This interview is based on Anthony Kelly’s article, “On the Interface of Influencers and Antagonists: Conceptualising the Role of Audience Antagonism in the Mediation of Reactionary Politics”
Kelly, A. (2025). On the Interface of Influencers and Antagonists: Conceptualising the Role of Audience Antagonism in the Mediation of Reactionary Politics. Media Theory, 9(2), 133–164. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i2.1274
This interview was conducted by Briony Hannell.
***
What can critical research on reactionary politics gain from a focus on audiences and fandom? How are audiences, or fans, implicated in the mediation and platforming of reactionary politics?
The research that I drew on in writing this article focused specifically on influencer fandoms. Writing in the context of work exploring the implications of platform power and the impacts of elite discourse and practice, my own guiding questions would be, how are these things encountered by audiences and what does that mean for how we might understand the mediated dynamics of reaction? How audiences engage with anti-pluralist, racist, and anti-LGBTQIA+ discourses may be marked by enduring power imbalances, but their engagement also means something. Focusing on audiences and fandom can offer a perspective on how those discourses get contextualised and sometimes, perhaps, contested—maybe in ways that challenge dominant understandings of influence. That’s something that fundamentally encompasses audience practices.
Audiences can serve as vectors for media discourses and misinformation, true, but they can also play a much more active role in the commercialisation of exclusion that defines how reaction gets mediated. Focusing on reactionary content creators and their audiences allows a foregrounding of this reactionary grift, including the role of audience labour in underpinning influencer monetisation practices. Social media audiences can like, share, and comment, but they can also use those tools to try to induce content creators to produce content in ways they judge to be more appropriate. Research from the field of fan studies gives us language to think about and describe what’s happening here regarding the interplay of elite and popular discourse characterising this space. That is, people encountering media can play with and rework content in ways that are meaningful to them, but they can also be engaged in ways that might be deemed toxic.
Why are participatory media affordances important in this respect?
I’m interested in how audiences use media to participate in the propagation of exclusionary ideologies. That includes, increasingly, considering how the spaces attributed to audiences are leveraged to serve reactionary agendas. My research addresses the various stances audiences establish with respect to the mediation of reaction. To me, this is interesting also because of the ambiguity and ambivalence that are made possible through participatory media affordances. This is true insofar as they enable the deployment of toxicity as a discursive strategy. But they also permit strategic manipulations in the form of so-called dark participation and computational propaganda. These latter may call into question the very notion that user-generated media can continue to serve as a representation of audience engagement.
So, while I view these participatory affordances—and their products—as a key component of the reactionary media landscape, I also see them as one element in a web of intersecting forces that can help us to better grasp how audiences embed themselves in this ecosystem. And all the time being reminded that what these participatory affordances introduce is often foundationally contradictory and complex, and that the digital intimacies they help to foster are likewise frequently riven with antagonisms. At the same time, platform affordances serve to limit as much as to enable, and audience engagement is thus also shaped by these uneven power relations.
Your article explores Andrew Tate’s presence on the alt-tech video-sharing platform Rumble and Chaya Raichik (also known as Libs of TikTok) on Twitter/X. What are the key similarities and differences between these case studies? What can we learn from examining them together?
From the perspective of discourse and ideology, a few things stand out. First, there were notable variations in how sex and gender were articulated, with the image emerging in the Tate case study of a violent and physical masculinity achieved through “doing the hard work” of constant and obligatory self-improvement. The Libs of TikTok case study, by contrast, revealed a focus on sex as a God-given and immutable dimension of human nature, with gender classed as “ideology” and gender transitioning as “mutilation”. These were distinct articulations of the relationship(s) between sex, gender, and identity, but both were rooted in claims regarding the primacy of biological sex imperatives, and so very much sharing this essentialism. Second, there were important variations in how the content creators solicited and then leveraged different forms of fan labour in their content. While Andrew Tate’s followers are actively mobilised into forms of reaction rooted in something akin to multilevel marketing logics, Chaya Raichik’s fans are prompted to provide the very materials she relies on to serve as content. From the perspective of platform affordances, the comparative approach also reveals quite a bit in terms of the operation of different systems for the algorithmic management of outrage. The comparative perspective is useful, I think, insofar as the various points of convergence and contrast serve to demonstrate some of the peculiar forms of plurality that characterise reactionary media, as well as the implications of discrete platform architectures that shape engagement with reaction.
In your article, you argue that audience antagonism(s) ‘are marked by a dialectic of assent and dissent.’ Can you tell us more about what you mean by this? What are the implications of this dialectic?
This article was designed to examine the often complex and contradictory ways in which audiences position themselves in relation to reactionary influencers, the content they (re)circulate and, indeed, their other followers. My position is that the relationships audiences maintain with media mean something and that these relationships can be quite convoluted. The dialectic of assent and dissent I mentioned speaks to the fact that audience and fan positionalities are often riven with internal contradictions and frictions, allowing audiences to engage with reactionary influencers at once as staunch devotees and, sometimes, strident critics. I believe that attempts to problematise or explain the relationships between the circulation of reactionary content and the global entrenchment of reactionary and extremist political agendas should consider this ambivalence with respect to the motors and vectors of reaction in and through media.
The dialectic is about the tensions between consensus and contestation, and what collusion and complicity in reactionary ideological agendas might look like from the perspective of contemporary participatory media practices. But it also goes further. The dialectic I speak of is also at play when forms of antagonistic discourse and practice aren’t merely presented in a register of resistance but are rather imbued with echoes of insistence, coercion, and perhaps even compulsion. What audiences think about their role here is the kind of perspective that I’m hoping to reveal a bit more of in my ongoing research. My postdoctoral work was limited to a degree by time and access constraints, but more encompassing work on audiences, particularly in the context of increasingly ubuquitous bot activity, is where I want to take this work. That recognition of the contradictory and the frictive must be, I think, an essential part of that ongoing project.
***
Anthony Kelly is a Teaching Fellow in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. Anthony’s postdoctoral research, funded by Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland, explored how the social media audiences of reactionary political influencers position themselves as stakeholders in the mediation of reactionary politics.
Briony is a qualitative feminist researcher and sociologist. At the University of Manchester, she is a member of The Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. Her research interests include reactionary gender politics, digital (anti)feminisms, young people, and social media.
Anthony and Briony are members of the RPRN.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0