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Another week, another conference: I’ve made my way to the SEASON (Search Engines and Society Network) 2026 conference in Hamburg, which is now in ist second year, and we start with a keynote by Thomas Höppner, who brings a legal perspective to the question of search engines and their role in society. Search engines serve as gatekeepers to information, and therefore have a key role to play in democracy: information is the currency and lifeblood of democracy (and indeed today is the International Day of Democracy, as it turns out).

So, if information is the currency of democracy, then the …

And the final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Claudia Thoms, who will present a semantic analysis of party competition in Germany. She begins by noting that political competition is also a competition over language, with parties trying to establish a distinct political profile. Issue emphases and positioning leave races in language, while strategic framing also shapes political perception itself.

Different parties want to associate themselves with different issues, to emphasise their competence on these issues; this also responds to ebbs and flows in public attention to specific issues. But issue relevance does not …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Jose David Ortega Chávez, who shifts our focus to Colombia, and specifically to the peace narratives in the speeches of its four last presidents. The interest here is in which actors these narratives highlight, what political functions the narratives serve, and what view of the nation they construct.

This draws on the strategic narratives framework, which are understood as meaning-making devices employed by political actors. Their point is to influence the behaviour of others. This project gathered some 7,400 speeches from the four presidents, from both …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Guillem Lloret i Triola, whose focus is on the analysis of metaphors in the Catalan electoral campaign of 2021. This builds on a complete corpus of speeches during the campaign, which took place after the annulled independence referendum and the exiling of pro-independence political leaders. This marked the end of the independence cycle, also against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The analysis of the speeches during the election builds on critical discourse analysis and critical metaphor analysis, and translates this to political communication in the …

The post-lunch session on this last day at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on computational methods for political discourse analysis, and starts with Felipe Barreto-Storandt. He begins by noting the growing adoption of LLMs in communication research, but also highlights that there are no standard methodologies for using them yet; this is experimental at this point, and not a planned feature by their designers.

Often they are simply run once over a dataset, though, and this creates only one data point. But because LLMs are stochastic, they will produce different scores every time; this means that multiple runs …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is by Leon Xiao, whose focus is on the regulation of Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines (VLOPs and VLOSEs) by the EU Digital Services Act; these are defined as having more than 45 million active users in the EU (10% of the total EU population). 25 such platforms had already been identified (two of those VLOSEs, the remainder VLOPs); three more were added recently (including ChatGPT, as a VLOSE).

Under DSA Article 39, these now need to provide a publicly accessible, transparent, and searchable repository of advertising on …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Bjarki Valtysson, whose focus is on regulating the cultural production of Danish influencers, with a case study of parents and child influencers Jas and Mika, who construct a platforms ecosystem based on perceptions of family life, authenticity, and intimacy, while promoting brands, products, and commercial ventures. This takes place in a legislative grey zone.

These influencers have some 317,000 YouTube subscribers, which has very large by Danish standards; they post long (~25 minutes) videos on YouTube and Instagram every Sunday morning (and their dog has his …

The next speakers at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno are Guna Spurava and Arjen van Dalen, with a focus on algorithmic content recommendations and media governance in the Nordic and Baltic region. Both perspectives may have valuable contributions to make here. Algorithmic content recommendation systems affect how people access news and information, and this is a challenge for media regulation; is there a new governance paradigm emerging here, or to regulators continue on established (and perhaps no longer appropriate) paths?

Communication values are normative principles about what communication should achieve; in the Nordic countries these extend overall welfare state …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Neil Thurman, whose focus is on age verification legislation across various states in the US, and its effect on the consumption of online pornography by under-18s. This is observed here via clickstream data.

Concerns about online pornography are as old as the Internet itself, and were instrumental in the development of the controversial US Communication Decency Act (CDA), signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996 and subsequently found to be unconstitutional; the US has not had any federal legislation to restrict online pornography since then …

The next panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno that I’m attending is on social media platform practices, and it starts with a presentation by Steliyana Doseva and Danilo Harles, whose focus is on the handling of offensive content on social media. Social media provide many opportunities for communication, but this also includes the spread of problematic and offensive content. The EU Digital Services Act requires platforms to provide mechanisms for reporting such content, and to show how they address this content.

However, while the DSA creates a shared responsibility across the EU, contexts and reporting behaviours differ between …