Project

The double edge of social media influencing: Participatory antagonism and communicative resilience in the Nordics (INFLU-NORD)

Overview

Social media influence has the power to shape opinions, spark movements and inform public debate. However, it can also spread misinformation and undermine democracy. The INFLU-NORD project examines this dual role in the Nordic countries. Led by researchers from Lund University, Copenhagen Business School, and the University of Helsinki, the project investigates how influence emerges through interactions between influencers and their followers on social media platforms. Rather than viewing influencers as isolated opinion leaders, the project introduces the concept of participatory antagonism, a collective communication practice in which influencers and followers jointly shape content that challenge democratic values and social cohesion.

What makes INFLU-NORD novel is its change of perspective, shifting the view from influence as an individual, top-down act to influencing as a collective, communicative process. This approach highlights how everyday social media interactions contribute to broader systems of influencing that threaten democracy. At the same time, the project explores how influencing practices could encourage democratic participation.

INFLU-NORD is financed by NordForsk. The project is linked to the Research Environment “Communication, Defense Willingness and Democratic Resilience (CDR)”, as well as The Centre for Preparedness and Resilience (LUPREP) at Lund University.

Research aims and objectives

The INFLU-NORD project has two main objectives. First, it aims to improve our understanding of the impact of new antagonistic participatory practices driven by social media influencers on the societal security and democracy of the Nordic countries. Second, it aims to develop strategies to strengthen democratic resilience and develop strategies to mitigate these emerging antagonistic practices, including by seeking ways to harness social media influencers as protagonists to support democracy. The project focuses on the communicative practices and community-building capacities of social media influencers and considers what kinds of antagonistic threats such developments could bring about.

Research questions

To accomplish the research aim, we ask the following research questions.

  1. What constitutes participatory antagonistic social media influencing?
    a) How are socio-political issues addressed by various kinds of social media influencers?
    b) In what ways do their communicative practices aim at systematically undermining societal resilience and trust in democratic institutions?
  2. How do social media influencing practices impact trust in democratic institutions among publics in the Nordics and in particular within vulnerable communities?
  3. How do social media influencing practices gain an organisational character and orient collective action toward an anti-democratic stance?
  4. In what ways can insights from participatory antagonistic influencing contribute to the development of protagonistic social media influencing strategies aimed at strengthening democratic resilience in the Nordic countries?

Novelty of research

The novelty of this study lies in that it focuses on the communicative organising and identity building of what we call participatory antagonism. Moving away from a focus on individual influencers and rigid views on communication as a top-down process, the project brings a novel epistemological focus on communicative practices of participatory antagonistic (i.e. anti-democratic) influence. Thus, it views influencing as a co-creative process involving both influencers and followers. This approach allows us to understand the (dis)organising qualities of these practices in times of democracy threats and hybrid warfare, which has previously not been studied sufficiently. The project will provide new insights into how influence operates in mundane social media interactions when targeting democratic norms and institutions, and thus, create novel knowledge on communication as part of the “system” of influencing. We argue that for gaining an in-depth understanding of social media influencing as a new form of collective political action and organising that often breeds anti-democratic sentiments, we need to  move  toward a communication-centred understanding of organisation (Basque et al., 2022; Schoeneborn et al., 2025), one that allows for capturing a broad variety of organisational phenomena occurring beyond the boundaries of formal organisations (Schoeneborn et al., 2019). A particular novelty herein lies in the focus on the organising qualities of communication beyond (formal) organisational actors, which will generate new insights of social media influencing as a form of collective political action.