Conference Program

In the contemporary digital public sphere, influ-activists (Murru et al., 2024) are emerging as new political intermediaries who play an important role in political education and media literacy, fostering political participation particularly among young people (Riedl et al., 2023). Operating at the intersection of digital activism and influence culture, these actors function outside traditional democratic institutions, engaging in strongly partisan political discourses on social media platforms (Rothut, 2025). They aim to raise citizens’ awareness, encourage active participation, and “irritate” the public sphere (Boccia Artieri, 2021). They achieve this through the accumulation of influencing capital and the strategic cultivation of their fanbase (Khamis et al., 2016), leveraging their attachment to socio-political causes.
Focusing on Italian feminist influ-activism on Instagram, this contribution investigates how publics negotiate the tension between admiration for influ-activists and commitment to feminist values, and how this negotiation shapes their participation.

To decode these dynamics, the study applies the framework of political fandom (Sandvoss, 2013; Dean, 2017). This perspective conceptualises political engagement not only as rational adherence, but also as a process driven by identity, affective investment, entertainment, and collective dynamics. This engagement can be directed either towards institutional figures and leaders (Campus & Mazzoni, 2025; “personalised fandom”) or towards political or value-based affiliations (Barnes, 2022; “ideological fandom”), providing a useful lens to interpret how publics relate both to influ-activists and to feminist causes.
The study adopts a qualitative approach based on 20 semi-structured online interviews with individuals who follow the most visible influencers within the Italian digital feminist landscape (according to criteria of theme, relevance and territory, Polesana & Risi, 2024). Participants were selected through a purposive sampling strategy (Patton, 2015) based on multimodal recruitment, combining: (1) offline interception of subjects during the 25 November demonstrations in Rome and Milan, to include individuals with high levels of participation, (2) direct online recruitment, and (3) the snowball technique to increase the variability of the sample by including individuals with more fluid or mediated forms of participation.

Findings reveal a wide spectrum of participation profiles. Some participants exhibit a strong personalised fandom, relying on influ-activists as central sources of information and political learning. In these cases, ideological adherence to feminism and political participation tend to be more individualised and intermittent, struggling to develop into a structured collective sentiment beyond the relationship with the influ-activist. Conversely, individuals with a more solid feminist identity and a stronger attachment to the political cause demonstrate a more detached relationship with influ-activists and a broader consumption of political entertaining content. In these cases, the parasocial relationship with influ-activists is present but mediated by a critical awareness of algorithmic logics and digital labour, which fosters processes of humanisation and deconstruction of celebrity.
Overall, the results suggest that personalised fandom can lower barriers to entry and facilitate mobilisation. However, at the same time the balance between attachment to individuals and commitment to causes shapes the quality of engagement and participation, determining whether it develops into a collective we-sense and sustained mobilisation or remains individualised and episodic engagement.