Blog

My next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on news influencers, and we start with Carlos d’Andréa. His focus is on the Google News Initiative and its impact on shaping journalism in Brazil. Such initiatives promote specific ideas of journalism and innovation; GNI started in 2018 and serves in a sense as a media patron that promotes particular journalistic norms and practices.

GNI emerged in the context of demands that digital tech giants should reimburse news publishers for their content, and Brazil hosts some 22% of projects funded by GNI grants between 2018 …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Elena Pilipets, who brings our focus back to TikTok and its glitch aesthetics. The platform is built on templateability and content reuse, but so far our emphasis in understanding glitch aesthetics has been on the visual rather than the sonic aspect.

Sounds are objects of resonance, and on TikTok they resonate across videos through the repetition and reuse that is a key aspect of the platform; but in ‘deep TikTok’ practices such sounds are multiply overlaid until they are no longer …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Marc Tuters, whose interest was peaked by videos of celebrities campaigning for Burkina Faso leader Ibrahim Traoré. These videos were part of a broader campaign of AI slop supporting Traoré, who has strong links to the Russian regime, and this led to a broader investigation of Russian influence operations.

Such operations no longer employ conventional propaganda dissemination techniques, but instead involve and enrol platforms and users in the production and dissemination of propagandist content; this is a form of memetic entrainment which …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Daniël de Zeeuw, whose focus is on the White House’s TikTok account and its appropriation of vibe-edits on the platform. On such platforms, multisensory streams and themes are complemented by fuzzy genres, and might be studied more appropriately through digital rhythm analysis that explores how we navigate digital media and digital media navigate us.

Vibes have become a medium for feelings, and describe a kind of postdigital intimacy where free-floating low-intensity emotion reigns and narrative recedes. Such vibes are now also increasingly …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Marloes Geboers, whose interest is in content moderation on audiovisual social media platforms, with a focus on two 2024 German state elections. These elections have been noted for the substantial presence of TikTok videos related to the far-right AfD party, with limited moderation especially of hate speech where it existed in the audio layer rather than in on-screen captions.

But beyond this, there is also a question of how different ideological actors utilise this same latent space of the TikTok environment. Multi-modal …

The first full day at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City starts for me with a session on sonic social media, where time is amplified by sound. We start with an introduction by Elena Pilipets and Marloes Geboers, who begin by reminding us about the ambient nature of sound, which was played with by the pioneers of ambient music and theorised by various scholars focussing on the ambient commons, the role of sound vibrations, and the distribution of sound across physical and digital space.

But the first paper is by Sal Hagen, whose focus is on …

For the last stop of my current travels, I’m at the undisputed conference highlight of the academic year – the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City, which starts with a keynote by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil. She starts with the saying that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, a saying which is perhaps also applicable to our current sociotechnical situation – to the mixture of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. This is a mixture which cannot be separated any more; it is also a series of systems that beget each other: patriarchy creates colonialism, and …

The final speaker in this last paper session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Theo Araujo, presenting the Macroscope project for investigating complex societal issues at scale. This brings together various key Dutch organisations in the humanities and social sciences, and seeks to develop a substantial number of methodological solutions and data observatories.

One aspect of this is to develop a Netherlands Media Corpus, bringing together conventional and emerging media sources (news, podcasts, television, social media) in a single corpus; building on this, it will then develop a Web & Media Diets Observatory that …

The next speaker at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Simon Kruschinski, whose focus is also on the comparison of different data donation approaches. There are many different data donation approaches, and these need to be compared more directly to identify the least burdensome and most user-friendly frameworks.

This study seeks to compare download-upload and automated data donation approaches, to examine patterns in who donates data, and to determine how participants experience trust and privacy in data donation processes. It draws on an online panel of some 7,000 participants in Germany which is linked with …

The next speakers in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin are Nico Pfiffner and Sina Horner, whose focus is on TikTok data donations; they compare the Download-Upload and Portability API approaches to data donations. In the former, participants are asked to download their own data packages from the TikTok platform, and then upload them to a bespoke data donation platform. This is a complicated process and produces considerable attrition.

By contrast, the EU Digital Markets Act also requires platforms to provide a Portability API which researchers can access directly once approved by the …