This paper examines the convergence of platform-dependent comedy and political commentary through the lens of the “Rogansphere” and the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump. Situating the study within the framework of platformisation, I argue that podcasting comedians have transitioned from mere entertainers to “embedded skeptics” who navigate platformed personality capitalism (Rosamond, 2022). By leveraging an ethos of “roast universalism” — a belief in equal-opportunity offense, paired with strategic sensitivity to platform policies — these actors facilitate both the politicization of comedy and the “comedification” of political discourse. Analysis focuses on two contrasting phenomena: the “Roganisation” of the Austin comedy scene via Tony Hinchcliffe’s podcast Kill Tony, and the emergence of the “Rogan-Hatersphere,” a critical network of YouTube content creators. I argue that, while figures like Rogan and Hinchcliffe utilize “cancel discourses” (Ng, 2022) to frame their alliance with tech billionaires and Trump-adjacent ideologies as a defense of free speech, the Hatersphere acts as a subsequent counter-force. These “personality enforcers” hold comedians accountable, challenging the cynical use of comedy as a depoliticized platform commodity. Ultimately, this research highlights how the unique creative sub-class of podcasting comedians negotiates the boundaries between U.S.-exceptionalist digital values and partisan political influence.
The aim of this paper is to introduce the phrase ‘digital banter’ to describe a highly localised typology of English-language speech that acts to veil xenophobia, misogyny, and other forms of extremism. Via an analysis of various videos on the sacking of British Foreign Secretary Suella Braverman, uploaded to the fringe social media platform Bitchute, this paper reveals certain aspects of the state of British politics and culture vis-à-vis platform norms and sociotechnical Internet subcultures. First, digital banter is a mode of anti-fandom that relies on a vocal dislike for non-white and non-male, seeking to dehumanise and delegitimise the identities and experiences of black and brown female politicians. While the principal point of attention for fan/anti-fan communities has historically been celebrities, politicians are increasingly becoming the focus of digital banter in Internet subcultures. Second, those profiting from political anti-fandom are called “banter merchants”, pointing towards mercantile imperatives that motivate social media creators to accrue influence through political anti-fandom. On Bitchute, serious political discussion is reduced to memetic ecologies of viral trends, rage, and shitposting, whilst signposting users toward a cascade of other platforms, paid subscriptions, and merchandise purchases. This research makes the case, however, that the extreme attitudes and behaviours witnessed on Bitchute are endlessly reproduced and reflected — albeit perhaps more softly and, therefore, more insidiously — throughout the British media ecosystem.
This paper explores the different narratives involved in and surrounding the cancellation of Dutch rapper Ali B, following charges of sexual assault and rape. It does so by drawing on a thematic analysis conducted on 171 articles in Dutch and Belgian media focusing on the court case following his cancellation. The analysis reveals a tripartite narrative being present in B’s representation: First, a narrative presented by himself and thus his self-presentation, picturing him in denial and a victim of cancel culture. Second, there is a narrative presented by the victims, portraying B as a predator and themselves as believable victims. Third, a narrative on B by the judicial system (particularly the public prosecutors) and media further aid his de-celebrification by emphasizing his lack of remorse and denial. Bringing these three narratives together allows us to examine how the mechanisms and dynamics of cancel culture unfold, by scrutinizing how B’s image shifts from a likeable to a despicable, de-celebrified media persona. Researching this cancel case then helps us understand how a celebrity can potentially be de-celebrified by his own cancel discourse and practices, those of his victims, and those of the law and the media.
This paper examines two binary oppositions that are commonly deployed by proponents of blockchains and other decentralised Web (DWeb) technologies: centralisation versus decentralisation and trust versus trustlessness. According to optimistic visions, DWeb technologies empower individuals to exchange resources on an unsupervised, peer-to-peer level. This reduces the need for “centralisation” and trusted intermediaries. DWeb proponents’ speculative claims are often disseminated via social media, business, and technology blogs. In response, we offer a magic quadrant. The quadrant covers unconventional, DWeb-based organisations that are expected to govern “alt-tech” social networks, shadow markets, and metaverse projects. The quadrant also illustrates attempts by various parties to make the DWeb a reality. Next to the quadrant, we offer possible theoretical lenses to approach the DWeb.
Musical virality on TikTok results from the convergence of sonic structure, emotional legibility, and algorithmic filtering. This study applies Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and k-means clustering to a dataset of 178 viral tracks, using Spotify audio features to model three dominant sound clusters and five affective profiles (happy, melancholic, intense, relaxed, neutral). Songs marked by high rhythmic intensity and clearly readable emotions are more likely to be reused, remixed, and embedded in performance-based formats. However, linguistic, gendered, and artistic factors introduce significant asymmetries: Spanish-language songs, despite strong rhythmic profiles, tend to be underrepresented in global popularity rankings, suggesting algorithmic bias. Differences by vocal gender and artist format further illustrate how conventions of sonic identity shape visibility. These findings support the notion of a platform-native aesthetic regime — one that privileges affective clarity, rhythmic accessibility, and compatibility with recommendation systems. This research contributes to debates on platform culture, emotional infrastructures, and the algorithmic shaping of musical success by revealing the affective and structural underpinnings of virality in short-form digital environments.
Our research team interviewed 20 TikTok content creators from historically disempowered social groups about their experiences with TikTok’s algorithms. The participants identified consistency in how the platform’s algorithms responded to the visible identities of the creators and to discussion of the social justice-related topics. They also described the relationships they saw between these practices and TikTok’s economic incentives and provided strategies they employed for navigating the platforms’ algorithmic systems. Four key themes emerged in the interviews: 1) Understanding TikTok’s algorithms is largely impossible; 2) Inequitable treatment is driven by relationship between identity and economic incentives; 3) Most aspects of the platform are automated, with humans only involved under limited and specific circumstances; and 4) Factors that impact views, content suppression, and monetization.
This paper investigates the rise of anti-mainstream figures in the Italian Telegramsphere and their role within Italy’s hybrid media system. It focuses on how claims of censorship and marginalization can coexist with substantial cross-platform visibility, including visibility on mainstream platforms. To address this paradox, we combined cross-platform mapping and qualitative analysis. Starting from 24 seed channels associated with conspiratorial and anti-mainstream content, the study reconstructs a broader network of 538 Telegram channels and examines the platform ecologies of the 413 channels that remained accessible one year later. Rather than forming self-contained alternative ecologies, these figures typically combine Telegram with mainstream services, using Telegram as a hub for the circulation of oppositional narratives and for the cultivation of direct audience ties. The qualitative analysis identifies four recurring rhetorical personas through which outsiderhood is leveraged: the Hero, the Rascal, the Professional, and the Faceless Ally. We argue that anti-mainstream visibility in Italy is built through the strategic conversion of exclusion, condemnation, and despicability into solidarity, support, and professional legitimacy.
This study looks at how femininity is performed through #CleanGirl content in the social media app TikTok using qualitative content analysis. Accessing a dataset of 100 TikTok videos, this research explores which values could be promoted in #CleanGirl content and what role does algorithmic curation play in its promotion. The analysis highlights two correlated trends: a clear reinforcement of gender normativity and traditional values, and a standardized visual culture. This study proposes that Clean Girl visual culture is closely tied to neoliberal discourses of self-optimization aimed at young women, promoting a promise of constant self-improvement through aesthetically pleasing and routinized everyday practices. In addition, it is suggested that gender and race are regulated through the construction of a collective female identity, where intimate, tutorial-style content acts as a regulatory tool.
As online editing tools and cosmetic procedures become more accessible, research has found links between body modifications and self-branding practices. These self-branding practices are often about producing sexualised Instagram content. This paper argues that ‘fame labour’ (emotion work involved in managing dissonance between an online and offline self) is entangled with performances of sexualised labour. This research contributes to existing literature in two ways; 1) exploring sexualised and aesthetic labour as online/offline identity management and 2) linking this now normalised form of identity work to algorithmic invisibility of marginalised content creators. The author achieved the status of Instagram influencer during the course of the project. As such the research constitutes an analytic autoethnography detailing his experiences, the experiences of other influencers, and those who identify as everyday users. Over 500 Instagram users were consulted over a five-year period.
Communication across social media and messaging platforms leaves information of what has been seen or read. Time stamps and ‘seen’ or ‘read’ notifications are examples of such platform-generated feedback. The information is subtle, yet distinct, and has become an integral part of social media practices, giving rise to the phenomenon of being “left on read.” Based on a repository of data crafted during a five-year digital ethnography across platforms and everyday contexts, this paper explores how tiny instances of platform-generated feedback are felt and how diverse dynamics of left on read pan out. This analysis sheds light on the affective turmoil that occurs when users sense platform-generated feedback, strategies they employ to circumvent this feedback and its affective implications, and not least the platform adaptability that follows.
In December 2021, a video posted on social media platform Douyin featured an Asian man with a striking resemblance to Elon Musk. Introducing himself as Yilong Ma, the Chinese Elon Musk, the man quickly became a sensation across social media platforms. In this paper, I follow the social media activity of Yilong Ma over five years to examine his rise to fame in detail as it intersects questions around concepts like celebrity, influence, despicability, impersonation, and Chineseness. As the following sections illustrate, Yilong Ma is not just a lookalike of a controversial tech CEO, but also an example of a synthetic impersonator: a new kind of virtual influencer whose activities take advantage of, and are shaped by, the affordances of social media platforms, the reconfigurations of celebrity culture, the social life of deep learning, and — in this specific case — the geopolitics of China’s global representation. After introducing the persona of Yilong Ma through his origin story, the three main sections of this paper examine specific aspects of synthetic impersonation: the uncertainty around the use of deepfake tools, the symbiotic relationship with the target’s own celebrity status, and the process of becoming an unwitting mirror of the impersonated.
This paper investigates the moral panic that emerged in Italy around the so-called maranza youth, focusing on the case of influencer Don Alì and his outlandish TikTok challenge to invade southern Italy. I examine how a digital provocation — initially designed for engagement and monetization — was reframed into a public order issue by traditional media and law enforcement. I highlight the interplay of algorithmic storytelling and processes of racialization in shaping both the subcultural practices of second-generation youth and their public representation. Interpreted through the metaphor of professional wrestling, this case reveals how ambiguity between fiction and reality sustains attention economies while exposing marginalized creators to intensified surveillance and exclusion. Ultimately, I argue that this episode exemplifies how moral panics still function as mechanisms of social control, redirecting structural inequalities into spectacles of deviance and reinforcing broader narratives of marginalization in contemporary digital societies.
Personalization on streaming platforms is often presented as neutral preference matching. Drawing on interview-based analysis of women viewers, this paper demonstrates how, in Taiwan, recommendation interfaces and engagement-driven learning align with existing cultural expectations of “feminine” genres and translate routine actions into stable taste categories that order catalogs and label content. Bringing feminist media studies into conversation with platform studies, we conceptualize this linkage as Algorithmic Affective Alignment (AAA): recommendation translates ideals of romance, self-care, and femininity into durable genre classification. The framework links micro-interactions to macro-classification, helps explain why exposure can narrow over time, and reveals how platforms participate in constructing the very preferences they claim to discover—making culturally specific patterns of feminine viewing feel like authentic individual choice.
Emotions have been found to increase online content sharing. Yet, current work has primarily focused on arousal, valence, or discrete emotions. Based on the literature on cultural evolution, this study proposes a more nuanced approach towards analysing emotions that acknowledges that a single post can convey mixed emotions. A principal components analysis (PCA) was used to select features from probability scores of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy, and optimism in a large Twitter dataset from Nordic countries. Drawing on COVID-19 as a relevant case of health crisis communication, logistic and negative binomial regression analyses showed an overall emotion and negativity bias, particularly for the high arousal negative emotions anger and disgust. However, the effect of negativity bias was weaker in COVID-19 discourse compared to general Twitter discourse, suggesting that social and contextual factors moderate the strength of these biases.
Livestreaming platforms have become a dominant medium for extreme media personae, from manosphere agitators to gambling creators and far-right influencers. This paper asks why. Through a walkthrough-based interface analysis of Kick, an alt-tech livestreaming platform owned by Easygo Entertainment, the parent group that also owns the cryptocurrency gambling site Stake, we argue that the prevalence of these figures is produced by a convergence of parasocial and speculative platform affordances, financialised incentive structures, and the subcultural formations that grow around them. Kick’s casino-like interface design, creator-first revenue model, and permissive content moderation philosophy create conditions under which extreme livestreaming personae thrive. Central to our analysis is “chatbox sociality”: a social condition in which audience participation, affective investment, and financial speculation become entangled within the livestream chatbox. We show how the chatbox operates as a speculative technology within a heightened mode of parasociality, producing “chat”: at once a figure of speech and a self-referencing collective identity. Drawing on Komporozos-Athanasiou’s (2022) theorisation of speculative communities, we argue that the chatbox is a commodified digital infrastructure that facilitates the circulation of speculative imaginaries, enabling collectivities whose mood, vernacular output, and financial commitments are inseparable from one another. Through the case study of looksmaxxing, we show how vernaculars originating in incel-adjacent forums are tested and ratified by livestream audiences, clipfarmed into short-form video, and carried into mainstream discourse, arriving, eventually, at the official communications of the U.S. Department of War’s Chief Technological Officer. We argue that this trajectory illustrates how “fratriarchal neoliberalism” (Thomas-Parr and Gilroy-Ware, 2024) operates as an increasingly infrastructural condition, animated through platform interfaces, speculative affordances, and a core ideological principle of ruthless optimisation.
This paper explores the role of digital media in the daily lives of young refugees in Portugal, aged between 11–18 years old. As an exploratory research, we drew upon a qualitative approach, focused on participants’ media consumption and practices. Three key themes emerged from the data: digital media practices, integration processes, and identity negotiation. Overall, participants showed a strong preference for platforms like YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram, mainly for entertainment, language learning, social connection, and self-expression. Such practices align with youth media trends that support hybrid identity formation across transnational and local contexts. Digital media also worked as educational tools, with AI, like ChatGPT used for language learning. Participants also actively engaged with Portuguese culture, revealing a dual belonging. This study highlights that young refugees are active media users, suggesting further research in Portugal in terms of youth refugees mediatic uses and practices for integration policy and digital inclusion strategies.
This essay examines a small but revealing practice: the manipulation of fitness devices to register activity that did not occur. Cases in which the lie serves an obvious external purpose — social clout, professional advancement, monetary reward — are excluded. The focus is on something stranger: lying about oneself, mainly to oneself, for no apparent gain. That narrow act turns out to sit at the intersection of three larger phenomena. First, a body of work in self-deception psychology asks why people persist in beliefs they know to be false, and what role technology plays in sustaining those beliefs. Second, scholarship on gamification and surveillance capitalism reveals the systems into which fitness data flows once it leaves the wristband (e.g., insurance platforms, employer wellness programmes, and public health databases) and the ways in which the data’s integrity is silently assumed by the algorithms that act on it. Third, resistance theory offers a framework for reading the same act not as irrational self-sabotage but as a refusal to let gamified systems define the terms on which a person’s relationship to their own body is measured. Drawing on all three registers, this essay argues that lying to fitness machines is a culturally revealing practice, one that exposes the tensions between self-knowledge and self-presentation, between user autonomy and the data imperatives of gamified systems, and between everyday resistance and the structures of auto-exploitation that shape our digital lives.
“Artificial intelligence” (AI) is both widely adopted and frequently debated, yet public understanding of AI remains limited. Given AI’s societal implications — such as potential unemployment impacts and the spread of disinformation — understanding public discourse around AI is crucial, as it can shape political decision-making. To explore this, we collected all tweets mentioning AI on Twitter (now X) for January 2023 (N=4,732,859). Our analysis reveals that users rarely differentiate between types of AI systems, such as generative AI versus artificial general intelligence, instead focusing on specific interests like image or text generation. Sentiment analysis indicates a somewhat positive tone in AI discussions, though some communities (e.g., AI art) exhibit marked polarization, while mainstream media has a minimal presence in the Twitter-based AI discourse.
This paper analyzes online Russian disinformation campaigns about Ukrainian refugees in Europe to better understand their impact upon target groups. Although disinformation can mislead audiences because of its verisimilitude with authoritative media sources, we argue that its deeper potency rests in activating existing cultural biases. We trace these dynamics in false narratives of refugees as threats to both privileged “Eurowhite” populations and vulnerable Roma people. In both cases, disinformation serves as an extension of larger hybrid and information warfare efforts by Russia. We conclude by critically assessing the potential of interventions — such as those launched by Google’s Jigsaw unit — to “prebunk” disinformation campaigns.
This paper explores how reactionary gender ideologies are rendered palatable in everyday Internet culture. Focusing on the subreddit r/ThePassportBros (200,000+ members), we explore a growing online community of Western men who travel abroad in search of what they frame as more “traditional”, less “Westernized” women. Their discourse blends romantic aspiration with dating strategy and (masculine) status anxiety. Once a small Internet subculture, passport bro ideology now features across mainstream platforms such as Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok. These conversations are framed as lifestyle advice, travel insight, and personal growth. We analyze discussion threads using qualitative thematic analysis, surfacing five recurring themes that guide how members evaluate countries, partners, and their own identities. We argue that this discourse relies on structural paradoxes: rejecting Western values while pursuing patriarchal ideals; Critiquing selectiveness while celebrating selective women elsewhere; embracing racial diversity while reproducing essentialist hierarchies. We propose that these contradictions be seen not as ideological failures, but as discursive affordances that allow extreme views to circulate within “soft” genres. In doing so, we contribute to broader discussions on how digital culture, platform affordances, and lifestyle genres collectively enable the diffusion of reactionary ideas.
