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Time 3:30 to 5 p.m., October 9th (Wednesday)
Topic Reactionary Political Influencers in the Context of Electoral Politics: Scrutinising Andrew Tate, Libs of TikTok, and their Social Media Audiences
Speaker Dr Anthony Kelly, IRC Government of Ireland Fellow, School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin
Location Room 210405 (Although this guest lecture will be held online between 15.30 and 17:00 (Taipei), attendees are expected to attend in person.)
More information about the topic:
Social media influencers have had a transformative impact on the marketing of goods, services, and lifestyles by commodifying the engagement of their followers (Shtern et al., 2019). Increasingly, influencers serve not only as ideological intermediaries (Arnesson, 2023) but as explicitly political influencers supporting political or social causes through their content (Riedl et al., 2023). With political influencers heavily implicated in the rise of anti-democratic, anti-science, and authoritarian sentiment globally (Woolley, 2022), the risks posed by these new modes of political campaigning have become the focus of public and scholarly debate. Even as institutional and regulatory frameworks seek to grapple with the platformised ecosystem within which these influencers operate, however, the research focus remains largely on content creators, with less emphasis on their followers. Yet, research shows how participatory affordances facilitate social media audiences in expressing entitlement to dictate the partisan content of media (Kelly, 2023). Taking Andrew Tate and Libs of TikTok as case studies, and building on a reactionary fan practices (Stanfill, 2020) framework, this lecture will scrutinise some of the ways in which the social media audiences of political influencers enable and embolden radical, extreme, and reactionary messaging online. Implications will be addressed first in broad social, political, and economic terms, before focusing on the more specific context of electoral politics.
Suggested readings
Kelly, A. (2023). Recontextualising Partisan Outrage Online: Analysing the Public Negotiation of Trump Support Among American Conservatives in 2016. AI & Society 38, 2025–2036. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01109-5
Riedl, M. J., Lukito, J., & Woolley, S. C. (2023). Political Influencers on Social Media: An Introduction. Social Media and Society, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231177938
Stanfill, M. (2020). Introduction: The Reactionary in the Fan and the Fan in the Reactionary. Television and New Media, 21(2), 123–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419879912
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