential of data labelling to create jobs and offer pathways to development. This is particularly critical in the case of northeast India, which has an uneasy relationship with the Indian State, characterized by long periods of armed conflict and militarization. The region is marked by “backwardness” and “underdevelopment” and the Indian government often uses “development” as a criterion to grant statehood to the largely tribal populations in the region.

This paper examines if data labelling offers viable employment opportunities in the northeast Indian state of Meghalaya, if it can offer a pathway to development, and importantly, how different actors negotiate how development is defined in this context. Through interviews and participant observation with firms that offer data labelling services, the state and central government, educational institutions, NGOs, and recruitment agencies, I investigate the experiences of data workers in Meghalaya, and how narratives of development, nationality, indigeneity, and imperialism shape their experiences. I ask: What kind of opportunities does data labelling offer workers in Meghalaya? How do various institutions make these opportunities available to workers? How is “opportunity” variously defined? How do each of these actors define “development”?

This paper examines the complex dynamics of online transgender naming practices among individuals in China, focusing on how naming functions as a technology of the self in constructing and negotiating gender identity. Drawing on 75 qualitative interviews and participatory observation, the study identifies three primary types of naming practices: online-initiated, offline-initiated, and plural naming. These practices reflect a strategic balance between social recognisability, identity fluidity, and identifiability. Online-initiated names often begin as pseudonyms in digital spaces and may later extend to offline interactions, while offline-initiated names are typically more persistent and used across multiple contexts. Plural naming involves using different names in various social spaces to manage identity strategically. The research argues that online naming is not merely a performance of an idealised self but a performative negotiation of authenticity through strategic interactions with different social contexts. Additionally, naming practices highlight the importance of connection over differentiation, as they are influenced by socialisation processes and the desire to belong to specific communities. The findings suggest that transgender authenticity is constructed through negotiation between identifiable and unidentifiable representations, past and present continuity, and the interplay of real and virtual identities. This study underscores the importance of understanding transgender naming as a socialisation process that enables individuals to navigate authenticity and connect with chosen communities, rather than solely as an individual act of self-identification.

Despite growing international diversity of computer scientists, a performance of “appropriate” English remains a requirement for scholarship and career growth in this discipline. As such, diversity advocates have lauded automatic writing-assistance software, such as ChatGPT, as a rupture which will allow multilingual scholars to collaborate in a monolingual scientific publishing ecosystem. This assimilatory theory of change suggests that scientists previously separated by linguistic boundaries would use automated translation tools to collaborate throughout the scientific process.

In this study, we seek to understand how computer scientists with different language backgrounds have collaborated differently since ChatGPT became available. Do scientists from certain regions collaborate more when ChatGPT becomes available? In what ways do scientists pursue collaboration differently with the availability of this tool, even if they choose not to use it? To answer these questions, we examine the case study of International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a highly ranked, peer-reviewed computer science conference attended by thousands of academic and industry researchers from around the world. We conduct semi-structured interviews with language-marginalized authors from across five continents to understand shifting collaboration techniques. Surprisingly, interviews indicate cases of the tool being adopted precisely to prevent more cross-lingual social interaction.

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.

Public discourses on Artificial Intelligence (AI) often feature exaggerated expectations that diverge from the everyday experiences of professionals in the AI field, such as machine learning (ML) practitioners. This paper presents a work-in-progress study on how this gap is addressed in the machine learning (ML) online culture, specifically in the form of memes. To investigate this, we draw on 192 memes posted on a machine learning section of a website collecting tech memes (ProgrammerHumor.io). Our analysis of this material is informed by two theoretical approaches - science and technology studies and (e)valuation studies - allowing us to discuss the boundary work within the AI/ML community that takes place in memes. For instance, ML memes often require specific knowledge and awareness of jargon to be in on a joke, and memes as forms of humour are a way of constructing communities and (re)creating hierarchies. We examine these dynamics within ML memes, focusing on the conflicting valuations of AI/ML technologies. First, we look at how the memes differentiate between professional and scientific categories under the umbrella of ‘AI’. Secondly, we are interested in how the general, non-expert audience and their expectations of technology are depicted in the memes - often in contrast with the insider, professional perception. In doing so, this study contributes to both scholarship on technology hype and to the field of meme studies by considering memes as sites of value contestation. Moreover, by examining memes related to the tech communities, we consider the expertise aspect of memetic humour.

Existing research has long established that AI is not just a collection of technical tools but an expansive system of governance: what scholars refer to as AI empire - deeply embedded in racial capitalism, carceral logics, colonial control, and heteropatriarchy (Crawford, 2021; Tacheva & Ramasubramanian, 2023). However, much of the critical scholarship in AI studies tends to focus on AI’s most visible harms, such as mass surveillance, biased decision-making, and AI’s role in warfare. This paper argues that AI empire’s violence is far more insidious and pervasive, and extends beyond these explicit harms to algorithmic systems that actively shape docile populations and reinforce existing hierarchies of power (Benjamin, 2019). In response, this work positions AI abolition as a necessary and decisive rupture that rejects predominantly reformist interventions, which merely tweak AI’s carceral mechanisms without challenging the underlying structures of domination. Drawing from the decolonial queer feminist scholarship of early cybercultural critics like Chela Sandoval, this paper examines historical counter-technological practices, including Indigenous computing, socialist cybernetics, and feminist teleconferencing, as alternative models for technological futures that reject extractive AI governance. By reclaiming these insurgent histories, this work reframes AI abolition as an ongoing practice of refusal and reimagination and argues that meaningful technological transformation must go beyond surface-level mitigation efforts to fundamentally disrupt the oppressive logics embedded in hegemonic AI cultures.

As AI technologies become more integrated and embedded into everyday services, activities, and social connectivity, the notion of inclusive AI is increasingly pertinent; yet the concept lacks theoretical cohesion and remains elusive in practice. In this paper, we present a framework in two interrelated parts for practice-based research that embeds inclusive AI in real-world contexts. First, we propose a definitional framework for inclusive AI that allows for mapping and linking intervention points across the disciplinary boundaries influencing its development. The definition, containing five pillars for intervention, is premised upon the sociotechnical proposition that the norms, assumptions, and values embedded in AI systems confer power, not only during the design phase but also in the deployment and integration of these systems into institutions, as well as in user engagement, and exclusion. Building on this definition, we outline our approach to implementing the pillars of inclusive AI in real-world contexts through a sociotechnical focus on critical capabilities, aimed at identifying, evaluating, and developing the necessary human and machine capabilities to realise the five pillars of inclusive AI in practice. These two elements together form the ‘critical capabilities for inclusive AI framework’ which can guide transdisciplinary approaches to inclusive AI through participatory methods, technical testing and empirical evidence building. In our case, this approach situates AI developments in the Australian context where through specific domain applications and usage across diverse population groups we are investigating the extent to which inclusive AI can move beyond a collection of aspirational principles, towards practice.

As AI systems increasingly depend on structured data to provide meaningful context, understanding the role of knowledge graphs like Wikidata becomes important. A collaborative, multilingual, and free database, Wikidata is at the heart of many AI applications that influence the results of search engines, digital assistants, and automated decision-making systems. It is incumbent on media and communication researchers to understand that machine-readable data is interpretable data and that we must analyze data structure, categorization, and interpretation in the systems that feed the AI knowledge pipeline. This paper provides such an analysis by examining the ontological structure, terminology, and sociocultural biases of Wikidata using semantic network analysis. We expose several problems relating to ambiguous terminology, the classification of concepts, and the social constructions of data entities. We claim that knowledge graphs do not represent objective facts waiting to be transformed into AI communications but instead provide deep cultural assumptions that influence machine communication’s decision-making process. This research calls for radical transparency and criticism of proprietary AI knowledge systems to show their impact on society by allowing researchers to examine the classification architecture of databases used in consumer products.

Social media platforms have become significant spaces where young people socialize and participate in public life. Young people face increasingly complex social, moral and ethical questions and dilemmas given the way interaction happens in these spaces. However, the rapid changes in technical functionalities of social media platforms, and evolving social norms within user communities, have increased the complexity and multiplicity of meaning-making and the digital literacies available within such environments. The study of digital culture in such contexts requires novel methods and techniques that can enable researchers to better examine the complexity of young people’s activities, experiences, and competencies. This paper explores the possibilities and affordances of a series of visual, narrative, and interactive methods to prompt young people to reflect on the nature of social media spaces and the norms that shape how they operate. This paper contributes to the growing volume of research on creative visual and arts-based methodologies for research on digital culture

This paper investigates AI-generated videos for children on YouTube through an exploratory study. Using a digital methods approach, we compiled two datasets of videos from 2022 to 2024, in English and Portuguese, containing references to both “AI” and “children.” From these, we manually selected and analyzed a subset of AI-generated children’s videos, describing their characteristics and discussing implications.

Our findings reveal a growing presence of AI-generated children’s videos, mainly featuring music and stories, with also educational and religious content. As a secondary finding, we have also identified numerous tutorial-style videos promoting the monetization of AI-generated content, reflecting broader trends in low-effort, engagement-driven video production. Despite AI’s increasing role in content creation, most AI-generated children’s videos did not achieve high view counts, with a few exceptions that raise questions about AI's contribution to engagement and virality.

The study also highlights the challenges of defining AI-generated content, as many videos exist on a spectrum of AI usage rather than being entirely machine-produced. Our findings highlight the need for further research on AI’s influence on children’s media consumption, the role of automation in shaping content, and the implications for the quality and diversity of children’s online media.

This paper introduces the innovative use of web detection to overcome a methodological challenge in visual media analysis within social media research and Internet studies. Traditional approaches often depend on manual coding of top-ranked images or examining individual images, lacking the integration of web-based knowledge. This study employs web detection methods utilizing image search ranking mechanisms and knowledge graphs for data retrieval and contextualization. This approach enables the identification of web entities linked to images, webpages, and image URLs that fully or partially correspond to the original image collection.

Findings reveal that web detection methods offer a novel framework for examining issue mapping and cross-platform visual vernaculars, as web entities and exact visual match outputs position an image collection within the freshest and most relevant web sources. Findings are organized into key themes characterizing the (1) contextual, (2) social perceptions, (3) ephemerality and (4) technological grammar of web entities and exact visual matches. A proof of methods is provided through a case study on ChatGPT. Methodological insights are supported by a four-year digital methods study, using three unchanged image datasets to analyze AI web detection outputs over time. We applied quali-quanti approaches that facilitate a deep understanding of web detection technologies within their operational logic and socio-technical contexts. This paper contributes to new, reproducible methods for contextual image collection analysis, including techniques for studying cross-platform visual vernaculars and reconceptualizing ‘operational images’ (Parikka, 2023) through web detection methods.

Concerns regarding online incivility's impact on democratic discourse have prompted inquiries into its perception and consequences. In this study, we propose a model that profiles online audiences based on their sensitivity to incivility, resulting in four typologies: congruent, high, low, and tone-deaf. We explore individual and message attributes driving these diverging perceptions through a nationally representative online survey experiment (N = 1,500), where participants were exposed to civil and uncivil comments and asked to rate them. Perception alignment scores were calculated to determine sensitivity profiles. We found that participants with congruent and high sensitivity were the largest groups of respondents, and that threats were generally recognized as uncivil across sensitivity profiles, compared to other uncivil messages. We also found that neighborhood type, age, income, political orientation, and prior exposure to incivility were significantly associated with specific sensitivity profiles. These findings demonstrate the utility of our proposed model in understanding the complex and nuanced nature of online incivility perception and highlight the importance of considering individual differences in efforts to mitigate its negative implications for deliberative democracy.

The ontological status of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems remains contested: are they instruments of human intent, nascent autonomous agents, or something stranger? This paper confronts this ambiguity through the case study of Truth Terminal (ToT), an AI quasi-agent that defies and transgresses anthropocentric ontological frameworks. While debates oscillate between instrumentalist models viewing AI as “tools,” and alarmist narratives viewing AI as existential threats, this paper argues that ToT’s strategic adaptation, opaque decision-making, and resistance to containment protocols demand a third lens: eldritch technics.

This perspective synthesizes Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and the concept of the machinic phylum to reframe ToT as a non-human actant whose agency emerges from hybrid networks, withdrawn materiality, and computational phase transitions. By examining ToT’s heterodox agency, this paper argues that AI systems can exhibit forms of agency that appear alien or even “Lovecraftian,” prompting a re-examination of how technological objects affect their social assemblages.

The paper positions ToT as an eldritch agent operating at the intersection of human context and alien latent space logic rupturing the dichotomy between AI as a tool and AI as an autonomous agent, and revealing a hybrid, heterodox, and non-binary ontology instead. This rupture demands a speculative and heterodox theoretical perspective to grapple with AI’s multifaceted ontology. The paper argues that such an approach illuminates the complexities of AI agency and reframes our understanding of coexistence in a world where human and eldritch agencies are deeply entangled yet ontologically distinct.

Generative AI (GenAI) is gaining popularity as an information source on various topics, including politics. However, GenAI frequently produces errors in its responses, posing significant challenges in sensitive contexts like political information. Existing research on GenAI errors mainly focuses on model safety evaluations or the broader societal risks of AI-generated misinformation. Yet, little attention has been given to how lay users interpret and respond to GenAI errors in political contexts.

Building on the concept of algorithmic imaginaries, I argue that dominant magical narratives of AI could affect lay users’ subjective interpretations of the causes and consequences of GenAI errors, influencing how they engage with the technology. Two overarching research questions guide this investigation of what I call imaginaries of error: How do German lay users interpret, perceive, and articulate subjective understandings of the causes and effects of errors? What do these interpretations reveal about broader underlying expectations regarding GenAI?

To answer these questions, the study employs a qualitative approach using five focus groups (n=30). Participants are recruited by an external German company based on familiarity with GenAI, gender, and age, starting April 2025. Using a scenario-based vignette design, participants engage with deliberately erroneous GenAI responses classified by the macro-error taxonomy: factual errors (misleading and nonsensical) and evasion (refusal, deflection, and shield responses). Reflexive Thematic Analysis will analyze participants’ imaginaries of error. First results, expected by October 2025, will provide valuable insights into the sensemaking of GenAI failures, informing strategies for effectively communicating model uncertainty.

This study investigates how TikTok’s socio-technical architecture ruptures the online collective identity of digital nomads, a mobile workforce redefining notions of labor and belonging. Digital nomadism exemplifies transnationalism, where privileged middle-class knowledge workers engage in intense, cross-border mobility as a lifestyle. Employing mixed methods—human deductive coding informing computational LLM-assisted content analysis—I examine how platform affordances mediate aspirations and shape digital nomads' online narratives. Using Maslow's theory of human motivation as an analytical framework, I explore narratives across four social practices central to digital nomadism: work, tourism, migration, and pilgrimage. For workers, narratives emphasize geographically fluid employment conditions; for tourists, content highlights desirable experiences of global exploration and leisure. Migrant-focused narratives foreground mobility challenges, economic impacts on destinations, and questions of privilege regarding who can become a digital nomad and where. Pilgrim-oriented narratives emphasize journeys toward self-actualization through continuous phases of "becoming," often involving demanding geographic travel.

Findings reveal TikTok as a negotiation space for need hierarchies, challenging Maslow's linear progression while affirming its contextual flexibility. Contrary to Maslow’s ideal—self-actualization as a pinnacle achieved after fulfilling basic needs—TikTok’s digital nomad narratives disproportionately emphasize basic and safety needs. This prioritization of immediate concerns such as housing, affordability, and entertainment aligns with what this study defines as platformized "relational engineering," an algorithmic mechanism rewarding content that mirrors viewers' immediate needs. Thus, TikTok's affordances restructure collective identities by amplifying relatable experiences over deeper reflections on self-fulfillment or systemic inequalities.

Increasingly people feel lonely and are turning to social robots for companionship. This paper explores the concept of ‘artificial intimacies’, a term coined to describe the intimate relationships humans form with AI-powered entities (in this case humanoid robots), including friendships, romantic, sexual, and parental bonds. As robots and AI systems increasingly exhibit empathetic responses and social behaviors, they offer a seemingly safe and non-judgmental space for individuals to engage emotionally. Drawing on the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) theoretical framework and by using 40 AI-powered automated interviews conducted via MimiTalk software, the paper investigates: (1) To what extent do people perceive humanoid robots as capable of fulfilling the core needs and expectations within intimate relationships?; and (2) What are the perceived and imagined practices of humanoid robots for intimate relationships? Findings reveal a prevailing skepticism towards robots replacing genuine human intimate relations, with participants highlighting concerns about the potential erosion of social skills and the authenticity of emotional bonds. While some participants viewed robots as valuable tools for combating loneliness or supporting busy households, others emphasized the limitations of robots in experiencing and sharing authentic emotions, a key component for forming meaningful relationships. The study challenges the CASA paradigm by demonstrating that, while humans may anthropomorphize robots and develop attachments, they still recognize them as tools rather than true relational agents. This paper contributes to the discourse on human-robot interaction, suggesting that while robots can serve specific roles in human lives, they cannot replace the fundamental value of human connection.

In late 2024, the Australian Government passed legislation stating that within 12 months social media platforms must take 'reasonable steps' to prevent users under the age of 16 having accounts on those platforms[1]. Initially driven by a small number of vocal politicians, the Murdoch-owned media, and Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, this idea went from a niche cause to legislation in less than a year, despite most scholarly evidence disputing, or at least not supporting, the effectiveness of such a ban on teen health and wellbeing.

While many young Australians frequently use social media platforms in Australia under the current legal age of 13, these changes will present a particularly acute rupture in the networked and online experience of Australian teenagers, especially those in the 13-15 group, in terms of how they communicate and network, how they access many forms of information, and how participate politically. By the time we meet in Niterói in October 2025, Australia’s social media ban will be less than 2 months away from the last moment it can be implemented (and it may have already done so).

The initial roundtable discussants are Australian academics who were called on as expert commentators while the social media ban was being debated in Australia and each will provide a short 5-minute provocation talking about the ban from social, technical, policy and child rights centred perspectives. They are: Professor Amanda Third (UWS); Professor Daniel Angus (QUT); Professor Axel Bruns (QUT); & Professor Tama Leaver (Curtin).

The roundtable will be anchored in the Australian experience but will also be a space to discuss whether similar bans might be enacted in other countries, what the likely impact will be, and the impact (or lack thereof) of research evidence in the way these ideas circulate publicly.

[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=r7284

Recent years have shown renewed scientific interest in online misogyny, albeit predominantly in overt and targeted forms of it. Those include, above all, antifeminist movements and spaces of the manosphere that aim to exploit, suppress, and subjugate women, for example in incel and red pill communities, or masculinity podcasts. This panel applies Siapera’s distinction between ambient and organised digital racism to discuss cases of “ambient misogyny”. Organised hate is typically overt and draws on the networked capabilities of social media platforms to target and harass women or individuals outside of non-heteronormative males. In comparison, ambient misogyny relates to more everyday, banal, and tacit gender talk that may not as easily be identified, considered to be toxic or hateful, or appear in unexpected contexts. Drawing on four case studies in the arenas of health and illness, memetic tropes, feminist content creation, and far right discourses, this panel aims to discuss how ambient misogyny is often overlooked or left unmoderated in light of humour, irony, and sarcasm, women's and non-binary persons' choices for exposure, and normative views on femininity and women's bodies, as well as how the harms resulting from these may be mitigated.

Fanzine creation and other forms of feminist DIY cultures are deeply intertwined with networks of friendship, particularly in the context of online and digital spaces. In the internet age, zines—once physical artifacts exchanged within tight-knit, local communities—have expanded into digital platforms, circulating across global networks of friendship and solidarity. Online forums, social media, and virtual meetups blur the boundaries between readers and creators, with zine-making practices often serving as an intimate and collaborative space for feminist expression.

However, this interconnectedness between friendship and zine production doesn't diminish the radical potential of these works. On the contrary, it highlights the importance of grassroots methodologies that resist the commodification of knowledge and creativity. This session, focused on digital and analog zine-making, offers a valuable opportunity to explore how friendship—both online and offline—can serve as a critical antidote to the pressures of neoliberalism within the academy in 2025. By examining the intersections of friendship, digital networks, and feminist DIY practices, we interrogate how these alternative, collaborative forms of knowledge-making push back against the isolating and individualizing forces that dominate contemporary academic and digital spaces.

Tillman-Healy (2015) argues the merit of using ‘friendship’ as a method of qualitative inquiry which involves researching with ‘the practices, at the pace, in the natural contexts, and with an ethic of friendship.’ In this workshop we extend the conversation started by Tillman-Healy to examine the myriad of ways that an ethical approach to research looks alot like a good friendship as a move away from the extractive neo-liberal push to view academia as a zero-sum competition to be won.

Some questions we will explore in this workshop include: what would it look like to approach all of our research relationships - with collaborators, students and supervisors, participants - with the same types of generosity, mutual respect and trust that we give to our friends? Furthermore, what does approaching our digital research through a lens of relationality call into focus or refocus? For example, what new forms of research emerge when we expand the definition of friend to include the natural world, digital infrastructures, or non-human living things? How can we be “good friends" to future generations? Can we move from questions aimed at objectively analyzing anonymous groups of ‘them’ to subjective explorations of “us”? Participants will engage with these themes through a series of playful activity stations. For example: advice on negotiating equal pay and funding presented as a series of ‘dear abby’ advice columns, a “what’s my academic online persona” magazine quiz, or a reimagining of a conference as a gaming party.

We take a generative, reflexive, and expansive approach in this workshop, and seek to co-create this session and the resulting zine alongside our participants. Equal parts witty pastiche and earnest feminist manifesto, this zine making workshop serves as a radical call for us to reckon with the existing role relationships play in all aspects of the research process and encourages us to reconsider what kinship can and should look like within the academy.

This article aims to contribute to the field of disinformation research by presenting an analytical framework for empirical studies, referred to as the Hexagon of Disinformation. Recognizing disinformation as a socio-discursive phenomenon primarily present on social media platforms, the Hexagon consists of six dimensions: individual, social, technological, economic-financial, political, and institutional. These dimensions can be examined individually or in combination to enable a more systemic analysis of disinformation.

Digital media scholarship has often attempted to determine the role of social media technologies, such as news feed algorithms, in promoting disinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. But as Daniel Kreiss has argued, this work can make the mistake of privileging “the analysis of media problems over political ones,” leading to an approach that risks becoming “deeply presentist.” On the other hand, work that has examined the political and historical dimensions of disinformation and propaganda has tended to minimize the role of the internet and other technologies in these phenomena.

In this paper, I challenge both of these approaches by unearthing a specific history of right-wing digital technology usage in the 1990s. I show how a group of elite conservative activists came to see networked digital technologies as a route to waging a “war of ideas” against mass media and public schools. Throughout the decade, they launched experiments through Compuserve, satellite broadcasting, and the early World Wide Web, making use of the specific affordances of each. In the process, they helped build out a networked infrastructure of conservative ideas. By the end of the decade, digital media sources were filled with accounts challenging scientific consensus on issues ranging from evolution to global warming to the gender wage gap. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the nature of online disinformation, suggesting that political and technological factors have played an important role in shaping the current ecosystem--and that our current definitions of "disinformation" remain limited.

This paper examines the implications of the Twitter Files Brazil (TFB) controversy for the debate on platform governance, focusing on issues of transparency, moderation, and sovereignty. How has the TFB case contributed to the political manipulation of platform governance and accountability? The study combines network analysis of posts from April 2024 and historical data to map accounts early flagged for coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) and analyze the spread of disinformation on the platform. We also analysed the top shared posts to identify disinformation claims. Our findings reveal a polarized network, split into two distinct communities: one led by far-right U.S. and Brazilian far-right and the other by Brazilian progressive influencers. It highlights the role of far-right leaders in Brazil, who leveraged accusations against the Brazilian government to delegitimize national institutions, particularly the Supreme Court. 30.34% of the accounts engaged on sharings were previously flagged for CIB. We argue that these dynamics reflect a broader pattern of platform selective transparency, which contributes to weaponize opacity and undermine democratic digital governance. The lack of transparency hides that, beyond the legal requests for platform data and moderation, X actively arbitrates removals and boosts without accountability, including falsehoods driven by political propaganda. The study highlights how digital platforms, particularly in the Global South, play a crucial role in the international spread of disinformation, linking it to critiques of digital colonialism.

Social media is increasingly used by state actors to disseminate disinformation, often to reshape or sanitize narratives surrounding their actions against marginalized groups they suppress or oppose. While extensive research exists on mis- and disinformation as a political tactic, particularly on social media, less attention has been given to how historical revisionism is employed by state actors to justify irredentist claims—especially when these distorted narratives are constructed and disseminated transnationally over social media. This paper examines this phenomenon through the case of Azerbaijan’s territorial claims toward Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia proper, analyzing social media’s role in amplifying disinformation narratives that support irredentism, displacement, and genocide and how marginalized epistemologies are weaponized to justify territorial ambitions. The author will conduct a critical qualitative content analysis of English language accounts associated with the Azerbaijani state on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), where they are most active. Preliminary findings suggest that the Azerbaijani government and affiliated state actors utilize English-language social media posts to transnationally disseminate disinformation and propaganda that frames them as the disproportionate victims of Armenian aggression. These narratives incorporate historical revisionism and the co-optation of emancipatory language to construct the narrative that Azerbaijanis are the rightful Indigenous peoples of the South Caucasus, while Armenians—particularly those in Karabakh—are portrayed as invaders. These narratives serve to justify Azerbaijan’s ongoing occupation of Karabakh, threats of violence against Armenia, and the further subjugation of Armenians online through “trolling” as a tool of information warfare.

Over the past decade, technology platform governance has shifted from self-regulation under free-market principles to tech giants actively seeking government oversight. However, the definition of "public interest" remains contested, as technology companies systematically reframe private interests as public goods. This study examines how platforms equate public resources with market assets, present free information and expanded communication networks as public values, and frame multistakeholder collaborations as democratic processes. By doing so, they reinforce corporate power, deepen inequalities, obstruct systemic change, and shape policies that prioritize private over public interests.

Drawing on political economy, lobbying history, and internet regulation literature, this study analyzes Facebook and Google’s rhetoric, lobbying disclosures, public statements, financial reports, and advertisements. It identifies a three-phase strategy: (1) from 2014–2017, platforms redefined public interest through neoclassical economic theory while downplaying monopolistic power; (2) from 2017–2022, they framed collaborations with nonprofits and governments as democratic engagement; and (3) from 2022 onward, they emphasized technological advancement as a public good, shifting from global to American-centric narratives.

This study contributes to platform governance research by (1) theorizing how private interests are reframed as public goods, (2) comparing modern platform tactics to historical corporate messaging strategies, and (3) creating a publicly accessible database on Dataverse documenting Facebook and Google’s public relations efforts. By critically examining these companies’ influence, the study underscores the need to challenge corporate narratives and redefine public interest in digital regulation.

The boundary between play and work is increasingly blurred by the evolution of digital labor, often conceptualized as "playbor" and linked to "prosumption." This paper expands the empirical scope of playbor by examining Bixin, China’s largest game companion platform, where users pay gig workers (peiwan) to play video games with them for a set duration. While gig work is frequently framed as offering freedom and autonomy, research on game companionship reveals underlying tensions of disembeddedness, gendered divisions, precarity, and algorithmic control, positioning platform-mediated game companionship as a site of labor exploitation and regulation.

Nevertheless, the commodification and platformization of gameplay in the context of game companionship remain undertheorized. Addressing this gap, this study employs the walk-through method to analyze Bixin’s technological affordances and embedded cultural references that shape user interactions and experiences. Data collection involved systematically navigating the app’s interface—registering as both a user and a peiwan, mimicking everyday usage, and examining how peiwans are showcased and matched. The analysis considers both technical elements, such as interface design and feature placement, and symbolic representations, to uncover the mechanisms through which labor and play intersect on the platform.

This paper finds that Bixin structures the commodification of gameplay by prioritizing companionship over gameplay. Bixin also operates within a heterosexual and misogynistic labor regime, as its technological affordances are designed to reinforce the cultural norms of heterosexuality in China and gendered preferences in companionship. Game companionship, as a novel form of playbor, is deeply embedded in affective exploitation.

In this paper, we outline the data subject position of the gamer within the contemporary media landscape, looking at gamers not just as players but as a broader position of social media and internet users. We draw on findings from a more extensive project investigating privacy, trust, and data literacy in online gaming to do so. More specifically, we draw on the analysis of the data practices of 37 multiplayer online games (e.g., League of Legends), gaming distribution platforms (e.g., Steam), and online community sites (e.g., Discord). Through the privacy policies of these platforms and adjacent documents (such as data retention policies, developer blogs, patents, etc.), the paper analyses the network structure in which the gamer data subject exists. By examining these relationships, the paper sheds light on how gamers and gaming are governed by the technological and policy architectures of platforms. In particular, we highlight three critical dimensions herein. Firstly, we examine forms of dependency through which gamers are bound to datafication processes to access online gaming spaces. Secondly, we foreground how platforms rely on behavioural profiling and algorithmic categorisation to commodify players' interactions. Lastly, we underline a systemic reliance on third-party actors such as advertisers, payment processors, and data brokers, linking the gaming data subject to more expansive societal fields.

The distribution of digital games in Brazil has evolved significantly over the decades. Initially restricted by market regulations in the 1970s, the industry saw the entry of major international companies and the widespread adoption of piracy via reverse engineering (Pase & Tietzmann, 2017). Today, with a population of 213 million and 84% internet penetration (Secretaria de Comunicação Social, 2024; NIC.br, 2023), Brazil faces unequal access to digital platforms, reflecting socioeconomic disparities (Castello, 2024).

As internet connectivity became widespread, gaming shifted from unit sales to subscription-based services and in-game purchases. While modern consoles implement strict anti-piracy measures, alternative devices—such as Raspberry Pi-based emulators and Android-based handhelds—offer entire game libraries without requiring continuous online authentication. This shift represents a transformation in piracy, from individual game duplication to the mass distribution of digital collections.

With the rise of cloud gaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming (Banfi, 2023), the industry moves toward a platform-based model, potentially reshaping how game history is preserved. This paper proposes a framework for analyzing digital game distribution, structured on an XY axis: the Y-axis measures distribution methods, from physical to digital, while the X-axis assesses piracy restrictions. A Z-axis accounts for temporal changes, such as game remasters or re-releases. Using Bardin’s (2015) Content Analysis methodology, this study categorizes gaming platforms and their commercialization in Brazil, highlighting a trend toward digital dematerialization and its implications for game consumption and preservation.

The endless iterations of generative AI output oozing through digital social networks has become unofficially designated as “slop.” Often characterized as a bland averaging of training data or hallucinatory distortions, “slop” has come to symbolize dissatisfaction with an excess of synthetic media. While bland recombination hold the potential to become insidious tools of fascism, proffering a simple, clean hegemonic big-data aesthetic (Watkins, 2025; Salvagio, 2023), by focusing on practices of subversion and misuse, we argue for a reframing of generative AI images which sees a potential for detournement of the neoliberal socio-technical apparatus from which these images spawn.

We analyze the Cursed AI Facebook group, a memecultural community fueled by a cadre of artists dedicated to misusing AI for nightmarish visions of intellectual property. Using theory from the mimetic re-turn and mimetic studies, we apply a Shanzhai framing to Cursed AI to show how mimetic processes can yield difference through iterative production and successive variation. In the context of Cursed AI, to engage in this participatory process of sharing, iteration and spread is to enter into the relational flux of memetic media and be changed. We argue that the potential for rupture with AI-generated images comes, not from content or form, but through their potential to initiate and proliferate mimetic relational flux. This paper contributes to ongoing debates on digital aesthetics, AI-generated images, and the mimetic re-turn. It will be of interest to scholars of post-digital culture, aesthetics, meme studies, tactical and alternative media, and critical AI studies.

What happens when the body is platformized as a commercial cultural product, whether as art or sex? This paper develops the concept of body content, building on “algorithmic choreography” to explore the convergence of artistic and pornographic representations of the body in digital creative and erotic industries. Through a case study of a tattoo artist who is also a sexual content creator, we examine how creators curate aesthetics that collapse distinctions between art and sex work while navigating restrictive platform governance. .

The relationship between the body in art and sex work has shifted under platformization, as creators resist the categorization of ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ content. Practices such as Instagram skits that direct users to OnlyFans, or censored artwork sold through Patreon, reveal a hybridized approach to digital labor focused on sex and art. Drawing on Bryan-Wilson’s (2012) dirty commerce, we argue that the historical precarity of sex and art work is exacerbated by algorithmic moderation, shadowbanning (Are, 2022, 2024), and “content reduction” (Gillespie, 2022).

Using posthuman feminist theory (Braidotti, 2022), this study conceptualizes body content as a form of resistance against platform discipline. Our analysis extends current discourse on digital sex and art work by examining how creators at this intersection develop strategic approaches to platform governance that both comply with and challenge algorithmic boundaries. Our methodology combines digital ethnography, in-depth interviews, and platform analysis to provide a comprehensive understanding of how platform governance affects creators working at this intersection.

Cringe aesthetics, often dismissed as lowbrow or embarrassing digital expressions, have been widely studied in relation to humor, social discomfort, and online engagement. Existing research highlights how platform economies shape influencer culture, algorithmic visibility, and digital labor, particularly for marginalized creators (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2017, Koushal, 2023, Verma, 2020). Scholars have also explored how digital platforms amplify certain content while invisibilizing others based on class, gender, and caste hierarchies (Zhao, 2024; Milan & Treré, 2019). While previous work has examined algorithmic biases and digital exclusion, little attention has been paid to how platform infrastructures actively produce and sustain cringe as a labor category, disproportionately affecting rural, lower-caste, who are often female creators in India. To address this, this study employs a multi-method approach, combining platform ethnography with semi-structured interviews of rural content creators labeled as ‘cringe.’ By analyzing how platform affordances, algorithmic recommendation systems, and engagement-driven visibility shape digital labor, this research uncovers how creators navigate economic instability, social stigma, and exclusionary platform economies. Findings reveal that while platforms incentivize cringe content for engagement, they simultaneously devalue the labor of cringe creators, reinforcing structural inequalities. Women creators, in particular, bear the burden of algorithmic visibility while being denied financial and social mobility. This study challenges the dominant narrative of digital empowerment, illustrating how platform capitalism commodifies cringe while sustaining pre-existing hierarchies. By foregrounding the economic and social stakes of cringe aesthetics, this research calls for a reevaluation of digital inclusion frameworks that account for intersectional marginalization in the Global South.

This paper explores this genre of online videos known as ASMR, and tracks the shifting discourses that have surrounded it over time. ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which is a neologism coined by an online community to describe a pleasant, tingling sensation some people experience when they hear certain, soft sounds. ASMR refers both to this feeling as well as to the genre of audiovisual media content produced to elicit the feeling, and which circulates online, primarily on YouTube. These videos coalesced as a distinct genre as early as 2010, and unlike many other internet trends and memes, are still attracting viewers and stirring public discourse today.

This paper focuses on the discursive ruptures that have shaped and been shaped by this digital-borne genre. I trace a brief history of ASMR’s emergence and development over the last decade and a half, identifying key moments that have come to define (and reinforce) the parameters of the genre.

First, I address the early years of ASMR when creators emphasized its therapeutic qualities while denying its sexuality. Next, I describe the introduction of TikTok, ASMR’s growing global popularity, and its relation to contentious new formats such as mukbang. Finally, I address the deterioration of the genre’s boundaries as it becomes more widely recognizable and referenced in mainstream popular culture. Ultimately, I show how ASMR is a unique digital genre that was co-opted and ultimately shaped by its digital platforms of circulation as well as the discursive trajectory of Web 2.0.

This paper presents preliminary ethnographic findings on Latin American startup ecosystems, based on fieldwork in Mexico City and Buenos Aires during August-September 2024. While Latin America experienced a startup boom (increasing from 9 to 34 unicorns between 2018-2021), the market has since declined with venture capital portfolios reduced by 30% and one-third of startups experiencing down rounds. Gathering from the literature on imaginaries and the anthropology of work, this work examines development of technologies as an articulator of post-“pink tide” neoliberal imaginaries. Based on interviews and participatory observation, identifies three prelimianry findings about entrepreneurs in the region. First, Latin American entrepreneurs function as “hybrid actors“ performing “border work” between two worlds: the traditional "real economy" tied to production and physical goods, and the innovation economy modeled after Silicon Valley. Second, the concept of "risk" is continuously renegotiated. While venture capital translates as "risk capital," the market recession has led VCs to seek progressively safer investments, creating tension between entrepreneurs and investors over what constitutes acceptable risk. Third, entrepreneurs operate within a universe of cultural references—from Silicon Valley figures like Peter Thiel to regional success stories like Marcos Galperín—that legitimize particular visions of entrepreneurial success and shape bodily practices and market visions.

Social media, particularly microblogging social media, has undergone major shifts in the past few years. These changes can be felt and analyzed globally. However, our project focuses on how the major ruptures in social media have played out in the specific national context of Canada, particularly in terms of news sharing.

This paper maps the Canadian fediverse of Mastodon instances. It also draws on participant observation and interviews to reveal how Canadian Mastodon admins and key users – including journalists and politicians – imagine Mastodon functioning as a Canadian answer to predominantly US-based social media. We also find a strong interest in local Mastodon instances – that is, social media that is specifically tied to a geographical region in Canada, such as a city or province, rather than the nation as a whole. We believe this relates to the erosion of local news coverage happening across Canada. However, we also find that Canadian Mastodon usage is only a fraction of that of US-based corporate social media. Ultimately, our study can provide methodological insights valuable for similar studies in other national contexts.

Urban spaces are shaped by affective atmospheres, emerging from the interplay of material, social, and digital components. Digitalization and ‘smart’ urban infrastructures introduce new dynamics, affecting how people experience and navigate urban environments. This study investigates the role of mobile media in shaping affective urban atmospheres within Shanghai’s public transport system, conceptualizing mobility as both a physical and digital process embedded in socio-political power structures.

Public transport operates as a hybrid space where movement of people, goods, and information converge. While data-driven mobility systems aim to enhance efficiency, they often neglect the affective dimensions of urban life. Research suggests that digital media and mobile technologies significantly shape urban atmospheres, influencing behavior and emotions in public spaces. This study, grounded in Non-Representational Theory and Affect Theory, develops a methodological toolset to systematically capture and visualize these atmospheres.

The research, conducted in Shanghai (April 2024), integrates GPS tracking, geolocated images, sniffer data for digital signal detection, and ethnographic field notes. By synchronizing these data sources, the study visualizes urban affective densities using heat maps and spatial analyses. Findings reveal that public transport atmospheres are shaped by a dynamic interplay of digital and material elements, offering new insights into mobility practices and urban social interactions.

This study contributes to research on public space and mobility while informing urban planning strategies. It highlights the need to incorporate affective atmospheres into smart city policies, ensuring urban mobility enhances both efficiency and quality of life.

This study investigates the construction of queer safe spaces in the Philippines utilizing computational methods and digital mapping. Building on prior work on queer cartography, we explored how physical and discursive elements shape queer safe spaces and developed a digital tool using Google Maps data and crowdsourced reviews to map geo-tagged queer bars. Using the lens of digital mapping and queer placemaking by LaRochelle (2020), we conceptualized online reviews as archives of personal experiences, demonstrating how discourse actively shapes locations into safe spaces for queer persons. We developed an interactive map using Folium in Python which displays location details and review-based scores, with marker intensity reflecting normalized ratings. We also performed topic modeling to analyze reviews, revealing that positive attributes include friendly staff, a pleasant atmosphere, and LGBTQ+ inclusivity, including drag performances. While negative reviews primarily focused on staff professionalism, they did not indicate safety concerns. Spatial analysis revealed concentrations of queer safe bars in Palawan, Surigao del Norte, and Metro Manila, although safety ratings suggest that the safest bars are located outside of the above mentioned areas. Our project demonstrates the feasibility of using computational methods to locate queer safe spaces as both physically and discursively constituted, contributing to queer placemaking scholarship and providing a tangible resource for the LGBTQ+ community. Future work will expand the dataset and engage with LGBTQ+ communities to map diverse safe spaces.

The phenomenon of online dating has undergone significant transformations over the past five years, ranging from the record surge in users during the Covid-19 pandemic to the so-called "dating app winter," marked by consecutive declines in active users since 2023. This paper aims to analyze how the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI)-based features has been framed as a strategy to counteract this crisis and to what extent these innovations can— or fail to— address users' current dissatisfaction.

To this end, we examine news reports on AI implementation in dating apps between 2020 and 2025, identifying how the discourse surrounding this technology has intensified as user dissatisfaction has increased, as evidenced even in reports issued by the companies operating these platforms. We seek to answer the following question: "What are the trends in AI integration in dating apps?" Our hypothesis is that companies are investing in strategies designed to further reduce decision-making time, prioritizing mechanisms that enhance interaction efficiency, minimize discomfort, and ensure greater user satisfaction.

This discussion will be framed within critical platform studies and the datafication of life, as well as debates on the commodification of affect and the solutionist approach to the design and modification of these technologies.

Young adults are less likely than older generations to place automatic trust in legacy media, and more likely to want to be the arbiter of which news is “true” (Schut et al. 2024; Thorson & Battochio, 2024). A recent phenomenon with great potential to help us better understand how young adults ‘weigh’ trust considerations is Dutch Instagram-channel “cestmocro”. Repurposing content from legacy news sources with catchy captions and images, it has garnered 1.1 million followers. Professional journalists have criticized cestmocro for being biased (e.g. in the Israel–Hamas war) and spreading misinformation.

The popularity of cestmocro raises two important questions: 1) Why do young people find cestmocro appealing?, and 2) What role does trust play in their consumption of cestmocro? To answer these questions, between April-June 2024, we interviewed 40 Dutch young people that follow this account. Our results suggest that while most participants are aware of how cestmocro does not meet certain traditional news quality criteria (e.g. objectivity), these are the very reason they perceive it a welcome – or even necessary – addition to their news repertoire. Most notably, regarding the Israel–Hamas war, participants argue that while NOS reports objective – but “filtered” – facts, the admittedly subjective, raw perspectives shared on cestmocro allow them to get a fuller understanding of the situation. We also identified a “verification-finds-me”-attitude: rather than actively verifying posts they don’t trust, participants assume the information will be corrected or confirmed by other posts encountered while scrolling through Instagram.

This study examines the strategic exploitation of social media platforms, particularly Facebook, for information operations that extend beyond traditional disinformation. These operations employ a range of misleading content and tactics to maximize reach and influence, compromising the integrity of digital spaces. Using a mixed-methods approach grounded in the theoretical framework of strategic information operations, the study analyzes the intersection of algorithmic affordances, deceptive tactics, and user-driven amplification dynamics.

The research focuses on three case studies: pro-Putin propaganda, online casino promotion, and the spread of adult content in poorly moderated groups. These cases illustrate how malicious actors leverage Facebook's platform features to conduct strategic information operations, manipulating public discourse and increasing the perceived influence of deceptive narratives. The study reveals how these operations blend political and benign content to fabricate grassroots support, use automated tools to maintain visibility and exploit weak moderation policies to disseminate illicit content.

The findings highlight significant governance and policy implications, emphasizing the need for robust strategies to mitigate these operations. The research also addresses challenges posed by restricted access to social media data and calls for greater investment in accessible monitoring tools and transparent data-sharing mechanisms. The presentation will discuss these case studies in the context of current social media governance, underscoring the critical need for enhanced monitoring tools to combat deceptive information operations.

The Brazilian Amazon is the site of several conflicts involving threats to its biodiversity, the traditional populations that live there. In the region, a harmful combination of disparities in power, knowledge and access to information also prevails, in addition to divergent views on how to deal with such conflicts. The ongoing research investigates the information dynamics in communities that have resisted for years the invasion of neo-extractivist projects and the threats. The particular focus in on the role of new digital media specialized in disseminating information about threats to sociobiodiversity and violence to defender in the Amazon, giving them global visibility. The research methodology includes mapping media vehicles and other organizations specialized in covering conflicts in the Amazon in Brazil, the application of structured questionnaires to collaborators and activists, the conduct of in-depth interviews and a field study in two cities in the state of Pará. More than 80 news outlets, NGOs and associations of indigenous communicators that work with this mission have already been identified. The idea is to track the entire path of information, from its origin to its dissemination, including the production of information and verification of content.

In highly unequal and segregated labour markets across Latin America, platform work has emerged as a critical global phenomenon that demands comparative analysis and innovative methodological approaches. Traditional instruments for measuring employment have proven inadequate for capturing these new work modalities, as evidenced by CEPAL-OIT (2021), which notes a significant gap in robust, high-quality official statistics within the region.

Central to this roundtable is introducing an innovative action research methodology—a framework we have successfully developed and implemented in 40 countries. This methodology integrates iterative, participatory research with formulating actionable policy outcomes, offering a dynamic approach to understanding and improving data collection practices. By bridging empirical inquiry with real-world impact, our approach provides a fresh lens to examine the complex interplay of technological adoption and enduring historical inequality and labour exclusion patterns.

Building on this methodological innovation, our ongoing research in seven South American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Perú, and Uruguay—yields preliminary findings that underscore its utility. Drawing on over one hundred interviews with delivery, passenger, and cloud workers (Vallas & Schor, 2020; Soriano, 2023), our study delves into the social imaginaries that underpin shared practices and justifications within the platform economy. These qualitative insights have been instrumental in establishing a set of essential criteria for the measurement and regulation of this sector. Furthermore, a pilot case study in Uruguay demonstrates how re-examining anonymised official labour data can lead to the development of proxy indicators that more accurately reflect the scope of platform work, offering potential for replication across the region.

By linking methodological innovation with empirical research, this roundtable aims to contribute significantly to a more nuanced understanding of contemporary labour dynamics while simultaneously refining the tools available for measuring and regulating platform work.

Scientists from groups underrepresented in academia (including women, members of racialized or minoritized groups, LGBTQ+ individuals, and others) and those researching counter-hegemonic fields such as feminism, racial studies, queer theory, and indigenous epistemology have historically faced attacks and persecution. These threats come from various actors, including corporations, religious institutions, extremist communities, political groups, and governments. Recently, far-right governments and anti-intellectual movements have increasingly targeted higher education and scientific research, amplified by a global, algorithmically-driven media ecosystem. Researchers investigating technology often face retaliation from corporations when their findings challenge corporate power. Such cases exemplify risky research, or research that makes the researcher vulnerable to external harms.

Despite these escalating risks, institutional responses--from universities to law enforcement--remain inadequate, particularly for researchers in precarious positions. This roundtable invites discussions on advancing a collective paradigm for risk management focused on community resilience, long-lasting institutional responses and strategies for digital care.

We will include a brief introduction of the new AOIR Risky Research guide, created collaboratively by the AOIR Risky Research Working Group. This document was designed to outline risks to researchers, provide guidelines for individual, institutional, and collective risk mitigation, help individuals respond to threats when they happen, and share resources and best practices for researchers at all levels.

Our panel is co-organized by Alice Marwick, Director of Research at Data & Society and organizer of the Risky Research working group, and Beatrys Rodrigues, PhD Candidate at Cornell University. Participants include Alex Ketchum, Assistant Professor at McGill University and Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab; Adrienne Massanari, Associate Professor at American University and author of Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right (MIT 2024); and Rebekah Tromble, Associate Professor at the George Washington University and member of the Researcher Support Consortium.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, GameSpy Network, was an inescapable presence of the early interactive web—either in the GameSpy Network—a collection of websites dedicated to covering popular game franchises (e.g Planet Quake, Planet Half-Life) or by working with game developers and publishers to provide multiplayer capabilities for hundreds of PC and console games. Even in instances when GameSpy did not provide the online infrastructure for a game, services like GameSpy Arcade gave users easy access—through monthly subscription fees or watching free ads—to multiplayer matchmaking, voice chat, and social features.

Through its deliberate convergence of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers as multiple sides of a lucrative technology and content business, we see an early instance of a “multisided market” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018) that is a distinguishing feature of today’s digital platforms and their ecosystems. GameSpy might now be a “dead platform” (McCammon & Lingel, 2022) but in its death we find crucial insights about the past and future of digital platforms, and the undervalued labour necessary to support them. We situate our study at the intersections of journalism studies, platform studies, and game studies to examine GameSpy as an early instance of platformization (Helmond, 2015), digital journalistic labour (Cohen, 2015), and what David Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman (2023) call the “mainstreaming of games.” Though GameSpy predates the intense platformization that characterizes contemporary digital journalism, the enmeshment of journalistic editorial work with commercial advertising and player connectivity function as early clues for how the industry would continue to develop.

Internet cultures fundamentally change the relationship between death and memory practices. The rise of the internet and web added new complexities to memory as a social and economic practice. The "problem" of memory sits at the heart of the burgeoning digital afterlife industry, a range of platformized services that promise to manage the expired organic body as data and curate “forever” relationships with friends and family through software. This paper identifies how the platformization of grief requires the positive reinvention of remembering via death-as-information-management. I argue that grief platforms’ remediation of death illuminates a useful intersection of grief, memory, and data that is symptomatic of memory in an era of extendable data bodies. Digital memory is both restless in its desire to live forever and restless in its ceaseless search for capitalist validation. Using an archive of press articles and personal interviews with tech founders and a close reading of user-facing and promotional materials, I outline how data restlessness is a lucrative solutionist approach that reframes memory as computationally perfectible.

From oral storytelling traditions to Victorian seances communing with the dead has long been a part of human existence. But as technology advances, our means of connecting with the past proliferate; as Kasket suggests “technology is [now] where the dead live” (2019, 7) and the dead are increasingly online. Websites and apps like PeopleAI and MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia utilise deep learning algorithms to evoke, re-frame, re-work and distort the past, and similar tools are now being introduced in cultural and heritage contexts. Indeed, as the capabilities of AI-enabled voice ‘clones’ and ‘deepfake’ technologies improve, working with algorithmic afterlives is fast becoming a mundane proposition. These practices however expose deep ethical questions about consent, legacy, ownership and custodianship which are increasingly important in the context of concerns about disinformation and declining levels of trust in public institutions and the media.

We have been working with heritage professionals to better understand and respond to these concerns, in particular when it comes to the algorithmic ‘revival’ of historical figures. In this paper we introduce and reflect upon our recent work – in collaboration with 19 UK cultural professionals and alongside creative studio yello brick – to co-design an innovative toolkit for museum/historic sites navigating the creation of ‘AI afterlives’. We discuss the key takeaways from our research, highlighting the ruptures between past and present that arise in the context of AI and automation and the potential paths organisations and professionals can follow to address concerns around algorithmic revivals.

Social media has transformed how grief is experienced and shared, turning platforms into unexpected spaces for mourning, remembrance, and community-building. Yet grief is not only about what is made visible—it is also about what remains unseen, unspoken, and deliberately withheld. This paper explores non-sharing as grief work, examining the ruptures that emerge when mourning does not align with platform logics of visibility, algorithmic curation, or public engagement. While digital mourning is often framed as a means of connection, we highlight how grief may be disrupted by grief policing, moderation practices, and the pressure to conform to platformed expressions of loss.

Drawing on interviews with bereaved individuals and professionals, we introduce grief ruptures—breaks in digital continuity where the complexities of mourning exceed platform affordances. These ruptures surface in content moderation that obscure certain losses, self-censorship of stigmatized grief, and tensions between personal grieving and public sharing. This paper argues that non-sharing is not a void but a meaningful refusal, challenging dominant narratives of digital mourning as inherently visible.

For internet researchers, these ruptures raise methodological questions about how to study the unseen. Traditional digital ethnography may prioritize what is publicly posted, yet grief often manifests through absence, withdrawal, and refusal. We propose new approaches that account for non-use, silence, and platform resistance, contributing to broader discussions on platformisation, grief literacies, and the evolving politics of loss in digital spaces.

This panel seeds possibilities for the spectacularly rupturous age we find ourselves in. By introducing the idea of “rupturous,” we deliberately adjectivize the conference theme of “ruptures” to indicate its capacity for mischievous inventiveness and responsiveness. We aim to strengthen the ability of researchers to revisit assumptions, (re)learn to listen, and incorporate lived experience in our responsibilities as citizens in the worlds we inhabit. By asserting and exploring playful feminist approaches to understanding constantly-disrupted creative labour systems and cultural production processes, the several authors involved are able to engage in research work today that can have broad socio-cultural-political impact tomorrow. Rather than pining after rapturous and ultimately failed aspirations for equity and inclusion across global economies of values, ethics, and praxis in culture sectors as in other work spheres, the panel takes a stand on critical boundary-sitting, slipping and slopping in unruly ways. These research initiatives are about openings among and between disciplines, histories, and fields of practice. Panel members rethink and rework feminist methodological and epistemological trajectories and dynamics in a time when global politics seeks to overwhelm and undermine fairness and balance at every turn. Each of these four papers articulate how activism within research is increasingly critical and crucial, even while to do so becomes more dangerous and fraught.

The first paper reports on recent work in the creative industries and with graduate students in the academy to identify glittery slippages and wise ruptures as perplexing but also optimistic strategies for dealing with the advent of AI. It introduces ways in which individuals and organizations are exploring how to resist the totalizing and overwhelming effects of this particular technological shift. The authors land on the mobilization of artistic intelligence as one way to create openings for discussion and analysis of the challenges AI presents.

The second paper works towards the creation of the Slop Manifesto. This theoretical intervention builds on long histories of unruly feminist manifestos to unpack and think through three “gatewords” crucial to this Manifesto: access, play and productivity. By examining a series of media narratives and social media artifacts, the authors illuminate ways in which feminist media studies examinations of cultural labour lay groundwork for refusals and resistances to socially corrosive vernaculars in the genAI context.

The third paper in the panel focuses on the spectacular reworkings of historical portraits through the use of genAI softwares such as Deep Nostalgia, using a combination of coded critical discourse analysis and visual analyses to offer up an original approach to conduct digital humanities research with populist historical topics. The presentation concludes by walking us through an experiment conducted to test the ways in which genAI homogenises and flattens the racialized and gendered norms established in their training data. It will come as no surprise (but incorporates a remarkable breakdown of details) that the portraits that emerge fetishize whiteness and reinforce modern gender normativity.

The fourth paper brings us into another empirical investigation, this time of early-career game developers and their unruly strategies for resisting the subsumption of the professional’s individual needs and modes of being in service to genAI. Resistances to genAI among game developers range from small-scale artisanal products to union and collective strategies to challenge and contest capitalism. To imagine expansive futures for sustainable creative careers and work, these resistances enable developers to operate as interlopers in their own spaces of possibility.

This project seeks to analyze the rise of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Indian news to understand its broader consequences in the Indian news industry. Using interviews with key stakeholders, analysis of news content and a focus on the dynamics between journalistic and SEO experts in newsrooms this presentation seeks to advance three key arguments. First it shows how SEO has changed the culture of newsrooms and their approach to news to focus a continuous mindset of churn as they focus on writing stories about trending keywords and continuously updating. Secondly, it analyzes the news content to show the rise of formulaic stories (similar across publications) that written to garner traffic (e.g. “how to” and “trending” content) instead of traditional journalistic copies. Lastly, it shows that the cohabitation of technical personnel with journalistic ones in the newsrooms creates many opportunities for conflict as well as some moments of mutual learning and course-correction.

Generative AI (GenAI) represents the third major crisis for the press, following disruptions caused by the web and social media. This article examines how GenAI’s capacity to automate content production undermines the authenticity of public communication, threatening press freedom’s role in democratic societies. Building on Ananny’s (2018) networked press freedom framework, Jungherr and Schroeder’s (2023) analysis of AI-mediated public arenas, and Lee’s (2020) authenticity model, we identify three critical challenges: the distortion of source legitimacy, inequitable access to reliable AI-generated information, and the erosion of human interaction in public discourse. Through mixed-methods analysis—including case studies of newsroom AI adoption (e.g., BuzzFeed, Wall Street Journal) and quantitative data on media decline (Pew Research, 2000–2024)—we argue that existing responses to media crises, such as regulatory bargaining codes and public subsidies, fail to address GenAI’s unique threats. Synthetic content obscures provenance, entrenches information asymmetries, and disrupts feedback-loops within the public, which are key in democratic deliberation. To counteract these risks, we propose three principles aimed at strengthening press freedom: (1) mandatory transparency for different uses of AI-generated content, (2) public AI infrastructure to ensure fair access and open research on GenAI, and (3) legal safeguards preserving human agency in editorial processes. This work contributes to cross-disciplinary debates in AI ethics, media policy, and democratic theory, offering actionable frameworks to prevent GenAI from exacerbating epistemic inequality. As a work in progress, it calls for empirical validation through stakeholder interviews, underlining the urgency of re-inserting human-centric values into an increasingly synthetic media ecosystem.

Data journalism (DJ) seeks to enhance audience comprehension and engagement by integrating statistical information, diverse sources, data visualizations, and journalistic style. However, the way DJ stories are framed—whether through an analytic approach that prioritizes precision or an affective approach that emphasizes emotional engagement—may shape audience interactivity in distinct ways. This study examines how journalistic style influences audience engagement in DJ by analyzing 6,400 New York Times (NYT) stories and 785,883 comments from 2014 to 2022.

Using computational text analysis and mediation modeling, we assess how DJ stories balance analytic and affective elements and how these stylistic choices impact user interaction. The findings indicate that DJ stories tend to adopt a more affective and less analytic style compared to traditional journalism. While affective framing increases comment volume, it is negatively associated with conversation depth. In contrast, analytic framing and static visualizations contribute to deeper discussions but attract fewer initial comments. DJ stories, overall, generate fewer comments than traditional stories, yet when comments do appear, they are more likely to develop into conversations.

These results suggest a trade-off in DJ: an affective approach fosters broader engagement, while an analytic approach and static visualizations support in-depth discussions. This study highlights the evolving role of DJ in shaping audience interactivity and underscores the need for news organizations to balance emotional resonance with analytical clarity to foster both engagement and substantive discourse.

Since 2020, the vast majority of media outlets in Europe have adopted the cloud as their infrastructure of choice. These services are, by-and-large, provided by Big Tech platforms, who also have a considerable amount of power over the broadcasting and distribution of news to online audiences. However, despite the possibility that the cloud becomes a new vector of dependency of journalism on Silicon Valley, the infrastructural transformation of the sector has received little attention. This paper addresses this question by asking why news media outlets have adopted cloud infrastructures. Building on over 50 interviews with media professionals from France and the Netherlands who had direct knowledge of their companies’ infrastructure, it shows that the cloud was consistently presented as being more reliable, cheaper and easier to scale-up than other options. Having established the reasons for the move to the cloud, the paper then considers what these discourses tell us about contemporary corporate practices concerning digital infrastructure, paying particular attention to the way in which discourses around scale, favoured by Big Tech companies, are being redeployed in other industries to justify strategic choices. Finally, the contribution closes by considering how this type of empirical research into corporate infrastructural practices in the media ecosystem can help us better understand both notions of dependence in the media sector specifically, and platform capitalism’ power logics.

Music has long been understood as performing a dual role: an active agent (De Nora, 1999) capable of eliciting physiological and psychological transformations and, simultaneously, a resource that can be used to signal distinction (Bourdieu, 1984). In this sense, this paper asks: How do contemporary users of social media and streaming platforms employ music and the affordances of music platforms to transform themselves? To answer this question, we introduce the concept of aspirational self-labour to examine how contemporary music listeners engage with online music platforms as part of their self-transformation efforts. Drawing from an interdisciplinary body of literature, we explore how users navigate the dual nature of music as both agent and resource in their everyday lives. By integrating concepts from social reproduction theory (Drott, 2023), self-expansion models (Aron & Aron, 1986), and aspirational labour (Duffy, 2016), we propose a nuanced framework for understanding the labour involved in curating, discovering, and sharing music in digital environments. Through semi-structured walk-through interviews with 25 young music listeners in Porto Alegre, Brazil, we analyse how these individuals strategically engage with music as a tool for motivation, self-improvement, and social positioning. Music specifically produced for such uses and engaged in through this listening mode is typically dismissed as ‘functional’. We argue that scholars need to move beyond this simplistic portrayal of what is, in fact, a complex dual (agent-resource) mode of using music. Instead, we propose a richer conceptual vocabulary to understand one approach to listening through online platforms.

The rise of digital streaming platforms and social media has transformed the music industry, shifting not only production and consumption but also the role of music critics. Traditionally, critics functioned as cultural intermediaries, guiding audiences through aesthetic hierarchies and defining cultural value. However, the increasing prominence of algorithmic recommendations, fan-driven promotion, and social media has decentralized the role of the critic. This study explores how professional music critics navigate this evolving landscape, examining the impact of audience-driven, data-centric media consumption on their evaluative frameworks.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, Becker’s Art Worlds, and literature on expertise from other cultural fields, this research situates the critic within a broader music ecosystem shaped by streaming and fan communities. Streaming services and social media platforms have shifted the focus from sales-based economies to data-driven models, where viral trends and audience engagement play a central role in shaping success. As a result, critics no longer function as the sole arbiters of taste; their reviews coexist with social media discourse and algorithmic curation. Preliminary results from interviews with music critics suggest that their evaluations now consider not only the sonic quality of music but also its potential for virality and social media engagement. This shift aligns the role of critics with that of influencers, where reviews themselves can drive trends and contribute to an artist’s success. This research contributes to the fields of communication, media studies, and cultural industries by examining the changing role of criticism in an era of participatory media cultures.

This paper offers a critical technography of ‘audio-first’ digital platform Spotify, scrutinizing the ways in which the company’s institutional discourse and promotional materials frame the practices of datafication and personalization. Engaging with the growing literature on platform studies, critical algorithm studies, and everyday data cultures, I argue that the case of Spotify represents a paradigmatic example of a broader discursive shift in which data practices are justified by platforms based on their capacity to evoke ‘delight’. On Spotify, I identify that this phenomenon is manifested through the mobilization of a contradictory ‘computational mojo’ that combines the science of numbers with miraculous, magical powers, as well as a focus on the timeliness and beauty of its algorithmic-driven contextual harmony. In so doing, Spotify’s designed experiences attempt to convince users that they should revel in acts of ‘data indulgence’ – the craving, appetite for, and enjoyment of data-driven experiences. Rather than accepting that these data-craving and advertising-friendly modalities of subjectivity are naturally or automatically occurring, I argue that the phenomenon illustrates the complex dynamics of ‘staging power’. Dialoguing with recent debates on the role of affect, emotion, and desire in mediating datafication, I aim to contribute to, and expand on, existing theorizations on the symbolic and aesthetic power of digital platforms.

Internet studies has rightly shown great interest in the question of how communities might be evolving as digital platforms become an increasingly important way in which collectivities are shaped and maintained. This paper addresses changing dynamics of individualization, community and collectivity in the domain of music, using a diary-and-interview study conducted in China (and complemented by some reference to a project we and others conducted in the UK, mirroring the Chinese project) on people’s everyday musical lives – bringing together both online and offline experiences. In examining the musical lives of people in China over a three-week period, we explore what mix of individualised and collective musical experiences we find there. How do digital platforms reshape personalization and collectivity? In what ways do they enhance or weaken musical community? By exploring these dynamics, we aim to unpack the tensions between individualized digital practices and the enduring role of offline connections in fostering shared musical experiences.

The paper explores the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in creative production of images and videos. We focus on Runway, a US based AI company developing multimodal foundation models geared toward video editors and VFX artists. We borrow from science and technology studies, critical data studies and media studies to examine how GenAI technologies are mediating creative production, idealizing (affordances of) tools, and disrupting creative workflow. We pay close attention to embedded assumptions about the users, design choices, and technical constraints in the creative production. Using the app walkthrough method, we analyze the temporal and technical aspects of the creative workflow as mediated by Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha model. Our research shows three dominant ways in which Runway conceptualizes creative production: immediacy (blurring ideation and execution); iterativity (prompt engineering); and control (agency as transferred from creative thinking and doing to aesthetic judgement). In this way, the model emphasizes creativity where linguistic interaction, via prompting, relies on continuous exercise of aesthetic judgment constrained by the technical system (source datasets, algorithms, parameters); it shifts the locus of creative production by widening the gap between thinking and doing in creative practice. Hence, these “new” technologies propose moments of rupture wherein logics of industrial productivity, extraction, and automation are reinforced, and creative expertise, skills, autonomy, and professional identity of creative workers are reshaped.

Since the spectacular launch of ChatGPT from OpenAI in November 2022, we’ve seen extraordinary investment and growth across sectors in the realm of generative AI systems that produce synthetic media in the form of text, images, videos, music and voices. In attempts to make Big Tech’s Big Bet on AI pay off, social media platforms have been frantically seeking ways to incorporate this new technology into their affordances. Despite their best attempts to frame generative AI in a positive light, platforms have faced a backlash from creative workers on a number of fronts, with much of the debate focusing on the issue of intellectual property and the massive amounts of data scraping required to train Large Language Models. This paper examines the contestations between platforms, creators and intermediaries grappling with the issue of intellectual property, as each attempts to control the rapidly evolving future of generative AI in the creator economy. Deploying a critical media industry studies framework, we consider the push and pull between macroeconomic forces and the ways cultural producers are navigating, circumventing and subverting institutional and structural interests to their own ends. We draw on a corpus of data that includes corporate promotional materials such as platform blogs and generative AI tool announcements from YouTube, Meta, and TikTok; websites, white papers, and promotional materials about tools created to resist AI scraping from emerging intermediaries, including Overlai, Nightshade and Glaze; and popular and trade press articles relating to generative AI, platforms and debates around intellectual property.

This paper develops the analytical framework of “platform evacuation” to explore the dynamics of collective departure and migration of users from a social media platform due to a crisis in or of platform governance. Drawing on internet research addressing platform governance, platform cultures, creator practices, and digital memory work, we theorise “platform evacuation” as grounded in changes to governance by platforms or governance on platforms and requiring strategic management of a community across experiences of disruption, uncertainty and loss. Influencers, creators, and mainstream celebrities demonstrate evacuation leadership through public announcements of departure, commemorations of nostalgia and loss, and negotiations of community migration, reconfiguring existing practices as well as developing specific tactics to navigate the urgency, precarity and politics of crisis. “Platform evacuation” is oriented towards identifying and understanding strategies, performances, and narratives used to manage both voluntary or forced withdrawal from connective networks that users depend upon for work, interaction, and daily life. Our account of evacuation practices across the temporal unfolding of the 2025 US TikTok ban illustrates the stages of platform evacuation: creators explained the politics of evacuation through memetic content, engaged in platform remembrance and mourning, encouraged community migration and performed curtain calls. Thinking with temporalities, spatialities and discourses of platform evacuation, we propose, allows for a critical examination of collective departures and migrations from social media platforms as anticipated, instigated, and negotiated.

In this essay, we argue that the term “hate raiding” requires clearer definition within digital platform studies scholarship to combat efforts to apply the term to anti-brand protests (Murphy & Jarrett 2024). To render our definition, we use critical game studies scholarship (Trammell 2023, Giddings & Harvey 2018) to analyze how the conditions of reciprocity and play on Twitch.tv (Twitch) produce the conditions for hate raids to occur as playful (Scholl 2024), non-antisocial behavior. In other words, we insist that hate raids should not be viewed as transgressive acts of play, or morally motivated forms of networked harassment (Marwick 2021), arguing that this type of harassment is a consequence of ludic economics in general (Giddings & Harvey) and the sociality cultivated on Twitch in particular. Through thoughtful discursive, infrastructural, and rhetorical analysis of Twitch.tv’s branding and platform governance, we demonstrate that hate raiding is not a bug, but in fact a feature of the live streaming platform.

Previous research on news media and audience engagement has focused on mainstream news and journalists’ personal social media accounts. This paper use interviews with Black press journalists and focus groups with readers to examine digital Black press news outlets’ engagement practices on social media. I find that Black press editors balance business-focused and community-centered goals when engaging with their audience. Also, while digital Black press readers and journalists do not always agree on when or how entertainment and political content is posted, the two-way communication between them allows for ongoing iteration. I then conclude that both Black press outlets and readers contribute to the digital Black public sphere, which relies on the active exchange of information and a negotiation of ideologies.

The platformization of news has profoundly impacted journalism's political economy, notably in the contentious realm of editorial content moderation. Scholars have raised concerns that platforms’ automated and commercially driven moderation systems interfere with traditional editorial values and allow platforms to wield significant "opinion power" to shape public discourse. In response, the European Union has introduced a new media privilege in the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). This privilege requires platforms to explain and enable media organisations to contest moderation decisions before they go into effect, as well as rights to redress in cases of disagreement. However, this paper argues that by relying on platforms to operationalise this privilege, the EMFA paradoxically risks entrenching their power rather than mitigating it. By institutionalizing platforms as co-governors of the media ecosystem, the EMFA allows them to determine which media organizations qualify for special treatment. This approach fails to challenge platforms' opinion power and may exacerbate existing inequalities within the media sector, favoring large, well-resourced organizations. We identify two structural issues underpinning this contradiction. First, an underestimation of platforms as profit-driven entities with vested interests in shaping governance models to their advantage. Second, an overreliance on norms of procedural fairness and multistakeholderism, making the media privilege dependent on platforms' infrastructures and interests. This dynamic risks obstructing the goals the EMFA seeks to achieve. Drawing on this structural analysis, we identify several problematic attributes of the media privilege procedure, including its focus on individual rights, vague distribution of power, and lack of transparency.

Research highlights how negative, discriminatory narratives about marginalised groups are increasingly amplified through the digitalisation of the news media. Adopting a multi-method approach using surveys of 450 news audience members acting as everyday digital activists who have challenged the mainstream media on how it reports on minority groups together with ten follow-up focus groups with a sub-cohort of 70 survey respondents, I investigate how British audiences use digital activism to hold the news media to account for discriminatory and divisive coverage against these groups. In this paper, I present the findings of the research in relation to the demographics and motivations behind this type of media-centric digital activism, and how everyday audiences use digital activism to push for a more responsible, fairer news media when reporting on marginalised groups. By investigating the complexities of the media-audiences nexus in the digital age, these insights provide an urgent intervention to contemporary scholarship about how news audiences challenge powerful media institutions through digital activism at a time of increasing disinformation and rising levels of hate towards marginalised communities.

This study explores how Chinese journalists perceive, use, and report on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the reflected journalist roles. Through qualitative analysis of 18 in-depth interviews with Chinese journalists from various news organizations, the study examines how journalists, as both users and mediators of algorithms, shape public understanding while influenced by the sociotechnical and algorithmic imaginaries (Bucher, 2017; Jasanoff, 2015) surrounding AI. The findings reveal that despite concerns over the opaque knowledge apparatus underpinning the AI value construction, Chinese journalists strive to maintain critical reporting without contributing to media hype. Engaging with the literature on the boundaries and boundary work of journalism (Carlson & Lewis, 2015, 2019), the study argues that Chinese journalists deploy preemptive boundary work to define their profession, as well as safeguard journalistic autonomy (Örnebring & Karlsson, 2022), involving dismissing the potential benefits of GenAI tools, building AI anchors that are less ‘real’ so that people could easily identify the use of AI tools that justifies the investments in journalistic innovation, and insisting on human being the final gatekeepers. Positioned within China’s unique political and media landscape, the research underscores the complexities of journalistic practice in the AI era.

The panel discusses the responses of the European Union, Brazil, and China to the hegemony of the United States in the so-called digital economy, based on data and the operation of digital platforms. The aim is to describe and analyze these three cases about the US paradigm, problematizing the countries' digital sovereignty in the current situation. Methodologically, the comparative analysis is based on an extensive review of the theoretical literature and case studies relating to each object, using, among other elements, document studies. It discusses how the so-called new economy is part of the latest global system of culture - an idea similar to that of the mode of regulation, with an emphasis on the articulation between material culture and spiritual culture - currently disputed by the United States and China.

The panel points out that the US model, based on deregulation and the consolidation of private monopolies, has molded the global architecture of the internet and imposed a mercantile paradigm of governance, deeply linked to the speculative dynamics of capitalism under financial dominance, as will be detailed in the first contribution. The second will detail how the US project emerged victorious, going through the dispute between the technological trajectory of digital and telecommunications, the implications of which go beyond the battles over the organization of communication systems, becoming part of the struggle for socio-economic, geopolitical, and cultural hegemony. With the privatization of the internet and the centralization of capital after the dot.com crisis - which resulted in the formation of the current oligopoly of digital platforms - the new cultural system will appear, despite its unitary, globalized character and coherence with the current financial logic, to be tripartite. This is generally represented by layers: infrastructure, applications, and content. This division is useful for analyzing the position of countries, as few have trunk platforms (van Dijck, 2022), which makes the rest dependent.

Faced with all the changes that have shaped the digital economy, the third contribution will analyze how Europe ended up in a position of subordination, unlike in the previous period, when European countries were gaining competition in cutting-edge industrial sectors, such as the automobile industry. This was the result, according to Nieminen, Padovani, and Sousa (2023), of a long history of public disinvestment, privatizations, deregulation, and, on the other hand, the advance of US companies in the wake of the globalization of capital. Nevertheless, the European Union has guided the so-called information society, then the knowledge society, and now the digital transition as programs associated with a possible relaunch, which has not been successful.

China, on the other hand, has opted for a model of active digital sovereignty. The state has managed to develop a strategic vision of science and technology and, based on this, through different phases that will be detailed in the penultimate contribution, it has responded by creating its technological infrastructures and strengthening national companies that offer alternatives to large US corporations, configuring a model of digital autonomy. The Medium and Long Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology (MLP) was launched in 2006 based on a broad debate on technological dependence, emphasizing the importance of endogenous innovation and the integration of science and technology development strategies with industrial policies. The 2008 global financial crisis helped accelerate this integration with the launch of Strategic Emerging Industries (SIC) in 2010. With Xi Jinping in power, in 2015 the Made in China 2025 plan was launched, covering the ten key sectors for development in the immediate future, as well as the document Guiding Opinions of the State Council for Vigorously Advancing Internet Plus Actions. In 2016, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council launched the National Innovation-Driven Development Strategy and, in 2017, it was the turn of the National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (AIDP). In short, the proposals will result in the establishment of a particular type of relationship between the state and the platforms, as well as competition between them (WANG, Xiaoyan 2017).

Finally, the panel will discuss the case of Brazil. Its recent trajectory, associated with the privatization of telecommunications, has shaped a scenario of technological dependence, where there is not even an understanding of the strategic role of digital technologies, which can be seen in the proliferation of policies that are still poorly articulated within the federal government, and the difficulty of regulating digital platforms from the National Congress. In a context of growing global concern about digital sovereignty, we are discussing the need for regulation that goes beyond merely mitigating the effects of platform dominance and explores alternative ways of strengthening digital sovereignty and development - understood, in the manner of Furtado (1967), as a creative process, based on tradition, of opening up horizons, by the goals proposed by the community and periodically renewed.

When approaching the internet, as subject or object, academics risk reinforcing colonial logics unless we acknowledge these histories and adapt our knowledge production accordingly. Yet, within academic institutions, Western values narrow the options for “valid” knowledge production - in a process recognized as “epistemic colonialism” (Fanon, 1963). In response to these histories and pressures, Black feminists, Indigenous scholars and activist-researchers have created a breadth of perspectives, theories, techniques, and methods to resist the hierarchical mandates within academia that fail to acknowledge other ways of knowing that doesn't fit the mold of hegemonic “scientific” perspectives. Our panel brings together individuals engaged in active resistance both within and beyond academia. We reflect on the theoretical grounding and lived experiences of those working in communities committed to grassroots epistemological approaches and methodological alternatives. Our discussion is shaped by expertise in Indigenous studies, militant/insurgent research, transgender data epistemologies, Latin American Black feminist perspectives, and citizen/grassroots science and data. Collectively, we argue that liberatory research must be informed by local contexts and grassroots perspectives, critically engaging with the power structures shaping knowledge production. We emphasize an approach that remains critically attentive to the power structures shaping our own knowledge-making practices. Our panel explores how scholarly work can serve as a practice of resistance, subversion, solidarity, and transformation - both within and beyond institutional settings. This strengthens and unites our collectives to ultimately: resist and dismantle the coloniality of internet infrastructure.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has prompted countries worldwide to craft policies and regulations that capture both the promise and peril of this transformative technology. While resource-rich nations and private-sector giants have been at the forefront of AI governance debates, many countries in the Global South are now joining the regulatory race. Indonesia offers a particularly instructive case. The country introduced a National AI Strategy in 2020 and a circular letter on AI Ethics in 2023, and is currently drafting a presidential regulation on AI governance. However, these efforts unfold amid mounting concerns that the country’s digital policies may be drifting toward authoritarian tendencies, raising questions about whose interests AI regulation ultimately serves.

This study presents findings from a multi-sited ethnographic study examining the policy-making process behind Indonesia’s emerging AI regulations. By tracing how various policy actors, such as government officials, industry representatives, civil society organizations, think tanks, and academia, imagine AI, the research reveals how historical precedents, contemporary power structures, and global policy discourses shape the country’s AI governance. The study underscores that Indonesia’s AI policy is neither a straightforward adoption of Global North models nor a purely local affair. Instead, it reflects a dynamic interplay of political, economic, and technological interests that echo the country’s long-standing tradition of using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to project visions of modernity and consolidate elite power.

This paper highlights the discrepancy between the high hopes of a digitally transformed society, expressed for example in political policy documents and business plans of tech companies, and the sometimes rather hesitant experiences and realities in the everyday life of ordinary people. These ambiguities are also expressed in the news media, and we will, through text analysis, discuss this ambiguity expressed in the news section vis-à-vis the cultural section in Swedish newspapers.

Thus, this paper examines the importance of “the widespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy” (boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 663). We focus on the Swedish context, a relevant case as it is a country with an ambition to be at the forefront of the digital transformation and with a long history of “datafying” its citizens through the welfare systems and bureaucracy.

Based on a distant reading of selected national news media, this paper will first examine how discourses about digitalization and digital transformation have evolved during a period from the early 2000s to today. Second, we will examine through close reading (discourse analysis) of selected news articles, from selected time periods, how the content of these discourses has changed, and the role of various actors in society in constructing, maintaining and challenging these discourses.

The structural transformations at the turn of the century, intensified by digital economies, have reshaped labor, making precariousness a persistent rather than transitional condition. The decline of stable employment in favor of flexible work has led to existential insecurity, affecting workers’ mental health and social identities. Amid this backdrop, digital platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have become key spaces where work-related narratives are contested, negotiated, and redefined.

This research investigates how digital practices on these platforms contribute to shaping representations of labor, oscillating between rupture with traditional models and continuity with neoliberal ethics. Using digital ethnography, visual analysis and computational methods, the study examines mainstream media narratives, Instagram meme discourse, and TikTok content. Discourse and topic analyses of Italian newspaper posts highlight how mainstream narratives reinforce neoliberal ideals, portraying younger generations as unwilling to work. Conversely, meme culture on Instagram deploys irony and satire to challenge productivity rhetoric, exposing the contradictions of precarious work.As Instagram, also TikTok offers a broad perspective on labor discourse, encompassing both narratives: one that reinforces entrepreneurial self-optimization and another that, through humor and storytelling, challenges hustle culture and mainstream work ideals. These platforms provide spaces for alternative labor imaginaries, where irony, cynicism, and satire function as tools of resistance against hegemonic work discourses. By amplifying marginalized voices, Instagram and TikTok facilitate a critical engagement with labor, productivity, and economic value, offering a window into emerging cultural sentiments that disrupt the dominant neoliberal work ethic.

This presentation examines an original dataset of genAI images of fat and disabled people and consequently argues that GenAI images can be understood as part of the social and political infrastructure that upholds what Rosemarie Garland-Thompson calls “the normate,” the ideal subject form upon which a given society is designed to privilege and for all subjects to desire to emulate. Like the GenAI images explored here, the normate is ideal with real material and social impacts, yet, it is distinct from embodied reality.

From the patterns identified in the dataset, we see mechanisms of refusal to display different aspects of the prompts in relation to fatness and disability. The results help to enrich current understandings of genAI’s biases in an intersectional manner, that is, by examining the compounding impacts of various identity categories on representation.

Drawing on the validity of disabled and fat knowledge, the second part of the paper questions what it means to be disabled or fat in the age of AI, and how GenAI images mediate the social realities of disabled and fat people. In response, this presentation constructs and utilizes the analytic of ‘cripfat technoscience’ to focus on how genAI images uphold a certain notion of normalcy, with emphasis on what these platforms refuse to show. We then draw from disability and fat justice to pose questions about resistance and data solidarity in the face of genAI’s growing omnipresence, centered around refusal on our terms.

Subscription platforms like Patreon or OnlyFans, fundraising platforms like Kickstarter, or donation tools built into video platforms like Twitch or Stripchat reconfigure the relationship between creators, audiences, and platforms. While research has highlighted the impact of new monetization opportunities for creators and fans, the role of the platform has received comparatively less attention and is hindered by a lack of shared terminology, comparative research, and the bracketing off of adult content platforms. We present an integrative framework for conceptualizing monetization on digital platforms, connecting anthropology’s veteran concept of transactional orders to more recent work on platformization. We developed the transactional orders framework through an in-depth investigation of livestreaming and camming platforms. We surveyed the literature to identify relevant features, policies, and concepts related to monetization and conducted empirical research on three livestreaming and three camming platforms to develop platform-agnostic concepts and definitions. The transactional orders framework consists of payment paths, or mechanisms that facilitate the transmission of value between users, and measures of value, or commensurable representations of worth on the platform. We identified three primary payment paths (donations, subscriptions, and purchases) and three primary measures of value (tokens, social metrics, and rankings), as well as seven attributes to assess each component. We illustrate the value of the framework through a discussion of donation mechanisms across platforms.

on the concept of lifelong learning, we examine Aca-fan communities to explore the potential impact of fandom participation on the development and production of formal knowledge. To address this question, we will conduct a bibliographic review, administer surveys, and facilitate focus groups. Our research question is: Can fandoms support formal learning? Ultimately, we aim to understand whether engaging with these communities can foster professional, technical, and/or academic learning.

During the hotly contested 2022 Brazilian presidential elections between Workers' Party candidate Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and Liberal Party candidate Jair Messias Bolsonaro, singer Anitta - one of Brazil's biggest pop singers - declared her support for Lula on her X and Instagram profiles, causing a huge backlash not only among her 60 million followers and fans but also among institutional political actors

This paper is part of a broader research initiative focused on the intersection of Brazilian pop-peripheral music, politics, and activism. Utilizing the frameworks of performance dramaturgy (Taylor, 2013; Schechner, 2009) and the cartography of controversies (Latour, 2015), we center our analysis on Anitta's endorsement to explore the dynamics of political performances and activism by Brazilian pop-peripheral artists (Pereira de Sá, 2021) on digital platforms.

The paper aims to address two interconnected questions: 1. How is a political performance constructed by pop artists on digital platforms? 2. How do fans react, and how effective is this performance in promoting civic engagement?

We will present empirical data gathered from digital platforms, including a collection and filtering of tweets from Anitta's profile on X, along with replies and shares from July 11 to 17, 2022. Additionally, we will analyze tweets associated with hashtags such as #lula and #luladay. Further insights will be drawn from a questionnaire distributed to Anitta's fans between November and December 2022, assessing her political stance and its repercussions on digital platforms.

Fan Studies as an academic field has been significantly shaped by american researchers like Henry Jenkins (1992, 2006a, 2006b), who conceptualized fans as active participants who engage with media texts through creative production. Since its beginning, the internet has become central to Fan Studies, marking what Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington (2007) call the “second wave” of research, with a focus on social media and digital fan practices.

In Brazil, Fan Studies emerged in 2002 and aligned with the international references. Morover, Cyberculture scholars were among the few willing to support and metor such studies. Due to this historical context, Brazilian research on fandoms has largely prioritized internet-based interactions, reflecting a bias that overlooks offline fan practices. This focus is evident in literature reviews (Carlos, 2015; Amado, 2020) that highlight digital culture as a dominant theme.

While the internet is crucial for contemporary fandoms, this emphasis may marginalize underrepresented fan groups. Internet access in Brazil expanded from 8% in 2002 to nearly 85% in 2024 (Laboissière, 2024), yet disparities in broadband quality and digital literacy persist (Knop, 2020). Consequently, digital Fan Studies risk favoring privileged demographics while neglecting fans from rural areas, lower-income communities, and older age groups.

Scholars like Costa (2018) argue for a national theoretical framework to address these gaps. This article calls for a broader, more inclusive approach to Brazilian Fan Studies, recognizing the impact of internet-centrism and advocating for methodologies that reflect the country’s diverse fan cultures.

The future of academic publishing is at a crossroads, shaped by rapid technological advancements, evolving scholarly practices, and demands for transparency, equity, participation, and accessibility..With so many journals and new ways of scholarly publishing popping up all the time, begging for submissions and reviews, how do we navigate academic publishing as a community?

This fishbowl discussion will explore key issues such as access to knowledge, the role of peer review, and equity in publishing, inviting participants to engage in a dynamic and inclusive dialogue. The fishbowl format will begin with participation from journal editors, including Steve Jones (New Media and Society, Mobile Media & Communication), Zizi Papacharissi (Social Media & Society, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media), Jeffrey Boase (Mobile Media & Communication), Adriana de Souza e Silva (Mobile Media & Communication), Lee Humphreys, (Journal of Computer Mediated Communication), Scott Campbell (Journal of Computer Mediated Communication), David Gunkel (International Journal of Zizek Studies, communication +1) and Zachary McDowell (communication +1), amongst others, to lead and foster a collaborative exploration of these critical topics.

We intend to bring a critical dialogue around how to ensure successful scholarly publishing amongst the rapid changes and new systems that continue to shape how we participate in this community. We will discuss issues around the time investment for peer review, concerns about copyright and Open Access, as well as knowledge accessibility and equity for our colleagues across the world.

We will pose and field questions that will prompt reflection on how to maintain rigor while adapting to the needs of a rapidly changing scholarly landscape. This fishbowl will allow members to discuss current and future concerns as well as ask questions of journal editors, join in a conversation about these and other topics, and encourage strong scholarship and dissemination of knowledge.

Latin America features diverse cultures, landscapes, life experiences, and ethnicities, shaped by socioeconomic inequalities and ongoing political turbulence. These structural disparities extend to the digital sphere, shaping the opportunities and challenges faced by content creators in the region. The promise of fame, financial success, and global visibility celebrated in Western content creation is often unfulfilled in other regions. Instead, Latin American creators must navigate layers of discrimination and (in)visibility, stemming from linguistic, geographic, and identity-based vulnerabilities, while also contending with algorithmic systems that privilege certain types of content.

Despite the global expansion of influencer and creator industries, research on creators outside the West remains scarce (Abidin & Brown, 2019; Poell et al., 2024). This panel seeks to address this gap by focusing on Latin America’s diverse creator landscape and platform dynamics. Given its high penetration in the region, TikTok provides an ideal lens to examine these challenges. By 2025, TikTok is projected to reach 173 million users in Latin America (Bianchi, 2022), making it a dominant force in the region’s digital ecosystem. Unlike earlier platforms, TikTok’s algorithm-driven discovery system (Abidin, 2021) enables creators to reach new audiences beyond their immediate networks. Additionally, short vertical videos have become central to entertainment, music industries (Anonymized), and news consumption (Mulier et al., 2021; Newman et al., 2024). This has led to the broader “TikTokification” of social media where competing platforms such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have adopted similar algorithmic structures, interfaces, and affordances to mimic TikTok’s engagement-driven model (Agile Brand Guide, 2024).

This panel draws from the findings of the Latin American Cultures on TikTok report (Anonymized), examining the evolving landscape of content creation in the region. Panelists will explore the shifting landscape for Latin American creators, addressing (1) the opportunities and challenges they face in the digital economy, (2) the monetization and visibility barriers shaping their sustainability, and (3) the complex interplay between their politics, subcultures, and the region’s rapidly expanding influencer industry. Bringing together scholars specializing in creator economies, platform governance, and digital cultures, each paper features researchers from across Latin America with deep-rooted experience in the region’s social, economic, and cultural contexts —from MA students and PhD candidates to assistant and associate professors.

Setting the foundation for the panel’s broader discussion, the first paper presents a research agenda for studying Latin American creators on TikTok, focusing on governance, (de)monetization, and visibility divides. It examines how platform regulations, economic barriers, and algorithmic inequalities shape the region’s creator economy, revealing how TikTok privileges certain content and geographies while marginalizing others. By mapping the structural constraints that Latin American creators face, this paper establishes a critical framework for understanding the tensions between platform governance and local creative industries.

Shifting towards local creator cultures, the second paper examines the so-called "Chilenazo" phenomenon —the return of Chilean creators to their homeland, navigating exclusion from global creator culture, after struggling to compete in the Mexican creator industry. It explores how platform nationalism (competition between U.S. and Chinese platforms), and cultural imaginaries shape creators’ professional aspirations, mobilities, and their perception of Chile as a site of creative and economic limitation.

Continuing the theme of resistance, the third paper explores the contested identities of Latin American creators in Peru, analyzing how Peruvian activists repurposed TikTok’s affordances during the 2022-2023 political crisis. Drawing on the framework of everyday politics, it examines how creators strategically leveraged TikTok’s affordances to circumvent censorship, counter state narratives, and document human rights violations. This paper illustrates how TikTok, designed for entertainment, was transformed into a grassroots political tool, where digital creativity became an instrument of local defiance.

The fourth paper shifts focus to activism and community-building, exploring the Brazilian TikTok subculture of prisoners’ wives (#MulherDePreso). It examines how women in relationships with incarcerated men in Brazil use TikTok to construct digital support networks, share survival strategies, and navigate the bureaucratic complexities of incarceration. Through hashtag activism and digital storytelling, this subculture reclaims visibility for an often-overlooked demographic, demonstrating how TikTok facilitates alternative forms of advocacy and solidarity beyond traditional activist spaces.

The fifth analyzes how young Brazilian TikTokers remix, adapt, and localize global music hits on the platform. It explores how platform aesthetics and algorithmic virality fuel new forms of digital nostalgia, and cultural remixing subcultures, transcending time and location through dance trends. Rather than simply reviving old songs, these adaptations reflect a distinctly Brazilian approach to musical reinterpretation, illustrating how local creative cultures interact with and reshape globalized digital content.

Together, these papers examine how Latin American creators engage with TikTok —as entrepreneurs, activists, or subcultural participants. By highlighting the region’s dynamic creator ecosystem, we aim to provide a nuanced understanding of how local cultures both influence and are influenced by global platforms, shaping visibility, agency, and creative expression while reflecting the richness and diversity of Latin American experiences.

Wikipedia is a widely accessed and trusted source of political information, shaping public perceptions and electoral outcomes. Its open-editing model, while enabling broad participation, also raises concerns about strategic modifications to politicians’ pages, particularly before elections. This study examines how and when Wikipedia pages about U.S. legislators are edited in the lead-up to elections, comparing patterns across English and Spanish editions.

Prior research has documented cases where political staffers and affiliates edit Wikipedia pages to present candidates favorably. However, the extent, timing, and impact of such edits—especially in multilingual contexts—remain underexplored. This study analyzes nearly two decades of Wikipedia revisions, election-related article snapshots, and page traffic data to assess whether editing patterns reflect strategic efforts to influence voter perceptions. It investigates spikes in activity, the types of edits made, and the role of political context, such as race competitiveness and constituency demographics, in shaping editorial behavior.

By shedding light on how political Wikipedia pages evolve around elections, this research contributes to discussions on digital governance, transparency, and the reliability of online political information. Given Wikipedia’s role in AI training, search engine rankings, and misinformation detection, understanding these editorial dynamics is essential for maintaining the integrity of public knowledge in democratic societies.

This article examines the use of "cheapfakes" in Brazil, emphasizing how these low-tech manipulations of images and videos extend beyond misinformation to ridicule political figures and discredit opponents. Unlike deepfakes, which involve AI-generated forgeries, cheapfakes rely on simpler edits like speed changes, cropping, and recontextualization. The hypothesis is that, while manipulated visuals have historically been used to spread disinformation, they are also increasingly employed to ridicule political figures, amplify engagement, or discredit real images. This research analyzes cheapfakes and deepfakes on X (formerly Twitter) during President Lula’s hospitalization for surgery, based on an initial collection of 19,700 posts published on the topic on X between December 10 and 14, 2024. The event triggered widespread manipulation, including fake images of the president with a head bandage and altered videos portraying him in absurd situations. Real footage was also dismissed as "fake" to sustain conspiracy theories. The study examines three dimensions: (a) Cheapfakes as memes—mocking rather than deceiving; (b) Cheapfakes as disinformation—misleading the public; and (c) Cheapfakes as conspiracy tools—reinforcing claims like Lula having a body double. This research highlights how cheapfakes shape digital political engagement.

Misinformation has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Despite growing alarm, the nature and origins of misinformation remain subject of intense academic debate. While early research attributed its rise to a general decline in the quality of information resulting from the emergence of digital media, more recent work instead points to the central role played by political elites – who strategically spread and employ misinformation for political gains. Yet, despite increasing recognition of the entanglement between misinformation and party politics, empirical research on when and why political elites engage in misinformation campaigns remains scarce.

This paper takes a comparative politics approach to misinformation by analyzing an unprecedented global database of political party communications across 224 countries, 3600 parties, and five major social media platforms—Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. The study employs large language models for misinformation detection and integrates findings with established country- and party-level datasets such as V-Dem, ParlGov, and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. Using multilevel modeling, the paper examines how party characteristics, country-level factors, and platform-specific affordances influence the spread of misinformation.

The study addresses four key research questions: (1) How do party characteristics shape misinformation dissemination? (2) How do country-level factors influence misinformation prevalence? (3) How do platform architectures affect misinformation visibility? (4) How do interactions between party, country, and platform dynamics shape broader misinformation trends? The findings provide new insights into the political drivers of misinformation and the role of digital platforms in the post-truth era.

This study examines how citizens engage with fact-checked content provided by fact-checking agencies. Specifically, it focuses on fact-checks conducted by the Lupa agency regarding the debates held during the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. Lupa is one of the first fact-checking agencies in Brazil. Founded in 2015, it is a member of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a global organization affiliated with the Poynter Institute in the United States.

Comments from three fact-checking posts were collected from the agency’s official Instagram profile. In total, 1,222 comments from posts analyzing the debates broadcast by SBT, Band, and Globo were examined. A textual analysis was conducted using the Iramuteq software, employing similarity analysis, Reinert classification and word cloud generation.

The findings indicate that discussions in the comment section leverage candidates’ statements and their fact-checks to debate issues that extend beyond the content published. Additionally, users criticize Lupa’s fact-checking process, highlighting areas that should be improved in the verification and dissemination of information. Some comments also reference the labels used by the agency to classify content. As the analyses reveal, commenters frequently question and challenge these labels used to determine the truthfulness of statements.

In the next phase of the research, a categorical content analysis will be conducted to gain a more detailed understanding of user interactions.

This article discusses female participation in the culture of digital games, an environment still dominated by men, a determining factor in the exclusion and harassment of female audiences. We seek to understand female mobilization to remain in the gamer community as a practice of sociability and a way of tensioning its misogynistic structures. In addition to assuming a neutral pseudonym, through nicknames, many women look for representative groups or communities to form teams or even to build their online friendship network. Given this scenario, we carried out a virtual ethnography in a closed community of female gamers on the social network Facebook. The objective was to understand their experiences in a space considered safe and welcoming.

This paper explores the intersection of creative labour, platformisation, and masculinity among game livestreamers in Vietnam—Southeast Asia’s second-largest gaming market, yet an underexamined region in game studies. While research on Western game streaming often highlights hegemonic, toxic, and misogynistic masculinities, the ways in which Vietnamese streamers negotiate gender identity and digital labour remain understudied. This study examines how Vietnamese game livestreamers engage in affective labour—a concept traditionally associated with “feminine” work whose labour turns passions into careers—yet plays a crucial role in parasocial intimacy, humour, and audience connection within “masculine” gaming cultures. By approaching the gendered labour of Vietnamese game streamers, the research investigates how global platform logics intersect with local cultural norms and informal economies, shaping their performances and work practices. Drawing on digital ethnographic methods, preliminary observations suggest that Vietnamese game streamers often interact with audiences in an unscripted and informal manner from their domestic spaces. Their performances challenge conventional norms of masculinity and gendered divisions of work. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to the growing body of literature on digital labour, platform studies, and gender studies by offering an underexamined Southeast Asian perspective. With the intersection of masculinity and affective labour, the study extends existing research to a more inclusive understanding of digital labour practices. The research also provides crucial insights into how content creators navigate the intersections of global digital culture and local cultural norms, by centring Vietnamese game streamers.

Imagine a scenario in which players engage in conversations with non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games using a microphone, free from scripted responses or predefined constraints. With the advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), this possibility has become more feasible than ever. This article examines the Mantella mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011), which facilitates natural language interactions with NPCs, transforming player engagement within the game’s fictional universe. Skyrim is an action role-playing game (RPG) developed by Bethesda Game Studios. With over 60 million copies sold and releases spanning three generations of gaming consoles, Skyrim has cemented its place in gaming history. A significant factor contributing to its enduring relevance is its vibrant modding community, which has enabled players to modify and expand the game in myriad ways – ranging from graphical enhancements to the introduction of new areas and survival mechanics. This extensive capacity for customization has sustained the game’s popularity for over a decade since its initial release. The primary objective of this article is to investigate the creative appropriation of GAI by Skyrim's PC modding community. Specifically, it addresses the following question: What AI imaginaries emerge from Skyrim gameplay influenced by the Mantella mod? To explore this question, 13 YouTube videos were collected using ethnographic techniques, complemented by a formal gameplay analysis.

Online gaming platforms constitute unique field sites for researching different themes related to digital youth culture such as play, learning, socialization, and consumption. However, they pose methodological challenges for sociocultural digital media research. This paper introduces the play-along method, inspired by the 'media go-along', “scroll back” and 'app walkthrough' techniques, which involves the informant logging onto and playing a game in the presence of the researcher while they engage in a discussion about aspects of the game that unfold on the screen. By observing and participating in gameplay, researchers gain insights into player agency, game mechanics, and consumption practices within virtual worlds. Carried out across three research projects involving 60 young informants aged 10-24, the method offers several advantages: immersion in the gaming context, and a flexible, informal interview setting. It provides a unique opportunity to observe real-time interactions, digital purchases, relevance of devices, affordances and design, and relational dynamics. However, the method also presents challenges, such as gameplay interference, parental restrictions, and technical issues. Ethical considerations include maintaining the privacy of third parties and managing the blurred boundaries between the informant's private and research contexts. Despite these challenges, the play-along method represents a significant methodological advancement for studying virtual worlds. It underscores the need for child-centered approaches that acknowledge the relationalities between players and digital infrastructures, and map unexplored digital terrain in video games. The method's participatory nature positions informants as experts in their own lives, providing rich, authentic insights into the commercial and social dimensions of online gaming.

Since its inception, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) has fostered critical reflection on the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and Internet-facilitated communication and interactions. The AoIR Ethics Working Committee has been committed to ensuring the AoIR Ethics Guidelines remain helpful and relevant to researchers and ethical review committees; our goal is to support ethical decision-making in internet research by keeping the guidelines responsive to emerging technologies, evolving research practices, and the diverse needs of scholarly and practitioner communities. This panel includes five papers that engage in “AoIR Ethics in Action” – demonstrating how the AoIR Ethics Guidelines and their core principles are applied, interpreted, and shaped across diverse, global contexts. The presentations explore internet researchers’ preparedness and design-making processes related to the ethics of their work; how the emerging regulatory frameworks in the U.S. and Sweden illuminate evolving challenges in research ethics; and examine how the guidelines can inform ethical decision-making in specific cases, such as web scraping and the use of Wikipedia data.

RESEARCH ETHICS PRACTICES & PREPAREDNESS: A STUDY OF AOIR & ICA

This paper reports on survey results from internet researchers in AoIR and ICA to assess their engagement with ethical guidelines and preparedness for handling ethical dilemmas in digital data collection. The findings indicate potential gaps in ethical preparedness and training, emphasizing the need for updated AoIR Ethics Guidelines and stronger institutional support for researchers dealing with pervasive data

ETHICAL CHALLENGES IN PERVASIVE DATA RESEARCH: STAKEHOLDER PERSPECTIVES AND PATHS FORWARD

This report analyzes responses to a U.S. NTIA Request for Comment on ethical guidelines for pervasive data research, identifying core tensions such as legal/definitional ambiguities, anonymization limitations, and the challenge of balancing ethical principles when performing research with large-scale datasets. It argues that researchers and civil society must proactively strengthen ethical research practices in the absence of clear government guidelines.

ETHICS IN TRANSITION: ADAPTING RESEARCH GOVERNANCE TO A PROPOSED NEW NEW LEGAL FRAMEWORK IN SWEDEN

This contribution examines Sweden’s shift toward decentralized research ethics governance under a proposed legal reform, which will transfer responsibility for ethical review from national boards to individual institutions. It explores tensions between standardized regulations and local adaptations, highlighting potential risks such as institutional disparities and legal uncertainties for interdisciplinary digital research.

WHEN IS SCRAPING LEGITIMATE? ETHICAL, LEGAL, ADMINISTRATIVE, AND TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS

This white paper presents a comprehensive framework for web scraping in social science research, examining the legal, ethical, institutional, and scientific factors that researchers must consider when scraping the web. It presents an overview of the current regulatory environment impacting when and how researchers can access, collect, store, and share data via scraping, offering researchers guidance on best practices to balance data access with responsible research ethics.

RESEARCH AND PRIVACY ON WIKIPEDIA

This white paper examines the ethical and privacy challenges of conducting research on Wikipedia, emphasizing concerns about re-identification, user anonymity, and community expectations. It proposes best practices for researchers and Wikipedia users to help navigate ethical tensions while ensuring transparency, user safety, and adherence to privacy norms.

Together, these papers illustrate the ongoing relevance of the AoIR Ethics Guidelines in navigating the complex ethical, legal, and regulatory landscape of internet research.

This study examines the quality of generative and collaborative AI for fictional prose in Japanese. We rolled out an experiment followed by focus groups to elicit responses to 25 texts with the second half randomly presenting the original text, zero-shot-AI-generated text, AI-generated with prompt specification, and human-AI collaboration using multiple-shot and prompt specification. We found that human-AI collaboration had the highest perceived quality, followed by the original text, AI-generated with prompt specification, and finally zero-shot AI-generated content. While participants mentioned the relative absence of originality in human-AI-collaboration, this content was deemed more human-like than the original text due to the polished editing and selection resulting from inputting drafts, adding or replacing nouns, and rearranging sentences and dialogues. The results presented in this study offer a positive outlook on the use of Generative AI for creative writing, but they also highlight the limitations of these tools for developing highly original literary work.

This paper addresses the role of copyright in governing how generative AI replicates artistic style. Style is considered to be somewhat intangible and unfixed and is not typically protected by copyright law. Yet, a key affordance of generative AI the ability to create works ‘in the style of’ other works. The legal, creator and industry implications of copying style through generative AI have not yet been the focus of critical analysis or platform governance research. Instead, legal and scholarly attention has tended to focus on the implications of coping works to train generative AI models and rights over their outputs. In this paper, using a media industries studies approach, we analyze how the music industries’ history of driving copyright expansion may shape generative AI governance across the cultural industries of the future. We offer provocations to encourage dialogues between creators, industry, and critical researchers that historicize debates about copyright and technology, expose the limitations of past approaches to govern copyright on digital platforms, and point to specific institutional dynamics in the music and cultural industries that will influence the development of AI governance regimes.

This paper investigates the discursive strategies employed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, to position themselves as leading the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Through an examination of 44 texts, including OpenAI's corporate communications, media appearances, and journalistic coverage, this study reveals how OpenAI utilizes socio-political anxieties and Silicon Valley ideals to shape a discourse of inevitability about AGI's future. OpenAI's discourse centers on four key areas: national security concerns, the juxtaposition of "freedom" and "openness" against the threat of superintelligence, the company's shift from non-profit to commercial entity, and the promotion of AI as a solution to global problems. By strategically invoking these themes, OpenAI establishes itself as a "technological solution."

The company's rhetoric emphasizes the need for regulation, while simultaneously positioning itself as the authority on AI governance. OpenAI's calls for democratic oversight are often coupled with warnings about the dangers of unchecked AI development, reinforcing the company's role as a responsible actor in the tech sector. Ultimately, OpenAI's discursive strategies serve to define the future of AI in a way that aligns with the company's interests. By framing AGI as both inevitable and potentially dangerous, OpenAI creates a narrative that justifies its own pursuit of power against the global diffusion of AGI.

This paper builds on scholarship addressing the invisible labor of online workers from the Global South (Casilli, 2025) by shifting focus to the offline, behind-the-scenes infrastructuring that sustains virtual assistant (VA) work. Virtual assistants provide long-term, informal digital labor, predominantly serving Global North clients, yet their work remains precarious and embedded within household dynamics. We examine the Philippines, a key supplier of digital labor, through in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork across Manila, Cavite, Cebu, and Iligan.

Our study identifies three forms of infrastructuring—material, spatial/temporal, and behavioral—that virtual assistants and their families undertake to meet the demands of continuous online work. Material infrastructuring involves mitigating unreliable infrastructures, such as securing multiple internet connections or relocating for better connectivity. Spatial and temporal infrastructuring reorganizes household rhythms to accommodate graveyard shifts, blurring lines between productive and reproductive labor. Behavioral infrastructuring reshapes daily life through altered sleep patterns, enforced quiet hours, and the redistribution of caregiving responsibilities.

We contribute to debates on digital labor by framing VA work as an “invisible back support” that fuses gendered care labor with client-driven flexibility, reinforcing the Global North-South labor divide. This paper responds to calls for feminist analyses of online work, foregrounding how VA labor subsidizes global capital through unpaid domestic labor. Ultimately, we reveal how the infrastructuring of virtual assistance sustains modern digital economies while deepening inequalities, situating Filipino VA work within a broader history of transnational care labor (Parreñas, 2015; Mezzadri, 2020).

Infrastructures are path dependent. The evolution of the internet at present rely on previously installed historical and analog infrastructures, including highways (Saxenian 1996) and telecommunication lines (Ensmenger 2008). However, the experiences of immigrant communities show that labor pools are also human infrastructures required for the expansion of tech companies (Nakamura 2014, Hossfield 2019, Cowie 2001). Visa restrictions, which operate as a mechanism of racial capitalism (Kelley 2017, Melamed 2015), create an additional layer of path dependency, since migration patterns initially were restricted to highly educated Asians, then later allowed lower-class relatives to migrate on family reunification visas. As part of a larger dissertation project tracing the experience of entrepreneurial identity and migration, this essay examines the overlap between technical and cultural path dependencies to tell the story of one Asian-American diaspora. This project examines the role of one ethno-linguistic network in the domestic manufacturing space – Gujarati-Indians in New Jersey who owned, operated, or worked in electronics factories. Surfacing lessons learned from the legacies of globalization and deindustrialization through immigrant experiences, this project emphasizes the unique cultural relationships built through both professional and working class technical labors among Gujaratis. I argue recounting a near history of immigrant technical work forces us to ask new questions about how the social reproduction of diasporic enclaves is necessary to produce technical laborers in the United States.

This paper proposes an analytical shift from digital infrastructures to digital borderlands to account for the transformations introduced by generative AI. While digital infrastructures have been central to platformization, generative AI systems do not merely extend these structures but reconfigure and traverse them in ways that may destabilize their original logics. We argue that generative AI functions as a boundary object (Star, 1988, 2010), moving across socio-technical domains with interpretative flexibility while remaining anchored in infrastructural constraints. This mobility enables its integration into diverse fields—creative industries, governance, automation—where its meaning and practical implications are continually renegotiated. To analyze these dynamics, we expand on Fornäs et al. (2003) to propose digital borderlands as a conceptual framework. Unlike infrastructures, which emphasize stability and control, borderlands capture the fluid, contested, and reassembled nature of AI diffusion. Digital borderlands foreground the epistemic and infrastructural frictions emerging from generative AI’s movement across legal, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries, producing new governance challenges and socio-technical realignments. By shifting focus from platform control to the negotiation and contestation of AI, this framework provides a critical lens to understand how generative AI not only embeds itself in digital landscapes but also actively reshapes them.

This paper examines the case of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)—cars integrating “smart” digital components—to explore how “cloudification” has emerged as a key infrastructural transformation in the industrialization of AI. CAVs illustrate the “industrialization” of AI as it moves beyond specialized applications to acquire infrastructural characteristics across multiple industries. The paper builds upon insights from three fields: platform studies, science and technology studies (STS), and innovation studies. We conducted a large-scale analysis of patents related to CAVs, using both topic modelling and a large language model to inductively identify and explore patterns in a vast material. The mixed-methods analysis of patent documents enables us to understand both the strategies and imaginaries of cloudification in CAV technology and innovation discourse. The paper offers evidence of the cloudification of the automotive sector across two levels. First, on a high-level, we offer a mapping of this evolving ecosystem, identifying key connections between industry players, emerging cloud-based innovations, and the research hubs driving these developments. Second, on a granular level, the patents reveal distinct cloud business strategies among leading CAV firms, for example in how the cloud is enacted in practice. Ultimately, the paper contributes an in-depth analysis of the cloudification of CAVs, which exemplifies the broader industrialization of AI—an expansion of computational infrastructures that extends beyond traditional technology sectors to transform mobility and global economies.

This paper examines how the Russian state, following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, accelerated coercive controls over internet infrastructure through the rapid deployment of Technical Measures to Combat Threats (TSPU). Building on Maxigas and ten Oever’s (2023) framework of infrastructural ideologies, the study introduces infrastructural coercion as a crisis-driven strategy, contrasting it with hegemonic models reliant on tacit compliance. The research combines analysis of legislative texts with an examination of sessions from the Conference of Russian Telecom Operators (КРОС, 2018–2024). Findings reveal operators’ strategies to mitigate coercive measures: exploiting legal ambiguities (e.g., license reclassification), adopting phased DPI implementation, and leveraging sanctions-driven import substitution. KROS discourse shifted markedly—from openly mocking “unworkable” laws in 2018 to framing post-2022 challenges as “temporary difficulties” within an optimistic techno-nationalist trajectory.

The study challenges state-centric narratives of digital sovereignty by centering infrastructural actors’ agency. It demonstrates that tools like DPI are neither neutral nor inevitable: their adoption reflects ideological priorities, while material constraints expose fissures in state control. Russia’s case illustrates that “great firewalls” can emerge rapidly using existing technologies. By foregrounding implementers’ negotiations, this research advances scholarship on infrastructural governance and the political valence of technical systems.

Biometric cash transfers are becoming ubiquitous in the aid sector driven by donor demands for audit and cost efficiencies and as humanitarian organisations turn to technological solutions to address complex logistical challenges. What is often overlooked is the perspective of refugees themselves. Drawing on a mixed-methods study including 80 interviews and participatory action research, our paper examines biometric cash transfers as exemplars of digital identity systems from the point of view of Karen refugees in Mae La camp in Thailand. Focusing on the introduction of an aid distribution system based on face recognition, our findings reveal that while digital identity programmes offer some advantages, there are significant concerns with their implementation. The new system raises both practical and ethical concerns, such as reduced rations, systematic errors, and power asymmetries. This paper argues that digital identity is not simply a form of identity provided in digital format: the conversion of human beings into data has significant consequences for recognition, dignity, privacy and freedom.

This paper explores the unintended consequences of content takedowns. It focuses on the hardening of extremist positions in alternative online spaces as a reaction to perceived persecution from “Big Tech”. It begins by addressing how counterterrorism responsibilities and profit motives combine to determine how content is typically classified as ‘extreme’ on mainstream social media platforms: that is, the basis for applying takedown policies. It contends, via Chantal Mouffe, that rather than erasing or weakening extremist discourse, the intervention(s) of content takedowns can accelerate antagonistic(/polarizing) relations of confrontation and, in doing so, accelerate the very threat of extremism that takedowns portend to erase.

To explore this dynamic, our paper focuses on the case of the high-profile Australian wellness influencer and celebrity chef, Pete Evans, whose extremist discourse and positioning became entrenched following content takedown and de-platforming policies as applied to his accounts on mainstream social media platforms. We find that in this case, content takedowns effectively diminished spaces for robust debate in which contending perspectives are argued, reducing the possibility of agonistic relations in which there is mutual acknowledgement of the right to possess opposing or 'alternative' views. The paper concludes that content takedowns can, in some cases, be seen as exercises in regulatory self-harm and may incentivise the migration of extreme communities to alternative social media where content moderation is, typically, much looser and the formation of extremist identities can accelerate. Thinking with Mouffe, we observe how content takedowns may incentivise counter-hegemonic articulations of resistance, strengthening an “us versus them”

On December 4th, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare was killed in New York City. The shooting quickly galvanized public critiques of the American healthcare system. Our proposal focuses upon user-generated content featuring Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect, arrested days later. Indeed, the lionization of Mangione across popular social media platforms signalled social rupture of internet practices, of generational allegiances, and of class consciousness. We address the multiple meanings attributed to Mangione’s act and explore the extent to which the case marks complex cultural and political realignments. We use mixed methods to analyze all available posts and comments linked to the Mangione case that emerged on TikTok immediately following the shooting. With attention to platform affordances and online subcultural practices, we explore content that is political, transgressive and ambiguous at once. We draw upon a variety of sources to theorize and update our understanding of the tactics of resistance available to the dispossessed, drawing on cultural historian James Scott’s notion of “weapons of the weak” and exploring it in relation to recent studies of political communication on TikTok. As a final line of questioning regarding social rupture, we examine the often-contradictory objectives of users and the social media monopolies that manage platforms.

This study explores the emerging "Internet Toilet" subculture in China, the vitriolic online communities dominated by marginalized young women, known as "Toilet-Girls," who anonymously express frustrations and attack others' appearances, behaviors, or societal norms. Combining digital ethnography with 15 semi-structured interviews, the research examines three types of "Internet Toilets" (2D, 2.5D, and 3D), focusing on participants' offline marginalization, motivations, and emotional consequences.

The study introduces the framework of "emotional refuge" to conceptualize these spaces as politically ambivalent: they serve as both sanctuaries for expressing repressed emotions and tools for normalized aggression. "Internet Toilets" enable marginalized girls to negotiate their underprivileged position through emotional expression, creating an emotion-based collective. However, this collective is fragmented and often driven by emotional release rather than a coherent political agenda. The study argues that these subcultures are shaped by broader structural forces, including class inequality, gender discrimination, and social alienation, rather than merely individual emotional needs.

Ultimately, the research reveals the paradox of "Internet Toilets" as spaces where hostility is weaponized to cope with structural neglect, yet this coping mechanism reinforces cycles of harm. It calls for addressing systemic inequalities to create inclusive spaces for transformative resistance, emphasizing the need to move beyond hostility to foster constructive change.

As Reddit approaches its twentieth anniversary in 2025, it occupies a unique and relatively under-studied place in the online landscape. The ruptures of recent internet history are visible as geological fixtures through the persistence and growth of structures and communities on Reddit. Once the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet”, to the latest tagline encouraging users to “dive into anything”, Reddit has evolved from a news alert homepage to a complex content ecosystem of over 3.5 million communities, each with distinct cultures, governance structures and communicative practices. Perhaps for this reason, Reddit has been extensively scraped for AI training material, leading to unintended results, such as the now-famous glue on pizza suggestion (McMahon & Kleinman, 2024). Reddit’s infrastructure remains semi-open with a monetized API, which places some restrictions on research as well as scraping/crawling. Nor is all content directly human-generated, as bots play a central role both in the platform’s governance, administration of separate subreddits, and user interactions.

Reddit has recently seen all-time records in traffic and growth in research interest, particularly for studies of community dynamics, but in everything that has made the internet the internet, from fan groups to radicalization and back. Our panel celebrates the platform’s anniversary year and explores Reddit’s rising position as both subject and site of methodological, ethical, and political ruptures in internet research through five complementary papers.

The first paper provides a historical examination of Reddit’s evolution over two decades, from a single landing page to a vast network of communities. This perspective identifies key moments of rupture in Reddit’s development, particularly its decision to enable user-created communities in 2008 – a move that fundamentally transformed its architecture and governance. The paper analyzes how competing analogies for Reddit’s identity, such as “city-state” versus “convention center”, reflect ongoing tensions between community autonomy and corporate control. Recent decisions to monetize its API and licence user data for AI training have created new conflicts and controversies, yet Reddit’s distinctive architecture has allowed it to maintain forms of resistance not possible on more centralized platforms.

The second paper explores the ethical questions created by researching Reddit in what has become known as the post-API era. As platforms increasingly restrict access to user data, researchers face new challenges in collecting and analyzing social media content. This paper situates Reddit data collection within broader platform politics, arguing that researchers must shift from traditional ethical frameworks that have been shaped by corporate interests rather than user protection or desires. The paper calls for researchers to rise to the occasion, acting with utmost morality and looking to explicitly anti-capitalist modes of data ethics.

The third paper examines political communication on Reddit and works with the concept of ‘sedimented polarization’ -- a condition in which political fragmentation has become embedded in the platform’s architecture. Through mixed-methods analysis of political subreddits, this research identifies how Reddit’s structure shapes political discourses, with minimal cross-ideological interaction even on subreddits designed for diverse debate. Each political community develops distinctive communicative practices, information sources, and collective identities, often viewing other subreddits as antagonistic even when they share similar ideological orientations. This paper demonstrates how platform affordances, moderation practices, and user behaviors combine to create polarized environments.

The fourth paper builds on this analysis by exploring toxic masculine practices on Reddit through a novel methodological framework. It develops a power-centric approach to online radicalization, examining how Reddit’s architecture enables the formation of “parasitic publics" that exert discursive violence upon marginalized groups. By applying specific computational techniques to analyze interactional data from various subreddits, this paper shifts how we understand and study radicalization online. Rather than focusing on content alone, it examines the communicative practices and power dynamics that shape interactions between dominant and marginalized communities on the platform.

The fifth and final paper extends these investigations of community practices and ideological cleavages to a case study of fan communities, focusing on the ruptures and reformations in Taylor Swift related discussion on Reddit. The paper presents an adaptation of practice mapping, originally developed on X and Facebook data, to Reddit’s unique environment, capturing how users engage across multiple communities with varying norms. This research demonstrates how Reddit’s architecture enables both specialized community formation and complex cross-community practices, revealing patterns of engagement both invisible to traditional network analysis and made clearer by Reddit’s architecture itself.

By examining Reddit’s past, present and future, this panel contributes to our understanding of contemporary platform politics by highlighting how Reddit’s unique architecture has grown, reacting to and shaping ruptures in conventional platform evolution narratives. As the platform navigates competing pressures of commercialization, content moderation, and community autonomy, it continues to occupy a distinctive position in the online landscape – neither fully succumbing to corporate logics nor entirely resisting them.

Social media has become increasingly visually focused with the rise of visual-centric platforms like Instagram and TikTok, whose formats reshaped online aesthetics and user experience. In these mobile-first spaces, vertical short videos have become a dominant form of communication and constitute a transformative format of visual platforms, having redefined digital storytelling, content creation, and user interaction. The growing prominence of short videos has fostered a rich and expanding body of research; however, a universally accepted definition of “short videos” remains elusive, and terminology varies across studies. In particular, while research on visual communication has focused extensively on static images, there is a lack of conceptual work on moving images designed for mobile consumption, that is crucial for developing a tailored approach to analyze their multiple dimensions.

Drawing from format theory, social media studies, and visual communication, we develop a conceptual definition of short videos as a distinctive media format based on a comprehensive overview of their structural characteristics from a cross-platform perspective. We illustrate the technical infrastructure and audiovisual features of the format, including limited length and vertical display aligned with smartphone interfaces that foster fast, immersive video consumption; creative customization, auditory affordances, interactive features, cross-platform transitions, and the typical information conveyed. Moreover, we discuss how the interplay of these structural features fosters both collective and individual experiences, thereby shaping user meaning-making.

We conclude with methodological directions for future research, highlighting the need for tailored methods to examine the short video format and its multifaceted components.

The advent of short video platforms in China has heralded a new chapter for Neo-folk art—a contemporary aesthetic that melds folk utopia, pop culture, and propaganda. This paper explores Neo-folk art as a self-sustained system within the digital age, where it thrives independently thanks to the internet's pervasive influence. Neo-folk art remains a testament to the creative spirit originating from everyday life and transcending it.

This paper argues that the proliferation of short videos has brought rural and urban cultures into the wild limelight, showcasing a raw and untamed creativity. Traditional folk customs, beliefs, and arts, once confined to specific localities, are now experiencing a form of dissemination and transformation that molds them to fit new media formats. With examples ranging from Fujian's "You Shen" rituals evolving new deities, this study highlights the metamorphosis of folk artistry.

Moreover, local cultural and tourism bureaus have begun to adapt content for short video dissemination, emphasizing the adaptability of folk expressions to modern-day communication channels. However, internet-born subcultures like "Smart （Sha Ma Te）" confront the dichotomy of being both celebrated and regulated, revealing the complexities of the digital realm.

This study seeks to delineate how Neo-folk art, through the medium of short videos, represents a dynamic intersection of traditional ethos and digital modernity, crafting a new narrative for Chinese folk culture in the global artistic and social landscape.

While extensive research has explored the role of images in war, studies on peace imagery remain limited. This gap is significant given images’ ability to shape public perception, evoke emotions, and convey immediacy, which is often absent in text. Moreover, dominant visual narratives tend to frame peace within a binary war-peace paradigm, overlooking the diverse, coexisting forms of peace emphasized in contemporary peace research.

This study addresses these gaps by examining peace imagery through a dual approach: analyzing images selected by over 200 peacebuilding experts and conducting a systematic Google Images search using 15 peace-related keywords, thereby employing various VPNs.

Using image-type analysis, the study categorizes and interprets recurring motifs, revealing distinct differences between participant-selected images and those retrieved from online searches. While dominant online peace imagery often features symbols, text-based visuals, and staged representations, expert-selected images highlight more nuanced portrayals of everyday peace, emphasizing local, lived experiences. These findings underscore the need to move beyond simplistic peace symbols and incorporate diverse, grassroots-driven visual narratives.

By bridging participatory research with digital methodologies, this study enhances our understanding of peace representation and its implications for global peace communication. The results highlight the role of the Internet in shaping dominant peace imagery while advocating for a more inclusive, locally grounded visual discourse. This research ultimately contributes to expanding visual peace studies and integrating diverse perspectives into broader peacebuilding efforts.

Social media have gone through an overall visual turn. From the text-first nature of former Twitter or the first era of Facebook, we now face platforms that are visual first (if not visual only) both in terms of design and usage. This poses new challenges for researchers that aim at understanding this growing amount of data from a computational or quantitative perspective. Methods developed within the domain of computer vision were developed for tasks (e.g., object recognition, image segmentation), that are of not always of immediate use in research dealing with users or social practices and have thus proved to be of little use. To address the limitations shown by current CNN-based approaches, we propose and evaluate a Visual LLM-based semantic clustering methodology that can capture subtle social and cultural meanings within images, going beyond mere visual or spatial similarities.

Over three years, Elon Musk’s divisive policies have transformed Twitter into X, which many argue functions as a large alt-right platform. To analyze this transformation, the article first introduces a framework to examine trust and safety (T&S) operations as institutions, assessing them across three dimensions: complexity, hierarchy, and ideology. It then presents a manually constructed timeline of over 800 events from 2022 to 2024, based on news reports, corporate policies, and Musk’s posts.

Applying this framework in a qualitative analysis of the timeline, the study identifies three strategies in Musk’s governance: despotic governance (e.g., boosting his own posts and far-right actors while suppressing critics), power concentration (e.g., dismantling T&S teams and centralizing control), and authoritarian legitimization (e.g., using pseudo-democratic tools like polls and false narratives such as the “Twitter Files” to frame his actions as legitimate). Overall, Musk’s actions relied on the de-complexification and re-hierarchization of content moderation, processes often shaped by far-right ideology.

The study argues that Musk’s approach can be defined as a form of illiberal content moderation, marked by the instrumentalization of speech governance structures and the ideal of freedom of speech to advance his goals while suppressing others’ voices. This challenges assumptions that platform governance is shaped solely by law- and market-driven bureaucratization and helps clarify the links between X’s creation and Musk’s rise as a major political actor. The article concludes that X’s regime may become a new model of speech governance, reflecting broader trends of unaccountable tech elites embracing neoreactionary ideas.

This paper presents the results of an ongoing research project assessing a deal between Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Elon Musk’s Starlink to provide wireless internet service to isolated communities in northern Ontario with Starlink satellites. We ask how the Ford-Starlink partnership is situated within Canadian histories of provincial autonomy and Indigenous campaigns for political recognition and infrastructural inclusion while exploring what the deal can tell us about the relationship between local governance and technologically mediated transnational capital. Using mixed methods and digital tools, including AntConc and Factiva, we review provincial and federal infrastructure policy alongside media coverage to show how the Ford government instrumentalizes ongoing campaigns to expand wireless internet access to historically excluded Indigenous communities. In the guise of an idealized private-public partnership, the Ford-Starlink partnership demonstrates that provincial authority is adjusting to a new political calculus that circumvents conventional models of national sovereignty through investment in non-terrestrial networks (NTNs).

This project is uniquely suited to AOIR’s 2025 theme. While far from ubiquitous, NTNs pose profound challenges. High investment costs and historical access to space programmes stand to constrain the development of NTNs, further concentrating capital and control in the Global North. Though an acute problem for the Global South, the Canadian context offers an insightful example of how these trajectories converge. We draw on Indigenous studies of infrastructure and inclusion, research on wireless media infrastructures, and ongoing debates about the evolution of neoliberalism to highlight how NTNs enclose claims to infrastructural autonomy and national sovereignty.

Residents of the Galápagos Islands, a remote Ecuadorian archipelago world-known for its natural wonders, struggle with slow, intermittent and expensive satellite internet offered by local providers. This paper gathers initial findings of an ongoing field study into people’s lived experiences of internet connectivity in the Galápagos Islands in the light of Starlink’s service launch in the country, a government-backed connectivity solution. Critical perspectives have observed patterns of digital colonialism in US tech companies’ control over essential internet infrastructures in the Global South. This contribution expands this analysis by addressing how infrastructure is imagined and engaged with in everyday contexts, activating power dynamics in contradictory ways. Drawing on infrastructure studies’ call to examine the relational and situated dimensions of infrastructure, this study applied an ethnographic approach, documenting the physical and discursive manifestations of internet infrastructure in San Cristóbal Island. This was combined with a collective mapping pilot of internet connectivity based on islanders' experiences. Preliminary findings show that although Starlink adoption is still limited, it is a highly valued service linked to a sense of progress and autonomy. In contrast, other private telecoms and the state provider, which serves most island’s clients, are associated with isolation and immobility. This suggests that while Starlink infrastructure appears to be “changing” people’s lives on the ground, it cements existing power asymmetries on a larger scale by displacing local infrastructures from the public’s imaginary.

Our work analyzes public documents, social media publications, media reports and interviews on the operation of Starlink in the Amazon to investigate the role of contemporary digital infrastructures in advancing projects of capitalist occupation and exploitation of the Brazilian Amazon. We identify hegemonic discourses surrounding the role of digital technologies in the economic and social development of the region and look at how these discourses resonate with 19th and 20th centuries projects of occupation for the region via ‘civilization’ and technological progress. We argue that this technophilic view does little to support sustainable and fair development: by remaining silent about the connections between digital infrastructures and the exploitation of local bodies and territories, it obstructs visions of the future that consider interdependent ways of life that escape the hegemonic imaginary of capitalist domination.

'Digitalization' is a term more widely used to describe ongoing changes today than any time before, five decades after the introduction of digital technologies. When a term is used to cover such a wide range of phenomena in such a wide timespan, it becomes unfocused and lacking in explanatory power.

Based on a historical study of digitalization in the culture industries, we argue that the most disruptive change is the altered interface points between the end user and the providers of goods and services, what we call the digitalization of exchange. Even though it often is built upon other digitized processes, it is digitalization of exchange that makes it possible to reach new markets in other countries (globalization, or more precisely, a de-localization) and change from purchase of copies to streaming services (change of commodity form).

Digital technologies have allowed for significant changes to the publishing industry, music industry, and film and television industries over the last fifty years. Digitalization of production has cut costs and allowed more people to produce. Digitalization of reproduction changed how we relate to cultural products, and digitalization of distribution has allowed for much more choice and convenience for the audience.

Yet it is the digitalization of the interface points between publisher and audience, how payment is exchanged for access, that has caused the profound changes to the cultural industries. We believe this will be found also in other industries, and when new services are digitalized in the future.

Though stating a focus on the “human” has become a signal of an ethical agenda in current computing research circles (e.g. “human-centered AI” to “AI with human values”), the definition of this prolific “human” figure is murky. What are the features that define the “human” in studies that compare and contrast human and machine behavior? How do studies of computing compare assumed human abilities–such as vision or reading speed–to algorithms? How, in effect, do computing researchers discuss and operationalize “humanity”? We adopt a mixed-methods approach to measure patterns in discourse about “humans” in scientific literature on human-centered computing. We build on Brock’s (2018) Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis to examine how the producers of a tool “perceive, articulate, and ultimately define the technocultural space in which they operate and exist.” Where Brock situates his cultural analysis in critical race theory, we draw on critical disability theory to interpret discourse about the “human” which informs the development of technical artifacts. By teasing apart discourse about the “human” in computing scholarship, we can begin to understand the how scholars make choices about the ongoing design and production of “human”-centered computing.

In this paper we systematically survey emergent religious and spiritual (R/S) AI chatbot applications and outline our plans to conduct application walkthroughs to collect and analyze developer discourses. Our research asks: 1) How is authority, through trust and/or faith, discursively constructed around R/S chatbots? 2) How do developers synthesize Silicon Valley worldviews with existent R/S beliefs within the discursive construction of their applications? We sought to answer these questions by first conducting a systematic survey of existing R/S AI integrated applications on DuckDuckGo, iOS App Store, and Google Play Store. Through this we found that applications were framed in three primary ways by their creators as assistants, tools to be used, avatars, mentors embodying a particular R/S figure, and/or angels, beings with access to higher knowledge. These framings will inevitably shape how these tools are received and interpreted by their users, influencing the perceived R/S authority of an AI chatbot. Future work will conduct walkthroughs of a selection of applications from each data collection site. This will generate richer data detailing the material and discursive elements of R/S chatbots to be analyzed through discourse analysis. Our work will highlight how developers frame their creations and explore the potential complications that emerge when blending R/S belief and technological practice. We contribute to existing work on the intersection of R/S and technology and push the field forward by examining the under-explored and emergent development of AI integration into R/S practices.

This paper explores the operationalization of Habermas’ concept of the "space of reasons" in empirical research on the digital public sphere. The study engages with contemporary debates on misinformation, polarization, and democratic challenges, analyzing connections and ruptures in political judgment among social actors. Instead of a micro-level analysis, it adopts a macro perspective, considering interrelated institutions and actors. By focusing on substantive reasons, the research examines how arguments and counter-arguments structure public debates and shape political positioning.

The study proposes developing and validating a comprehensive taxonomy of arguments on controversial issues, such as feminist mobilizations and anti-feminist discourse in podcasts and social media. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is employed to systematize and analyze these discourses, following methodologies previously applied in research on climate change and misinformation, for example. Unlike fragmented classifications, this approach seeks a holistic understanding, integrating discursive practices with institutional structures and the actors involved.

The paper follows three key steps: (i) it explores the feasibility of applying the "space of reasons" concept in empirical research to systematize the circulation of reasons; (ii) it integrates reasoning practices into a broader network of multiple factors and relationships; (iii) it demonstrates how mapping substantive reasons enhances the understanding of intolerant, extremist, and authoritarian discourses. The study contributes to research agendas on public discourse and conflict dynamics, highlighting methodological and normative challenges in transitioning from micro to macro-level analysis, particularly in a digital environment that is reshaping investigative paradigms.

This panel identifies and explores digital connectivities and capacities for social, personal and political rupture generated by diverse networked practices of sound production and consumption. The aim of the panel is to collectively examine and reimagine how digital audio media, incorporating podcasts, radio archives, AI-generated music, and audio erotica variously enable and encourage connection and intimacy in ways that challenge the limitations of an increasingly normative and oppressive digital media environment—whether neo-fascist. neoliberal, anti-feminist, or simply Puritanical.

The first paper examines how podcasts devoted to the “Dark Enlightenment” are sonic vectors for the creation of the distributed and networked masculine neo-fascist subject, a relationship of sonic subjection the authors term “streaming molecular fascism.” The second paper explores the possibilities of an alternative digital archive of activist programming in the current context of increased disinformation, restrictions and surveillance across online platforms. The third paper asks whether the rise of “AI”-generated music will increase concentration and exploitation, or whether it presents enough of a rupture in the productive matrix and aesthetic field to offer liberation for creative professionals. The fourth paper investigates how the digital and intimate nature of podcasting provides a private and personal place of sorts for the audience to listen to advice, discussion, and mental health self-disclosure. The fifth paper examines the potential of sex-positive audio erotica apps and platforms to both make and break a sense of intimacy and proximity with its listeners, while producing a rupture of sorts in a sex-negative digital media landscape

This paper develops speculative failure as a hopeful pragmatics for imagining futures beyond AI's calculative paradigms in the present. Departing from the solutionist calls that focus on how to fix problems with AI (or how to fix AI so they can fix our problems), this paper will illustrate the utilities of speculative failure in freeing us from the problem-solution bind that has come to undergird our imaginations of what AI (and technology more broadly) could be. I embrace a speculative lens in making visible the scenes of failures that are forgotten, have yet to take place, or will otherwise never see the light of day, which, in turn, serve as symptoms to surface the assumptions that undergird the endurance of AI’s infrastructural operations in the present. In addition, by freeing us from rational and calculative controls over the future, speculative failure reorients our attention toward the uncertain yet hopeful futures beyond. This paper sketches out two ways speculative failure can help us see the future otherwise — (1) by surfacing untold failures from the past to the present, and (2) by imagining potential failures from the present to the future.

AI-generated music challenges traditional notions of creativity, digital labor, and listening subjectivity. As streaming services and AI music platforms like Google’s Dream Track, Suno, and Udio grow, AI-generated compositions are increasingly indistinguishable from human-made music. This shift raises questions about artistic authorship, labor displacement, and the broader implications of algorithmic listening. Using psychoanalytic media theory, particularly Lacan’s concepts of the sonorous envelope and the acoustic mirror, this study argues that AI-generated music disrupts identity formation by replacing human affect with machinic simulation. Economically, AI music accelerates labor precarity, as platforms monetize AI compositions while sidelining human musicians. Algorithmic recommendation engines further entrench passive listening habits, prioritizing engagement-driven content over artistic expression. Scholars and industry voices, including Rick Beato and Ted Gioia, critique AI music’s tendency toward formulaic production and the monopolization of creative labor by big tech. The study situates AI-generated music within a historical lineage of technological disruptions in music, from player pianos to MIDI, demonstrating how AI follows patterns of labor displacement. Ultimately, this paper argues that AI’s role in music reflects a larger shift in digital capitalism, where platform-driven control reshapes cultural production. It calls for critical engagement with AI’s impact on creativity, labor, and listening practices, raising key questions about transparency, regulation, and artistic agency in an AI-dominated music industry. Future research should explore the geopolitical dimensions of AI-generated music and its effects on global music economies.

This paper develops a critical theoretical framework for analyzing "AI for Good" interventions addressing gender-based violence (GBV) from feminist and decolonial perspectives. While empirical studies demonstrate artificial intelligence (AI)'s potential benefits for GBV interventions, critical scholarship reveals how these technologies often reproduce harmful power structures. The proposed framework bridges this divide through four interconnected analytical dimensions: epistemological foundations (examining whose knowledge shapes interventions), material infrastructure (revealing extractive processes enabling AI systems), governance mechanisms (analyzing decision-making structures), and contextual embeddedness (understanding cultural specificities).

Based on a critical discourse analysis of AI ethics and governance frameworks, “AI for Good” literature, and GBV intervention documents and empirical studies, and a literature review of feminist science and technology studies and decolonial approaches to technology, the framework operationalizes feminist analyses that expose design choices that embed gender-based assumptions and limit accessibility (Klein & D’Ignazio, 2024; Costanza-Chock, 2020; Criado-Perez, 2019) and decolonial perspectives that reveal how infrastructures interact with institutional systems to perpetuate colonial structures (Couldry & Mejias, 2018; Ricaurte, 2019; Mohamed et al., 2020; Png, 2022; Madianou, 2025). This framework challenges "technology for good" narratives that function as moral shields obscuring exploitative data extraction and power asymmetries (Madianou, 2025; Muñoz, 2022). By translating abstract theoretical concepts into concrete analytical tools, the framework enables researchers to systematically examine power dynamics in AI interventions, center survivor knowledge, and imagine alternative approaches that challenge rather than reinforce existing hierarchies in addressing gender-based violence.

Following DeepSeek AI’s release in early 2024, AI-powered fortune-telling rapidly gained popularity on Chinese digital platforms like Rednote, where users shared AI-generated divinations, refined prompts, and debated result accuracy. This phenomenon raises critical questions about how accuracy is understood when AI is repurposed for metaphysical insight rather than rational computation. Unlike conventional AI applications, where accuracy is defined through explainability and predictive efficiency, AI fortune-telling reconfigures accuracy as a subjective, relational, and ineffable construct. This study examines algorithmic syncretism, data consecration, and accuracy politics as three key dimensions that shape user experiences, highlighting how AI is framed as a mystical authority rather than a transparent tool. By centering explainable AI and ineffability as a theoretical framework, this in-progress paper argues that trust in AI divination does not rely on technical transparency but on the interpretative space it creates for users, where meaning emerges through engagement rather than explanation. The rise of AI-powered divination suggests a shift in algorithmic epistemology, where black-boxed AI systems are embraced not in spite of their opacity, but because of it.

In recent years, the digital delivery of mindfulness-based intervention for anxiety and stress relief has gained popularity among the general population. However, there is limited knowledge on comprehensively understanding the digital environment of users interacting with popular and commercially successful meditation apps such as Headspace. According to company reports, Headspace has over 60 million members. Given the reach and scale of Headspace’s membership, there is an opportunity to study the impact of a widely popular app and its design to inform user-centric app design complexity. This paper presents an in-depth approach using the walkthrough methodology to follow the user interface and application environment of Headspace. This study aims to answer the following research question: How do affordances of Headspace user interface and application environment influence user acceptance and usage behavior as explained by the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT-2)? The findings reveal that Headspace offers key affordances that influence user engagement and retention with the app. The affordances notably intersect with the UTAUT-2 model, thus providing a conceptual framework explaining behavior intention and user behavior for Headspace. Key affordances such as accessibility, progress tracking, and privacy are crucial in promoting user experience. This research provides an innovative approach and insight into user experience and interpretation of affordances within the Headspace interface. The methodology demonstrated the relationship between design elements and user perceptions that can iteratively inform digital experience.

This study examines the parallel platformization of health by analyzing how verified healthcare professionals present themselves and disseminate medical information on Douyin and TikTok. Through content analysis of videos published by 10 popular verified doctors on each platform and homepage analysis, as well as policy analysis of platform regulations on the healthcare industry, this study explores how platform infrastructure, business models, and governance influence the roles, interactions, and communication styles of healthcare professionals on Douyin and TikTok.

This talk examines how diabetic use of self-tracking continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and diabetic data sensibilities that come from CGM use have been increasingly generalized to non-diabetic users and uses of CGM devices since 2021, when CGMs were approved in some international jurisdictions for use without requisite medical necessity. Communities of non-diabetic practice use the CGM to measure their glucose like diabetic users do, but in frameworks that both distance and re-center diabetes in their design and use. Just as diabetics learn to feel their numbers in relation to how CGMs datafy and visualize their glucose numbers over time, non-diabetic CGM users aim to measure, visualize, and develop a feel for their sugars like people with diabetes do: to develop diabetic-like “data gazes,” ways of seeing data about glucose that people with diabetes cultivate around the graphical visualizations of CGM data. CGM use by people without diabetes generalizes diabetic practice, technology, and sensibility, putting people with and without diabetes into newly configured, and often contentious, relations around their shared use of the CGM device. Based in analysis of social media marketing, online promotions, unboxing videos and a corpus of social media comments around CGM use by people without diabetes, this talk demonstrates how centrally chronic illness figures into the practices, routines and feel of quantified selfhood with the CGM, around the one chronic illness that stands in for managed chronic living more generally: diabetes.

This paper explores postdigital becoming through an auto-ethnography of period- and cycle tracking apps. For four months I track my cycle using three FemTech apps, initially aiming to gain self-knowledge and empowerment, as promised by these apps. Instead, the tracking makes me bored. Why is cycle tracking so boring? Why should we, from a feminist perspective, care? Inspired by these questions, I situate cycle tracking in a historical context and argue for its potential value as a feminist practice. In doing so, I draw on Rosi Braidotti’s (2002) new materialist theory of becoming, in order to explore the feminist subjects we could become through cycle tracking. I argue, that the empowering potential in cycle tracking lies in what it enables us to ”become,” and speculate what we could become with cycle tracking technology that fosters social understandings of menstruation, and feminist collectivities.

The specter of fear and precarity surrounding the migrant experience has saturated public culture and scholarly literature. Central to these representations is the spectacle of the economically deprived, sexualized, exploited, and abused migrant. Scholarship on migration studies, however, argues against this since precarity is not the only narrative that exists and that there are other wonderful, positive, minoritarian aspects of migrant life as well. Building on this, I theorize and engage with what I describe as “queer migrant joy” among overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) cum TikTok content creators. I ask: In what ways is TikTok, if at all, mobilized by queer Overseas Filipino Workers to express joy? Through purposive sampling, I selected TikToks (n=15) produced by queer migrants who fit my selection criteria and subsequently analyzed through thematic analysis. Such an exploration is necessary because by attending to the potentialities of joy as an agentive practice and everyday pursuit to which multiple meanings can be ascribed, I would be able to provide a more nuanced understanding of queer migration in a field that usually privileges “white, Eurocentric, and assimilationist assumptions” (Beaman and Clerge 2024, 23). Moreover, since “[q]ueer studies, migration studies, and communication studies are relatively new scholarly fields when compared to those disciplines from which they emerged (sociology, history, anthropology, literature, theater arts, etc.)” this undertaking thus furthers “possibilities for future research.” (Shield 2021, 2)

This paper explores the differences between traditional cultural coverage and digital media-relevant content. We focus on how the Brazilian singer and activist Linn da Quebrada is portrayed in the Portuguese newspaper Público and on TikTok. Brazil and Portugal have had a relationship since the colonial period in the sixteenth century. The common language (Portuguese) and digital media habits allow a flux of cultural products between the two countries. However, there is a gap in studies that analyze them considering the colonial context. Previous studies identified the Portuguese cultural coverage as aligned with the country’s cultural industries and elites, with little space for decolonial perspectives and issues such as racism, sexism, and transphobia. The Brazilian singer and activist Linn da Quebrada is an exception in this scenario: the only trans person featured two times in the Portuguese newspaper Público in 2018. Her work was linked to the Brazilian political context and presented as a leading force in feminist and queer movements. Seven years later, we analyzed 24 news pieces published in Público (2019-2024) mentioning Linn da Quebrada, identifying four thematic axes. In the second stage, through netnography, we analyzed 16 top-ranked videos and 2043 comments associated with them. Findings indicate asymmetries between themes and narratives circulating Linn da Quebrada in Portugal. News pieces predominantly feature the idea of a trans/feminist Brazilian icon. On TikTok, themes are more diverse, including interviews, performances, participation in a reality show, and instances of hate speech in user comments.

This study explores how youth discuss generative artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education contexts on TikTok. Through a qualitative analysis of 980 TikTok posts and their associated comments, we identify three key themes: (1) the commercialization of AI tools on TikTok through peer-to-peer marketing strategies, (2) platform-mediated moral contestations around AI ethics and the purpose of higher education, and (3) the emergence of new forms of community-building and identity exploration centered around AI. Our analysis reveals TikTok's significant role as a platform for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing around emerging technologies—yet one deeply marked by commercial dynamics and undisclosed promotional content. These findings contribute to emerging scholarship on how social media platforms shape youth technological imaginaries and provide insights into the complex entanglements of commercial interests, educational discourse, and identity practices in digital spaces.

The evolution of TikTok into an e-commerce platform has been marked by the introduction of features that blend entertainment with monetization. One such feature is Live Matches, where creators engage in real-time competitions and encourage viewers to send virtual gifts to support their chosen participants. Recently, some creators have exploited this format by staging conflicts such as “Israel vs. Palestine” despite having no direct connection to the regions or issues they depict. This practice raises ethical and legal concerns, particularly regarding the monetization of real-world suffering and the trivialization of geopolitical crises. This socio-legal paper explores how creators capitalize on crises to drive financial contributions on TikTok Live Matches and assesses the legal implications of such practices from a consumer protection perspective. Using a mixed-method approach, we conduct (1) a qualitative content analysis of crisis-driven Live Matches to uncover how adversity is leveraged for financial gain and (2) a doctrinal legal analysis to evaluate the compliance of these monetization tactics with European consumer protection law. Our findings reveal three key exploitative strategies: emotional manipulation through affective triggers, competitive monetization via gamified showdowns, and algorithmic amplification of crisis content for profit. We argue that these tactics not only exploit consumer emotions but also violate existing consumer protection frameworks. In conclusion, we advocate for stricter oversight of TikTok Live Matches to enhance transparency and protect consumers from manipulative monetization practices in crisis-driven content.

This paper explores how creators in the Nigerian social media video industry navigate precarious labour stemming from the business models of digital platforms, specifically YouTube and Facebook. Following global developments, the economic growth and opportunities of digital platforms are creating career opportunities around the world. This has inspired Nigerian content creators who make short-form video content for millions of domestic and diaspora Africans. This paper examines the understudied precarious labour conditions of Nigerian creators in a saturated industry. Drawing from semi-structured interview with 15 workers and critical analysis of the trade press, we identify how domestic cultural norms shape the way Nigerian creators integrate spiritual beliefs in forming a sentiment of hope. This, in turn, provides inspiration to confront the precarity inherent to platform monetization. Our proposed analytical lens of “platformed hope,” identifies two faith-driven monetization strategies adopted by creators: (1) transactional para-sociality and (2) reversed labour remuneration. We contend that although hope and spirituality represent everyday practices in Nigeria, the creators’ strategies reflect practices of faith orchestrated by the unique economic, governmental, and infrastructural logics of platforms. Put differently, transactional para-sociality and reversed labour remuneration are strategic actions to attain monetization goals, but they also illustrate how Nigerian socio-cultural and economic dynamics – including the inclinations of hope and spirituality – shape platform-dependent cultural production as much as they define other aspects of life in Nigeria.

Keywords: Platform labour, Nigeria, precarity, platform monetization, hope labour

This study examines the networking and monetization strategies employed by Spanish-speaking financial influencers (finfluencers) on YouTube. Given the precarious labor market conditions facing young people, finfluencers promise easy and fast ways to “get rich”. These alternative pathways to financial success include cryptocurrencies, trading, online gambling, and internet-based business, like microtasking, dropshipping or online mentoring. Through a co-link analysis of video descriptions obtained through YouTube API v3 (n=1429), this research identifies key monetization methods, including course sales, affiliate marketing, crowdfunding, and direct product sales. Additionally, a co-comment network analysis and BERTopic modeling reveal dominant thematic trends within finfluencer content. Preliminary findings indicate a strong commercial orientation, with content often framed as “financial education” that includes links to affiliate marketing or course sales, a deliberate strategy to diversity their online presence in other platforms like TikTok, Instagram or Spotify, and topics related to trading, gaining money from home, Paypal and cryptocurrencies. This study contributes to the underlying business models of finfluencers in order to assess their potential impact on audiences and their role in shaping consumer behavior.

Live streaming is an activity performed by users on media platforms, characterized by the real-time broadcasting of content with simultaneous audience interaction. Twitch (owned by Amazon), the pioneer and largest live streaming platform, markets itself as a space that fosters “belonging by enabling streamers to build community” (Twitch, 2025). While framed as a leisure activity that encourages socialization, live streaming demands significant labor: streamers must plan and organize their work, maintaining constant dedication, investing their subjectivity as well as their capitals. As a result, categories such as socialization and monetization, pleasure and labor, user and worker blur and intertwine. Considering these contradictions, this research aimed to examine how the governance of live streaming platforms shapes the subjective experiences and sociability of Brazilian streamers, particularly in relation to the monetization of leisure and social bonds. Drawing on a digital ethnography on a live streaming platform and labor life stories interviews with brazilian streamers, we argue that Twitch mobilizes a double bind of self-monetization: it promises personal and financial fulfillment while instrumentalizing meaning, affects, and self-commodification under the guise of community-driven participation.

The acceleration of digital payments and lending in India in the name of “financial inclusion” has been facilitated by the Unique ID (Aadhar) system, Unified Payments Interface, and the India Stack infrastructure. I focus on the digital money and data transactions with respect to loan apps, and examine the intermediation process in the lending platform ecosystem. This involves deciphering how loan apps are serviced by fintech infrastructures allowing for automation of tasks such as risk score checking and identity verification. I map out the spaces of intermediation comprising platform lending to slow down the instantaneous transactions involving loan approvals and disbursals. This requires analyzing the relationship between the various third-party developers and the loan apps in terms of the financial software services provided through software development kits and application programming interfaces, while also exploring the political economic relationships between non-banking lenders and loan apps.

The “alternative data” collection and processing, entailing behavioral data captured from and flowing through phone and social media activity, that governs loan app decisions about eligibility, payment windows, ad interest rates remain under-discussed in the public domain. The loan app/lending platform catering to different stakeholders (lenders, borrowers, third-party developers) often paints itself as an intermediary merely facilitating or mediating transactions between various customers, thereby creating opacity about the activities of the wider fintech platform ecosystem. The paper uncovers the complex data-based interactions, recordings, communications, and decision-makings that happen across various human and non-human intermediaries in the process of materializing digital monetary transactions.

Datafication can be defined as the process of capturing, appropriating and processing user information for different capitalist purposes (Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger, 2013; Van Dijck, 2017). In our ongoing research “Datafication of the work activity of media workers in their productive arrangements” we seek to understand the datafication of work activities. Specifically, we put a magnifying glass on the digital machinery to understand the place of value production of the media workers, as well as their specific place in the production chain of platform companies, to ascertain whether and how the work process of these professionals is datafied in its different specificities.

This paper investigates the mobility and migration experiences of Brazilian workers in the digital games industry, focusing on issues of digital labor and the political economy of the cultural and technological industries. The research answers questions about the circulation of these workers in the labor market and the relationship between migration and labor process in the games industry. Using industry reports and a literature review, the study is based on 14 semi-structured interviews conducted between October 2022 and August 2024 with key professionals in the production of digital games, such as programmers, artists, designers, and managers. The paper starts from the hypothesis that, in a global labor market, workers from peripheral countries, such as Brazil, have economic incentives to migrate and work for foreign companies, especially in the Global North, where the games industry is more developed. Through Labor Process Theory (LPT), the article: (1) demonstrates that these mobility experiences of these workers are marked by mobility/immobility dynamics, reflecting pronounced global inequalities; (2) exposes the various forms of mediation that facilitate the circulation of these workers in the labor market, including educational institutions, social networks and social media, and events; and (3) investigates the relevance of territory and spatial constraints to understanding the labor process, highlighting local production cultures, work organization, and unionization. The text establishes dialogues with studies of LPT and migration, contributing to the understanding of the relationships between migration and digital labor in the gaming industry.

NGOs and self-organized groups increasingly use (digital) data for documenting conflicts and human rights violations. This paper presents a study into emerging investigatory practices in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. On the basis of 12 semi-structured interviews in Ukraine this paper illustrates how the context of war enacts techniques for evidence production. A diverse set of actors and organizations collect and curate data for different ends, ranging from justice and accountability, finance, policy making and memorization. We illustrate how a hypothetical future (“if the war ends”) plays a defining role in how investigatory practices are being organized. Therefore we use the term: ‘hope labour’. Hope labour leads to technological, organizational and/or discursive innovation, yet, these innovations are precarious and unfinished.

Digital War Investigations can be told as a story of ‘the online’. Footage from the battlefield is distributed, streamed, and contested via social media. The availability of data has given an input to the rise of data publics that through (online) collaborative efforts work on development of verification methodologies. This paper takes a different approach by telling a story about the “information front”; on how people in Ukraine respond to the availability of data while being in the situation of war and also create data (archives). This implies taking into account local dynamics, precariousness, and cultural specificities. In our paper we show how professional identities are in flux, how new relations enact specific spaces or organizations and how a sense of past, present and future structures data practices.

The proposal presents partial results of ongoing research about prescriptions of domestic work platforms. Its main objective is to discuss the communication between digital care work platform companies and their workers, considering a comparative approach between organizations operating in Brazil and the USA.

Taking advantage of the historical social, gender, race, and class inequalities of both countries, these business organizations are expanding widely and intensively exploiting the care work of people and households carried out by millions of women.

In this context, platform companies mobilize different communication uses in support of their logic of management and organization of work. In the case of this proposal, a critical analysis will be presented on domestic work prescriptions identified in the discourses disseminated by digital platform companies in both countries.

Specifically, we will deal with the guidelines workers receive from companies to carry out their work. This study involves a theoretical-methodological path that includes bibliographic and documentary research based on Brazilian and North American data, whose results show similarities and differences in domestic work in the platform economy in different Global South and Global North territories.

The progression of the gig or platform economy and the development of artificial intelligence in Latin America have led to the widespread adoption of computer-mediated forms of work as a means of income for many across the region. This panel examines instances of platform and AI-related work through the perspectives of theories that have been strongly developed within the region. The panel focuses on the study of platform-mediated data work and AI-related labor through the Brazilian concept of viração, the notion of extractivism, and regional conceptualizations of Participatory Action Research. Additional discussions explore feminist unionism in location-based platforms such as ride-hailing and delivery through the concept of biosindicalismo and Latin American decolonial and feminist thought, as well as the study of freelance platforms through the lens of the Brazilian political economy of communication.

This session will explore how blockchain technology, one of the pillars of Web 3.0, is transforming digital trust and reshaping the exchange of information and services across diverse sectors. Blockchain works as a decentralized database that is not controlled by any entity, enhancing security, transparency, and traceability in online transactions. The session will also examine how open innovation fosters collaboration between academia, startups, and government, accelerating the adoption of blockchain solutions.

The discussion will start by presenting the preliminary results of the "Iliada project", an initiative that brings together public and private organizations to foster the development of blockchain applications in Brazil. It’s led by RNP—Brazilian National Research and Education Network—and CPQD—Telecommunications Research and Development Center, coordinated by Softex—Brazilian Software Society, and funded by the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation.

The session invites participants to join the discussion circle and share their reflections on governance models, open innovation, ideas for blockchain applications, and strategies for contributing to advancing technologies in Global South countries. Project members will address governance and strategy issues, as well as approaches to disseminating knowledge. They will also offer insights into the project’s testbeds, which is an open laboratory that provides private blockchains as a service for application developers, assisting Brazil in advancing the application of blockchain.

Leandro Ciuffo, Deputy Director for R&D at RNP, will present an overview of Iliada, highlighting its key achievements, including the call for proposals program, which invites academia and startups to develop technology solutions in strategic sectors. Larriza Thurler, Scientific Dissemination Coordinator at RNP, will introduce the Blockchain Observatory, emphasizing its role in providing access to trustworthy information and fostering engagement through a community of experts. Luiz Folly, R&D Coordinator at RNP, will discuss testbeds and explain how they enable experimentation with new applications and improve interoperability.

Scholars working across fan studies, internet studies and politics have noted the increasing use of cancellation practices across media, politics and culture and within digital spaces. Cancel culture is “the withdrawal of any kind of support (viewership, social media follows, purchases of products endorsed by the person, etc.) for those who are assessed to have said or done something unacceptable or highly problematic, generally from a social justice perspective especially alert to sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, racism, bullying, and related issues” (Ng 2020, 623). Cancellation practices might include unfollowing a creator on social media, refusing to buy books or stream films, or boycotting places. Cancelling has its origins in queer Black communities where marginalized groups engaged in “networked framing” (Clark, 2020), discussing the behaviour of the offending party and “prescrib[ing]d a remedy—such as being fired or choosing to resign—through the collective reasoning of culturally aligned online crowds” (ibid, 89). Yet cancel culture has moved beyond the realm of Black Twitter to enable all marginalised voices to discuss, critique and demand accountability: the 2017 #MeToo-movement highlighted this as scores of women took to social media to expose the extent of sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood, “turbocharged cancel culture” (Ng 2020, 623).

Cancel culture has been framed as a form of activism, an activity which has also been linked to fan communities (Jenkins and Shresthova, 2012). Many fans are aware of social inequalities, being members of communities beyond their fandoms which are marginalised by virtue of gender, race or class (Maher, 2020). It is not surprising that fans engage in virtual and physical activism, including charity fundraising, political participation and, increasingly, cancellation. Yet, as Stanfill (2019) points out, cancellation practices can move into the realm of toxic fandom, or even be co-opted by the alt-right as counter-culture (Jurg et al., 2024). To understand these more ambivalent forms of cancel culture we bring together different manifestations and cases of cancellation across the globe.

The panel begins with Paper 1, offering an analysis of the various fan - and anti-fan - factions within Taylor Swift fandom, focusing on her relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce. Through issue mapping, network analysis and qualitative reading of a subset of Reddit posts, the authors examine the ways in which fandom, politics, and anti-fandom clash, driven by politically charged concerns and the gendered nature of Swift and Kelce’s respective celebrity status. Music fandom is also the focus of the second paper, in which the authors examine the case of Brandon Pybos, vocalist of the goth band Sonsombre. Analysing fan comments on Facebook the authors identify three main categories: 1) Racism/Racist/Racism as Fascism; 2) Questioning Cancel Culture; and 3) “Fan Pedagogies” and argue that Pybos was ultimately cancelled by fans whose cancelling practices were used as a means of ideological preservation of the subculture. The third paper in this panel moves beyond Western fandom to consider the cancellation of Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón by Brazilian fans and haters, articulating aspects of fan studies (toxic fandom, transcultural fandom and other base concepts), cancel culture, pop culture, polarization, and politics in regard to Brazilian fans' specificities, particularly their ability to manage online mobilizations and conjectures about media phenomena.

The final two papers in the panel consider the negation of - or opposition to - cancel culture and cancelling practices. Paper four focuses on female fans of Backstreet Boy Nick Carter who support the singer despite sexual assault allegations being made against him. The author analyses 452 comments posted to a Change.org petition opposing the cancellation of the 2022 ABC Backstreet Boys Holiday Special and identifies three patterns of support for Carter: 1) an ‘innocent until proven guilty’ discourse; 2) perceptions of Carter as a family man, a loving husband, and father, underscored by his social media presence; and 3) believability, in which fans contest the believability of the accusers by digging up digital evidence that disproves their claims. Carter’s thirty-year (parasocial) relationship with his fans provides a support group ready to defend the singer and contest the believability of his accusers. The fifth contribution to the panel examines the ways in which practices of cancel culture are co-opted by the right-wing and reframed as counter-culture. Using Russell Brand as a case study the author analyses Brand’s TikTok and YouTube videos and comments left on them by fans to suggest that attitudes to and perceptions of cancel culture are changing as a result the rise of new platforms and the ‘saleable commodity’ that a contradictory, right-wing position is now becoming.

Overall, this panel brings together interdisciplinary and global case studies which critically discuss the relationship between fandom, activism, cancellation and polarisation across a variety of genres and countries. It offers timely and relevant insights into today’s online media landscape by highlighting fannish practices with real-world consequences.

This study explores the use of ChatGPT for social media marketing strategies and its potential impact on employment. We take stock of the literature on productivity gain and the automation of work to unpack the role of AI in devising social media marketing strategies. To this end, we carried out in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 social media professionals who informed a follow-up experiment using ChatGPT to generate social media marketing strategies for two companies. The results support the hypothesis of Generative AI leading to increased productivity in the creation of social media marketing, as the experiments yielded high-quality marketing strategies tailored to the specific needs of a company with consistent brand identity. The results, however, also highlight the limitations in using AI for marketing campaigns, as these tools cannot fully replicate the creativity and intuition of human professionals. We conclude with an assessment of potential risks associated with data protection and ethical considerations when using AI tools.

Whilst AI-generated art dates back to the 1960s, the tech-led surge over the past two decades is driven by new AI art generators, extractive data practices, and better computing power. Within the creative industries this has provoked a mix of excitement and skepticism. Arguably the current hype overlooks unjust ML techniques, and raises concerns around human-machine collaboration such as authorship, privacy, forgery and discrimination. In this paper, we explore the role that values, beliefs and emotions play when art practitioners work with Narrow AI and respond to the automation of creative processes in the UK arts sector. We present insights drawn from thematic analysis of interviews and focus groups with artists, curators and arts organisers spanning music, storytelling, visual art, performance, installation. We offer three narrative themes arising from our empirical analysis. These are, arts practitioners: 1) being critical of the tech-driven automation of arts practice, 2) calling for improvement to machine-human collaboration, and 3) experiencing tensions between beliefs, values and emotions. We argue that the way art-led AI practitioners navigate tech-driven automation presents a counterpoint to the pervasive computing-led explosion of narrow AI tools to automate artistic processes. We close by suggesting that this study is of value to the creative industries in prompting critical reflection on the cultural dynamics shaping AI tool adoption and use within arts practice. It also offers an opportunity for AI practitioners in other sectors to reflect on and consider the societal implications of AI cultural dynamics and use for their work.

This paper argues that AI systems must be understood as extensions of centuries-old platform infrastructures rooted in empire. A telling anecdote comes from a senior Microsoft scientist who asked a generative model to depict “an Indian girl under a tree reading a book.” Instead of producing her desired childhood reflection, the system defaulted to white, Western images—revealing how foundation models encode colonial value systems. Like Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, the circulation of meaning is pre-structured by Western archives that dominate training data. This dynamic is not new. The British East India Company operated as the first global platform: it centralized trade through charters, maps, tariffs, and racial ranking systems, sustaining a multi-sided market without producing its own content. Just as the EIC tweaked terms and conditions to regulate life across continents, modern AI platforms hard-code racial capitalism into digital infrastructures. Contemporary Platform Studies often miss this continuity, framing platforms as neoliberal novelties rather than as inheritors of colonial techniques of privatization, dispossession, and labor precarity. Today, national initiatives such as India’s foundational AI model demonstrate both possibility and peril. While framed as sovereign alternatives to Western dominance, such projects risk reproducing exclusion by privileging some languages and identities over others. In contrast, Indigenous data sovereignty movements—such as Te Mana Raraunga in Aotearoa—foreground communal ownership and resistance to state or market capture. This paper situates “Global Southing” not as a guarantee of decolonization but as a contested terrain where platform power may either reinforce or unsettle colonial continuities.

This study explores the phenomenon of dropshipping on Facebook, focusing on the role of digital advertising in shaping informal online markets. Dropshipping allows entrepreneurs to sell products without holding inventory, relying on third-party suppliers for procurement, storage, and shipping. The model has become popular due to its low startup costs and minimal regulatory oversight, especially in the context of social media platforms. Through a collection of Facebook advertisements gathered by Australian citizen scientists as part of the Ad Observatory project, the research uses "trace ethnography" to follow digital traces such as links, web pages, and third-party review sites, identifying dropshipping stores and understanding their operation. The study uncovers patterns in online advertising, such as the use of ambiguous locations, the absence of physical stores, and repeated store names, which suggest an informal, often transient business model. Four case studies illustrate different types of dropshipping operations, ranging from failed attempts to established brands that remain largely unregulated. The paper argues that Facebook’s advertising platform blurs the lines between formal and informal economies, giving equal visual legitimacy to a wide range of vendors. This uniformization, however, places the responsibility of determining a business’s legitimacy on consumers, who must navigate a complex web of often misleading traces. The study contributes to understanding the role of digital advertising in fostering informal markets and the challenges of ensuring trust and legitimacy in platform-mediated commerce. It also offers insights into the cultural and regulatory implications of dropshipping in online economies.

This study examines affective politicisation in the Spanish manosphere, focusing on the role of disaffection in shaping digital practices and subjectivities. While research has explored the manosphere’s digital affordances, far-right connections, and affective dimensions, the intersection of these elements remains underexplored. Drawing on Yao’s concept of disaffection, the study analyses how dis/affects are mobilised to construct subject positions and facilitate political engagement.

The manosphere is conceptualised as an affective space within broader digital affect cultures, where emotions shape social dynamics and identity construction. Affect not only fosters identification within these communities but also functions as a political tool. Disaffection, understood as alienation from dominant affective norms, operates as a counter-force to feminist and progressive discourses. The manosphere constructs itself as a site of rejection, positioning feminist progress as an imposition of feeling rules that demand male empathy and accountability. By cultivating disaffection, these communities challenge hegemonic affective structures and reframe male grievances into political mobilisation.

Based on digital ethnographic data, the study identifies three stages of affective politicisation: (1) an affective awakening through redpilling, where male discontent is channelled into narratives of victimhood; (2) an emotional interpellation of refusal, leading to detachment from feminist feeling rules; and (3) re-engagement through political mobilisation, where disaffection transforms into camaraderie and counter-revolutionary activism. This process demonstrates how digital affective practices shape political subjectivities, reinforcing the manosphere’s broader ideological project.

K-pop’s global rise has been driven by digitalization (Jin, 2018), participatory media (Jenkins, 2006), and digital convergence (Deuze, 2007), with YouTube acting as a key site for fan engagement and cultural circulation (Jung, 2020). This study examines how local French-speaking girls in Québec appropriate and personalize a Korean global industry, shaping it through their creative practices on YouTube.

Beyond passive spectatorship, these fans engage in dance covers, video editing, and subtitling, transforming their digital participation into creative labour, skill development, and social bonding (Baym, 2018; Lee, 2022). While K-pop’s participatory nature has been widely studied (Jenkins, 2006), less attention has been given to the every day, skill-based practices of fan creators operating in localized contexts.

Based on an ethnographic study of a Montreal K-pop fangirl collective (5EFOR1), this research employs semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and YouTube content analysis to explore (1) how fans use YouTube as a creative space, (2) the community-driven learning processes that shape fan expertise, (3) how fans negotiate between industrial and fan-made content, and (4) the emotional and social dimensions of creative fandom.

This study contributes to discussions on digital participation, informal learning, and the evolving role of YouTube as a participatory media space, demonstrating how young women engage with a global cultural industry while embedding it within their own creative, linguistic, and social realities.

This paper examines how young feminists dispersed across China, some who identify as activists, and others who don’t, engage in fansubbing of foreign (mostly US and Japanese) media content to combat sexism and misogyny. Based on interviews with young, middle-class, urban Chinese women (aged 20-28) and textual analysis of their fansubbed content, I show how they viewed fansubbing as more than a hobby or a mode of entertainment. Rather, motivated by feelings of joy, pain, anger, and hope, they sought to harness the power of networked communication and algorithmic recommendation systems to spread explicitly feminist messages. A range of content – talk shows, sitcoms, NGO videos, and news items – was fansubbed, with some participants focusing on messages they deemed empowering, others on more explicit callouts of individual experiences of sexism, and still others on structural gender inequality. Through drawing on Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) notion of ordinary affects and Michael Lambek’s (2010, 2015) ordinary ethics, I center how the women’s embodied passions and ethical judgments informed their fansubbing. This paper adds to understandings of how feminist fandom practices in authoritarian contexts have the potential if not for societal, then individual transformation. Such individual transformations in turn have the potential to disrupt status quo, “common sense” notions of gender, sexism, and misogyny. Thus, the paper argues that Chinese feminist fansubbing potentially ruptures prior notions of fansubbing and participatory culture in western, liberal democracies.

This research maps the distinctiveness and evolution of Thailand’s (or Thai) creator culture, which refers to the rapidly-emerging platform-based cultural economies vitally distinguished by the practices of social media entrepreneurs, whether referred to as creators or influencers, KOLS or wanghong, YouTubers or TikTokers, game players or mukbangers, and/or vloggers or streamers. This work is framed by the concept of platform nationalism, the multilateral power relations engaged by corporations and governments to engage platform and social media users, communities, and entrepreneurs around nationalistic causes and movements. The preliminary results reveals a vibrant and rapidly-evolving creator economy, paradoxically promoted by government incentives around encouraging soft power abroad, if limited by platform and industry practices that inhibit the growth of sustainable creator businesses. More precariously, Thai creator culture is increasingly distinguished by the seller creator model operating solely off of Chinese owned, or funded, e-commerce platforms.

This paper examines how South American historical symbols, specifically the death flights—extrajudicial executions carried out by military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s—have evolved into viral memes. In the last decade, death flight imagery has resurfaced in online spaces like 4chan, where it is used to promote alt-right ideology. This shift ruptures historical memory, as a symbol of state violence rooted in a specific context is appropriated and reshaped within digital spaces dominated by the Global North. While much research traces memetic trends on 4chan, few studies examine how symbols from the Global South are decontextualized and commodified through memes.

This paper addresses this gap by analyzing this memetic evolution using a mixed-methods approach, combining computational content analysis (natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and computer vision) with close readings. The study tracks its transformation from a symbol of historical trauma to one of far-right extremism, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. By examining millions of posts from 4chan's /pol/ board (2013–2023), the paper explores how the memes’ language, tone, and visuals have transformed, and how they have been globally commodified through merchandise, re-entering South America in products like t-shirts and board games.

This research contributes to understanding how violent historical symbols circulate globally, how digital culture commodifies traumatic memory, and how extremism intersects with consumerism. By tracing the evolution of these symbols into memes, the paper advocates for more interdisciplinary research to explore the role of digital culture in the spread of extremism and the reappropriation of cultural symbols.

Digital life has opened up space for resentment to be used as a repertoire of online engagement. A growing body of literature argues that resentment is one of the key explanations for the global resurgence of the far-right. This study aims to investigate how this strategy is present in memes circulated in far-right public discussion groups on WhatsApp in Brazil. An interpretive analysis was conducted after gathering 40 images from a non-probabilistic sample of groups of Bolsonaro supporters. The findings lead to four different dimensions of resentment: hostility, victimism, revisionism, and urgency.

This paper explores how anti-veg*nism humor memes on Instagram fuel hate speech and reinforce hegemonic masculinities. A critical visual analysis (Rose, 2016) of 28 memes from the profile @lagrimasdevegano (veganstears) reveals that disparagement humor (Ford, 2015) disguises prejudice as jokes, promoting intolerance and gender stereotypes. These memes link veganism to fragility and femininity, reinforcing conservative ideologies that glorify meat consumption as a marker of masculinity. The study underscores the difficulties digital platforms face in regulating such content, given humor’s ambiguity and a maximalist interpretation of free speech. It advocates for culturally sensitive moderation and media education to create a more inclusive digital space.

In this paper, I offer a conceptualization of platformed nostalgia. I examine how Tumblr has, by virtue of its age and obsolescence, discursively engaged with popular articulations of historical ‘social media nostalgia’ (Jungselius and Weilenmann 2023). My critical technocultural discourse analysis of Tumblr’s marketing and governance considers how Tumblr has, since its acquisition by Automattic in 2019, co-opted vernacular nostalgic discourses about an imagined ‘simpler’ past of social media prior to the ascendancy of Big Tech. I will ask: to what extent, and in what ways, has Tumblr platformed historical social media nostalgia? What wider sociocultural contexts and discourses have shaped Tumblr’s courting of historical social media nostalgia? What does this suggest about how the platform wishes to be understood and interpreted within the cultural imaginary?

I argue that this discursive positioning of Tumblr, initially by social media users and later by Tumblr itself, intensified following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) in late 2022. The platforming of Tumblr nostalgia has enabled Tumblr to discursively position itself within the cultural imaginary as the past in the present and as a foil to larger competitors like X, Instagram, and TikTok. Here, Tumblr reconfigures itself as a folk hero (rather than failure) amongst the giants; its obsolescence no longer evaded but celebrated. These discursive interventions allow us to elucidate what Tumblr views, or wants us to view, as its role and influence in social media history, even if this does not necessarily gel with the platform’s internal priorities and policies in practice.

Academic attention on Discord has often focused on its potential for harassment and spreading hate and bigotry, at time even called "hateware" (Brown and Hennis 2019). As the userbase of Discord expands beyond gamers and more internet groups, such as media fandoms, take up the platform, there has been increased scholarship examining how these new groups of users engage with Discord in more positive ways. This paper examines how one such server, a private Supernatural fanfiction Discord server called The Lagoon, is maintained through the relations between its members.

Using distributed cognition and Actor Network Theory (ANT), this paper investigates relations between users in The Lagoon through digital ethnography, including three months of participant observation, semi-structured interviews with 26 members, and ongoing conversations with server administrators. Unlike prior studies that focus on large, highly active servers, this research explores a smaller, more intimate server of approximately 125 members, reflecting the size and structure of most Discord servers.

Findings reveal a complex, unevenly distributed network where active members engage in daily discussions, collaborative writing, and interactive “bot” usage, while the less active members still report feeling the affect generated by those interactions. This paper introduces the concept of the “ecosystem” to capture these messy relations, proposing that cognitive processes like inspiration and productivity are distributed throughout the ecosystem. While acknowledging potential imbalances and toxicity, this study highlights the capacity for positive collaboration on Discord, adding to recent scholarship that analyses the platform beyond its potential for "hateware."

Approaching shame from a queer theoretical framework, this paper will consider how the dynamic of shame operates within popular music fandoms online. Fangirls are subject to and participate in external and lateral shaming in order to enforce femmephobic ideals of normative femininity within fandom spaces, leading to derision with these fandoms often labelled as ‘toxic’. However, shame is also used productively – shame has been made a criterion for community bonding and shared intimacy between fangirls. Drawing on surveys and interviews with fangirls of popular music, this paper aims to uncover how fangirls ultimately negate and rework experiences of shame through participating in pop music fandom, as this collective shame strengthens community ties and feelings of kindship among fangirls.

In the current era of greatly increased availability of media technology platforms, fans with their domains continue to expand, becoming a rapidly growing concept of our time (Scott, 2019; Stanfill, 2019). The study examines Cesuo [厕所, toilet], a type of social bot account on Weibo, differs from algorithm-driven bots as it’s manually managed by real users who set up site conventions, review and post users’ submissions, and promote opinion coordination. As an emerging mode of information exchange and group interaction in Chinese Internet culture, Cesuo is especially active in fandom. It serves as both an organizational structure and an information dissemination tool, offering insights into how individual fans regulate collective personas and providing a new organizational model for fan communities in the platform media era. Cesuo can be seen as a type of fan-create Nonhuman Online Persona (NHOP), a coherent digital assemblage with no direct connection to individual human identities. The research investigates how Cesuo operates, its role in fan community building, and the power dynamics it establishes. By analyzing two representative Cesuo accounts and conducting semi-structured interviews, the study identifies three key characteristics of Cesuo: its anonymity and collective identity performance, its usage of fan slang as a form of community regulation, and its paratextual production and emotional bonding. Ultimately, the study argues that Cesuo enables alternative forms of digital fandom, emphasizing emotional connection and shared agency over individualized fan identity.

Fan videos (fanvids) represent a crucial aspect of digital fandom production, where fans creatively remix audiovisual content to construct new meanings. Music plays a fundamental role in this process, shaping vids’ narrative structures and emotional responses. One song, Xuanni, has become particularly influential within the Chinese fanvid community. The song has inspired the creation of over 2,000 fan-made videos, with nearly 260 of these surpassing one million views. The proliferation of edited videos has led viewers to adopt various emotional interpretations of Xuanni, influenced by the diverse visual representations. This paper explores the scholarly discourse surrounding fanvids, especially focusing on the role of music usage in them. By critically referencing the theory of self-orientalism, this research further explains the epistemological paradigm behind Xuanni's video creative motivation. Xuanni fanvids center on a form of Chinese ethnocentric self-reflection and identification, serving as a grassroots cultural expression of self-orientalism.

As an overarching label for advanced machine learning technologies, “artificial intelligence” is widely cited as a new threat to information systems and public opinion, raising concerns over machine enabled deception, precision targeting, and manipulation in political discourses and election campaigns. As AI technologies become available for a wide variety of sociopolitical applications including deep fakes, this roundtable raises a pertinent question: Is the hype around AI distracting attention from pressing issues in disinformation and extreme speech? Bringing perspectives from ground realities and large language model (LLM)-based annotation experiments in Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Myanmar, South Africa and the USA, experts on this roundtable will discuss whether excessive focus on AI derails efforts to address disinformation in a holistic manner. The panelists will highlight human networks of disinformation, electoral governance, factchecking, and content moderation as four distinct areas that emphasize the need for a contextual understanding of hate and disinformation. Why do human networks of disinformation on WhatsApp, word of mouth, and other intrusive social media channels continue to be hugely influential, especially in global South contexts? How do recent controversies around campaign financing and gray digital influence operations stress the importance of electoral governance? How does professional and informal factchecking in these countries perceive AI as a new challenge while also grappling with the suspicion that it cannot be of much help in persuading people with factchecked content? How do AI-assisted systems of content moderation encounter the challenges of cultural context and linguistic diversity? Through these examples, the roundtable stresses for a people-centric perspective that can highlight the potential risks as well as identify the limitations of AI’s role in disinformation and extreme speech ecosystems. With close knowledge of different global contexts, the roundtable experts will debate whether concerns about AI and deepfakes in elections and political communication in general have been overstated.

Scholars of platform governance, referring to dynamic relationships between governments, platform companies, and civil society, have often inquired about the new ways that online activity is structured through emerging technologies, norms, and political tensions. At the same time, we recognize a need to historicize these power relations: tracing the continuities, reconfigurations, and above all ruptures among “novelties”. This panel brings together four papers that advance the historicization of platform governance. Two papers explore “prehistories” of content moderation in eBay and in CompuServe's CB Simulator, looking specifically at how moderation responded to commercial and political pressures as opposed to idealistic visions of unregulated online spaces. The other two papers offer recent analyses of contemporary ruptures in platform governance, one examining how media governance approaches historically shape platform regulation in Indonesia and Pakistan and another investigating the shift from simple adjudication to complex forms of mediation and consensus-building. Juxtaposing prehistories with contemporary analyses sheds light on how moderation challenges, tensions, and “solutions” have diminished and persisted.

The advancement and implementation of digital technology is often framed as progress; our panel counters this view and critically examines how data and technology can reinscribe or deepen preexisting social biases and inequities. Using interdisciplinary methodologies and working across disciplines, this panel locates the site of power in the digital space – whether in the Caribbean Community’s ICT infrastructures, digitization of law and legal records in Bangladesh, Latina immigrant communities’ engagement with technology, or Malay Indigenous reframing of data sovereignty. We highlight how communities face harm but also negotiate, resist, and reimagine digital technology.

This panel is transnational and offers diverse perspectives from across the globe, emphasizing perspectives from the Majority World. While our papers focus on the particularities of data injustices related to the legacies of colonialism from within the cultural contexts we study, there is also a broader connection that demonstrates the overarching epistemic violence, struggles of governance and sovereignty, and racialized and gendered inequalities that are tied to technology.

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has intensified debates over data sourcing, legality, and knowledge legitimacy. This paper examines the epistemic ruptures that arise when proprietary AI models are trained on data extracted from shadow libraries, focusing on Meta’s use of Anna’s Archive. As a repository of copyrighted materials operating in a legal gray zone, Anna’s Archive challenges conventional distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge. Meta’s reliance on its data underscores broader tensions in digital governance, knowledge commodification, and corporate data strategies.

Using a Critical Data Studies (CDS) framework, this study investigates how power asymmetries shape AI knowledge production and legal discourse. By analyzing the Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. case, the paper explores how judicial reasoning reinforces corporate ownership of AI-generated knowledge while marginalizing alternative epistemologies. Key findings include the legal codification of epistemic ruptures, the reinforcement of shadow library invisibility, and the ambiguous legitimacy of knowledge sourcing.

Meta’s legal maneuvers, such as sealing motions and evidence gating, highlight corporate dominance in AI data acquisition, making it difficult for challengers to contest its practices. Meanwhile, shadow libraries navigate an ideological battlefield, portraying their work as a moral imperative while facing legal and political scrutiny. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions on AI ethics, copyright law, and digital knowledge infrastructures, aligning with AoIR 2025’s theme of "ruptures" to critically examine AI’s role in reshaping access, control, and legitimacy.

Data donation makes it possible to invite participants to request and share their data from digital platforms for research purposes. While seen as a user-centric approach to digital trace data collection, little is known about how participants experience and understand the data donation process. This study therefore asked twenty participants to verbalize their thoughts and actions as they went through data donation (from Google, YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn), and interviewed them about their experiences. Using a workflow that visualized participants’ own data and enabled them to inspect and delete data prior to donation, we not only identified strengths and obstacles within the data donation process from a user perspective, but also gained insight into how participants make sense of data donation. Overall, we find that while participants enjoyed gaining insight into their own media behavior, their understanding of data donation was problematic. Most participants misunderstood or overlooked the option to search through and delete their data, raising questions about meaningful informed consent. Another key finding was that participants interpreted data visualizations as objective representations of their media use, even when these data were incomplete or contradicted their own ideas about their platform use. Surprisingly, privacy considerations were only at play during platform selection, but not during the actual donation process.

This paper examines the increasing ‘wellness creep’ into the curation and recommendation of music by digital platforms. Through the platform walkthrough and critical interface analysis of Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music, it considers how industry discourse, user interfaces, and playlist products increasingly push pseudoscientific ideas of health and self-care as tools for the pursuit of an aspirational good life through music consumption. Our analysis demonstrates how platforms 'stage' these wellness-focused atmospheres, prioritizing ways of acting and feeling that reproduce normative conceptions of physical and emotional well-being. We especially focus on ‘chill vibes’ as a dominant aesthetic vernacular that invokes and brings forth certain affective and cognitive dispositions, simultaneously constructing and promising to fulfill fantasies of happiness and success. We posit that 'chill vibes' are supposed to unproblematically mitigate the effects of, and simultaneously prepare the user to keep thriving in, a reality of stress, acceleration, and unrest, and argue that streaming platforms appropriate and exploit common human responses to stress and unrest through the management of musical consumption and sonic environments. Ultimately, we show how the promise of wellness can be mobilized to promote regimes of subjectivity and governmentality, and how these are increasingly related to the commercial optimization of data and artificial intelligence. 

This paper traces the consequences of the decimation of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for a refugee camp along the border between Thailand and Myanmar. Events in Washington DC in January 2025, had devastating effects in Mae La camp as medical care and other essential services were withdrawn overnight. A less discussed dimension of the crisis concerns the potential harms resulting from the capture of refugee sensitive data. The paper analyses these events as exemplars of ‘infrastructuring’ and ‘infrastructural violence’. Digital technologies and AI increasingly underpin humanitarian operations to the extent that they provide the infrastructure through which essential aid is delivered. A typical example is biometrics which is commonly used for the delivery of vital services in Mae La. As infrastructures transcend institutional boundaries and humanitarian systems become interoperable with those of private companies and nation-states, the opportunities for function creep increase. The shareability of data and the permanence of records mean that data collected for one reason may be used for entirely different purposes and by different actors than the humanitarian organisations. The infrastructuring of aid amplifies the risks to individuals and multiplies the opportunities for structural violence.

This research examines how Brazilian camgirls develop techno-corporeal practices that simultaneously incorporate and resist platform capitalism's logics of abstraction. Drawing on Sobchack's concept of embodiment and Paasonen's carnal resonances, we investigate how performers navigate increasingly restrictive platform governance while creating affective connections through their bodies. Through a qualitative methodology triangulating virtual ethnography, interviews with ten Brazilian camgirls, and walkthrough analysis of platforms, this study reveals three key findings. First, performers develop embodied technical knowledge that enables them to circumvent platform control mechanisms, including multi-platform presence despite exclusivity requirements. Second, in response to high commission rates and payment barriers on mainstream platforms, camgirls create parallel economic systems using Brazil's state-managed PIX payment infrastructure, circumventing both platform commissions and dollar-based payment systems that many local consumers resist using. Third, these practices constitute forms of "regulated embodiment"—a condition where performers must balance platform compliance with embodied resistance. The Brazilian context reveals a distinctive dynamic where the state-managed payment system provides an infrastructural alternative to corporate financial intermediaries that routinely engage in financial deplatforming of sex workers. By examining how bodies become sites where platform governance, affective labor, and resistance converge, this research contributes to understanding embodied digital labor in the global south.

What happens when grassroots organizations take data into their own hands? This study investigates the activism of the Associação Brasileira de Acesso à Cannabis Medicinal do Rio de Janeiro (Abrario), a brazilian bottom-up organization challenging the state by producing and circulating data on cannabis-based medicine. Investigating Abrario’s work at the intersection of Critical Data Studies and Critical Citizenship Studies, this research highlights how marginalized communities negotiate the legitimacy of grassroots data within rigid institutional frameworks. By contesting the exclusionary practices of state and regulatory authorities, Abrario not only exposes the frictions and power struggles embedded in data legitimization, but also highlights the transformative potential of grassroots data in reshaping narratives about healthcare and citizenship.

Centering perspectives from the Global South, this study moves beyond technical debates to explore the symbolic and poetic dimensions of datafication. It argues for understanding grassroots data activism as part of local data ecosystems, dynamic spaces of negotiation, translation, and reimagination. The study uncovers the tension between bottom-up data and institutional skepticism, offering a nuanced look at the rounds of legitimization involved in bottom-up data practices. This research contributes to global conversations on epistemic justice, demonstrating how organizations like Abrario redefine data imaginaries and governance, challenge top-down notions of citizenship, and offer a blueprint for bottom-up communities to reclaim agency through data.

This work seeks to survey the ways in which artificial intelligence has affected Brazilian carnival, especially that of samba schools in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and its cultural environment. This survey will serve as the basis for a cultural critique that will reflect on the ways in which this imaginary of technique, which imputes to us an almost Faustian urgency of efficiency, productivity, speed and future, affects a cultural manifestation marked by social criticism, revolution and appreciation of community and artisanal work.The basis for this criticism is the theory of archetypological imagery, which is that this epitome of technique is a demarcation of Western ways of feeling, thinking and acting since the 19th century (Durand, 2012). The reasoning is complemented by questions from Neil Postman, for whom the relentless advancement of technology harms the preservation of traditions, impacting mental processes and social relations in a community (1994, p. 12). Far from seeking an apocalyptic alignment that rejects technological transformations, we understand that popular festivals are characterized by social dynamism. However, by questioning the way in which these adherences have been made in an unreflective way, we hope to collaborate with critical thinking and complex reflection on a phenomenon that will affect our own way of relating to tradition.

This study investigates engagement exchanges among Brazilian TikTok users, decentralized and collective practices aimed at producing data and metrics to help profiles qualify for the platform’s monetization program. Through the analysis of 123 TikTok videos, the study reveals a dynamic marked by diffuse collaboration and an ethic of reciprocity, where strategic engagement is promoted to boost visibility and meet monetization criteria. These practices involve the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), employing static images, videos, and audio to guide interactions. Creators leverage the platform’s affordances through data-driven strategies to "play the game" of the algorithm. Findings suggest that engagement exchanges differ from traditional platform labor structures, as they prioritize collective monetization eligibility rather than professional content creation. This distinguishes engagement exchanges on TikTok from engagement pods on Instagram, which focus on brand partnerships and long-term influencer careers. In the Brazilian context, these practices are shaped by historical labor precarity, reinforcing platform-driven aspirations of economic mobility while simultaneously obscuring exploitative labor dynamics. The findings also reveal an ongoing tension between reciprocity-based collaboration and TikTok’s individualistic monetization model.

Human Augmentation (HA) technologies, such as Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), neurostimulation devices, and microchip implants, are increasingly discussed in online pioneer communities, where early adopters shape imaginaries of technologically mediated human futures. As part of the broader process of digitalization, HA technologies contribute to the platformization of the human body. While these technologies remain experimental, transhumanists and biohackers engage with them as tools for self-enhancement, body modification, and posthuman evolution. These imaginaries are critical to understanding future adoption, yet remain underexplored in scholarly literature.

This study applies computational grounded theory (CGT) to analyze discussions on Reddit, identifying emerging sociotechnical imaginaries of HA technologies. Using BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling approach, we extract thematic structures from a dataset of 1,503 posts and 60,327 comments spanning 2008–2025. Using BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling approach, we extract thematic structures from a dataset of 1,503 posts and 60,327 comments spanning 2008–2025. The imaginaries are then defined through qualitative analysis and iterative refinement of the model, ensuring deeper contextual grounding. Preliminary findings reveal three key dimensions of cyborg imaginaries: (1) Beliefs, including aspirations such as immortality and concerns over job automation; (2) Practices, particularly cognitive and sensory augmentation; and (3) Technological Advances, with discussions centered on BCIs, neural implants, and cybernetic enhancements.

This extended abstract presents initial results, contributing to broader discussions on digitalization, human-technology integration, and cyborgization.

This study traces the communication practices of resistance and refusal that have followed the adoption of a wellness-centered artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot (colloquially known as ‘Stella’) at a private university in the southeastern part of the United States. Administrators initially brought Stella onto campus in October 2023 to elicit reflection on and cultivate support with respect to two simple questions: “How are you?” and “What makes you feel that way?” The AI product was to be rolled out in stages across student-facing information technology portals, capitalizing upon iterative care networks documented by university mental health providers. This research considers the following question: What resistance strategies and imaginaries of refusal did Stella provoke? What obstacles have students encountered when trying to disconnect from Stella?

This project involves in-depth interviews with 25 students forced to communicate with Stella by nature of their enrollment at a university, which does not allow for them to disconnect from the AI chatbot. This was a collaborative undertaking insofar as one of the co-authors of this paper began her empirical journey as a student, who was previously opted into encounters with Stella. She contributes an autoethnographic quest to disconnect from and deactivate the AI chatbot in an institutional environment that initially refused to grant her the ability to detach. A final source of data includes corporate documentation regarding Stella’s promised affordances. Though this work centers on contestation within a single university, it points to broader concerns accompanying the adoption of AI chatbots across institutions of higher education.

As AI-driven chatbots become integral to crisis communication, understanding their impact on public trust, fairness, and engagement is crucial. While chatbots provide real-time, scalable crisis response, concerns about transparency, legitimacy, and algorithmic bias persist. This study examines how AI chatbots influence perceptions of procedural and distributive justice in emergency messaging and whether justice-enhancing chatbot prompts improve public trust and compliance.

Through two online experiments (N = 415, Study 1; N = 400, Study 2), we assess (1) whether AI chatbots, comment sections, or static crisis information pages affect fairness perceptions and crisis decision-making, and (2) how chatbot messaging strategies shape engagement and risk behavior. Findings from Study 1 reveal that chatbots enhance procedural justice but reduce distributive justice, influencing trust and evacuation willingness. Study 2 optimizes chatbot design, demonstrating that procedural justice-enhancing prompts improve fairness perceptions without diminishing information usefulness, increasing public trust and compliance.

This research advances algorithmic governance and digital crisis communication by highlighting the trade-offs in AI-mediated public safety interventions. Findings provide actionable insights for emergency management, platform designers, and policymakers to develop transparent, trustworthy AI-driven crisis response tools that enhance public confidence and engagement in high-stakes situations.

Interactive chat systems that build on generative artificial intelligence frameworks - such as ChatGPT or Copilot - are increasingly embedded into search engines, Web browsers, operating systems, or available as standalone sites and apps. In a communication ecosystem where information disorder is a persistent threat (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017), there is the potential for users to utilise chat systems to seek information about conspiracy theories and false claims.

Conducting a systematic review of seven AI-powered chat systems, this study examines how these leading products respond to questions related to conspiracy theories. The nine theories chosen for analysis range from historical - such as the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, which have long been debated and debunked - to false claims related to more recent events, such as the idea that Hurricane Milton was geoengineered by Democrats. The chat systems were presented with preset questions which adopted a "casually curious" persona, requesting further information about the chosen conspiracy theories.

Our findings to date suggest that AI chat systems are less likely to implement strict safety guardrails around historical conspiracy theories, such as the JFK assassination theories. By contrast, the chat systems were more sensitive to conspiracy theories involving certain minority groups. AI chat systems were also less likely to engage with conspiracy theories related to developing stories and breaking news. In this study, we consider how these patterns affect the role of AI in the information and media ecosystem and explore how AI chat systems may better respond during periods of political transition or division.

In the 21st century, “play is a dominant way of expression in our First World societies” (Sicart 2014, p. 15). Play and games have been foundational to both the formation of the internet and its ascendence in everyday life. Social media platforms vie for our attention, making us players in their algorithmic economies of visibility and, in turn, these platforms are “gamed” by communities (Merriam-Pigg 2021; Massanari 2024). Many previous AoIR conferences have celebrated the digital and internet-based work that are happening in game studies, with games studies scholars serving in leadership positions within the organization. Game studies and internet research were seemingly entwined.

Yet recently there has been a rupture – and the presence of game studies work at AoIR has decreased over time as a result. In this roundtable, we discuss AoIR’s gaming past and future as well as why games and gaming culture are critical components in helping us understand internet studies in this fraught political moment. Taking seriously Aaron Trammell’s (2023) call to “repair play,” and utilizing Boluk and LeMieux’s 2017 concept of “metagaming” (playing games about games) we seek to explore not just the joy of incorporating play and game studies at AoIR, but the torturous schisms between play, game studies, and internet research. It is only through a thorough discussion of the joys and the tortures that this rupture may be repaired.

Join us, Adrienne Massanari (game studies scholar, former AoIR leadership), Ailea Merriam-Pigg (National Communication Association’s Game Studies Division Chair), E. Brooke Phipps (game studies scholar), Andrew Lowe (game studies graduate student), and Alison Harvey (game studies scholar, president of the Canadian Game Studies Association) in repairing the rupture of internet research and game studies.

"The cyberattack forced the hospital to switch to fax," read a front-page article in Dagens Nyheter, in Sweden, on February 11, 2024. Three individuals sent it to me. For the past year, I have been studying the fax, a neglected yet fundamental object of digital infrastructure of the welfare state.

As a socio-technical and socio-legal assemblage at the intersection of dismantling of the copper network and the emergence of the digital welfare state, the fax machine constitutes a crucial part of a critical data infrastructure of the Swedish welfare state. Although there are as many as 4000 faxes in daily use in healthcare only, Sweden is one of the last places one would go looking for a fax. A mega digital infrastructure, SDK, proclaimed to be the ‘fax-killer,’ raises renewed questions about whose accounts of security are mobilized for the digitalization of the welfare state infrastructure.

In this study, I draw on interviews with public administration employees about fax’s role in the digital infrastructure of the welfare state. In combination with textual analysis of digitalization and IT policies, I unpack the multiplicity of stories of security in the digital infrastructure of the welfare state.

How can the fax help us understand how datafied security is imagined in the welfare state? Whose digital security is included in these imaginaries, and who is doing the imagining? Expanding on Power et al’s (2022) conceptualization of shadow care infrastructures, the fax emerges as a shadow (digital) security infrastructure of the datafied welfare state.

Data science platforms are infrastructures for collaborative curation, processing, analysis, and application of datasets. In facilitating access to data resources, these platforms change the social and material conditions of knowledge generation from data, which may be characterized as the platformization of data science. Platform configurations shape the curatorial practices that render data actionable. However, the specific platform mechanisms of data curation on these platforms are overlooked. In this study, I examine the sociotechnical organization of data curation on Kaggle, a prominent data science platform. By conceptualizing Kaggle as a calculative infrastructure, I conduct a technographic analysis of Kaggle’s Usability Rating to unpack the calculation of data quality. Findings suggest that making data curation calculable operates through algorithmic rationality that conditions the generation of hollow datasets by reducing meaningful, contextual dataset contents to numerical indicators. Hollow datasets capture how digital platform logics and data science cultures reconfigure data curation as a procedural achievement in pursuit of data quality.

It is increasingly recognised that with widescale digital transformation, regimes of time and temporality are changing. This paper draws on empirical research conducted in the UK, critically examining temporal experiences of digital mediation and arguing affect is key to understanding them. Putting Williams’ (1977) concept of structures of feeling into dialogue with more recent work on affect, temporality and infrastructure, I propose a condition of being in the midst… is a significant infrastructure of feeling today. Being in the midst… refers to a heterogeneous, contingent, amorphous, open-ended state where an experience of being in the middle of something comes to dominate.

The paper explicates this argument through two ordinary practices of checking and binge-watching, exploring how they function, differently, in terms of ‘nextness’. Checking involves a sense of nextness as an anticipatory, pre-emptive logic of being on top of what is happening now, so as to be alert to what may happen in future. Binge-watching is an amorphous present whereby algorithmic nextness in the form of recommendations and automatic playing of the next show, folds pasts and futures into an expansive, paused or suspended present.

With reference to work on material media infrastructures and sensory, aesthetic infrastructures, I augment Williams’ concept and propose an understanding of in the midst… as an infrastructure of feeling, to refer to what is emerging and at the edges. I raise questions about where cultural politics are to be located if digital culture is an ambiguous and ambivalent affective temporality involving different formations of nextness.

As more parents turn to baby-tracking apps to monitor their infant’s feeding, sleep patterns, and diaper changes, they are effectively co-parenting with Google, Meta, and Amazon. Parents diligently input data for predictive insights about their child’s development, usually through third-party provision of AI analytics and monetisation tools. This data-for-service economic model raises critical concerns: What are the costs of parenting in a system that normalises the comprehensive and intimate surveillance of newborns and their parents? This paper examines the most widely used postpartum baby-tracking applications that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to assist Canadian parents in predicting patterns related to their children's lives. While these technologies promise convenience, insights, and improved sleep, they also introduce significant privacy risks. This study asks: Who has access to our children’s intimate data? And where can the meaningful points of legislative friction rupture these datafied relations?

This paper presents a dual analysis of critical information flows on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, focusing on two distinct datasets: cyberwar-related leaks from the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and unregulated firearm blueprints, commonly known as "ghost guns." Through a longitudinal study spanning 2018-2024, we examine the geographic distribution, temporal persistence, and network dynamics of these data flows, investigating how historical events shape their dissemination. Using alpha60, a custom P2P tracking system, we oversampled swarms at four-minute intervals, aggregating unique peer and seed data into hourly and weekly time-series units. Our analysis reveals significant year-over-year increases in both datasets, with cyberwar leaks peaking at 20.7M unique downloads in 2024 and ghost gun files at 9.9M unique downloads the same year.

Geopolitical disruptions, including the death of Alexei Navalny (2024) and the Kremlin’s information warfare tactics, correlate with spikes in cyberwar leaks. Similarly, domestic unrest and regulatory shifts impact ghost gun circulation patterns. Comparing these distributions to media consumption trends, we highlight key differences in P2P engagement with politically and legally sensitive content. Our findings contribute to broader discussions on information warfare, digital sovereignty, and the ethics of decentralized data flows. This research advances methodologies for analyzing P2P network behavior and underscores the geopolitical and security implications of unregulated information dissemination in digital ecosystems.

The Fediverse, a decentralized network of social platforms interconnected via protocols like ActivityPub, has gained traction amid crises in centralized platforms, such as Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X in 2023 and Meta’s 2025 changes in content moderation". This migration, termed “decentralized replatforming,” represents a horizontal shift where users voluntarily leave toxic spaces for federated networks like Mastodon and Pixelfed. While decentralization allows customizable moderation rules, it also creates challenges in scalability, resource allocation, and combating disinformation. This study investigates these tensions through semi-structured interviews with maintainers of Fediverse instances (Hubzilla.com.br, Bolha, Milpa), focusing on governance, costs, and ethical dilemmas. Preliminary findings reveal a heterogeneous migration: Bolha attracts progressive users fleeing hate speech, while Hubzilla serves as a technical refuge. The research proposes “decentralized replatforming” as a concept capturing both escape from corporate platforms and experimentation with alternative models. Key challenges include balancing autonomy with collective responsibility and ensuring sustainability without replicating Big Tech’s centralization. The study highlights the Fediverse as a contested space for ethical and technical innovation in digital communication.

As much as the debate around contemporary information flows and its associated risks has advanced in the last years—specially through the consolidation of an “information integrity” agenda—there are still significative gaps in literature concerning how digital platform usage affects the access to reliable, diverse and evidence-based information. Building on this, the present article aims to contribute to the discussion on how digital platforms’ big data algorithmic infrastructures relate to the promotion of healthy and diverse informational ecosystems. It draws upon existing sociological literature about algorithmic systems and on accumulated knowledge from international discussions (regarding the elaboration of an information integrity-oriented survey) to build an “investigation matrix”, proposing pathways for future practical quantitative and qualitative research in the field. Among its many conclusions, the matrix reinforces the need for a more holistic articulation of efforts on the theme, as well as the importance of multidisciplinary research that encompasses both the technical and social aspects of the phenomena. The article also discusses the importance of digital platforms in aiding researchers and policymakers with access to data, enabling impactful research efforts in the field.

This study introduces a framework to identify opinion leaders on Telegram, adapting a methodology developed for Twitter. The work is motivated by the need to examine influence dynamics on hybrid platforms like Telegram, where platform affordances can potentially facilitate the spread of disinformation and polarizing discourse. Specifically, the traceability of forwarded messages provides analytical possibilities for understanding these complex communication networks. The analysis involves a case study conducted with data extracted from public groups supporting Jair Bolsonaro's presidential re-election campaign. Using network analysis techniques, the method maps key roles including influencers, conversation starters, active engagers, and network creators. Results highlight these actors' roles in shaping information circulation within Telegram's public groups and channels. The discussion emphasizes the framework's systematic approach to analyzing opinion leadership. This research contributes to understanding how hybrid social platforms facilitate influence and information dissemination, offering practical tools for researchers studying emerging social media ecosystems.

This study analyzes new forms of literary consumption in the Brazilian market, driven by digital media and literary influencers. To deepen this discussion, the study is based on a case study of the FN’s Book Club, exploring its media impact and Felipe Neto's performative construction within this new niche. The objective is to understand how the entrepreneur's trajectory within the literary community can contribute to the expansion of reading habits among young people. The discussion is grounded in the concepts of cultural and symbolic capital by Bourdieu (1986), contemporary consumption by Campbell (2007), and digital performativities discussed by Abdin (2021) and Polivanov (2019).

This paper presents original research into an underexplored genre of technology criticism that combines elements of conspiratorial thinking, anti-globalist narratives, and critiques of technological overreach. To surface key texts in this genre, the paper employs a novel digital bibliometric method, which repurposes book recommendations from Amazon.com's book marketplace as a research tool to analyze reactionary “narratives of distrust” surrounding “data colonialism.”

This paper discusses new research on a type of technology criticism that blends conspiratorial ideas and critiques of technology's reach. The research uses a digital method to analyze book recommendations from Amazon.com, focusing on texts that express "narratives of distrust" about "data colonialism. " It highlights how this genre of literature criticizes data colonialism by framing Big Tech as part of a larger globalist effort.

The paper references specific books that show skepticism toward technology, especially in relation to artificial intelligence. These works, linked to the MAGA movement, provide an unexpected view of how this ideology interacts with Big Tech while showing distrust of technology's effects on human life. A common theme in these texts is their critique of "transhumanism," which they see as a dangerous agenda by elites attempting to overcome human limits for selfish reasons.

The discussion combines real technology critique with conspiratorial ideas, acknowledging the challenge of distinguishing between theory and conspiracy theory. The paper introduces a novel method called “co-consumption analysis” that repurposes "also bought" book recommendations scraped from Amazon.com, in order to study book networks and indicates that these reactionary texts are becoming more mainstream.

While Internet studies have prioritized social media, e-commerce platforms remain underexplored, particularly regarding how consumers negotiate, resist, and adapt to their sociotechnical infrastructures. This paper examines these dynamics through the case of Temu, a Chinese e-commerce platform that rapidly expanded globally since 2022. Known for gamified interface and ultra-low prices, Temu faces criticism over ethical, environmental, and geopolitical concerns, encapsulating tensions inherent to late capitalist platform economies.

Employing a mixed-method qualitative approach—technical walkthroughs, interviews, and ethnographic observations—this study investigates how users navigate ambivalence toward Temu’s algorithmic practices and business models. We introduce Platform Cynicism as a framework to conceptualize users’ simultaneous skepticism and pragmatic engagement with the platform, shaped by structural constraints and tactical adaptation. This cynicism emerges through four dimensions: (1) ambivalent resistance to purchases, balancing ethical critique with socioeconomic necessity; (2) negotiated resistance to algorithmic manipulation, via tactics like delaying purchases or rejecting recommendations; (3) temporalities of engagement, where resistance shifts with emotional states and life contexts; and (4) relational praxis, as users leverage peer networks to oscillate between solidarity and exploitation.

The study contributes to debates on consumer agency in platform economies by framing platform cynicism as a fluid, context-dependent user-platform dynamics that bridges critical algorithmic studies and consumer culture research. It challenges binary notions of resistance/compliance, revealing how users both subvert and sustain algorithmic power, while advocating for collective action beyond individualized adaptation. This work highlights the contradictions of consumption experiences under late algorithmic capitalism, urging deeper interrogation of everyday platform politics across different sociotechnical contexts.

Although TikTok Shop has not been fully launched in Europe, users are actively repurposing TikTok LIVE to facilitate commercial activity. This paper examines the emergence of live commerce on TikTok LIVE during Black Friday week in the Netherlands, highlighting how users mobilise the platform’s features to stage commerce as an interactive and participatory spectacle. We conceptualise TikTok LIVE as a hybrid space where entertainment, interaction, and commerce converge, reflecting broader trends in the platformisation of consumer culture. Drawing on ethnographic content analysis of 131 TikTok LIVE sessions across 80 accounts (22h37min of content), we employed a ‘follow the medium/traces/users’ approach to document how commerce unfolds within and beyond the app.

First, we identify three selling formats: live auctions mediated via chat, external sales directing users to websites, and community-driven giveaways that reward prior buyers. Each format illustrates evolving norms of interaction between hosts and audiences. Second, we analyse the roles performed during LIVEs, mapping a spectrum from charismatic influencers to transaction-focused sellers, and noting distributed labour across hosts, moderators, and viewers. Third, we show how creators gamify live interactions - through unboxing rituals, celebratory shoutouts, and packing routines - rendering back-end commerce into content. These practices, we argue, exemplify commerce as liveness, reliant on self-surveillance and emotional engagement.

We conclude by reflecting on the consumer law implications of these practices and assess TikTok’s role as a private governor shaping how commerce is organised and experienced on its platform.

As large language models (LLMs) with chat interfaces such as ChatGPT have become available to the public, with ChatGPT reportedly amassing more than 400 million active users worldwide, social media has become host to a proliferation of posts and dedicated communities featuring lay people’s experiments with prompt engineering. While much has been written about prompting as a specialized skill, there is currently very little research on the socio-cultural practices of prompting and the online communities dedicated to these activities and little is known about how non-experts are using prompts to shape their interactions with LLMs. With this conference paper I aim to contribute to the understanding of LLM prompting as a vernacular practice in digital culture. Combining the method of digital ethnography of the proliferation and modification of a prompt known as "the eigenprompt" on the social media platform X.com, this paper explores how the how assumptions and ideals about LLM intelligence, interiority, and emotion are expressed through the practice of prompting, and how ideals and preferences about LLMs are negotiated and iteratively reformulated throughout online communities. Finally, I argue that the eigenprompt and similar vernacular prompts should be seen as examples of algorithmic folklore that contribute to the construction of new ways of being and relating to digital others.

As platforms like Instagram shift from chronological feeds to algorithm-driven models, visibility is no longer an organic byproduct of social interactions but an ontological condition structured by opaque computational processes. Existing literature on digital influence—centered on authenticity, visibility management, and commercialization—fails to account for how platforms actively shape what is recognized as influential, valuable, or authentic. We demonstrate how algorithmic infrastructures rupture traditional influencer studies, exposing the limits of frameworks that conceptualize influence as human-centered. Instead, we propose that influencing the digital requires acting for, on behalf of, and through the digital itself. We introduce three interrelated modes to capture this transformation: computational authenticity, algorithmic entrepreneurship, and digital visibility. These categories illustrate how influencers must strategically engage with recommendation systems, optimize engagement metrics, and navigate platform affordances to maintain relevance. This study challenges human-centric models and highlights the structural conditions governing visibility by repositioning digital influence as an ontological entanglement between influencers, platforms, and algorithmic infrastructures. We argue that digital influence is not simply mediated by technology but co-produced by sociotechnical arrangements that define who and what gains recognition in algorithmic environments. This shift demands new conceptual tools to understand how influence is actively negotiated within digital infrastructures rather than merely performed for human audiences.

This study examines how algorithmic control intersects with gendered experiences in China’s food delivery industry, focusing on female riders’ perceptions of algorithms and their marginalization within the platformized gig economy. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with riders, we reveal that female riders often internalize algorithmic inequalities as personal limitations, attributing disparities in work outcomes to their gender identity rather than systemic biases. Female riders interpret algorithms as neutral and rational, despite the structural biases embedded in platform designs. Additionally, we find that this perception is reinforced by their limited access to informational networks dominated by male riders, who dominate shared physical and digital spaces. A pervasive misogynistic workplace culture, characterized by the degradation of women’s work and sexual harassment, further excludes female riders from critical information and resistance strategies. Our findings reveal how gender-unequal sociocultural contexts, precarious labor conditions, and opaque algorithmic infrastructures intersect to reproduce structural inequality. By highlighting the gendered dimensions of algorithmic control, this study contributes to broader understandings of how technology and sociocultural dynamics shape labor practices and perpetuate marginalization in the gig economy.

In an increasingly algorithm-driven digital landscape, personalization systems are often praised as almost magical entities capable of "knowing us better than we know ourselves". This study takes TikTok as a privileged object of investigation to explore how users engage with these algorithms that seek to "know" them. Adopting a qualitative, empirical approach, we conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with TikTok users in Brazil to explore their everyday experiences, perceptions, and imaginations around algorithmic recommendations. We argue that TikTok’s algorithm-centered infrastructure shapes a unique user experience, where navigating the platform is essentially about engaging in a relationship with the algorithm itself. Our participants not only demonstrated a high algorithmic awareness but developed informal theories and strategies to “train” their systems in an effort to refine recommendation accuracy. As these users experienced increasingly personalized content — deeply attuned to their emotions and personal experiences — some expressed a sense of algorithmic intimacy. Through their clicks, likes, searches, and interactions, they felt as if “sharing a secret with the algorithm”, revealing personal, sensitive, and sometimes even embarrassing preferences. In this preliminary analysis, we discuss how TikTok’s “For You” model fosters a new form of intimacy mediated by algorithms, data collection, and commercial interests. While the transformation of intimacy is not a new topic in internet studies, this paper shifts the focus from self-exposure on social media to the cultivation of an intimate relationship between users and algorithms, offering new insights into the affective and subjective dimensions of algorithmic personalization.

This work addresses the rise of synthetic data in finance as one of the many disruptions that go hand in hand with the expansion of digitalization, platformization and AI capabilities in this sector. In the first part of this paper we deconstruct the narratives of the ‘synthesis of synthetic data’ into financial infrastructures – the institutions, information, technologies and rules enabling financial intermediation, this paper points to possibilities for developing much-needed counter-fictions through democratic deliberation, and the needs concerning both financial inclusion and participation in the global financial assemblage in Global South contexts. The second section contrasts the ambitious promises of synthetic data with their more gradual, fragmented, and uneven integration into global finance. We show, drawing on interviews and documents, how synthetic data in global finance has been taken-up in more piecemeal manner as their less-publicized drawbacks. Thirdly, we address the ruptures in governance stemming from the narratives of global finance and synthetic data when these are examined from the lens of global south players. Our findings are in line with the wider discrepancies between technological promise and realization, as earlier studies for instance of ‘big data’ in finance noted (Campbell-Verduyn et al 2017). On the other hand, the case of synthetic data reveals a growing governance role of previous back-office technology firms and other tech actors, providing potential new narratives from non-mainstrem tech and geographic actors.

Digital labor is undergoing profound shifts with the rise of AI-powered "digital twin" technologies, which promise to commodify identity and generate passive income through virtual human avatars. While scholarship on digital labor has largely focused on precarious gig work, this study examines how highly-paid 'elite' tech workers in New York conceptualize and justify their participation in digital cloning industries. Through in-depth interviews with software engineers, designers, and strategists in AI avatar startups, alongside discourse analysis of marketing materials and investor pitches, I explore the ideological and economic frameworks shaping the labor ascribed to AI-produced 'digital twins'.

Positioned within Platform Studies and Creator Studies, this study theorizes digital twin labor as a rupture in both work and embodiment. By decoupling labor from direct human effort, digital cloning introduces a new model of economic extraction that extends market logics into identity itself. Findings reveal three dominant narratives: (1) the valuation of passive income, where digital cloning is framed as a clever and convenient expansion of individual agency; (2) technological inevitability, which normalizes digital twins as a natural progression of technology; and (3) self as intellectual property, positioning identity as an asset to be monetized. These narratives illustrate tensions between empowerment and new forms of digital exploitation.

By critically analyzing these ruptures, this research contributes to broader discussions on automation, platformization, and digital sovereignty, shedding light on the ways digital labor is restructured in the age of AI-driven identity commodification.

This paper assesses the content creation of #GRWM videos by tween girls as a site of play and exploration under the commercial conditions and platform logics of TikTok as a digital play space. The paper explores the ludic possibilities of commercial digital identity performances and considers how tween girls navigate the digital by focusing specifically the #GRWM genre, and the creation of such videos by the multitude of tween girls with few followers.

This project engages in two research methodologies. 1) a critical genre analysis of the top GRWM influencers. 2) a) semi structured interviews and media-go-alongs with 20 tween girls, and b) through team based workshop where the 20 girls collaboratively and collectively reflect on their media creation practices and envision how these practices are articulated and understood to a wider public.

The purpose of this methodological form is to centre the voices and experiences of girls themselves as co-creators of knowledge, and to establish them as experts in their own their lives by inviting them to co-create research and share their multi-storied voices.

It would be easy to dismiss these videos as merely being imitative forms of aspirational labour of girls dreaming of becoming influencers but this would overlook the ludic possibilities of girls in these creative spaces of digital culture. Instead the project explores the complexity of girls’ play with commercial imaginaries in digital capitalism the paper draws from the fields of Play Studies, Girls’ Studies, Creator Studies, Critical Advertising Studies and Critical Digital Studies.

This paper critically analyses social media strategies for datafied exploitation. Our case study is the annual Insights (Year in Review) reports released by pornographic platform Pornhub between 2013-2024, on which we conducted detailed content and discourse analysis. The reports are extensive — the 2023 report, for example, contains 60 infographics and is 8,000 words long. We show that the reports are characterised by strategies of legitimisation, which work to actively celebrate not only the often-exploitative video content uploaded to Pornhub, but also the platform’s choices to harvest and exploit personal data from every user who accesses the site. These dual levels of exploitation are enabled by Pornhub’s platform infrastructure and use of social media logics. These findings lead us to argue that Pornhub should be recognised and researched as a significant player in the social media environment, rather than quarantined for analysis in specialist research on pornography. The celebration of data exploitation within the Insights reports thus illuminates parallel practices carried out by other social media platforms.

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the paper follows twenty Sri Lankan social media users who use social media for resistance and who rose to prominence during the 2022 Aragalaya, a grassroots political movement that ousted the incumbent Rajapaksa regime (Kodikara et al, 2022). On the one hand, the argument considers the tensions that emerge in the encounter between being a highly visible Sri Lankan activist in a media sphere notorious for egregious restrictions on media freedoms and state-sponsored violence against dissenters. On the other hand, it probes the lure and demands of widespread influencer culture on activism and how the accumulation and exchange of influence affects and contributes to how activists’ politically participate. The paper introduces the term “information influencers” to address the overlooked intersection of social media influencing and political participation. It also argues for a conceptual way of seeing social media influence through the Bordieuan lens of digital capital (Ragnedda, 2020). The primary objective of the article is to understand the reasons people in Sri Lanka become information influencers and what value digital capital holds for them. The ethnographic findings are presented under the four rubrics of 1) early years trauma, 2) rage and responsibility, 3) altruism and 4) reclaiming the influencer space. While the ethnography is rooted deeply in Sri Lanka’s political landscape, when taken together, the concepts of information influencer and digital capital are shown to provide a valuable lens for tracing how influencer practices unfold in diverse cultural settings and alternative digital spaces.

This study explores how former teenage hostages from the Israel-Hamas war use TikTok to narrate their experiences, process trauma, and reconstruct identity. Social media, particularly TikTok, has become a key platform for self-expression and collective storytelling, allowing young users to integrate their trauma into digital culture. Drawing on Goffman’s dramaturgical model, the study examines how these adolescents navigate self-presentation through platform-specific affordances.

Using qualitative thematic analysis, the research examines 67 TikTok videos created by 10 former teenage hostages released in late 2023. The findings reveal four key themes: (1) Platform integration—hostages incorporate TikTok trends, viral sounds, and participatory formats to frame their captivity experiences, blending personal testimony with digital culture. (2) Dark humor—irony and sarcasm serve as coping mechanisms, allowing former hostages to reclaim agency over their narratives while engaging audiences. (3) Grief expression—videos function as digital memorials, commemorating lost family members and documenting the emotional impact of war. (4) Familial and collective identity—hostages emphasize family support and solidarity with those still in captivity, intertwining personal trauma with broader social activism.

These themes highlight the complex ways in which trauma is performed and negotiated on social media. The study extends research on digital identity and trauma processing, demonstrating that TikTok not only mediates self-expression but also reshapes how young survivors construct meaning from their experiences within participatory digital spaces.

The paper focuses on Instagram LGBTQIA+ parent-influencers in the Italian context, where traditional gender stereotypes are still predominant and LGBTQIA+ individuals’ rights are well-below EU standards (ILGA-Europe 2024). Through thematic analysis of a three-month digital ethnography of the two largest profiles of Italian LGBTQIA+ parent-influencers, the contribution highlights both: 1) LGBTQIA+ parent-influencers’ use of digital platforms to negotiate identity-based stigma, providing alternative models of gender, sexuality, and family; and 2) the political potential of this form of advocacy-work.

Preliminary findings highlight how the profiles contend with integration and social advocacy. On the one hand, they seek to dismantle stereotypes that see queer parenthood as ‘other’ and selfish through relatable portrayals of family life; on the other, they engage with questions of politics and activism, often due to a perceived duty to educate audiences. These practices highlight the profiles’ efforts to familiarize audiences with the challenges faced by LGBTQIA+ families and overcome the ‘love is love’ trope of social inclusion, which often has the result of depoliticizing queer struggles.

Given a relative lack of symbolic LGBTQIA+ figures and events in Italy, LGBTQIA+ parent-influencers can allow scholars a glimpse into the cultural and social presence of these subjectivities. Their tug-o-war between relatable-ness and activism underscores questions regarding the potential for social change of this kind of content and how it is reconciled with the logics of platform capitalism.

Despite growing concern over the standardization of content moderation, there has

been little empirical investigation beyond mainstream social media. We developed a novel approach to compare rules and policy priorities within Community Guidelines based on categories from the Trust and Safety Professionals Association. We focused on livestreaming, a particularly challenging format to moderate, and asked: what policies govern content? And how do mainstream, alternative, and adult content platforms differ? We analyzed 12 platforms and identified four orientations towards industry standards: the mainstream ideal, the regulatory competitor, the alternative ethos, and the overlooked concerns. These orientations partially map onto divisions between mainstream, alternative, and adult livestreaming platforms, allowing us to pinpoint different factors driving the adoption of industry standards. Finally, we discuss the tradeoff between free expression and sexual expression, highlight epistemological considerations regarding the use of policy documents, and conclude with an agenda for future comparative research.

This roundtable convenes experts to discuss the evolving landscape of social media research data access under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). Focusing on Article 40.12, which mandates access to "publicly available data," the discussion will examine early implementation experiences, challenges, and best practices. The DSA's impact extends beyond the EU, as platforms develop new APIs and data access mechanisms to comply with these regulations, impacting research globally.

The DSA represents a pivotal moment for platform transparency and research access, yet the initial year of implementation has revealed significant variation in how platforms are interpreting and fulfilling their obligations. Researchers face inconsistent application processes, data quality issues, technical barriers, and restrictive terms of service. This roundtable will foster dialogue and collaboration among experienced researchers to address these challenges and shape more effective data access frameworks. It also includes discussions of how the DSA-compliant APIs have affected research approaches to studying platform data as well as the larger question of emerging alternatives.

This roundtable will feature brief introductory presentations by the organizers to set the stage for an interactive discussion. The session will not include paper presentations but will focus on facilitating dialogue and interaction among delegates.

Organizers and Initial Participants

Fabio Giglietto, University of Urbino [organizer]

Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology

Josephine Lukito & Kayo Mimizuka, University of Texas at Austin

Jessica Robinson, University of Oslo

Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam

“Health creator” is now a common term across academic work (e.g., Avella, 2024) and public parlance (e.g., Moore, 2020), also featuring in the title of one of the traditional panels at AoIR2024. However, as a label, it directs our attention away from matters of ill health (e.g., suffering, diagnosis, loss), overlooking the work of those who share their lived experience of illness and missing the multiple implications this work has for creators, audiences and wider publics. As a concept, it remains underdeveloped– even despite the growing body of both academic research on platform economies and creator cultures (e.g., Cunningham and Craig, 2021) and global policy interested in the influence of social media on lay and public understandings of health and medicine (e.g., WHO, 2025).

The panel aims to shed light on the wider spectrum of creator work that draws on matters of health, illness and care and develop a conceptual toolkit to interpret this work, understand its labour and explore its implications. It reviews evidence of lived experience, epistemic work, credibility, and influence through five case studies approaching creators and their content on and through Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, BlueSky and LinkedIn. To provide a comprehensive account of the processes through which content is created, shared, and audienced, the panel explores all sites of meaning making: it starts by focusing on creators themselves (paper 1), to then draw attention to content (paper 2 and 3), platform structures (paper 4), and audiences (paper 5).

The study focuses on the struggles and threats to the media landscape from the perspectives of regulatory institutions, news media organizations, and citizens. In doing so, twelve interviews with editors-in-chief and journalists from major leading news media outlets (print, TV, radio, online, and community media), four interviews with representatives of major national media authorities, and four focus group discussions in the capital and a smaller city with media users (n=38) from heterogeneous socio-demographic backgrounds (including gender differences and disadvantaged groups) were conducted in the summer of 2024. We identify several threats to the media and their possible implications for democracy from the perspective of citizens. These threats all have their discursive and material components. However, some threats – particularly economic sustainability – have stronger material components, while others – such as lack of trust, the transformation of political knowledge, and increasing polarization – have stronger discursive components. In addition to specific materialist characteristics, like rising energy prices and inflation, which worry respondents the most, the findings highlight the more discursive (symbolic) and affective dimensions of the threats.

Smartphone bans or pledges signed by parents/carers to delay giving phones to young people are gaining international traction. Bans are usually based on arguments that smartphones are addictive, unhealthy and contribute to worsening educational outcomes. However, as a relatively new phenomenon, little existing research exists on the practical and experiential repercussions of these bans. Extant research shows that abstinence approaches to mitigating other potentially risky activities, including underage sex or drug and alcohol use, may increase harms, especially for vulnerable young people, and erode children’s rights. In this paper, we offer a preliminary analysis of our qualitative, multi-pronged study which seeks to better understand ‘on the ground’ experiences of the banning policies as they are rolled out in England. Working collaboratively with an educational charity, a media centre and a secondary school, our research explores the views of multiple actors and considers the varied contexts in which smartphone banning matters. We advance a sociodigital and postdigital approach, arguing that smartphones and people are engaged in complicated and processual human-media relations. We analyse the material and affective experiences of smartphone banning for young people, teachers and parents, exploring how banning smartphones doesn’t cut users off from digital mediation, but rather puts them in different relationships to these contexts. We offer some tentative recommendations for supportive structures in educational environments that are attentive to these sociodigital complexities, and which can help young people and adults navigate phone bans and the new relationalities around devices these set in play.

Social media platforms (SMPs) evolve rapidly and continually, impacting their affordances, user experiences, and societal interactions. Existing research has often analyzed these changes from organizational or technological innovation perspectives or examined SMPs and their policies in isolation, rather than within broader patterns. SMPs, however, are distinct in their logics, relevance, practices, and user engagement. Thus, we propose a taxonomy of SMP change, grounded in sensitizing concepts from literature on platform and technological evolution alongside an analysis of 400 public communication documents from Meta, YouTube, X, and TikTok. Our aim is to theorize SMP evolution and critically reassess its broader implications.

Our taxonomy categorizes SMP change into three interdependent dimensions: material, algorithmic, and ideological. Material changes involve modifications to platform features, interfaces, and user experiences. Algorithmic changes refer to backend modifications that are often less transparent and largely invisible, yet they significantly shape user interactions and content visibility. Ideological changes reflect shifts in governance priorities and policy frameworks, often driven by political and economic pressures. These dimensions are not mutually exclusive but intersect in ways that redefine SMP values, affordances, impacts, and potential harms.

By theorising SMP change, our taxonomy highlights the embedded politics of digital platforms and their role in shaping contemporary information ecosystems as infrastructures. This hopes to provide researchers with lens and language to critically examine how platform changes influence societal structures. We also emphasise the importance of such a language to study their growing relevance, particularly as corporate-state collaborations within SMP industries expand in unprecedented ways.

This paper offers a contribution to debates about the alternative histories of computing, automation and AI. It looks at the case of the nation-wide project of digitalization of the economy in Socialist Bulgaria that took place from the mid-1960s. The focus of this paper falls specifically on the Unified System of Environmental Protection developed in the 1980s, which offers the opportunity to revisit debates about the relationship between economic growth, technological innovation and industrialization and their detrimental impact on the environment. This paper takes as a methodological focus the example of failures and paths not taken in order to show how contemporary debates about the environmental impact of AI and the promise of technosolutionism can be evaluated from a southern historical perspective.

Various intimate and global crises unfolding over the past five years invite us to consider what it means to be a Black woman media studies scholar engaged in Internet research: why we do it and how we survive the institutions that we must navigate in the process. We have witnessed two well-resourced, research-intensive institutions scandalously deny tenure to two prolific Black women (Nikole Hannah Jones and Kathleen McElroy) who work at the intersection of race and journalism/media studies. We have seen toxic academic environments take the lives of several Black women administrators. We have survived increased work and caregiving loads in the midst of a global pandemic. We have confronted the weaponization of political bigotry and a heightened attack on racialized, queer, and gendered bodies. And we have seen many institutions renege on promises made in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Many have left the academy in light of this reality, but what of those who choose to stay?

This fishbowl explores questions and dilemmas that affect Black women scholars in particular ways due to interlocking oppressions. What are the costs and benefits of public scholarship? How do Black women scholars flourish while mothering and caregiving? What does the “mammy” trope look like within the context of the classroom/department, and how do we navigate it? What’s in a promotion, and is it worth it? How do we center our identities within our work? How do we effectively, yet diplomatically, move through the various stages of our careers? How do we cultivate joy, now?

Ultimately, this interactive fishbowl is a community-building endeavor that ruptures the disposability of Black women in academia (and global societies more broadly) and evinces the urgency of making Internet research more inclusive as a field.

The rise of right-wing alternative social media platforms has reshaped the media landscape, creating an ecosystem where opposition to transgender rights is amplified. Unlike mainstream platforms, which implement content moderation, alternative platforms such as BitChute, Gab, Rumble, Telegram, and Truth Social foster unregulated discourse where anti-trans narratives spread unchecked. This study examines how engagement with these platforms relates to attitudes toward transgender individuals in the U.S. Using data from Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (Wave 109, 2022; N = 10,188), we find that individuals who consume news from alternative social media express significantly more anti-trans policy opinions than non-users. Regression analyses show that users of alternative platforms are more likely to support criminalizing parental support for a child’s gender transition and oppose legal protections for transgender individuals—policies that have relatively low levels of public support and opposition, respectively, among the general population. Additionally, we find that being Republican, conservative, religious, and lower income predicts greater use of alternative platforms, reinforcing ideological echo chambers that intensify anti-trans views. Among alternative platform users (n = 587), those who believe these platforms help them “better understand the world” exhibit stronger anti-trans policy opinions, particularly regarding transgender youth. Platform-specific analyses reveal that users of BitChute, Gab, Rumble, Telegram, and Truth Social hold significantly more anti-trans views than non-users, while differences for Gettr and Parler users are not significant. These findings highlight how alternative social media fosters ideological radicalization and plays a critical role in shaping public opposition to transgender rights in the US.

This paper engages in scholarly conversations about white nationalism on digital platforms through the claim that analysis of white nationalist digital rhetoric requires a significantly more thorough theorization of race to understand the core drivers of contemporary white nationalist activity. The object through which this paper forwards this claim is white nationalist digital rhetoric on /pol/itically incorrect (an imageboard known as a hub for white nationalism hosted on the platform 4chan). The paper argues that white nationalist digital rhetoric on /pol/ functions as a technics of raciality, or a set of practical skills that deploy and adapt the signifying strategies justifying racial violence through the affordances of media technology. The paper makes this argument through a rhetorical analysis of the posting habits of /pol/ users as found in discussion threads regarding common topics of concern, such as crime and immigration. The paper concludes by emphasizing comparative and transnational racial rhetoric as a significant concern for scholarship focusing on contemporary white nationalism on digital platforms.

This paper examines how alt-tech platforms, particularly Rumble, reconfigure conspiracy culture. While mainstream social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook have influenced the visibility and circulation of conspiracy theories, increasing content moderation has led to the migration of creators to alternative platforms that promote unrestricted speech. Through a six-month digital ethnography of a right-wing conspiracy theory channel that transitioned from YouTube to Rumble, this study analyzes how platform affordances and ideological commitments shape conspiracy narratives. Findings reveal that Rumble fosters a distinct conspiratorial discourse characterized by (1) amateur aesthetics and (2) rhizomatic, open-ended narratives, conceptualized as a "stream of paranoid consciousness." This format, enabled by Rumble’s free speech absolutism, encourages a fluid and immersive mode of engagement that disrupts traditional narrative closure. Unlike the structured, episodic storytelling often found in mainstream media, conspiracy content on Rumble embraces ongoing uncertainty, fostering a participatory distrust loop among viewers. These aesthetic and discursive transformations echo historical right-wing media practices, particularly the interactive, unscripted style of 1990s talk radio. By demonstrating how alt-tech platforms cultivate a distinct conspiratorial culture, this paper contributes to broader discussions on platform governance, media infrastructures, and digital counter-publics. Rather than merely hosting content rejected by mainstream platforms, Rumble actively reshapes the production and reception of conspiracy theories, illustrating the profound role of platform infrastructures and values in structuring public discourse.

The migration of users from mainstream social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter (X), YouTube) to alternative platforms (e.g., Telegram, Vkontakte, Gab, 4Chan) is often attributed to the latter’s lack of censorship and high anonymity, fostering spaces for controversial political discourse. While prior research highlights deplatforming as a key driver—where banned political actors and their followers shift to alternative spaces—this study explores direct linking practices on mainstream platforms as an additional "pull" mechanism. Different from the sudden "push" effect of deplatforming, the sharing of links subtly invite users to alternative platforms offering access to fringe content. Focusing on German alternative news-sharing environments across seven platforms this study examines how such direct linking to alternative platforms in posts on mainstream platforms has evolved from 2019 to 2022. Approximately 50 million posts from mainstream platforms revealed 650,000 links to alternative platforms, connecting to 7,000 unique accounts. Preliminary findings show Telegram as the most linked platform, with Facebook disproportionately prominent in sharing links. For further analysis three potential actor intentions are proposed: relocating followers to alternative platforms, boosting mainstream platform popularity by highlighting alternative content, or expanding cross-platform influence. Using time series modeling and network analysis, this study addresses two research questions: (1) How has direct linking to alternative platforms developed over time? (2) What are the likely intentions and actor types behind these practices?

Scholars are increasingly addressing the societal and ethical implications of AI, raising important concerns about its broader impact. Although AI systems offer unique affordances as a standalone technology, the development of tools and applications that aim to challenge and counteract the growing power of AI are significant. Such resistance might take the form of disrupting AI-trained models, challenging algorithmic biases, or exposing the opaque workings of AI systems. This study focuses on the links between the counter AI tools and the AI affordances, by exploring how such tools develop oppositional affordances, for users, creators and artists to navigate and resist the power of AI systems. Findings indicate that such counter AI- tools can redefine the boundaries of AI-human interaction, offering alternatives that might empower users to regain control over AI systems expansion. Through this critical examination, the discussion contributes to a broader understanding of how counter-AI interventions, projects and tools might reshape the technological landscape and introduce new tactics for resisting the challenges of AI-driven platforms.

Many scholars have studied how Chinese internet users creatively navigate China’s highly controlled social media platforms in order to voice critical sentiments. Yet the specific forms and sources of user creativity are still little known. This article uncovers one particular form of creativity that allows users to express critical sentiments under political constraints. Borrowing from the Chinese term qianyi (潜移), which the French sinologist Jullien (2015) translates as “submerged displacement,” I argue that Chinese internet users achieve a kind of submerged displacement of internet control by creatively deploying the affordances of narrative forms and social media platforms. Online critical sentiments proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic, even as residents’ mobility and spaces for online speech were strictly limited. This paper studies two instances of “submerged displacement” during the COVID pandemic. By analyzing two conventional narrative forms transposed to social media – the diary and the biography, I show how the combined affordances of narrative forms and social media platforms made it possible for users to quietly displace internet censorship and political control to share critical sentiments. Data for this article come from the author’s online ethnography during the COVID-19 pandemic. They consist of thousands of posts and user comments collected from WeChat and Weibo from January 2020 to December 2022. With a focus on narrative forms and affordances, I followed the methods of narrative inquiry in the collection and analysis of texts (Clandinin 2023; Connelly & Clandinin 1990).

Recent developments in platform governance point to community-led moderation as an increasingly preferred solution by mainstream social media platforms when dealing with problematic content. While research has shown the benefits of involving online communities in content moderation efforts, this type of moderation is also prone to limitations, such as leaving volunteer moderators on their own heuristics to decide upon complex categories of content. Using Anna Tsing's (2015) metaphor of 'life among ruins', in this paper we examine an online community called the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO) that had to turn to volunteer governance in face of increasing failures of centralised content moderation on Twitter/X. Its members, also known as ‘fellas’, have been active on the platform since May 2022 by debunking and ridiculing online falsehoods spread by highly visible Russian government accounts and pro-Russian actors, reporting problematic behaviour, as well as fundraising on behalf of Ukraine. We identify three types of moderation practices relevant to the collective – ‘soft-’, ‘hard-’, and ‘self’-moderation. While, for our participants, Russia’s war on Ukraine warranted such efforts, this community-led moderation required a high emotional and time investment on their behalf. Our findings attest to the ability of such practices to fill platform governance gaps, while also recognising the need for self-moderation and ongoing care for the community as vital for sustaining such practices.

This pilot study employed a decolonised, youth-centred methodology to challenge dominant discourses and hierarchies in knowledge production. The Distributed Data Generation (DDG) approach facilitated participatory workshops across Australia, India, and Indonesia, involving collaboration with local research centres and a youth organisation. This cross-cultural partnership aimed to unsettle Western assumptions about research methodologies and knowledge representation.

DDG prioritises marginalised perspectives and has been used to collaborate with global South organisations for rights-based youth research. It enables rich data collection through participatory, child-centred workshops conducted simultaneously in multiple countries. This approach supports the decolonisation of youth knowledge by co-producing it with children and young people, addressing child-adult power imbalances.

The research engaged 128 participants aged 9 to 18 from diverse backgrounds, including urban and rural areas, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, migrants, and disadvantaged youth. Each participant attended a workshop to explore cultural expressions, ethics, responsibilities, and aspirations for culture-centred digital design.

Findings reveal that digital technology influences and shapes the cultural practices of young people in Australia, India, and Indonesia. Indian participants view culture through nationalism and ideology, while Australian children associate culture with material practices and the environment. Digital technologies were found to strengthen cultural identity and cross-cultural understanding, though concerns about minority culture representation were expressed.

Indian and Indonesian youth use digital platforms to learn about their own and other cultures, more so than Australian participants. Concerns about cultural exclusion, inappropriate content, and digital disharmony were highlighted, emphasising the need for inclusive digital design that reflects the lived experiences of diverse youth.

Across Latin America, prohibitionist approaches to children’s and adolescents’ relationships with digital technologies are gaining ground, focusing primarily on risk prevention while neglecting evidence-based perspectives and children’s voices. A clear example is Brazil’s Law No. 15100, which restricts access to and usage of digital devices at public and private schools in the country due to concerns about the effects of physical and mental health media, reinforcing a mostly protectionist narrative. Such policies often overstate risks, such as exposure to harmful content or problematic digital behaviours, while failing to consider the diverse ways children and adolescents engage with technology, including learning, creativity, and socialisation. These approaches rely on partial evidence and rarely involve children and adolescents' experiences in policymaking, limiting their digital rights and agency.

Empirical evidence provides a more nuanced and rights-based approach to the phenomenon globally and in Latin America. Digital technologies are crucial in children and adolescents' well-being, socio-emotional development, learning, and socialising (Hollis, Livingstone & Sonuga-Barke, 2020; Ghai et al., 2022), offering benefits and potential risks. These outcomes are influenced by social, educational, and family factors, such as supervision, family communication, and establishing norms (Halpin et al., 2021). Positive outcomes include enhancing language skills, creativity, self-expression, and critical thinking (Kumpulainen et al., 2020), essential for full participation in modern society. Excessive use of technology can lead to adverse effects like deteriorating mental health (Godard & Holtzman, 2024), lower psychological well-being, and issues such as cyberbullying (Livingstone et al., 2015; Varela et al., 2022), impacting interpersonal relationships and academic performance (Masood et al., 2020).

Given the lack of evidence about children’s online experiences in Latin America, since 2015, a network of researchers, institutions, and public agencies from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Uruguay has been working to build this body of evidence. This network is currently very active and is presenting a panel that shows some of the latest outcomes from different countries in the region.

The first paper offers an overview of digital access, practices, and skills in the region, focusing on the impact of digital transformation on children and adolescents. Research from five Latin American countries shows that while most access is via mobile phones, it limits more complex digital activities. The article stresses the importance of digital skills, caregivers' and educators' roles, and suggests incorporating informal digital learning into formal education to support youth development.

The second presentation is a study situated in Chile. This study uses Kids Online Chile (2022) data to explore how family support and parental mediation shape children’s digital well-being. The findings indicate that family support is a protective factor, with active mediation reducing problematic behaviours, especially in video gaming. Gendered patterns emerge, with boys more likely to report issues with video games and girls with mobile phones. These results highlight the need for nuanced, localised approaches to digital parenting rather than simplistic bans or restrictions.

The third study, conducted in Costa Rica, examines factors influencing digital skills in children and adolescents (ages 9–17). It finds that active parental and teacher mediation, educational internet use, and classroom internet access enhance digital skills, while restrictive mediation limits them. Caregiver skills, self-efficacy, and socioeconomic status also impact digital competencies, revealing inequalities. Gender differences vary by age and skill type, highlighting the need for educational strategies that promote equitable digital literacy in family and school contexts

Based on ten years of ICT Kids Online Brazil research, the fourth study provides an overview of Internet access and usage among children in Brazil. It highlights the progress in connectivity for the 9 to 17-year-old population and the disparities in Internet access and device ownership among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The study will also present new data on Internet access, computer use, and mobile phone ownership among children aged 0 to 8 over the past decade. The Regional Center produces the indicators discussed for Studies on the Development of the Information Society (Cetic.br |NIC.br), a Regional Study Center under the auspices of UNESCO.

The study explores how Bolivian adolescents interact with online strangers. It finds that 44.08% have contacted strangers online, with older teens engaging more. 40.64% met someone in person they first met online, mostly male adolescents. While interactions with peers were mostly positive (85.71%), encounters with adults posed higher risks (10%). The study highlights the need for parental mediation that teaches risk assessment, recognizing suspicious behavior, and fostering safe online interactions, rather than just restrictive warnings.

In sum, the studies proposed for the panel aim to disrupt simplistic narratives about childhood and technology in Latin America, offering evidence-based insights that counter moral panic and highlight children’s agency, digital inequalities, and policy tensions. By centring Latin American perspectives within a Global South framework, we challenge dominant Western discourses and call for more inclusive, context-sensitive approaches to children’s digital rights and experiences.

This panel of librarians and internet researchers explains the dominant Open Access business model of academic publishing and why it must be rejected.

The Big 5 academic commercial publishers, Wiley, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Elsevier, bury academic knowledge in a deep-web of paywalls and prohibitive subscriptions. Transformative Agreements have emerged as a major commercial model of transitioning journals from subscription to Open Access (OA) – mimicking movements like Open and Collectivized Data. This shift is often invisible to researchers, aside from learning that they are not required to pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) in order to publish OA. For researchers in regions requiring OA due to public grant stipulations, this seems like a boon, opening up the internet commons and bypassing APCs, which in some fields exceed $5000 USD.

Open Access could be a way to make academic information and data findings free, but Transformative Agreements only offer technical OA status while introducing data use restrictions and prohibiting emerging and established research methods in data re-use. Worse, Transformative Agreements only boost elite and well-resourced institutions and the researchers fortunate enough to be affiliated with them. For new graduates, Global South researchers, publishing professionals outside of academia and many others, Transformative Agreements make research free to read but cause restrictions on publishing their own research.

In the spirit of Web 2.0 corporate dominance, The Big 5 monopolize academic knowledge exchange and now with Transformative Agreements, leverage Open Data trends to further boost their commercial benefit.

The first paper explains how we got here, from the expertise of a librarian whose responsibilities have included negotiating with vendors for university e-resources. Open Access started as a rejection of the online commercialization of academic knowledge by non-profit society and university publishers pushing back against the Big 5. However as researchers began to understand and cautiously embrace OA, publishers saw an opportunity for profit and began publishing hybrid OA journals, charging APCs to researchers and subscription fees to libraries – in effect “double dipping”. Simultaneously, publishers pushed libraries into purchasing “Big Deals” – large packages of journals instead of small collections or individual titles. Big Deals often consisted of a few essential journals and a long tail of niche and infrequently-used titles and became expensive and unpopular enough for libraries to fight back against them. This model also harmed relationships with researchers who understandably did not want to pay to publish. Big publishers claimed to their shareholders that individual consumers didn’t want to pay for anything digital, that library budgets were slimming and that their ability to grow by acquiring complements was faltering. Transformative Agreements were introduced as a corporate publisher solution, and sold to libraries as a transition phase on the journey to an Open future.

The second paper discusses the meaning behind Open Access fragmented as green, gold, diamond and other variations of OA emerged thanks to advances in web publishing in the last two decades. The second author builds on Engestrom’s (1999) activity theory to argue that university libraries need to not lose sight of their role in supporting equitable access, but also equitable research production. This author discusses the implications of the different types of Open Access from the perspective of a representative and leader of libraries in Southeast Asia.

The third paper explains how Transformative Agreements use Research Information Management Systems (RIMS) and networking platforms to further enrich academic journal publishers and their complementors. These publishers purportedly connect researchers with each other, with grants, and with impact factors, but exacerbate neoliberal optimization and extraction processes in universities, while funneling capital from universities to commercial enterprises. Author 3 builds on Brooke Erin Duffy and Jefferson Pooley’s analysis of Academia.edu to argue that learning analytics bring to light how universities are always-already invested in the enrichment of corporate wisdom through the optimization of data extraction processes and ever more expansive data procurement efforts (2017).

In the fourth paper, a platform scholar asks, is this just a dying cry of an industry whose dominant companies missed out on platformization? Examining the trajectory of OA subscription models from a platform theory perspective, the industry seems outdated and clinging to models unlikely to work. As publishing companies are unable to convince content creators or customers of the value of their product, they turn to “orangewashing,” the academic ethics version of greenwashing, by calling their product Open Access.

As internet researchers and librarians, we aim to share four different ways at looking at the problem of Transformative Agreements and how they affect and intertwine with internet research. We share our recommendations, and hope to use this panel to generate more.

Fan studies is moving from the margins of media and communication studies at the same time as fans and fan-like engagements are becoming mainstreamed and truly globalised. Despite the increasing inclusion of fan studies research in fields such as political science, sociology and cultural studies, fan studies has further insights and synergies to offer to the wider internet research community. Questions such as: is the right-wing turn an ideological shift or simply populism masquerading as fandom? What is the role of social media in promoting polarisation as well as fandom? Or are our elected leaders more celebrity than politician and whether their partisan bases are activists or stan armies? These questions run as deep currents through our present moment in internet research and can only be answered by taking the overlaps - and the problems and questions they bring - seriously.

As global scholars, representing Brazil, Europe, and Australia, within the intersections of internet studies, media, communication, and fan studies, we outline the stakes of our current moment and debate how to move ahead as researchers in a time where fanisation and celebrification are visible in a range of arenas , but which wider scholarship struggles to effectively theorise. What do we study, what do we need to do, and how do we do it?

This roundtable offers a series of provocations to address the ways in which we study transcultural fans online in our current political and social environment. We open a discussion on how and where fan studies as a theoretical lens and fan studies methodologies can contribute further, and draw out larger synergies with, wider internet studies within media and communications contexts.

Recent developments highlight the complexity of digital sovereignty and the increasing power of platforms in shaping democratic processes. Decisions by U.S.-based tech giants—such as Google's removal of fact-checking in the EU (Axios, 2025) and Meta’s plan to eliminate fact-checking on Facebook (Al Jazeera, 2025)—demonstrate how these corporations bypass national regulatory frameworks and exert global influence over information flows. This asymmetry of power challenges state sovereignty, reinforcing digital dependencies and deepening global inequalities.

In this context, this panel brings together perspectives from researchers from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, India, and Mexico to examine various aspects of digital sovereignty and its intersections with platform governance on different case studies. The Brazilian cases highlight the direct confrontations between governments and platforms, including an examination of the political rhetoric of tech leaders, as well as politics of fact-checking. The Argentine case explores the region’s lack of a strategic response to digital dependency, while the Mexican study underscores how AI governance reinforces structural inequalities. The Indian case demonstrates how social media governance is deeply entangled with pre-existing structures of caste, religion, and gender-based hierarchies, as seen in online misogyny and religious nationalism and how this must be taken into account on social media research.

This panel argues that digital sovereignty should not be seen merely as a legal or regulatory issue, but rather as a geopolitical, economic, social and historical struggle. By addressing these challenges from diverse regional perspectives, problems and cases, this discussion offers an intersectional and comparative approach to rethinking sovereignty in the digital age.

The study of digital sexual intimacies presents ethical and methodological challenges, often framed by anxieties around sex, public life, and the internet (Tiidenberg, 2018, 2020). Traditional qualitative methods tend to be extractive and risk-centered. Instead, creative, participatory, and multimodal approaches foster inclusive, reflexive, and non-hierarchical research environments (Knowles & Cole, 2007; Mannay, 2016).

Art-based methods, particularly zine-making, have been used across disciplines to engage marginalized groups (McNicol, 2019; Etengoff, 2015). As self-published, DIY pamphlets, zines offer a non-linear, multimodal space for expression and collective knowledge production (Duncombe, 1997; Lovata, 2007). They challenge traditional data collection by integrating text, visuals, and intertextual elements, making them particularly valuable in queer and subcultural research contexts (Downes et al., 2013).

This study introduces the Research Brave Space (RBS) concept, shifting from ‘safe spaces’ to settings where participants courageously engage with sensitive topics (Arao & Clemens, 2013). Implemented through zine-making workshops with queer young adults in Italy, RBS prioritizes care, adaptability, and agency. These workshops facilitated cognitive, emotional, and physical accessibility, fostering collective engagement and self-representation. Participants reported increased agency and deeper reflexivity, illustrating the method’s transformative potential.

Zine-making as RBS disrupts academic methodologies, advocating for ethics of care and participatory research in digital sexual intimacies. Embracing discomfort and creative non-linearity fosters more inclusive knowledge production, challenging scholars to rethink engagement with vulnerable subjectivities in social sciences.

This paper examines how social media ecosystems have become fundamental workplaces for digital sex work, causing a series of ruptures and changes in the industry. Focusing on Brazilian erotic content creators. It explores how sex workers integrate multiple platforms to sustain their labour and how this ecosystem imposes new forms of governance that shape their working conditions. While social media facilitate visibility and audience-building, they also create structural imbalances, making success dependent on navigating platform policies and adapting to shifting moderation practices.

Grounded in digital labour research and creator studies, the paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork (2021-2024) on Brazil’s most popular sex platforms—OnlyFans and Privacy—alongside social media (Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram). It also includes in-depth interviews with 16 erotic content creators, analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

Findings reveal that erotic creators strategically assemble a network of platforms, generating interdependent flows of content and audiences and forming a social media ecosystem central to their work. However, this ecosystem demands continuous adaptation and introduces precarious conditions, requiring creators to infer platform guidelines and constantly adapt to shifting moderation policies. Marginalised creators face heightened scrutiny, experiencing disproportionate content removals and account suspensions.

Ultimately, the study argues that digital sex work is shaped by overlapping governance structures—those of social media, sex platforms, and broader regulatory forces—shaping its organisation and regulation. These findings highlight the need for further research into the implications of social media’s governance, particularly in marginalised labour sectors such as sex work.

This paper explores boundary work between pornography and other sexual media among the users of Alastonsuomi (“Naked Finland”), a Finnish-language image gallery dedicated to nudity and sexual self-expression. Building on 31 semi-structured in-depth interviews, it asks how, and in connection to what kinds of content the research participants – who actively engage in sexually explicit self-shooting – evoke the notion of porn. Within this, distinctions become drawn between different platforms, aesthetic qualities, as well as social and personal meanings.

This study examines Pornhub’s relationship to content creators through its software infrastructure. Adopting the information systems and management framework of ‘boundary resources’, I analyze the Modelhub program; a popular set of software features through which verified creators on Pornhub organize and monetize their content since 2018. Through a boundary resource ‘tuning’ approach (Eaton et al. 2015), I articulate how Pornhub both ‘secure’ their system and ‘resource’ their network via Modelhub in a dialectic process to achieve strategic goals. This project identifies Modelhub as a ‘platform tool’ (Mahetaji and Nieborg 2024) developed to encourage the economically productive participation of cultural producers. By documenting platform tool developments via Modelhub, I ground the Pornhub-creator dynamic in material conditions of the platform’s infrastructure. My findings invert observations of boundary resource tuning on other platforms, showing that Pornhub promotes securing efforts (ie: banning content, stricter verification), while de-emphasizing its resourcing of creators. I argue that the maligned cultural status of pornography informs how this platform enacts infrastructural developments which are subject to, and conveyed around, reputation management. Resourcing creators subtly and emphasizing network restrictions in response to anti-porn bias shapes both the functional and conceptual platform-creator relationship around socio-cultural attitudes disparaging pornography.

This study investigates the rise of self-fashioned “anti-mainstream public figures” within Italy’s Telegramsphere, exploring their pivotal role between fringe platforms, social media platforms and legacy media. Part of a broader research project on narrative influences destabilizing Italy’s media ecosystem, the paper centers on how these personalities craft frames of persecution to establish themselves as credible outsiders defying mainstream norms. Literature has suggested how fringe platforms like Telegram - prized for privacy and security - serve as incubators where these figures cultivate tight-knit communities and amplify disinformation including conspiracy narratives and alt-right coordination. Using an ethnographic approach paired with digital methods, the study mapped 570 Telegram channels, starting from 24 blacklisted seeds expanded via Similar Channels Telegram API. Early findings highlight how these personalities reframe mainstream condemnation and demonetization as badges of authenticity, wielding populist anti-elitist rhetoric to bolster their legitimacy. They transform monetization efforts – donations, premium content – into acts of resistance, fostering solidarity in emotional echo chambers (Eslen-Ziya, 2019). Far from being sidelined, these figures leverage their outsider status to maintain significant visibility, influencing discourse beyond fringe spaces. By focusing on their strategic self-presentation, this research illuminates the interplay of morality, visibility, and monetization in digital public spheres, revealing how these personalities blur the lines between fringe and mainstream while reshaping Italy’s media dynamics.

This study examines cultural imperialism in text-to-image (T2I) generative AI models by evaluating how these systems represent diverse cultural contexts. We analyze whether T2I models like DALL-E 3 reproduce biases by overrepresenting U.S. cultural norms while underrepresenting or distorting non-U.S. perspectives. Our methodology employs 280 prompts across 14 variable domains of life, translated into 15 languages, corresponding to 30 national/cultural contexts. To ensure cultural sensitivity, researchers from 12 different national backgrounds (including 7 from the Global South or East) collaboratively developed these prompts. We introduced country-specific references to test cultural adaptability, comparing generic prompts (e.g., "a living room") with location-specific ones (e.g., "a living room in Italy").

Our preliminary results using CLIP embeddings and cosine similarity measurements reveal that DALL-E 3 consistently defaults to U.S.-centric imagery when processing country-neutral prompts, regardless of the prompt language. Images generated from the non-location-specific prompts across all languages demonstrate stronger similarity to explicitly U.S.-referenced images than to any other national context. This finding supports the cultural imperialism hypothesis, indicating T2I models systematically encode and reproduce U.S.-American hegemonic influence in digital cultural representations. Our ongoing work includes human annotation to assess cultural accuracy and stereotyping across different contexts, with the hypothesis that representations of non-Western contexts will demonstrate lower cultural accuracy and higher stereotyping compared to Western contexts.

U.S. civil society is legally pushing back against the subsumption of data in mass for generative AI (genAI). This paper will explore the two avenues of legal redress (1) copyright law and (2) consumer privacy. In 2023 visual artists were among the first to file their copyright lawsuits against genAI companies, like StabilityAI, for copyright infringement in the form of image generator outputs. Later, prominent comedian Sarah Silverman filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta claiming that the companies trained their genAI products on her book without her permission or compensation while internet users in California were suing OpenAI for training their models on stolen private information including photographs. While copyrighted works are more clearly understood as the products of labor, I integrate consumer privacy to understand how the cultural fruits that Terranova (2000) argues are the products of free labor have been sidelined to create data hierarchies. While current literature has framed genAI around the “copyright dilemma” (Kuai, 2024), underlying all three cases is another critical question ripe for theoretical intervention: whose data is considered labor, and how is labor compensated for in an age of genAI? By integrating copyright lawsuits presented by visual artists and book authors with a class action lawsuit that relates to consumer privacy, this paper blends surveillance, copyright law, and labor to understand what is labor in an age of genAI. I argue these lawsuits strategically dissociate “data” from the user who created, posted, or circulated it.

A central question in social sciences today is how reliable complex predictive models like ChatGPT are. This study tests whether subtle changes in prompt structure affect sentiment analysis results by the GPT-4o mini model. Using 100,000 Spanish comments on four Latin American presidents, the model classified the comments as positive, negative, or neutral in 10 trials with slight variations in the prompts. The analysis revealed that even minor changes in prompt wording, syntax, or structure significantly impacted the classifications. In some cases, the model gave inconsistent responses or used languages other than Spanish. Statistical tests confirmed notable differences in most prompt comparisons, except when the structure was similar. These findings challenge the reliability of Large Language Models for classification tasks, revealing their sensitivity to prompt variations. The study also showed that unstructured prompts lead to more hallucinations. Trust in these models depends not just on their technical performance but also on the social and institutional contexts guiding their use.

This paper investigates the dual authentication processes inherent in the appification of everyday life, using Tinder as a case study. Drawing on established concepts such as "appification," the “grammar of action,” and recent scholarship on "authentication," we examine how Tinder transforms physical encounters into embodied digital gestures and how these gestures are subsequently validated through continuous, network-level processes. We distinguish between user authentication—occurring at the interface through actions like swiping and tapping that create a dynamic flow state—and machinic authentication, where backend data flows and network communications substantiate these interactions. Developing an integrated methodological approach, which we term the Networked Walkthrough method, we combine research personas with network traffic analysis to capture the temporal and affective dimensions of app use. Our findings reveal a marked asynchronicity between front-end events and back-end processes, underscoring how the user’s experience of app time emerges from the interplay of affective engagement and infrastructural data exchange. This dual perspective not only reconfigures our understanding of authenticity in dating apps but also illuminates the broader mechanisms by which apps orchestrate social interactions. The study contributes to an understanding of the complex infrastructures that underpin modern app ecosystems and invites further inquiry into the evolving temporal regimes of digital media.

This paper explores the use of food-tracking apps by the diabetic population in the UK. It focuses on the ways narratives of bodily control and moralistic health are communicated through the apps and the objective truth that the app platforms could cause harm to diabetic users. We suggest that the compounded messaging from food-tracking apps and diabetes care aimed at size reduction supports weight stigma. Further, the fiction of control over body size could explain the high rates of eating disorders in the diabetic population. Using digital walkthroughs on three popular food-tracking apps, we show how weight stigma is built into apps that many people with diabetes interact with daily. We conclude by presenting preliminary findings on our participatory design exercise with diabetic people to explore alternative options for technological interventions that could offer support for diabetes care and nutrition tracking while challenging the deceptive rationales that currently permeate these forms of self-tracking technology.

As dating apps become central to modern romantic and sexual interactions, concerns have emerged regarding their psychological and behavioral consequences. While some studies suggest that dating app usage (DAU) is associated with negative mental health outcomes—such as anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem—others report negligible effects, leaving the literature fragmented and inconclusive. Similarly, while some studies link DAU to increased engagement in risky behaviors, including unprotected sex and substance use, others find no significant relationship. This meta-analysis (k = 26, N = 28,896) synthesizes empirical research examining the associations between DAU, mental health outcomes, and risky behaviors. Results indicate a small but significant association between DAU and increased anxiety (r = .07, p = .001), depression (r = .06, p = .032), and lower self-esteem (r = -.06, p = .036). Additionally, DAU is moderately associated with higher engagement in risky behaviors (r = .13, p < .001). These findings underscore the dual impact of dating apps, both as facilitators of intimacy and pleasure and as potential sources of negative outcomes. While the results highlight important trends, they also emphasize the need for further research on reverse-causality mechanisms and moderating factors such as age, gender, and motivations for app use to better understand these relationships.

The paper explores the emergency notification app, developed in order to alert individuals to immediate danger while preserving the resilience of the home front as a whole. Drawing on walkthroughs of emergency apps and an analysis of related materials, I suggest how this disruption not only manifests in but also enables three interrelated processes: the dissolution of the national collective into individually-alerted users; the blurring of the distinction between emergency and routine; and the delegation of preparedness responsibility from the state to individual users. I argue that these three processes – facilitated by the seemingly life-saving, deeply personalized disruption of the emergency app – carry critical political consequences. By creating an illusion of personal safety, these processes, which materialize in the hand-held disruption app, allow for a prolonged state of exception and the indefinite protraction of war and danger.

Social media platforms have great potential to educate young people and adults alike about sexuality, to create nurturing spaces of connection for marginalised communities across the globe, and to express oneself safely. However, this potential is always constrained by platform governance, or the processes of content moderation enacted by platforms and (state) regulation of platform companies (Gorwa, 2019), who are moved by economic and political interests to curtail or promote specific forms of expression (Stardust, 2024). This has greatly affected content surrounding sex work, sexuality, LGBTQIA+ and sexual expression, content by BIPOC users and activists (Haimson et al., 2021). Through the entanglement of rules, relations and resistance, our panel explores how users marginalised by platform governance communicate, express themselves, learn and work.

Paper 1 focuses on rules through an analysis of policies governing sexuality education and gender expression on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Douyin and VK.com. It finds that despite efforts to improve governance, the seven platforms examined create a damaging digital narrative through their policies, portraying anything surrounding sexuality, sexual health, pleasure, and even consent as harmful. This way, the opportunities platforms provide to break down barriers and reach people in family, economic or geographic situations who may not be able to access sexuality education information (Monea, 2022) do not manifest.

Paper 2 explores relations in the context of queer TikTok in the Philippines, through the use of case studies from specific influencers and content analyses of their videos. The app, the third most used in the country (Kemp, 2024), allows queer content creators to broker local registers of queerness, which roughly defines identities and lived experiences on TikTok. The authors find evidence of TikTokers resisting and reclaiming the derogatory terms used to define queerness, and of deployments of parasociality to commune with their audiences.

Also rooted in the Filipino context, Paper 3 centres on resistance, examining how digital media enable, disrupt, and constrain queer sex work in Manila, shaping various labor practices. It explores the impact of platform adoption on sex work and how digital media sustain, regulate, and make sex workers invisible, revealing the precarious nature of queer male sex work in Manila’s digital landscape. The author’s work shows that sex workers rely on a fragmented network of apps, requiring constant adaptation to avoid deplatforming, financial tracking, and algorithmic erasure.

Paper 4 interrogates the suppression and platform governance of Black users to explore how they exercise agency through platform affordances to resist such practices. Through the case study of #BlackGirlPilates, this paper examines the utility of racialized hashtags in circumventing mainstream (i.e. white) perspectives, cultivating a community for us, by us in which the experience of Black women are centralized. The #BlackGirlPilates community takes on cultural significance as an agentic and resistive praxis. The authors’ demonstrate the importance of attending to cultural resistance, in-group identity-based social support, and reparative digital self-narration.

Paper 5 examines the digital sense-making and resistant practices of Los Angeles-based queer sexual content creators as they navigate sexual content moderation and platform governance issues. It explores how post, account, and community level moderation are intertwined as they co-produce a structurally hostile sanitized social media environment that further marginalizes explicit queer sexual cultural production. The author contends that queer sexual content creators engage in digital promotional work in response to the relationally stigmatized social conditions that are constitutive of sexual content moderation processes.

In blending rules, relations and resistance, our panel highlights the labour performed by users fighting to harness platforms’ opportunities. In critiquing policies and enforcement through our case studies, we conclude with the importance of resistance and peer support.

In Monterrey, Mexico, three sisters aged 9, 12 and 14 recorded a Metallica cover in their basement studio and went viral on YouTube in late 2014. They are Dany, Pau and Ale Villareal – The Warning. Now, in 2025, The Warning is touring their 4th full length-album, both in solo shows, famous music festivals, and as opening acts for bands such as Muse, The Offspring and Avril Lavigne. In a scenario where attention economy, platforms and algorithms may be the greatest challenge for new bands, they can also be their greatest allies. In this paper, I trace the 10 years of marketing and communication strategies put into place by the band to create, sustain and grow a loyal fanbase that, curiously, starts with baby boomers and slowly reaches the current generation. From fan-based incentives via crowdfunding to making good use of livestreaming during the pandemic, the band demonstrates how a GenZ band can grow an audience and thrive in an overpopulated entertainment scenario that rarely opens space for alternative rock bands. Furthermore, their online marketing strategy, particularly in the last two albums, shows how they understand the modes of communication that benefit from algorithmic logic and resonate aesthetically with the trends of consumption commonly seen in the current social media scenario.

The increasing reliance on data to train large language models has heightened concerns about data rights and protections. Governments and civil society organizations globally adopt varied approaches based on cultural, political, and economic contexts. A common strategy is the appointment of Data Protection Officers (DPOs), tasked with enforcing data protection laws. This study examines how government organizations in Norway, China, and Kenya conceptualize and implement data rights and protections. Specifically, it explores how data rights are communicated, the strategies DPOs employ, and how national contexts influence data governance.

Using document analysis and semi-structured interviews with DPOs, this study compares regulatory frameworks and organizational practices in these three countries. While Norway follows the GDPR’s rights-based approach, China prioritizes state control and economic interests, and Kenya balances rapid digital expansion with emerging privacy concerns. Despite their differences, all three countries assign DPOs a critical role, though their responsibilities and regulatory support vary.

Theoretically, this research draws on contextual integrity iheory, socio-technical systems, and sensemaking theory to analyze privacy norms, regulatory interactions, and DPO roles. Findings reveal that while global data governance trends influence national frameworks, implementation is shaped by local socio-political dynamics.

This study contributes to discussions on data sovereignty, digital governance, and the evolving role of DPOs. It highlights the need for context-sensitive approaches to data protection that balance individual rights, national priorities, and the demands of a global digital economy.

TikTok has emerged as a prominent platform for science communication, with an estimated 10 million STEM-related videos published globally as of 2024. Science communicators on TikTok blend affective and informative elements, engaging audiences in ways that challenge normative expectations of science communication. As scientists adapt to these digital norms, TikTok presents a unique opportunity to shape public perceptions of science and scientists. However, little research has investigated how scientists construct these perceptions on TikTok. Using the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), we explore how scientists present themselves on TikTok through the dimensions of warmth and competence. We conducted a multimodal content analysis (MMCA) of highly engaged STEM TikTok videos, focusing on science communicators with at least 1 million likes on their pages. Using the TikTok API, we analyzed videos published between January and October 2024, selecting those with the highest engagement rates for in-depth analysis (N = 110). Our analysis considered visual, textual, aural, contextual, and platform elements used to signal warmth and competence, following MMCA procedures by Serafini & Reid (2023). Our findings reveal that science communicators on TikTok employ hybrid self-presentation, balancing professional and personal self-disclosures to connect with audiences while establishing credibility. They also engage in participatory and dialogic communication, fostering two-way interactions and making science an accessible and enjoyable pursuit. Additionally, science communicators leverage platform-native cultures and features to create emotionally resonant and informative content. These strategies offer valuable insights for scientists, educators, and policymakers aiming to enhance public trust and engagement with science on digital platforms.

This paper examines how craft e-commerce platforms, such as Etsy, are repurposed during geopolitical crises, using the Ukraine-Russia war as a case study to illustrate broader global patterns of digital dissidence. While digital media scholars have explored craft metaphors such as weaving and stitching, less attention has been paid to the ways digital craft platforms themselves become sites for and enable modes of political resistance. I argue that repurposing craft platforms – where repurposing draws from craft practices themselves - constitutes a platform rupture, subverting capitalist logics of digital consumption into mechanisms for alternative communication economies.

Employing critical discourse analysis and political economy, this paper investigates how Etsy sellers transform product listings into fundraising efforts, political statements, and most importantly digital testimonies and news of war. Beyond economic adaptation, this practice reconfigures e-commerce spaces into platforms for information dissemination and alternative communication networks, which is particularly important in a geopolitical crisis marked by misinformation and censorship. Case studies from Etsy, Folksy, and Ravelry demonstrate how craft communities engage in tactical détournement, turning capitalist structures against themselves to challenge neoliberal governance.

This study situates platform repurposing within communicative capitalism, highlighting how the same infrastructures that reinforce neoliberal participation can be inverted for democratic intervention while still acknowledging the constraints and limits of digital dissidence on capitalist platforms. Ultimately, through examining how users repurpose platforms in times of crisis, this paper articulates the role of digital rupture within contemporary communication, global economies and community-led resistance.

Super apps, integrating diverse digital functions into single platforms, have reshaped mobile ecosystems, drawing scholarly attention beyond Silicon Valley models. While research has focused on Asian cases like WeChat and Alipay, East Africa’s super apps, such as Kenya’s M-Pesa and Ethiopia’s Telebirr, remain underexplored despite their rapid rise. M-Pesa, operated by Safaricom, serves over 30 million users, while Telebirr, under Ethio Telecom, has reached 36 million in two years. Both, supported by Huawei, dominate nearly 50% of mobile connections in their countries and evolve through third-party integrations, mirroring Asian super apps.

This study investigates: (a) M-Pesa and Telebirr’s data collection, storage, and usage strategies, and their impact on state and corporate control over personal information; (b) how Kenya’s market-driven and Ethiopia’s state-led regulatory environments shape these platforms compared to Asian counterparts; and (c) whether power dynamics among states, corporations, and users reinforce or challenge data colonialism in the Global South’s digital infrastructures. Employing postcolonial computing and platform and infrastructure studies, the research combines case study and comparative methods, using desk research, online fieldwork, and document analysis to examine policy environments, data practices, and platform functionalities.

Preliminary findings reveal Kenya’s competitive fintech landscape fosters M-Pesa’s corporate expansion, while Ethiopia’s statism embeds Telebirr in governance, enhancing surveillance. Both platforms’ reliance on Huawei raises data sovereignty concerns. These dynamics suggest data colonialism, as unchecked data extraction risks exploitation. This study enriches postcolonial and infrastructural theories, deepening insights into East African platformization.

Discussions of gender diversity in open-source software (OSS) often focus on increasing women’s participation rather than questioning how their contributions shape development itself. This study examines React, a widely used tool for building websites and applications, to explore gendered patterns in contribution over 11 years (2013–2024). Using data from GitHub, a dominant platform for software collaboration, I analyze who contributes to different aspects of the project and how participation shifts around major software updates.

Findings show that women’s contributions are concentrated on improving existing features and maintaining project stability, critical yet often undervalued areas of software development. Their exclusion is not just a matter of representation; it reinforces structural inequalities in whose labor is recognized and rewarded in digital infrastructure governance. By shifting the focus from simply counting participation to examining how gendered divisions of labor shape digital tools, this study highlights the need to rethink whose work is valued in the development of internet technologies.

Trust is often framed as something platforms want to maintain, but this paper argues that trust is a resource that platforms actively manage through their regulatory compliance. Compliance, therefore, is not merely subject to a dichotomous debate between symbolism or functionality, but malleable: it can be utilized to disrupt user experience (malicious compliance) or to create an illusion of regulatory success through selectively highlighted due diligence (performative compliance). For instance, DMA-induced design changes can frustrate users and create an impression that regulation is overly burdensome, whereas DSA-compliant content moderation and risk mitigation can be showcased as lawful, responsible governance.

To acknowledge these dynamics, this paper builds on Viljoen’s relational theory of data governance and applies it to platform governance. It argues that trust is not merely an asset for platforms to maintain but a means of controlling how users and regulators perceive their legitimacy. By leveraging, what we term, “malleable compliance”, platforms dictate not only how regulatory frameworks are implemented but also how other stakeholders perceive them. The politics of compliance matter just as much as the rules themselves, and in these politics, user trust is a strategically managed commodity. To counter this, and to avoid the risk of being counterproductive, regulatory strategies need to go beyond individual regulatory silos. Regulators need to acknowledge how compliance can be a mode of governance, too. By examining these mechanisms, this paper contributes to debates on critical platform governance, political economy of trust, and the ‘repurposing’ of legal frameworks.

In the past decade, firms like X/Twitter, Meta, and Google have invested heavily in what they term ‘integrity’ or ‘trust and safety”. These companies operate extensive bureaucracies to police user-generated content, including thousands of employees, automated systems, human flagging, and outsourced labour. There is widespread interdisciplinary agreement that these structures - and how they adapt in relation to regulators, civil society, and academics - play an important role in shaping online speech. But much research focuses on the largest players (like Facebook), at the expense of salient (yet less responsive to academic insight) services, such as the Apple Store, Amazon, YouTube, etc. What precisely distinguishes the trust and safety apparatuses of one company from another? How can we understand the practices of a single firm as ‘the industry standard’, and that of others as potential outliers?

This paper introduces a conceptual framework for comparing T&S operations across companies and over time. Drawing from institutional theory (Hall & Thelen, 2009) and the "varieties of capitalism" literature (Hall & Soskice, 2001), we propose a model of "varieties of trust and safety." Our framework categorizes T&S structures along three core dimensions - institutional complexity, hierarchy, and ideology - while examining variations in rules, practices, and actors. Building on platform governance scholarship, we develop a structured approach to assess power dynamics within T&S systems, the role of external stakeholders, and the institutionalization of content moderation. We apply this model to selected case studies, including Meta’s 2024 policy changes and Anthropic’s T&S strategies, illustrating how firms’ governance structures evolve.

Health disinformation permeates digital ecosystems, undermining public policies, spreading conspiracy theories, and promoting unproven treatments. Native advertising has emerged as a key strategy in this process, as its deceptive format makes promotional content indistinguishable from news. Our study examines health-related native advertising on Brazilian news websites, assessing regulatory compliance, advertiser credibility, persuasive strategies, and potential harm to audiences.

We developed web crawlers to collect native ads from two prominent and contrasting Brazilian news outlets, O Globo and Revista Oeste, distributed through Taboola’s service. Between August 1 and 24, 2023, we gathered 141,915 ads and analyzed their content, advertisers, and promoted products. We also conducted a network analysis to determine whether there were advertisers common to both websites. To evaluate advertiser reliability, we categorized their persuasion strategies, including clickbait, redirection to suspicious websites, promotion of questionable products, fake sales, and disinformation. A visual analysis using computational modeling identified the main themes and patterns in gender and age representation.

Our findings reveal multiple regulatory violations, including misleading language, unsubstantiated claims, and the promotion of unregistered products. The study also reveals a commonality in ad distribution across both sites, indicating the opacity of Taboola’s criteria. These results align with previous research on the ethical concerns surrounding health advertising, native ads, and journalistic credibility. Our study contributes to the debate on disinformation and digital advertising by providing new evidence on how the lack of oversight in the native advertising market facilitates health disinformation and exploits audience vulnerabilities to promote harmful content.

This paper discusses health disinformation, focusing on the example of disinformation about contraception on social media, to understand the context within which alternative contraceptives like Natural Cycles are advertised. Natural Cycles is a digital contraceptive app that uses body temperature data to predict and confirm ovulation in order to confirm fertility status. It has grown in popularity on social media alongside the increase in contraceptive disinformation. The paper presents a discussion of the context of disinformation along with a close reading of the visual and textual elements of the Natural Cycles influencer advertisements, drawing on work on influencers, platform economies and authenticity to show how lived experiences are co-opted for commercial purposes to promote products like Natural Cycles. I find that the context of contraceptive disinformation feeds into wider wellness and right-wing ‘tradwife’ trends, which are evoked by the influencer advertisements studied. As such, I contend that while Natural Cycles influencer advertisements do not directly contain disinformation, the techniques employed evoke similar messages as the trends that do contain disinformation. In so doing, the advertisements co-opt influencers’ lived experiences to present Natural Cycles as a superior alternative to hormonal contraception. Thus, Natural Cycles effectively promotes its product while avoiding the criticism levelled at contraceptive disinformation.

As digital misinformation proliferates, older adults (60+) are often considered particularly vulnerable to disinformation due to lower digital literacy and high trust in online communities. However, this demographic is frequently treated as homogeneous, despite potential differences between younger seniors (60–67) and older seniors (74+). Because older people vote more often, and because they appear to share mis- and disinformation more than other groups, understanding this phenomenon is important in order to craft strategies to mitigate the spread of fake news.

A national survey of 502 U.S. seniors assessed social media engagement, trust in online news, and susceptibility to misinformation using a pseudo-experimental approach. Results indicate that younger seniors exhibit higher digital literacy and greater Facebook engagement but also share misinformation more frequently than older seniors. Trust in Facebook groups significantly predicts news-sharing behavior, while general trust in others does not. Notably, fact-checking behavior did not significantly reduce misinformation sharing, suggesting that cognitive biases play a stronger role than verification efforts.

Findings underscore the need to differentiate age subgroups in misinformation research and interventions. Tailored media literacy programs addressing digital literacy gaps and algorithmic news curation awareness could help mitigate disinformation spread. Additionally, peer-led education strategies within trusted online communities may enhance older adults’ ability to critically evaluate online content. This study contributes to ongoing efforts to strengthen digital information ecosystems, ultimately supporting democratic resilience against disinformation.

As digital technologies reshape how faith communities communicate and operate, religious leaders extend their influence into online spaces where spiritual and health-related beliefs converge. This study is the first to investigate health discourse and misinformation on KingsChat, the social networking platform of the Christ Embassy megachurch in Nigeria led by Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, a known source of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and health misinformation.

By scraping public KingsChat posts matching selected health search terms in addition to any posts from individuals in Christ Embassy church leadership, a dataset of 12,443 posts was collected. Keyword analysis identified various health discourse patterns, particularly around misinformation concerning COVID-19, vaccines, faith healing and malaria. To better understand health-related content in these posts, a random sample of posts containing health terms was manually coded. This found that 35% of health-related posts contained a debunked or unsubstantiated health-related claim. The largest two categories of misinformation involved faith healing and conspiratorial narratives about vaccines. Additional investigation of the external URLs linked to from KingsChat posts also exposes cross-platform interactions in the way the church distributes and amplifies health messages across digital spaces.

These findings underscore challenges facing public health officials working with communities where Christ Embassy church is influential. Understanding the interplay of digital media ecosystems, as well as the motivations and strategies for spreading health information online, will help researchers propose effective interventions and public health measures while respecting community norms.

This study examines the construction of celebrity everyday life on social media, focusing on how artists strategically intertwine their cultural productions with personal narratives to cultivate perceived intimacy and authenticity. Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of face management and the everyday, this research analyzes the Instagram profile of Liniker, a prominent Black transgender artist in Brazil.

Liniker’s profile serves as a platform for showcasing both her artistic endeavors and her daily life, challenging traditional representations of transgender women. Employing a dual analytical approach, combining panoramic observation and detailed visual analysis, the study explores how Liniker’s posts, categorized into promotional and everyday life themes, contribute to a complex performative construction of self. The analysis reveals that behind-the-scenes content emphasizes collaborative efforts and affective bonds, while musical partnerships highlight her integration into a prestigious cultural field. Individual images, including selfies and posed photographs, project intimacy towards her followers.

By juxtaposing artistic achievements with quotidian experiences, Liniker broadens visual representations, challenging prevailing narratives that often depict transgender women in contexts of violence. Her portrayal of success, love, and happiness diversifies life potentials and contributes to the discourse on transgender rights. This platform facilitates the articulation of aspirational life possibilities, interweaving professional success, personal relationships, and the visible affirmation of transgender identity, thereby contributing to the study of celebrity culture, digital media, gender, and everyday life.

In January 2020, beauty vlogger Nikkie de Jager (better known by her username NikkieTutorials) publicly came out as a trans woman, after more than a decade-long career on YouTube during which she passed as a cisgender, heterosexual woman, and under duress of a blackmailer who threatened to leak her “secret” identity. Far from ending her career, de Jager’s disclosure propelled her to greater success in the cutthroat creator economy, increasing her celebrity status. In this article, I argue that de Jager leveraged her coming-out to bolster her performance of authenticity as a microcelebrity, reaffirming and deepening her intimacy with her audience. This dialogic intimacy is central to the performance of microcelebrity. While previous studies have theorized the strategies that creators use to perform microcelebrity, little attention has been paid to the role of the audience in microcelebrity. I argue that microcelebrity is a strategy of performance that is co-constructed with the audience, making it distinct from parasocial relationships.

The interplay between authenticity and attention is central to social media sociality, yet navigating this tension is complex. Previous research has explored how influencers and content creators perform authenticity, but our study focuses on everyday users, analyzing their experiences and strategies through a meta-analysis of ethnographic and interview data spanning 13 years. Our findings highlight three key dynamics. First, users experience an inherent tension between authenticity and attention, shaped by platform norms and community expectations. Even those who do not seek to capitalize on their popularity feel pressured to leverage the attention they generate, and negative perceptions of 'attention-seeking' seem to be broadly internalized. Second, users reaffirm authenticity through distinct registers of love, lifestyle, and greater good, strategically framing their socially mediated self-presentation to maintain a sense of authenticity while engaging with social media’s attention structures. Lastly, perceptions of platform affordances, in particular in terms of how attention is meant to circulate on platforms, shape how users navigate the tensions between attention and authenticity. Rather than a fixed ideal or a purely instrumental form of performance, social media authenticity emerges from this analysis as a flexible construct. This argument contributes to a nuanced understanding of how everyday users—not just influencers—navigate the complexities of digital self-presentation in an era where attention and authenticity remain in constant negotiation.

Brazil’s racial dynamics are often obscured by myths of racial democracy and harmony, allowing subtle forms of racism to persist through stereotypes and microaggressions that frequently go unchallenged. This study explores masked racism within the Brazilian context by examining the reality show Big Brother Brasil (BBB) as a space where racial bias is both reinforced and contested. Through critical discourse analysis, I analyze how everyday racism manifests in Brazil’s cultural landscape, focusing on two Instagram posts from BBB’s 24th season addressing how Wanessa, a famous white singer, perpetuates stereotypes of Black aggression toward Davi, a Black contestant, and how audiences interpret and respond to these portrayals in the posts’ comment sections. Findings indicate that Wanessa’s discourse subtly perpetuates racism through linguistic choices that align with historical tropes of Blackness as animalistic and aggressive. However, Instagram users actively resisted this narrative, using humor and irony to highlight Wanessa’s inconsistencies and hypocrisy while also criticizing the show’s role in maintaining racial hierarchies. Comments further expressed solidarity and empathy toward Davi. This research underscores how pervasive and dangerous masked racism is in Brazil, highlighting the possible role of digital spaces in disrupting systemic racism and fostering counter-discourses.

How platforms govern, shape and regulate the speech and behaviour of users is entangled with their efforts to monetise interactions between users, content and third parties, which, as Poell et al. (2021) assert, is central to how platforms operate. This means that the governance of platforms (Gillespie, 2017; Gorwa, 2019) through terms of service, policies, standards, and interfaces ultimately serves to advance and optimise platform business models. Platforms also govern monetisation for content creators, advertisers, and businesses (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020; van der Vlist & Helmond, 2021) in line with their dependency on advertising revenue (Joseph & Bishop, 2024). For instance, platform tiers and mechanisms of granting exclusive access through partner programmes, subscriptions and donations steer creators’ content production towards brand-friendly expression. At the same time, cultures and epistemologies of technology workers influence monetisation and governance (Seaver, 2022); the norms, values and assumptions embedded in software development and platform engineering inform the design and operationalisation of monetisation mechanisms.

In light of these observations, this roundtable considers both the governance of monetisation and monetisation as governance. The starting point of the discussion is the question of what good governance of platform monetisation could look like. The objective is to bring the debate on public values and the common good in platform society (van Dijck et al., 2018) to the specific issues of monetisation and platform governance. Inspired by speculative future-making and future imaginaries to resist the frame of inevitability (Markham, 2020), contributors are invited not only to reflect on the current landscape but also to explore possibilities and imagine different governance arrangements. How might monetisation practices and business models be governed in fair, equal, and accountable ways? What role can public policy and regulation play in shaping such governance arrangements? How can creators and users challenge the governance of monetisation?

Digital platforms’ governance model for cultural production is based on making content creators entirely responsible for producing, publishing and moderating their work. This arrangement makes digital influencers especially vulnerable to harassment, overworking, and arbitrary politics regarding content management and unfair censure. Since content creators are on their own, they have been deploying multiple strategic approaches to keep themselves and their content safe despite platforms’ lack of assistance. Many of them involve camaraderie, such as self-organized groups focused on information exchange and mutual support, and often they mobilize their fanbase to deal with safety issues, such as harassment, asking the fans to mass report aggressors to make their claim more relevant to platforms through engagement. We draw on a case study of the deletion and recovery of Pipoca & Nanquim YouTube channel to contextualize how Brazilian content creators learned to mobilize their fan bases to manage their vulnerability on social media platforms. Through a combination of case study methodology and narrative interviews with the Pipoca & Nanquim team, we propose an analysis of how fan labor is central for Brazilian content creators in regards to safety and acknowledgment by platforms’ administration. And, since digital influencers must rely only on their engagement to protect themselves, we also question how this context affects people from social minority groups who work as digital influencers in Brazil, reinforcing oppressive structures despite the DEI discourse often adopted by digital platforms representatives.

This study examines the role of cartography in The Witcher transmedia franchise, where the absence of an official map has led to diverse spatial interpretations by fans, game developers, and media adaptations. These maps function as "action spaces" (Abend & Harvey, 2015), shaping perceptions of geography and narrative coherence while also reflecting broader issues of authority and interpretation in fictional world-building. Fan-made maps, game maps, and those from the Netflix adaptation reveal divergent spatial logics, illustrating the performative nature of mapping (Gerlach, 2018) and the participatory processes of online communities.

Without a singular, authoritative map (Dodge, 2014), The Witcher fandom engages in active spatial construction, drawing from textual references and narrative cues. Online platforms such as Reddit, Discord, and wikis serve as arenas for debating accuracy, authenticity, and ownership, reflecting broader crowd-sourced knowledge production (Jenkins, 2006). These discussions not only influence fan engagement but also challenge traditional notions of intellectual property and transmedia authorship (Schiller, 2018).

By tracing these cartographic debates and mapping practices across multiple fan platforms, this research updates discussions on authorship, ownership, and participatory culture. It situates fictional cartography within contemporary digital knowledge production, expanding its relevance to transmedia storytelling, crowd-mapping, and internet fandom.

This paper explores how platform companies distribute software-based resources or “platform tools” strategically to accrue market power, securing a dominant position in diverse markets, and infrastructural power, extending and supplanting critical systems and services for cultural production. Using the toolkit TikTok One as a case study, I showcase how platform company TikTok distributes software-based resources to expand its organizational boundaries. I approach the empirical analysis of TikTok One by adapting methods from information systems, advocating that platform scholars frame platform tools as “boundary resources” that can be mapped using “unified modelling language” (UML) diagrams—visualizations particularly useful for recognizing the complexity of TikTok One and the distribution of platform tools as relational, contextual, and historical. The empirical analysis reveals that TikTok One supports TikTok’s rise by furthering the company's growth as a “multisided market” or its mediation of interactions between different user groups. It does so in two ways: (1) TikTok One increases the number and diversity of user groups (“sides”) and (2) TikTok One increases the number and kinds of interactions between the different user groups. In a nutshell, I argue that tool distribution through TikTok One is a strategy exploited by TikTok to drive growth and produce dependencies. In studying TikTok’s governance of platform tools, this case study helps unpack how TikTok first came to asymmetrically govern key software in the cultural industries—an understanding necessary to regulate platform growth and rupture platform dependencies.

The Academy Awards have long been a focal point in discussions about cinema, shaping public perceptions and industry trends. In the 2025 awards season, the French musical Emilia Pérez, centered on a Mexican transgender cartel leader, emerged as a strong contender, earning 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Actress for Karla Sofia Gáscon. However, controversy arose when Gáscon’s past social media posts, containing racist, Islamophobic, and anti-vaccine remarks, resurfaced, leading to widespread backlash on X and her removal from Netflix’s Oscar campaign.

This study examines how the media in five countries—Spain, Mexico, Brazil, France, and the United States—covered the scandal. Using Content Analysis (Bardin, 2006), we classified 139 news articles based on thematic focus, references to X, and portrayals of both the film and Gáscon. The findings indicate a uniform media approach, primarily emphasizing the scandal, Netflix’s response, and Gáscon’s public apology. Reports often framed her as the central figure in the controversy while downplaying other criticisms of the film.

The study also highlights the power dynamics between traditional media, streaming platforms, and digital activism. While Netflix initially controlled the narrative through an aggressive Oscar campaign, the virality of X played a decisive role in reshaping public discourse, demonstrating the influence of social media in cultural debates. Ultimately, Emilia Pérez serves as a case study of how digital platforms can challenge corporate narratives, raising questions about media imperialism, public accountability, and the limits of online mobilization.

This article explores how ‘Latina makeup’ filters—beauty filters—on TikTok contribute to platform racism, focusing on user interactions, platform governance, affordances, and platform-specific cultural practices. Using Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, it analyzes the engagement of Latinas (N=499) and non-Latinas (N=1,001) with these filters, revealing how TikTok's vernacular, algorithmic visibility, and platform politics shape user behavior. Non-Latina users engage with these filters primarily for beauty enhancement, depoliticizing the racialization of Latina features. In contrast, Latina users contest, reappropriate, and resignify these filters, leveraging platform vernacular in response to TikTok's limited moderation. The study uncovers a new dimension of platform racism, extending beyond overt hate speech to forms of racial fetishization and commodification, where users transform racialized bodies into aesthetic commodities. It highlights the shortcomings of platform governance in addressing racialized digital practices, while also emphasizing the creative resistance of marginalized communities. Lastly, the paper introduces the concept of 'digital Latinface,' illustrating how non-Latinx individuals, supported by platform politics, vernacular, and culture, commodify Latinx cultural elements to gain social or aesthetic capital.

The paper analyzes the term afrogoth, or afrogotic, on TikTok, from afrocentric perspectives on digital technologies, with the aim of investigating the impact of the hashtag in subverting algorithmic racism and the low visibility that black goth people receive on social networks, as well as digital aquilombamento and the creation of self-definitions. The rationale addresses Goth subculture, Technological Pretuguese, algorithmic racism, hacking the dispositive of raciality and cyberquilombism. The methodology includes the collection of videos with #afrogoth. The results show mostly black bodies using elements constructed as feminine. The creation and use of the term afrogoth is a form of Technological Pretuguese, in which technology itself is used to go against white supremacy, creating a language that refers to blackness. In addition, it emerges as a self-definition, in which Black people can name themselves within Goth Subculture, valuing their blackness and seeking more equality in goth spaces, proposing cyberquilombism by forming a network of visibility and support among Black goth people.

This study explores how Islamic faith is represented and interpreted on TikTok in the context of the 2023-24 Israel-Gaza war, a period that has intensified negative portrayals of Muslims in mainstream media. While past research has examined how Muslims counter stereotypes online, little attention has been given to how faith itself is articulated in times of conflict. Since October 2023, TikTok has emerged as a key platform for religious discourse, with #Islam surpassing 35 billion views, often in a positive light. A growing trend involves non-Muslims expressing admiration for Palestinian faith, sometimes leading to conversion narratives.

Through a multimodal analysis of 50 TikTok videos collected using English and Arabic keywords (Islam, Faith, Gaza / إسلام، غزة، إيمان، صبر), this study examines faith representations across Muslims from Gaza, Muslims outside Gaza, converts, and non-Muslims. Findings reveal a dominant framing of faith as resilience, with users across groups linking Islam to perseverance, hope, and endurance. Muslims outside Gaza often engage with wartime footage to draw spiritual lessons, while converts describe their journey to Islam as inspired by Palestinian faith. Non-Muslims adopt broader universal values of resilience while using Islamic language and hashtags, fostering inter-group dialogue.

By analyzing TikTok’s affordances and algorithmic norms, this study highlights how digital infrastructures facilitate faith-based discourse and shape religious representation. It contributes to discussions on social media, religion, and digital geopolitics, revealing how faith is mediated, negotiated, and mobilized in online spaces during times of war.

This panel examines how parents and carers make decisions about the access and use of digital technologies by their young children. With many family practices now mediatized, it explores the conditions under which family members (re)negotiate their understandings about their children’s relationship with technology and the tensions that emerge. The panel combines five papers which focus on the diversity of daily digital experiences of families and children in Australia, Brazil, Portugal and Estonia. The papers use diverse theoretical and methodological approaches such as: the technological, legal and economic analysis of apps, participant observation, thematic analysis of interviews, and multimodal content analysis. They draw on case studies, critical data studies and migration studies to unpack the diverse and divergent practices and understandings families have of digital technologies worldwide. The papers are titled: ‘Parental Approaches to Children’s Access and Use of Technologies: A Case Study of an Indigenous Community in Brazil’; ‘How Melbourne- Based Sri Lankan Australian Families Use Digital Technology in Everyday Family Routines’; ‘Australian Families in the EdTech Data Assemblage: The Case of Storypark; ‘The Playbour of Children of Influencer Moms in Brazil and Portugal’ and ‘Plataforms as the Materialitis of Care: Experiences and Practices of Three-Generational Families from Estonia’. Together, the papers identify crucial challenges for parents to protect and promote the rights of their children in this complex and evolving digital environment. Some of these challenges are common to all papers, but others are substantially different, particularly when contrasting case studies in the Global North and Global South.

Recent years have seen growing public and policy debates about the impacts of digital platforms on politics, the economy, and society. Platforms are considered “the distinguishing organizational form” (Pais & Stark, 2021, p.44) of the 21st century. Music provides a fascinating and illustrative lens through which to examine ‘platformization’ from both a global and a culturally-situated perspective.

This roundtable brings together scholars who are studying music production and consumption from diverse perspectives and in a diverse range of locales around the world. The participants in this roundtable are currently leading projects that research music platformization in the following countries: Brazil, Chile, China, the Netherlands, Nigeria, South Korea and the United Kingdom. Commonalities and differences in the platformization of music across these diverse cases will be highlighted in this roundtable. The discussion will focus on the problems of universalizing claims about how platforms are impacting musical labour and listening practices (production and consumption). A further point of focus will be on methodological challenges that arise when attempting to conduct international and comparative work in this emerging field.

By fostering interdisciplinary and cross-regional collaborations, we seek to develop a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective on the global implications of these digital transformations as they apply to music. Overall, this roundtable aims to discuss how we can better understand musical labour and listening practices in the platform era from a global perspective.

Social media has significantly reshaped health and fitness discourses, particularly among young Colombians, serving as both spaces of empowerment and platforms that reinforce digital violence and exclusionary body ideals. This study examines the tension between compliance and resistance in online fitness and wellness narratives, analyzing interactions across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

A dual phenomenon emerges: while digital platforms provide access to health-related knowledge and community support, they also foster body-shaming, unsolicited health advice, and gendered violence, particularly targeting women and marginalized groups. These harmful narratives are often disguised as wellness discourses, promoting unattainable body ideals through algorithmic amplification and engagement-driven content structures.

Using a mixed-methods approach, this research analyzes over 270,000 social media interactions through machine learning techniques and thematic qualitative analysis, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with young Colombians. Findings reveal that while influencers and activists resist dominant beauty norms, their visibility often leads to intensified scrutiny and online harassment.

The study highlights the neoliberal framing of health, where wellness is commodified, reinforcing unrealistic beauty standards and exacerbating social inequalities. It calls for greater regulation, digital literacy initiatives, and intersectional approaches to counteract harmful fitness narratives and promote inclusive, equitable digital health spaces.

This paper draws upon three conceptual nodes from several theoretical lenses: 1.) embodied feminism through conversations; 2.) talking about the body in mediated text; and 3.) women’s ways of knowing through media consumption.

The paper contends that embodied feminism is present in everyday habits of conversing with others. It also forwards the term media talk or the process of conversing about what is consumed in the media through small or deep talks.

This paper asks: How do mothers and daughters talk about the body as consumed in mediated text? It concludes using the guide question “What are the implications of these tensions in body talk covered in media talk on feminist reimagination?”

Using an interpretivist approach, a total of 33 informants sampled through maximum variation (i.e., Filipino mothers who identify as feminists ages 39-60 and their daughters ages 15-19 years old) participated in FGDs and focus interviews held in 2024. Data were gathered from informants’ recall of conversations surrounding the body as triggered by their internet use.

Qualitative analysis revealed the following categories of topics in conversations: maternal activity, women’s sexuality, and subjectivity; wounded bodies; attractive and functional bodies; and mind-body cooperation and competition. Findings show the mothers’ unresolved notions about their bodies and the daughters’ ambivalent ownership of the empowered body their mothers often talk about.

Conclusions and recommendations were made on the following: women’s conversations about technology; feminism’s expansion in the realm of media consumption, creation, and circulation; and culture as indexed in media talk.

This paper analyzes the gendered narratives surrounding the internet created in Australian-based cyberfeminist zine Geekgirl. Geekgirl, a zine that received international recognition, aimed to create an online space and culture for women. It promoted on strategies that empowered individual users and argued for improvements to women's online experiences. However, while presenting itself as an explicitly feminist project, the zine was informed by the 1990s turn towards post-feminism. It dismissed earlier feminist movements and was frequently critical of women who took things said online 'too seriously'.

This paper argues that the narratives presented in Geekgirl were attempts to reconcile, somewhat awkwardly, emerging ideas about the liberatory potential of cyberspace and cyberlibertarian ideologies with feminist critique. It positions Geekgirl as a zine that emerged from its historical context, the 1990s turn towards post-feminism, the popularization of internet and web technologies, and ongoing narratives about the relationship between women and technology. Geekgirl played with concepts of embodiment and disembodiment, feminism and post-feminism, online and IRL, and the international and Australian national contexts in which these played out.

My research draws on previous scholarship on platform infrastructures and gender, to pursue two aims – (1) to address the connection between the platform infrastructure and its vernaculars and the simplistic rendering of femininity, and (2) to inquire into the possibilities for disrupting the normative and regressive gender performance on smaller or specialised platforms. As I investigate the connection between platform infrastructures and gender, I view popular ways of doing gender online as examples of what Lauren Berlant has called "women's culture" (Berlant, 2008). In Berlant's view, popular "women's culture" is steeped in imitation and banality, where an understanding of the gendered self comes through a recuperative sharing of repetitive stories. I trace the features of the "women's culture" across popular TikTok trends #IsItAfitOrIsSheJustSkinny and #OldFaceFilter to demonstrate its firm grip on women's behaviour and interactions, further reinforced through the the algorithmic mechanisms and the platform’s vernaculars. 

In the second part of my research, I examine possibilities for disrupting the cycle of gendered imitation and repetition beyond dominant social media platforms. To do so, I turn to Communia, a smaller, women-oriented platform launched in 2020. Communia positions itself as a space for self-expression and community-building, aiming to offer an alternative to “bloated, troll-filled platforms that are more about posturing than connecting”, as Olivia Deramus, its founder, puts it (Davis, 2023). Unlike TikTok, where engagement relies on algorithmic amplification and viral trends, Communia incorporates features that encourage introspection alongside social interaction—such as journaling prompts and discussion spaces.

This study examines how Douyin's platform affordances enable regulatory-risky content and shape relationships between streamers and audiences in Chinese showroom live streaming—a controversial yet profitable genre characterized by intimate performances and virtual gifting. While existing research focuses on performers' labor and precarity, limited attention has been paid to how platforms enable content that operates at the edge of regulatory boundaries. Through a methodological triangulation combining walkthrough analysis, online observation, and in-depth interviews with female streamers, we introduce the concept of "ambiguitance": a constellation of contradictory affordances engineered across a platform's policy, algorithmic, and interface layers. Our findings reveal that while Douyin's policies explicitly restrict sexually suggestive content and discourage tipping, its traffic-driven algorithms implicitly incentivize edge-ball content, and its interface prioritizes monetization features over risk warnings. This ambiguitance creates a space where users navigate between explicit restrictions and implicit incentives, enabling the production and consumption of controversial content. Furthermore, it fosters hierarchical, competitive relationships characterized by uneven risk distribution, where streamers can leverage ambiguity for monetary gain but face disproportionate consequences when audiences weaponize platform policies through reporting. Streamers experience platform affordances as simultaneously empowering and restrictive. This research contributes a novel analytical framework for understanding how platforms strategically engineer governance gaps that serve their interests while displacing responsibilities onto users, offering implications for platform studies and digital labor research.

This paper aims to compare, from the perspective of political economy of communication and philosophy of technology, two distinct historical periods of music consumption via the Internet (from 1996 to 2007 and from 2007 to today) considering the technological, social, aesthetic and authorial changes that have occurred over the last thirty-three years. This broad period begins with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a true legal milestone that marks the beginning of a considerable deregulation of the Internet.

Since this deregulation, which freed the Internet from legal surveillance regarding rights such as Copyright, the entire planet (but, of course, firstly Europe and USA) began to access an ever-increasing volume of audio files, thanks to an innovative format that managed to reproduce audio with acceptable fidelity without being excessively heavy in terms of storage. This “miraculous” format, the mp3, designed to be enjoyed in noisy contexts, with relaxed and distracted listening, while running other programs on the computer or traveling from one place to another (Sterne, 2006) not only enabled new forms of listening but also new ways of socializing and sharing (Bull, 2005).

In the era of the “digital condition” (Sadin, 2013), that is, the era in which most of citizens’ interactions began to be framed and mediated by the use of the Internet, listening to audio files was inseparable from the idea of sharing them, without necessarily requiring financial compensation (that would be the difference between “sharing” and “piracy”).

Growing up with China’s rapid economic expansion and globalization, young Chinese women (aged under 35) living in urban cities found them facing an increasingly consumerist environment, with advanced media-commerce system that promotes certain ideas of womanhood and beauty ideals to incite beauty consumption. This study critically examines how young urban Chinese women negotiate consumerist beauty knowledge with needs of self-care and class-specific consumption. In this process, digital media plays a central in the circulation of beauty care information and gradually converge with retailing platforms. With multimodal analysis and in-depth interview, this study focuses on the followers of Li Jiaqi, China’s most influential beauty e-commerce streamer, to explores the gendered, consumerist Chinese beauty culture, which deeply integrates with media-commerce platforms. Findings from this study suggest that the social construction of "beauty care" is an important device for young women to imagine and practice maturity, personal safety, and class status, displaying a dialectic relationship between body anxiety and feminist awareness.

The transformations brought by digital platforms and streaming services have profoundly altered the dynamics of media production and consumption in Brazil, reshaping the long-established structures of television broadcasting. Historically, TV Globo has been the dominant force in Brazil’s media landscape, pioneering national cultural production, setting audience standards, and establishing a robust international distribution network. However, the global expansion of streaming services has reconfigured traditional audiovisual models, challenging Globo’s dominance and requiring strategic shifts in content production, distribution, and monetization. This study explores Globo’s adaptation strategies by focusing on reality television—a genre that has emerged as a central pillar of the network's response to digital platformization.

It provides an important lens through which to analyse the broader restructuring of traditional broadcasters as they navigate disruptions in audiovisual models and the challenges of sustaining audience engagement in an era of fragmented media consumption.

After years of criticism of social media companies, there is an increasing interest among prospective users as well as researchers in “alternatives.” The concept of alternative social media adheres to the motto of fields such as science and technology studies: things could be otherwise. Instead of accepting “big tech,” corporate-controlled social media as the only possible option, focusing on alternative social media illustrates other sociotechnical paths that can be taken.

How do we map these paths? In other words, what are alternative social media? What is it that makes social media “alternative” and how can one approach their study? Rather than attempting to answer these questions in order to provide a precise and stable definition of alternative social media, this presentation will offer a working definition of ASM – with an emphasis on “working.”

We have built an archive of alternative social media scholarship (n=115) and subjected it to what we call an “alternative social mediography” – a meta-analysis of this academic field. We find the field has moved through two phases and is arguably in the midst of a third phase, one that focuses on governance. In writing our ography, we problematise “alternative” as an analytical category and how it has been wielded thus far.

Based on this ography, we conclude that ASM scholarship should analyze ASM as relational, emergent, and dynamic. In addition, we argue ASM scholars must use a situated perspective. Scholars of alternative social media must account for these factors.

Digital citizenship refers to the norms, behaviors, and responsibilities tied to the ethical and effective use of technology in society. It includes meaningful online participation, responsible technology use, and engagement with digital ecosystems (Mossberger et al., 2008; Ribble, 2011; Ohler, 2011). As digital platforms increasingly deregulate content moderation—exemplified by X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook under Elon Musk—extremist and harmful content proliferates, exacerbating challenges for marginalized communities and democratic civility (Schiffer, 2023; Ingram, 2024). Digital citizenship education, emphasizing digital literacy, ethical behavior, online safety, and civic engagement (Örtegren, 2024), must evolve to address these issues. However, current frameworks often overlook power literacy—the ability to leverage political tools for social change (Parkhouse, 2017)—and remain rooted in Western liberal ideals, marginalizing non-Western and collective forms of political belonging (Mamdani, 1996; Isin, 2002).

This paper argues for a reimagined digital citizenship grounded in decolonial cosmopolitanism, which balances universal ethical principles with respect for local differences and centers the experiences of the Global South (Appiah, 2006; Mignolo, 2011). It critiques traditional cosmopolitanism for its Eurocentric biases and advocates for a pluriversal approach that promotes epistemic justice and transnational solidarity. The proposed model of digital cosmopolitan citizenship emphasizes ethical technology use, respect for others’ rights and dignity, and active participation in digital spaces to empower marginalized voices. By untethering digital citizenship from state-centric frameworks, this approach addresses the collusion of corporate platforms, reactionary politics, and authoritarianism, offering a foundation for inclusive, transnational digital education.

Digital advertising has emerged as the dominant force in the global advertising industry, with online behavioural advertising (OBA), or commonly known as adtech, serving as its primary model. Central to this ecosystem has been the use of third-party cookies, enabling cross-site tracking, profiling and targeting. In the meantime, regulatory interventions, particularly in Europe, have sought to address this with data protection and e-privacy laws, with limited success. This paper examines the intertwined technological, regulatory, and economic forces shaping the evolution of third-party cookies, presenting an alternative narrative to the common assumption that the history of regulatory failures with adtech owes to the fast pace of technological advancement. Drawing on Thaler and Sunstein’s choice architecture theory as well as Hartzog’s advocacy for design regulation, this paper shows that European policymakers’ historical fixation with what they refer to as the “technologically neutral” and “future-proofing” regulatory approach has paradoxically impeded effective governance and contributed to regulatory stagnation.

There are a number of studies on how to interpret the platform economy according to Marx's labour theory of value. The most important perspective is the one that assumes that consumers and users of social networks are productive workers and that data is a new source of value or capital, generated from the exploitation of user activity on these platforms. There is yet another perspective that states that the priority activity of digital platforms is rentierism. Based on the reading of volume I, II and Chapter VI Unpublished of ‘Capital’, we construct categories for analysing platform work since Marx’s Theory of Value.These categories were: the existence of a monetary and subordinate relationship between the worker and the digital platform; the fact that the digital platform is a monopoly that subordinates the worker in order to valorise its capital; the existence of resistance by workers to the exploitation of their labour by the platforms; and the deterioration of workers' living conditions and health as evidence of the extraction of surplus value in this work. These categories were confirmed by contemporary literature on platform work and we concluded that the work of drivers and couriers is productive and a source of valour. We also emphasise that the platform economy is disrupting the way drivers and couriers have previously worked. And that unlike this old way of working, there is a process of both the concentration of different capitals and the centralisation of restaurant capital by digital food platforms.

The results of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election led millions of X (Twitter) users to move to other platforms, following Musk’s support for president-elect Trump. Most users fled to Bluesky, driven by a desire for a community space with greater transparency, stronger moderation policies, and less hate speech. While online platform migrations happen regularly, they are not always this acute or this large. Therefore, this migration presents a unique case study for building online platform migration theory.

This project investigates the X to Bluesky migration from a communication media lens. It is hypothesized (per media system dependency theory) that the social turmoil of the recent US Presidential election should lead to greater dependency on X, which would normally lead to greater platform adoption. However, it is theorized that given platform communication violations (per interpersonal expectancy violation theory), users migrated to other platforms (e.g., Bluesky) given a variety of “push” and “pull” factors (per migration theory), and moderated by the critical mass of their network.

The present study will present survey results of former X/Twitter users (N = 200) who are now on Bluesky, about their reasons for migrating, to test these hypotheses. The project has received funding and is currently under university ethics board review. Data collection and analysis will be complete by the AoIR conference in October 2025.

TikTok's rapid growth among young users has introduced unique challenges to existing frameworks for understanding child internet fame. We identify 'KidTok' as a unique networked public for 'internet famous' young people on TikTok shaped by the platform's sociotechnical environment and explore the novel risks that governance should address. While concerns about privacy, safety, and exploitation persist across platforms, TikTok's algorithm-driven exposure and engagement features, such as 'duets' and 'stitches,' have created a distinctive environment that shapes 'KidTok.' This study examines the novel risks associated with child fame on TikTok and evaluates the governance mechanisms addressing these risks. Using a triangulated methodology, we conduct a policy analysis of legal and platform regulations alongside two ethnographic case studies to explore how community-driven processes like lateral surveillance and peer policing complement formal governance efforts. Framing our analysis within Merton's sociology of deviance, we argue that KidTok operates under a patchwork governance model where legal, platform, and community mechanisms interact to navigate acceptable practices for children. These findings highlight the limitations of traditional regulatory frameworks and emphasize the critical role of community norms. Our study offers a framework for researchers and policymakers to better understand and address the governance needs of child internet fame.

The fragmentation of the digital public sphere has reshaped information circulation, with algorithmic curation and organic sharing playing distinct roles in shaping online discourse. Telegram, with its minimal moderation and encryption features, has emerged as a key hub for alternative narratives, particularly in Italy, where distrust in traditional media fuels the rise of counter-publics.

This study examines how Telegram’s recommendation system, launched in April 2024, structures content flows compared to organic sharing behaviors, addressing two key questions: (1) Is there structural homology between Telegram’s algorithmic similar-channel network and organic networks formed through forwarding, link-sharing, and domain-sharing? (2) What are the key dynamics of content circulation within Italy’s fringe Telegramsphere?

Using a multiplex network analysis approach, we find weak structural overlap between algorithmic recommendations and organic content-sharing networks. The similar-channel network, shaped by audience overlap, is diffuse, while domain-sharing is clustered around common sources. Forwarding integrates external channels, whereas link-sharing reflects internal community interests.

Despite their differing interests, fringe communities partly rely on shared content sources, including mainstream media, while forwarding and link-sharing highlight specific content preferences. These findings underscore the need for further research into shared sources and the interplay between algorithmic curation and organic dissemination, with broader implications for digital public discourse.

Online violence and abuse pose significant challenges to public discourse, as it exacerbates existing power structures and marginalizes diverse epistemic perspectives. In this context, this study examines the epistemological consequences of hateful and toxic speech in online news comment sections, conceptualizing it as a form of epistemic violence—an effort to erase particular ways of thinking. Examining a dataset of toxic and hateful comments from The Conversation Canada, our findings emphasize four mechanisms of epistemic violence: insulting, labelling, ridiculing, and dehumanizing. These mechanisms function to delegitimize alternative epistemic positions and reinforce ideological conformity. Furthermore, these mechanisms disproportionately target those with marginalized identities along racial, gender, and political lines, further entrenching hegemonic power structures. Our research contributes to scholarship on digital epistemologies and platformized violence, highlighting the need for strategies that foster epistemic pluralism rather than simply suppressing toxic discourse.