You are invited to register for our upcoming two-day symposium, Darkness to hyper-visibility: exploring promotional and creator cultures of social media taking place on 13 to 14 November 2025. As part of the program, attendees are also warmly invited to a public lecture by Dr Kelley Cotter, supported by the Tom O'Regan Fellowship and the School of Communication and Arts, on 13 November at 4:00 PM. No separate registration is required for the lecture, but please let us know (digitalcultures@hass.uq.edu.au) if you can't stay for this part of the program.

About the symposium

Social media is now a central space for promotional activity, not just by advertisers and brands, but also creators, influencers, public figures, and everyday users. These platforms operate on systems of visibility and algorithmic recommendation, requiring all users to engage in promotional practices to be seen, heard, and valued. In doing so, they blur the boundaries between public and private life, branding and authenticity, visibility and obscurity.

This two-day symposium explores the visibility games at the heart of social media’s promotional and creator cultures. From influencers and everyday users to advertisers and automated algorithms, everyone on digital platforms is caught in the dynamics of being seen, being hidden, or being unknowingly profiled. What does it mean to be hyper-visible? What does it mean to stay in the algorithmic dark?

We invite researchers to examine the spectrum of visibility in social media: the politics of who and what gets seen; the cultural and technical systems that shape promotion; and the strategies users develop to navigate these infrastructures.

This symposium will explore how branding, identity, algorithmic culture, advertising, and online self-presentation intersect in the digital attention economy, and how these intersections shape questions of visibility, power, and social justice.

About the Public Lecture

Platform Epistemology: Shaping Algorithmic Knowledge in the Visibility Game

Understanding of platform algorithms is central to the creative and strategic work of achieving and sustaining an audience online, as they determine who and what becomes visible in feeds. Platforms have long been criticized for concealing details about their algorithms in ways that limit creators’ agency. This talk extends those critiques by introducing the concept of platform epistemology, an additional vector of platform power shaping creativity, labour conditions, and inequity within promotional cultures. Kelly will illustrate platform epistemology through a case study of Instagram influencers, demonstrating platforms’ control over the epistemic resources shaping the practices by which influencers construct and legitimate knowledge about algorithms. Influencers learn about algorithms via observation, experimentation, desk research, social connections—particularly with platform employees—and training from self-proclaimed algorithm experts. Throughout these learning processes, Instagram, as both an infrastructure and commercial entity, shapes the availability, distribution, and perceived legitimacy of information, influencing how the community constructs and values knowledge about its algorithms. Here, the “visibility game” structures not only pursuits of visibility but also the community of practice through which influencers come to know algorithms. Platform design and disclosure decisions thus do more than constrain and enable creators’ strategies; they actively shape the production and distribution of knowledge about how visibility works.

About Kelley Cotter

Kelley Cotter is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University whose research explores how data-centric technologies (especially algorithms) shape social, cultural, and political life. Her research examines how everyday users understand and interact with algorithmic systems, and how these insights can inform more equitable forms of platform governance.

Program

(download the full version here)

Thursday 13 November

Time	Session
8:30am–9:00am	Registrations and Arrival coffee & tea
9:00am–9:30am	Opening Remarks – Darkness to hypervisibility; Amy Dobson and Nic Carah
9:30am–10:40am	Panel 1 - How creators do what they do Amanda Lotz: Darkness of microculture Emily van der Nagel: The Tease: Visibility on OnlyFans Bingxi Huang: Vulgarity as a Form of “Digital Suicide Bombing”: Chinese Rural Women’s Self-Deprecating Humour on Short-Video Platforms
10:40am–11:00am	Morning Tea
11:00am–12:10pm	Panel 2 – Creator personas Yuchen Song: When Algorithmic Visibility Becomes Manipulative: Exploring TV Series Marketing on Douyin Anthea Taylor: Making an Authorial Persona in Digital Times: Women Writers, Platforms and Gendered Labour Mona Rayaprolu: Internet celebrity meets AIGC: from AI clones to AI fan fiction
12:10pm–1:20pm	Panel 3 – Virtual visibilities Rachel Berryman: Making the Virtual (Hyper)Visible: Towards a Theory of Hypervirtuality Kiah Hawker and Julia Coffey: Automating faces: Filters and the data gaze in visual AI Chenxue Guo: Traditional Chinese Culture Meets Generative AI: Rethinking Authenticity in Human-Community-Machine Interaction
1:20pm–2:00pm	Lunch
2:00pm–3:40pm	Panel 4 – Dark trades Ian Goodwin and Antonia Lyons: Influencers promoting their own alcohol brands on Instagram: From darkness to hyper-visibility Steven Threadgold: Financialised Gimmicks: The Gamified Aesthetics of Buy-Now-Pay-Later Platforms Andrea Alarcón: Encoding ambiguity: dropshipping as platform-dependent supply chains Maria Gemma Brown: A guide to playing on “slopmode”: Slop, scams and gambling on social media platforms
3:40pm–4:00pm	Afternoon tea
4:00pm–5:00pm	Tom O'Regan Fellowship Lecture Kelly Cotter Platform Epistemology: Shaping Algorithmic Knowledge in the Visibility Game This keynote explores “platform epistemology”, a concept how platforms shape what creators know about algorithms. Drawing on a case study of Instagram influencers, it shows how creators learn through observation, research, and social ties, while platforms control access to and legitimacy of that knowledge. The visibility game isn’t just about being seen, it’s about how knowledge of visibility itself is produced and valued.
5:00pm–6:00pm	Refreshments in Atrium

Friday 14 November

Time	Session
8:30am–9:00am	Arrival coffee & tea
9:00am–10:30am	Panel 5 – Promotion of alcohol and nightlife on social media: Participatory scenes and their proxies Sara Roetman, Lauren Hayden, Kiah Hawker, Meg Thomas, Aimee Brownbill, Amy Dobson, Brady Robards, Daniel Angus, Nic Carah A panel discussion presenting arguments, reflections and outcomes from our Linkage Project with the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education: Brady and Nic on the evolution of the project from screenshot methods onwards Lauren on promotional formats, Sara on nightlife scenes and Dan on the ad library Nic, Lauren and Aimee on the engagement with FARE including the Buy Now button report and the work with the Ad observatory
10:30am–10:50am	Morning Tea
10:50am–12:00pm	Panel 6 - Selective visibility Jin Lee: Keep it under the radar: Porn content creators’ navigation of the visibility game through pornographic algorithms Jonathon Hutchinson: Using Darkness to be Seen: Performance crime communities engaging social media (in)visibility logics Yuxuan Lai: Seeing and Not Seeing on TikTok: A Dual-State Lens for AI-Synthetic Short Videos
12:00pm–1:10pm	Panel 7 - Rules and standards in (chaotic) platform cultures Fan Yang: Disinformation is a Vibe Anne Kruger: Protect your voice, your audience Elif Bose Doyuran: The rise and politics of provenance technologies for governing AI-generated content
1:10pm–1:50pm	Lunch
1:50pm–3:00pm	Panel 8 – Shine a light Joanna Strcyharz: Exposed and Excluded: Vulnerability Exploitation through Algorithmic Persuasion Giselle Newton, Phoebe Price-Barker, Meg Thomas, Lara Skinner: Tuned ad coding as an intimate practice Verity Trott: Networking modularity dynamics within a red pill YouTube channel: Validation, instruction and amplification
3:00pm–3:30pm	Closing remarks and afternoon tea