The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Sally Tuomola, whose interest is in the produsage activities of Finnish news influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify. Her project engaged in semi-structured thematic interviews with 20 such influencers across the political spectrum, combined with digital trace data. These were chosen based on their self-presentation as correcting and countering mainstream journalism.
News influencers have been understood as doing boundary work in the journalistic field, critiquing or threatening mainstream journalism and positioning themselves as peripheral actors with distinct personas. Such news influencers engage in a form of produsage on the platforms they operate on.
This project also sought data donations of platform histories from these news influencers; one, for instance, spent some 660 hours listening to true crime and US politics podcasts on Spotify over the course of one year, with a strong focus on anti-Trump content and non-aligned Finish professional journalism podcasts.
Only four influencers ended up donating their data, however; for future work, this requires a rethinking of the research approach, combining data mirroring with scraping of the influencers’ published content.
