Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s New Media & Digital Cultures Working Group Cochairs Reed Van Schenck and Elaine Venter discuss their special section entitled Digital Platforms and Agency, which appeared in Lateral 14.2 (Fall 2025), with additional content from three of the included authors: Kelsey Cummings (Christopher Newport University), Nina Medvedeva (Winona State University), and Nathalie Schäfer (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Chris Alen Sula.
Articles by Nathalie Schäfer
Nathalie Schäfer is a PhD candidate in the research training group Media Anthropology at the Faculty of Media at Bauhaus-University Weimar, with expertise in the practice of “botting” with fame-enhancing bots on Instagram. Her research focuses on bots, cultural techniques and practices, the intersection and entanglement of human and automated (bot) cultures, social media, and platform governance, as well as methodologies for researching digital media. Nathalie holds a BA in Art, Music, and Media from Philipps-University Marburg and the Université de Poitiers (2017), as well as an MA in Media Studies and a Master’s degree in Cinéma et Audiovisuel from the Université Lumière Lyon II, the Bauhaus University Weimar, and the Universiteit Utrecht (2019). She is board member of the Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR) executive committee and co-editor of Szenen kritischer Relationalität" (meson press 2024, with Bolwin et al.). Her web presence can be found at https://nathalieschaefer.de, and she is @nathalie@social.aoir on Mastodon.
Call the (Bot-)Police: User-Led Platform Governance of “(In)Authenticity” on Instagram
The pervasive practice of botting by using fame-enhancing bots and operating porn bots, and Instagram’s opaque and unreliable authenticity governance, has evoked human Instagram users to actively police and govern botting and other bot activity. Botting describes repetitive and quantitative posting, messaging and engaging on social media platforms to provoke reciprocal engagement. Running bot police accounts, Instagram users engage and try to play an active role in the authenticity governance process of Instagram. The article investigates why and how Instagram users govern two types of “inauthentic” Instabots, which concentrate on detecting automated interactions by fame-enhancing bots and reporting porn bots. Two case studies of three Instagram accounts and their content show different approaches to user-led authenticity governance and how these profiles perceive themselves as custodians of “authenticity.” The key findings reveal that their activities of pillorying and collective flagging are considered digital vigilantism that potentially cause harm to other users. Furthermore, they show mechanisms of peer surveillance and mutual moderation on a user level, and complex power asymmetries between the platform company, its moderation systems, advertisers, and its users.