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The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Christian Schwieter, whose focus is on deplatformed far-right activists on Telegram during COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How do such activists claim legitimacy during crises?

The focus here is on the UK far-right activist ‘Tommy Robinson’, a former leader of the fascist EDL who has self-styled himself now as a citizen journalist; and the Austrian Martin Sellner, an Identitarian influencer who is also the chief strategist of a ‘remigration masterplan’ endorsed by the German far right and presents himself as …

(Content warning: contains references to self-harm and suicide.)

The first session on this second day at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City for me is on digital extremism, and we start with Sean McCafferty. His focus is on coerced self-harm as a form of nihilist violent extremism (NVE), and on the legal protections against this that do or do not exist in the European context.

This is a new phenomenon which has become a growing topic in recent years, also in counterterrorism contexts (though perhaps it does not fit this category especially well). NVE occurs both …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my colleague Sam Vilkins, whose focus is on the study of political defectors’ communication practices. This is influenced by the gradual incursion of social media logics into politics, which has led to the rise of political influencers as well as of politicians-as-influencers, as well as to a decline in partisan allegiance.

Overall, this has led to increasing doubt about the costs and benefits of being part of a party machine, and manifested in a growing number of political defectors who see …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my fabulous colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on tracking the ideological trajectories of Australian political influencers (with a later extension to German influencers as well). Here, the focus is on high-visibility political influencers for the period of 2016 to 2025.

Such changes in position might point to an erasure of complexities, which is also a symptom of destructive polarisation. By adjusting their positioning on various issues, influencers may increasingly form antagonistic camps, leading to greater and more profound polarisation. Political influencers …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on the 2018 and 2022 presidential elections in Brazil; the former elected the far-right anti-establishment candidate Jair Bolsonaro, while the latter saw the return of leftist Lula.

This same period also saw significant changes to the Facebook algorithm, from a downranking of news during 2018 through the emergency measures enacted after the 2020 US presidential election and coup attempt to a 2022 reduction of ‘political’ content (by some nebulous in-house definition) in users’ personal feeds …

The final panel for today at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City involves quite a number of colleagues from my team at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, and we start with Vish Padinjar, whose focus is on trajectories of radicalisation on Reddit. This focusses especially on the GamerGate misogynistic harassment campaign in 2014, which snowballed into a broader Manosphere campaign of harassment targetting supposed ‘social justice warriors’.

Vish explores this through Reddit discussions from January 2014 to December 2016 across several gaming-related, toxic masculine, and feminist subreddits. What happened here is a form of radicalisation …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Rory Sharp. His focus is on 5G conspiracy theories, which extend well beyond the normative definition of 5G as a communications technology. There is here a general sense that 5G is a compromised form: that it is tainted by technological hype and paranoia.

There is a difference here between conspiracist and conspiratorial ideation, too: 5G conspiracy theories are not conspiratorial. Most of these link back in some way to a post by notorious Twitter account @dril, which in itself commented on a …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Lena Kostuj, whose focus is also on the understandings of AI in conspiracist communities. Such communities have always tried to make sense of technologies, and are now turning their interest towards artificial intelligence as well – this produces a form of algorithmic folklore, both about as well as created by and through algorithms, which shapes how these groups relate to AI technologies.

The focus here is on the German conspiracy theorist Christian Köhlert, who is especially popular on Telegram and YouTube; he …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Calum Lister Matheson, whose focus is also on conspiracy theories; these are driven by psychological factors, but also substantially facilitated by the information access provided by Internet technologies – from hypertext through search to AI. This has resulted in the demise of symbolic efficiency.

This can be understood through paranoid-metonymies theory: it begins with foreclosure that rejects organising signifiers, fills the gaps with delusion, and produces certainty and a commitment to absolute truth beyond the evidence. In conspiracy culture, this works through …

The next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on conspiracy theories, with a focus especially on UFOs and UAPs. We start with an introduction by Marco Bastos. This has produces several hypotheses: especially, about UFOs as cover for military black ops; or about UFOs as a real, alien phenomenon. This hardly matters any more, though, because UFO claims also feed into an arms race in space technologies.

The rise of conspiracy theories also contributes to democratic backsliding: they tie into perceptions of a lack in transparency in democratic processes, especially in the US …