This talk aims to introduce my SISU colleagues to thinking about how we communicate through social media. This has larger consequences for how we live together in society, and is endemic of where we are heading thinking about (and solving) issues.

In media and communications studies, one perspective on social media networks is how they have great potential to bring people together, to create communities across networks of hashtags, forums and platform.  Groups of people formerly isolated, fragmented or voiceless, now have spaces to share ideas, come together and be heard.  Optimistic interpretations of this process see the potential for vastly increased civic participation, raising the democratic process. Some studies, looking closer at some of the viral feeds where this occurs, suggest that beneath the surface there can much less coherence. Feeds based on hashtags can carry a range of views and interests, often linked by some kind of ‘affective’ moral binding, and where there is very little actual interaction and responsiveness to others. And such networks can be dominated and colonized by different levels of influencers.

In this presentation, I look at examples of such hashtag feeds, first on X (Twitter), and then on Weibo. At a more superficial glance, social media provides a site for support and coming together. Yet a closer look reveals that such feeds may be better thought of in terms of how they colonize and shape our understandings of civic issues.