Session Chair: Jennifer Stromer-Galley
Presentation 1
All politics is local: News influencers and audience engagement in local and state politics discourse dynamics on TikTok
Sebastian Svegaard, Samantha Vilkins
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
TikTok has rapidly established itself as a fixture for debate on the state of the web and society at large. The platform serves as a primary generator of trends and viral content, and as a locus for political concerns around globalisation, surveillance and privacy. What is considerably understudied is how TikTok is forging connections in political discourses more locally. We present an exploration of political discourses on TikTok through the case study of local city council elections, and later state elections, for Brisbane in the state of Queensland, Australia. Video metadata was recorded using the Zeeschuimer (Peeters, 2023) tool. We focus on the discursive dynamics of the broader local community both separately and in response to the communication of candidates. We draw on research on the social news landscape and the role of ‘newsfluencers’ and community narratives amidst changing audience expectations (Hurcombe, 2022), and clustering of cross-ideological ties in social media news sharing over time (Angus et al, 2023). Through this, we contrast the topic-selective engagement across various actors, from mainstream and national news outlets, local or alternative media, businesses, organisations, political campaigners, and unaffiliated individual users. As such, we focus on how local TikTok users respond to, remix, engage with, and disseminate political communication on TikTok, as well as how they create their own political content, such as advocating for/against a candidate, an issue, or engaging in commentary on the wider election process.
Presentation 2
“OH, YOU MEAN… GAY?”: RELATIONAL LABOUR AND THE INDUSTRIAL ARTICULATION OF HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY BY ANDREW TATE AND HIS FOLLOWERS
Anthony Patrick Kelly
University College Dublin, Ireland
This paper examines how the figures and imaginaries of hegemonic masculinity are co-produced and contested among a reactionary influencer fandom. It assumes an intersectional masculinities approach to the question of how Andrew Tate and his social media audience(s) articulate and mobilise anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQIA+ discourses online. Affective intermediation is proposed as a concept that situates relational labour within the influencer ecosystem in terms of the affective production of masculinity as a cultural and economic category. Data consist of a 15-month sample of Andrew Tate’s posts on the video-sharing platform Rumble (n=213) and a purposive sample (n=17) of Tate's posts on X (formerly Twitter). The dataset includes all user responses to posts on Rumble (n=112,656) and X (n=14,796). The methods used are constructionist thematic analysis, which orients towards the sociocultural contexts of discourse and computational discourse analysis, including topic modelling. Incorporating perspectives on fandom, labour, and the manosphere, preliminary findings suggest three key points of tension. First, the tension created by audience directives about who Tate should interact with and how he should conduct himself in order to avoid collaborations with creators who appear “gay’. Second, the tension between “simping” and support that fans and followers must navigate when expressing approval of Tate whilst trying to avoid being seen as “gay”. Third, the tension between demands of cultural and economic production, including how audiences articulate their expectations with regard to the production of masculinist content.
Presentation 3
Influencer Creep in Parliament: Platform Pressures in the Visibility Labour of French MPs
Annina Claesson
Sciences Po/Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France
Are politicians starting to behave like influencers? While pursuing visibility is hardly new for elected officials, the platformization of our media landscape has intensified and multiplied pressures to establish an active presence on social media. Building on research in the cultural industries, “influencer creep” (Bishop, 2023) describes an invasion of commercialized social media logic into other professions. We currently lack similar insights into the political field, despite considerable scholarly attention to how social media transforms political communication.
I explore the platformization of communications activities undertaken by French parliamentary teams in the Assemblée Nationale. Combining over 40 semi-structured interviews with MPs and their assistants, participant observation within parliamentary environments, and a quantitative analysis of MPs' social media presences, I study how MPs and their teams structure their online visibility labour.
I identify a convergence of "influencer creep" dynamics within parliamentary communication practices, characterized by its three main dynamics as theorized by Bishop (2023): the construction of personal brands, optimization strategies tailored to platform infrastructures, and the performance of authenticity to engage audiences. These pressures present a heavy burden for French parliamentary teams. High workloads and limited staff leave little time to devote to online visibility labour, and even less to master digital tools, platform cultures, and algorithmic strategies.
These findings highlight the encroachment of commercial logics in political spheres, blurring distinctions between public service and self-commodification. Highly disparate professions are internalizing platform logic into their work routines, motivating continued study into how "influencer creep" transforms labour.
Presentation 4
Boycott Wokeness, Shop like a Patriot: A Discursive Analysis of Conservative MLM Promotion on Instagram
Diana Casteel
University of Illinois at Chicago
Female conservative political influencers are an obscure but growing force within American politics, steadily sewing distrust in public institutions. By exploiting the inadequacies and inequalities in a capitalistic society, these women profit off the fears they cultivate through conspiratorial narratives such as the government poisoning food and indoctrinating children to encourage their Instagram audiences to boycott “woke” corporations by purchasing their household supplies through Patriot Wellness Boxes and other conservative MLMs. Guided by Abidin’s (2021) framework of refracted publics and Cotter’s (2019) concept of “playing the visibility game,” this study seeks to understand the ways that vaguely coded conservative MLMs such as Patriot Wellness Box enable conservative female influencers to circumvent algorithms and sentiment seed more radical conspiracies within lifestyle content. The major findings reveal that these women utilize self-amplification groups to simultaneously to grow their audiences and obscure their connections to the far-right and one another. Second, the MLMs are discussed in ways that mirror sovereign citizen/white militia rhetoric that positions the government as an existential threat they must be prepared to fight. While they are not organizing militias, they are promoting anti-democratic messages, xenophobia, and authoritarian-esque sentiments under the guise of a conservative lifestyle achievable through MLM participation. As the 2024 presidential election looms large, we must analyze the ways that trust in government and public institutions is being undermined through neoliberal conservative MLMs one subscription box ad at a time
