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The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Ruth Wendt, who highlights the many uses that social media can be put to, and the many risks which critics have identified: opportunities for networking, social connection, peer support, information retrieval, etc. are juxtaposed with concerns about cyberbullying, child exploitation, misinformation, etc.

Studies to date have found only very weak association between time spent on social media and wellbeing, but studies on minors remain rare; social media bans in Australia and elsewhere are an unfortunate natural experiment which will shine further light on this. There are …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is the great Anja Bechmann, who adds some empirical data on how younger users are actually engaging with social media platforms. The focus here is on Danish users aged 18-35, and on YouTube, and on users with ‘deviant’ personality profiles including extroversion and neuroticism.

This study worked with some 1,000 Danish participants who donated log files of YouTube use and engaged in a 25-minute survey about their usage practices; this enabled the project to examine, for instance, the time spent on the platform at various times in …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is my QUT colleague Kim Osman. She presents a project by the Centre for the Digital Child, which actually consulted children and young people about their perspectives on the impending social media ban; this took place against the uncertain and shifting background of Australian policy-making, which was (and remains) unclear about the definition of ‘social media’ and prevaricated about which platforms would even be included in the ban (Facebook is; 4chan is not…).

In the end, this project conducted some 86 30-minute interviews with young people aged …

The next morning at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno starts with our panel on the social media bans of young people in Australia and beyond, and our first speaker is the fabulous Sonia Livingstone, who focusses on the question of children’s rights. Bans of children from social media platforms are ultimately against children’s rights: they ban children rather than banning technologies (and in fact the UK government has now proposed a nightly curfew for children, too).

Such bans started with the one in Australia, but similar initiatives are also away across many European nations, as well as countries around …

And the final speaker in this panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Moritz Bürger, whose focus is on the communication strategies of political actors as they legitimate their violence. This builds on a concept of legitimacy that emphasises conformity with existing rules, adherence to shared beliefs, and consent to power relationships.

Legitimisation statements can be analysed for speaker, object of legitimisation, evaluation, and argument; and hegemonial and subaltern positions can be distinguished here: hegemonial and subaltern decision-makers, insider challengers, and outsider challengers.

The focus here is on several contexts, where decision-makers include the US and Ukrainian president …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Kateryna Maikovska, whose focus is on the communication of Ukrainian and Russian policymakers on Telegram. Especially during times of war, such platforms can be used for both mobilisation and manipulation, but more research is still required to understand current patterns. Telegram is playing a key role in the full-scale Russian war against Ukraine, of course, so this is the focus of this paper.

The paper examines the political communication of policymakers in both countries before and after the illegal full-scale invasion; it focusses on politicians who …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Konstiantyn Yanchenko, whose focus is on social actors on Telegram. In Europe, Telegram is used as a source of news specially in southern countries (Spain, Italy, Serbia, Turkey), and features a degree of institutionalisation: there are news outlets, government institutions, politicians, as well as influencers and individual, sometimes anonymous users; in democracies as well as autocracies, it also provides a platform for alternative and dissident voices.

What identity cues do Telegram actors provide, then? What external information is available about them? Do these match the actual …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Mykola Makhortykh, with a video presentation. His interest is in Russian propaganda curation on search engines. Russian propaganda has of course been a major concern since at least the 2016 US elections; its influence operations have only increased since the illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Much of this is driven by algorithmic information curation systems – via the Russian search engine Yandex, of course, but also through other mechanisms that affect western search engines. This project engaged in an agent-based algorithmic auditing of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and …

The last panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno starts with Morgan Wack, whose focus is on X’s Community Notes programme. Community Notes enables users of X to add notes to misleading posts, and these are then rated by other users; if these ratings show agreement even across partisan lines, the notes are publicly attached to posts, and reduce reposts and likes on the platform by nearly 50%.

YouTube, Meta, and TikTok are now implementing similar crowdsourced annotation approaches; this is part of their move away from professional and platform-funded fact-checking and moderation frameworks. But only 14% of all …

The final speaker in this morning session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Eva Mayerhöffer, whose focus is on the role of digital trace data in understanding exposure to alternative information. One point of departure for this is often to start with a list of alternative and problematic news outlets which are then identified in survey responses, data donations, or digital trace data; the focus here is then also often only on the top domains, i.e. the most frequently accessed sources.

But such a reduction to the most notorious sites substantially underestimates exposure, since there is a very …