Based on interviews with feminist Instagram users, this article studies emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram through the concept of filtering. Filtering entails both enhancement and subtraction: some feminist sensibilities align with Instagram’s interaction order, while others become subdued and remain at the margins of visibility. Taken together, users’ filtering practices contribute to the confident and happy image, individualistic streak, and accommodationist cast of popular feminism, while also amplifying feminist politics that affirm the pleasures of visibility and desire. Instagram proves a more challenging environment for feminists seeking to criticize competitive individualism and aesthetic norms. The notion of filtering enriches existing research on how online environments reconfigure feminist politics and problematizes the avowal of feminism in media culture.

In this paper, I approach platform governance through algorithmic folklore, consisting of beliefs and narratives about moderation systems that are passed on informally and can exist in tension with official accounts. More specifically, I analyse user discussions on ‘shadow banning’, a controversial, potentially non-existing form of content moderation on popular social media platforms. I argue that discursive mobilisations of the term can act as a methodological entry point to studying the shifting grounds and emerging logics of algorithmic governance, not necessarily in terms of the actual practices themselves, but in terms of its experiential dimension that, in turn, indicates broader modalities and relationalities of control. Based on my analysis of the user discussions, I argue that the constitutive logics of social media platforms increasingly seem to run counter to the values of good governance, such as clarity and stability of norms, and consistency of enforcement. This is reflected in how users struggle, desperately, to form expectations about system operation and police themselves according to perceived rules, yet are left in a state of dependency and frustration, unable to take hold of their digital futures.

How do audiences make sense of and interact with political junk news on Facebook? How does the platform’s “emotional architecture” intervene in these sense-making, interactive processes? What kinds of mediated publics emerge on and through Facebook as a result? We study these questions through topic modeling 40,500 junk news articles, quantitatively analyzing their engagement metrics, and a qualitative comment analysis. This exploratory research design allows us to move between levels of public discourse, zooming in from cross-outlet talking points to microsociological processes of meaning-making, interaction, and emotional entrainment taking place within the comment boxes themselves. We propose the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement to illustrate how the interplay between audiences, platform architecture, and political junk news generates a bivalent emotional dynamic that routinely divides posts into highly “loved” and highly “angering.” We argue that high-performing (or in everyday parlance, viral) junk news bring otherwise disparate audience members together and orient their dramatic focus toward objects of collective joy, anger, or concern. In this context, the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media. The emotions that animate junk news audiences typically refer back to a transpiring social relationship between two political sides. This affectively loaded “us” versus “them” dynamic is both enforced by Facebook’s emotional architecture and made use of by junk news publishers.

This article reorients research on agentic engagements with algorithms from the perspective of autonomy. We separate two horizons of algorithmic relations – the instrumental and the intimate – and analyse how they shape different dimensions of autonomous agency. Against the instrumental horizon, algorithmic systems are technical procedures ordering social life at a distance and using rules that can only partly be known. Autonomy is activated as reflective and informed choice and the ability to enact one’s goals and values amid technological constraints. Meanwhile, the intimate horizon highlights affective aspects of autonomy in relation to algorithmic systems as they creep ever closer to our minds and bodies. Here, quests for autonomy arise from disturbance and comfort in a position of vulnerability. We argue that the dimensions of autonomy guide us towards issues of specific ethical and political importance, given that autonomy is never merely a theoretical concern, but also a public value.

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