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The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Muira McCammon, whose focus is on AI chatbots, and particularly a chatbot called Stella, and its use in higher education. Unusually, this is a rule-based chatbot rather than a completely generative AI system. This and other chatbots are now also increasingly used by undergraduate students in higher education, and even embedded in university Websites; the implications of this still need to be understood.

Stella was brought onto campus at Tulane University in October 2023, unbeknownst to teaching staff themselves, and asks students two simple questions: how are you …

The next day at the the AoIR 2025 conference starts for me with a panel on AI imaginaries that begins with a paper by Giuliana Frascaria, whose interest is in cyborg imaginaries of the form that have been promoted by people like Mark Zuckerberg for some time. She has previously reviewed the literature and studied public attitudes towards these technologies, but this is limited by the fact that so few of these technologies already exist in the wild; this means that four the most part they remain futuristic imaginaries.

There are only some transhumanist pioneer communities that are early adopters …

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is David Craig, whose focus is on Thai creator culture. Creator culture is now a worldwide phenomenon; these creators exist across multiple platforms within a complex transnational cultural industry and media ecology, but this still also has many diverse national and local forms.

Creators exist at the nexus between platforms, content, management, and community; this is inflected by the specific contexts of national imaginations, technonationalisms, and digital nationalism that configure differently in each country. There is also a kind of platform nationalism as national governments, media, tech, and users …

The second speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Cara Wallis, whose interest is in feminist fansubbing (or femsubbing) in China. Young women in China who identify as feminists attempt to educate and encourage others in part through such fansubbing practices; some but not all of them identify as activists, and they form a loose online network pushing back against misogyny and male domination.

Fansubbing is one part of their practices: fandom is well understood as having the potential to lead to political participation since it is part of an active, agentive, and potentially resistant participatory culture …

The final session for this first full day at the AoIR 2025 conference is on online communities, and begins with Nina Duque, whose focus is on K-Pop fandom on YouTube in Quebec. Local francophone Quebecois teenage fangirls have embraced K-Pop, much like other fan communities around the world; this is even though K-Pop is of course a highly mass-produced and industrialised entertainment product.

Much of this is consumed via YouTube, and teenagers see this as much better than television because of the instant accessibility of K-Pop content; this meets a local participatory culture, and K-Pop thereby becomes a networked cultural …

The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard, shifting our focus to Taylor Swift fandom on Reddit. The first Swiftie subreddit was created in 2010, but such fandom has evolved and diversified considerably over the years; several new subreddits emerged especially in 2023 in response to Swift’s romance with NFL star Travis Kelce. The present paper examines this for a period from September 2023 to October 2024.

/r/TaylorSwift remains the largest of these subreddits, but the anti-fandom subreddit /r/travisandtaylor was particularly active as the romance intensified in mid-2024. A smaller group …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, whose focus is on the manosphere on Reddit, with a particular focus on the gamergate controversy. This phenomenon has in part been studied from the perspective of radicalisation, but this is problematic: the focus of radicalisation studies is often driven by an anti-terrorism law enforcement agenda and centres the state and its institutions while othering religious and ethnic groups, rather than emphasising human experience.

A different way of approaching radicalisation is via counterpublics theory: such counterpublics are often defined in relation to …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my great colleague Ehsan Dehghan, whose focus is on sedimented polarisation across Reddit collectives. To what extent is there cross-ideological interaction on the platform? What forms does such interaction take: how deliberative or antagonistic is it?

Indeed, what do we mean by cross-ideological interaction? This could mean information sharing, cross-posting, cross-commenting, cross-linking between subreddits, or other discursive patterns. The project drew on a dataset of activity over 16 years across 11 subreddits, containing 6.2 million submissions from 801,000 authors and nearly 200 million comments from 5.5 million authors …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Ari Stillman, whose interest is in Reddit data analysis. Historically, Reddit has provided data on activities on the platform quite openly; its leaders had been strongly committed to open access and data sharing, but this changed substantially some 1.5 years ago when Reddit restricted its API, however.

This caused outrage in the user community, and especially amongst the unpaid community moderator workforce who relied substantially on API access to automate some aspects of their work. Following highly controversial debate, Reddit promised a Reddit 4 Researchers programme, yet this …

After a very lively roundtable on the Australian social media ban for young people at the AoIR 2025 conference, I’m now in a session on Reddit which features many of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues. We start with Dom Carlon, exploring the evolving trajectory of Reddit as a platform. What is the platform’s sense of identity, and how has this changed over its twenty-year history?

Reddit has shown remarkable staying power and has a unique position in the AI-infused Internet economy of today. It started in 2005 in pursuit of its mission to be ‘the front page of …