Sisters in Conspiracy – Instagram As a Gendered Third Space for Political Mobilisation

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among female content creators on Instagram, the paper explores the dynamic relationship between everyday practices employed by the content creators (such as sourcing information, communicating with their community) and the affordances of the platform (requirements of the algorithmic feed, ephemeral nature of the Stories feature). The empirical case study focuses on female content creators on Czech-speaking Instagram who, from the onset of the pandemic in 2020, continuously pivoted from lifestyle, domestic content to openly political, conspiracy-related content tailored specifically to their female audiences.

Drawing from the concept of „platform vernaculars “(Gibbs 2015), the paper seeks to entangle the intersection between the seemingly apolitical image of Instagram as a platform that relies mainly on aspirational, lifestyle aesthetics and the use of its affordances by the women who adapt radical, political and conspiratorial content to the platform aesthetics. By providing an opportunity to create a semi-closed community (as opposed to YouTube) and to post content that disappears from the platform (as opposed to TikTok), Instagram effectively functions as „third space “(Wright 2012) for political deliberation, in which the female content creators feel free and safe to discuss political issues. The same mechanics, on the other hand, allows for creation of echo chambers, where disinformation and conspiracy theories proliferate and multiply freely.