About the Event

It begins with kitschy kittens on the For You Page. An AI-generated clip of cats in alpine folk aesthetics. They are cute enough to circulate in a family group chat, until the same visual grammar of nostalgia, tradition, and cleanliness resurfaces in “vibey” far-right edits drifting through the same feed. The distinction between harmless humour and ethno-nationalist affect becomes increasingly unstable. As slop, content mass-produced with generative AI, saturates the feed, it becomes a vehicle for synthetic propaganda: content that does not need to argue or deceive, but borrows familiar forms and accumulates until a political world simply feels coherent.

Presented as a work-in-progress report, this lecture develops a broader diagnosis I term postdigital propaganda: the infrastructural organisation of political alignment within algorithmically governed platform ecologies. This marks a shift from message to environment, from actor to infrastructure, and from persuasion to alignment. Working through synthetic content on TikTok, including recurring AI personas, xenophobic pseudo-news clips, and the meme aesthetics emerging around the 2026 Iran war, I examine how authoritarian states, liberal governments, and networked actors increasingly remix the same visual vernacular. Such propaganda, I argue, disorders discourse while ordering affect.

When the same grammar circulates across state and non-state actors, and when close analysis can no longer reliably locate where propaganda begins and ordinary circulation ends, the problem is no longer simply how to identify false or manipulative content. The talk therefore asks what analysis, regulation, and critique can mean once propaganda is less a discrete campaign than a condition of the platform environment.

About the Speaker

Marcus Bösch researches how propaganda works in the age of AI, with a focus on synthetic media, platform dynamics, and the political uses of TikTok. His 2026 doctoral dissertation at the University of Münster develops the concept of postdigital propaganda. His work on computational propaganda and mediated conflict has appeared in New Media & Society, Platforms & Society, and Media and Communication, alongside policy publications for the Mozilla Foundation and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. He publishes Understanding TikTok, a newsletter on platform politics.

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