Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the strategies of young content creators who use Instagram and TikTok to communicate political news to their audiences. It proposes the concept of hybrid visibility to analyse how theye navigate their identities within the algorithmic affordances of the platforms.

Paper long abstract:

Online influencers play an increasingly important role in political communication – they serve as both intermediaries and producers of political messages. Until recently, influencers were mostly characterised by their ability to recommend and sell products and, thus, perceived predominantly as marketing tools (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2016; van Driel, Dumitrica, 2021). Recent research documents the rise of the category of “political influencers”, who use their authority and fame online to engage in meaningful and political content (Riedl, Schwemmer, Ziewiecki, Ross, 2021; Fischer, 2022 ).

The proposed paper uses the notion of “political influencers” to examine how young Czech social media influencers use their online presence to communicate with their publics about global events, specifically the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Based on long-term ethnography among young Czech influencers who use Instagram and TikTok to communicate about “shit you should care about” in the words of one of my respondents, 22 year old Johana, it focuses on how the young people navigate a) the algorithmic affordances of the platforms that shape when and to whom their content is visible and b) their own identity as activists and content creators. It employs the notion of “hybrid visibility” to analyse their strategies of managing the above mentioned entaglements.