Blog

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Fatima Gaw, whose focus is on political influencers in Asia and North America. These have been integrated into party politics, instrumentalists for foreign propaganda, involved in journalistic works, and other areas; but most ‘political’ influencers do not solely post about politics, but are considerably more diverse in their attributes and activities.

This means that they are often miscategorised as inherently political; but their persuasive potential results not only from their political themes but also from their personal communication styles. We must instead pay …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Tom Divon, whose focus is on advocacy influencers in the Middle East. These operate in a post-Arab Spring environment, which fundamentally changed the role of social media platforms in public communication in these countries: where they once helped the Arab Spring develop, they are now used (and allow themselves to be used) as instruments of state oppression. In response, activists worked out that they needed to exploit the affordances of the medium to get their messages out, without triggering the moderation mechanisms that …

The next speaker in this panel on influencers at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Desirée Schmuck. Here, the focus is on ordinary people who gained popularity through their social media activities, and excludes people who are influential because of their pre-existing popularity.

Such influencers are increasingly relevant especially for young audiences, but remain undertheorised; theory tends to draw on opinion leadership, but whether this applies to influencers still needs to be examined in more detail. They do of course convey opinions, but are not necessarily knowledgeable (as the original opinion leadership model would expect), nor …

The last panel at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town for today is on political influencers, and we start with Leiyuan Tian and Fan Liang’s scoping review of influencer concepts, theories, and roles. Political influencers have been research across various contexts, of course, but they remain poorly defined: for example, they may be grassroots or established actors – becoming well-known and developing personal brands through social media activity, or alternatively using their existing visibility as politicians or journalists to branch out into influencer roles.

Political influencers may also no longer always be human actors: AI influencers are …

For the final paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town we are going back to Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the role of generative AI in representing history-related information. The vast volumes of historical information mean that AI is increasingly used to process such materials, and in recent years there has been a considerable increase in end-users engaging with AI chatbots to explore historical information.

But LLMs also generate new textual and visual content, which can make historical material more accessible but also raises questions about the fabrication of facts and information …

The next speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Javier Amores, whose focus is on toxicity, hate speech, and engagement in Spanish parties’ tweets about gender and sexuality. Sexual and gender identity, sexual freedom, and related topics have been a matter of considerable debate in Spain, even though Spain has made great advances in liberalisation and inclusivity in recent years; there is a need to examine how this has affected how parties communicate about these issues on social media platforms, and what engagement this produces.

This project explores this for tweets between 2015 and 2023 …

My next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the political role of search engines. During the 2024 US election, Donald Trump claimed that Google search engines and autocomplete search recommendations were favouring Kamala Harris; but we know far too little still on how search engines select their search results, and what effects these may have on their users’ information environments.

This particular paper explores how algorithmically selected information might affect users; this is also dependent on how users formulate their search queries, of course …

The last speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Andrea Carson, whose focus is on Facebook response to the assassination of far-right US political activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk was killed during a public appearance, and this was widely assumed in the media to be a case of left-wing political violence, though this has yet to be established.

It produced considerable public reaction, with some controversial statements resulting in the sackings or suspensions of various journalists; social media responses ran the gamut from grief through outrage to political blame, and show …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Bar Fishman, whose focus is on the use of atrocity tweets during the war in Gaza. Military conflicts have now become global image wars, with all sides using media images to win over public support. This seeks to produce legitimacy, sympathy, attention, and moral authority; it responds to the structural collapse of traditional public diplomacy in the wake of public debate on social media.

Ministries of Foreign Affairs therefore now have to work as round-the-clock public relations organisations; they must justify the use …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Florian Töpfl, whose focus is on the news repertoires of Russian speakers in Germany. Past work on this has found four key sub-types here: those with a politically motivated news repertoire, who tend to choose either pro-Western or pro-Kremlin news repertoires; those with a truth-seeking news repertoire, who actively compare diverse news sources; and those with a situationally motivated news repertoire, who are relatively limited news users overall.

This study extended on this by interviewing some 25 Russian speakers during September …