Streaming Media

And the final speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Monica Vania Chavez, Anna Feigenbaum, and Rinlapas Ketverapong, whose focus is on divine feminine energy content on TikTok. This encourages women to ‘step into their feminine energy’ but ultimately returns to highly traditionalist gender roles. This sits oddly next to ‘trad wife’ ideas: trad wives romanticise the past and draw on Christian roots, while divine femininity is rooted in alternative spirituality.

This project explores this for TikTok, but creating a new account and searching for divine femininity content, selecting a total of 24 …

The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Ella Duncan and Avery Fraser, whose focus is on true crime content’s gendered constructions of mothers who kill. Media representations of violence against women tend to reproduce gender inequalities, and this remains true for digital forms of such content.

True crime podcasting is a genre dominated by women, who present themselves as feminists, yet it remains riddled with misogynist tropes and stereotypes; this applies especially also to the women who committed homicides who may be covered in such podcasts. This project addresses three such …

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Gordon Dimitrieff, whose focus is on platform non-market strategies as a form of power projection, with a particular interest in the music industry.

Platform regulation is now having a moment, with various regulatory approaches around the world, and platform providers increasingly have their own internal departments to deal with such regulatory interventions; Gordon’s focus here is on how streaming platforms have responded to Canadian regulatory developments.

Platforms do not exist in a vacuum, of course, but are companies operating within a market, which …

The morning session of Day Two at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow starts for me with a presentation by Gil Sharon, on the MAGA movement’s presence on TikTok. The 2024 US election was the first election where TikTok played a significant role, and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement used the platform extensively for its campaigning.

Charlie Kirk was one of the most significant MAGA figures on TikTok, and believed that there was something about the platform that particularly managed to reach potential Trump supporters. This also involved a substantial collaborative effort; it engaged not only in top-down messaging …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Hannah Fecher, with a paper on the impact of the algorithmic environments of short-video platforms on political communication. Political actors have begun to adapt their content to these platform cultures (or to how they understand them) in order to reach constituents.

But content distribution is highly personalised and optimised to platform engagement, and some video characteristic are associated with higher vitality. Users also report a mismatch between viral tendencies and their own content preferences, however, especially also with respect to political content …

The next presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Siyu Zhang, whose focus is on political livestreaming. Such livestreams typically consist of the live video itself, alongside a live chat feed; some platforms also provide ‘super chat’ message functionalities which receive greater visibility and may also be picked up by the influencer themselves during the livestream.

Influencers themselves may signal their political identity through visible paraphernalia, express identity through their background settings, show relevant recent chat messages, and call for donations. Such monetary participation by audiences captures a behaviour that other metrics …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Felicia Loecherbach, whose interest is in video-based data donation, in the specific context of TikTok. Data donation is now a growing trend in digital media studies, of course, and many workable approaches to this have been developed, but to work with this approach remains difficult in practice.

TikTok is a key target for this – both because of its current importance with certain user demographics, the limitations of its API, and the fact that API-based observations do not accurately represent the experience …

Up next at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Ramin Soleymani, whose focus is on the analysis of social media content from a social ecological perspective. The use of social media has enabled digital nature experiences, somewhat making up for an overall decline in the direct nature experiences of an increasingly urban population; this might lead to the emergence of digital relational values including seeding, spreading, and grounding.

Relational values are a relatively new concept in the science policy arena; they complement nature’s instrumental (extractive) and intrinsic (inherent) values. Relational values refer to the relationships …

The final speaker at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library today is Kristina Petzold, whose focus is on the question of whether music-related user-generated content can be seen as cultural heritage – this includes, for instance, some of the creative content generated and shared during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is part of post-digital everyday practice.

This includes content remixes, memes, and mashups, and is therefore highly referential; it is culturally relevant (and the cultural relevance of remix practices is now formally recognised under German law); but it is also highly ephemeral, especially where it exists in …

The final speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Kieran McGuinness, Hannah Adler, and Susan Grantham, further exploring the role of influencers in the TikTok and Instagram campaigns of the major parties during the 2025 Australian federal election. This project surveyed Australian voters for their experiences with political content on these platforms during the election, some months after the election. It received some 1661 responses from a diverse group of participants.

Participants used these platforms at minimum several time a week; around 50% used them several times a day or more. There were no substantial gender differences …