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The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Frederik Weber Henriksen, whose interest is in cross-cutting engagement and polarisation. This is often connected to people sorting into homogeneous information environments (or ‘echo chambers’), yet cross-cutting exposure is actually very common in everyday experience, and such exposure can itself also be a source of polarisation.

Passive and active cross-cutting engagement and polarisation turn out to be more complex matters than simple ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ narratives tend to suggest, not least also because such cross-cutting exposure can also occur in …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Michelle Kulig, whose focus is on perceptions of algorithmic recommender systems amongst news avoiders in the United States. The US political environment is characterised by terminal polarisation, with competitive news markets that incentivise outrage while being subjected to political pressures, and an absence of strong and trusted public service media that might function as an epistemic anchor.

News consumption here is now primarily via social media environments, which are to some extent algorithmically curated and therefore produce further epistemic disruption. There is …

The post-lunch panel at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on polarisation, and starts with a paper by Marco Bastos, who begins by introducing the various understandings of polarisation that exist in the literature. These also differ by the unity of analysis, and the present study focusses on narratives as its unit of analysis. Can these be quantified, and their polarising qualities assessed?

Narratives, put simply, are stories about how and why things happen. There are various structural models of narratives, such as Greimas’s actantial model, involving a key subject aided by supporters and frustrated …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my QUT colleague Shana Mohammadamini, whose focus is also on the protests in Iran in January 2026 that led to the regime’s murder of some 40,000 people.

Western responses to this also included the creation of AI imagery meant to support Iran and Iranians against their regime; one of the people engaging in this is the Polish content creator Rafal Wegiel, for instance, and Shana examined the themes and messages of such content.

Themes included women and freedom, resistance, protest, and mourning …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my excellent colleague Ehsan Dehghan, whose focus is on the current situation in Iran. Iran’s media ecosystem is tightly controlled by the regime, with many social media platforms banned but accessible via VPNs and other workarounds.

Current protests in Iran are only the latest in a long series of anti-regime protests that date back at least as far as 1999, often over regime censorship, election fraud, the economic situation, and regime violence towards women and other groups. The protests appear to be …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is my fabulous QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko, whose focus is on online support for Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Such supporters may be based all around the world; one of Kateryna’s informants is a woman in her fifties from Japan who is involved in the NAFO initiative, for instance, through activism on Xitter. And while this platform is becoming much less hospitable to pro-Ukraine activists, she and others persist in their work nevertheless.

Such online political activism is much more than mere slacktivism …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Tom Divon, whose focus is on war influencers reporting from war zones; this can provide insights into the lived experience in such spaces, but can also misrepresent and misinform about this experience.

Social media platforms have accelerated the spread of such war content, and have themselves become environments for hybrid warfare. Media no longer just disseminate conflict information, but are themselves shaping conflict conduct and participation. This has been the case for war reporting for many decades, but is now also affected …

My next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on activism and resistance, and starts with Laura Cervi, whose focus is on makeup activism. Such activism responds to gendered violence, for instance in the context of the Ni Una Menos or Mahsa Amini Woman Life Freedom protests and more recently the war on Gaza, by appropriating platform-native beauty practices for political protests, such as makeup videos on TikTok.

This project engaged in a purposive sampling of hundreds of such videos from TikTok for a comparative multimodal analysis. TikTok is not a neutral channel in …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Carolina Parreiras, whose focus is on the circulation of violent images on Telegram that would be censored on other platforms. Her focus here is especially on Brazil, and she is employing a lurker ethnography approach, during the Operação Contenção in late October and early November 2025.

Such lurking is a form of participant observation, but ethically and morally questionable, since the presence of the anthropologist in an online group is not visible to other members of that group; however, if the researcher …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Rita Hermann-Gsenger, whose focus is on the German Querdenken movement which emerged especially in response to COVID-19 government health measures; it started in early 2020 and peaked in August 2020, and used Telegram as a key tool for its own organisation.

The key interest here is on Querdenken’s monetisation ecosystem; this combines platform-mediated income with multi-channel monetisation strategies. It draws on heterogeneous monetisation streams in a layered environment of communication, payment, financial, and commercial infrastructures.

The approach to this can be split …