Dear AoIR friends, Sharing with you our exciting call for papers for a special issue in Platforms & Society - Platforms and the Mediation of Conflicts in Politically Hostile Environments. The guest editors - Emillie de Keulenaar, Diyi Liu, João C. Magalhães, Ivar Alberto Hartmann, and myself (Tom Divon) - come to this with a broader concern about the ecology of power through which conflict is mediated on platforms: how it becomes visible, circulates, gains credibility, triggers action, or disappears. We know the power of mediation may be a tale as old as time, but platforms make that power especially tangible and infrastructural. Their normative assumptions, carried through moderators, policies, algorithms, and interfaces, help structure these spaces of mediation and determine what reaches our eyeballs, and what never does. We therefore welcome scholarship that advances our understanding of how platforms mediate conflict in environments shaped by democratic instability, authoritarian pressure, occupation, political violence, or war. The full CFP sets out the range of possible angles, including platform moderation and governance, state pressure and regulation, visibility and participation, propaganda and disinformation, witnessing and evidence, activist and journalistic practices, prosocial or conflict-sensitive design, and emerging technologies such as GenAI. We welcome different platforms, cases, regions, methods, and theoretical approaches. We would be delighted to hear from anyone whose work sits somewhere in this universe, and would be very grateful if you could circulate the call to colleagues and networks who might be interested. The full CFP is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dg2D1NdEBQ50KAMCmypz8IaFduF4heSj/view?usp=d... *Abstracts: up to 700 words (with the requested structure detailed in the CFP) *Due date: 17 December 2026 *Decisions: late January 2027 *Submit (and fire any questions!) to: platformsandconflicts@gmail.com XO, Tom (on behalf of the guest editors) -- *Tom Divon* Creators & Platforms R*esearcher* Dept. of Communication & Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Sammy Ofer School of Communications, IDC, Herzliya Tel: +972-547-532681 [image: Twitter] <https://twitter.com/TomDivon>[image: Instagram] <https://www.instagram.com/divon.tom/>[image: Facebook] <https://www.facebook.com/tom.divon> Website: https://tomdivon.com/ Co-Founder: The Content Creator Scholars Network <https://www.ccsn.site/> *Publications*:
Playful Activism: Memetic Performances of Palestinian Resistance in TikTok #Challenges <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051231157607> #JewishTikTok: The JewToks' Fight against Antisemitism <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359548581_JewishTikTok> Serious TikTok: Can You Learn About the Holocaust in 60 Seconds? <https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/digitalholocaustmemory/2022/03/24/can-you-learn-about-the-holocaust-in-60-seconds-on-tiktok/> Playful Trauma: TikTok Creators and the Use of the Platformed Body in Times of War <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051241269281> Platform gaslighting: A user-centric insight into social media corporate communications of content moderation <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/29768624241303109> The unsolicited algorithm: unveiling gendered harms and (non)consent in apple iOS features <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09589236.2024.2433683?src=> The sound of disinformation: TikTok, computational propaganda, and the invasion of Ukraine <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448241251804?icid=int.sj-full-text.citing-articles.1> Youthful Platform Commemoration: TikTok as a Frontier for Holocaust Education and Memory <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383957738_Youthful_Platform_Commemoration_TikTok_as_a_Frontier_for_Holocaust_Education_and_Memory>