Elections

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Chiara Vargiu, who takes us back to Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech which preceded the coup attempt at the US Capitol. Can political leaders’ violent rhetoric contribute to a radicalised mindset which produces partisan violence, then?

This can be described as stochastic terrorism: leaders’ inflammatory rhetoric is not in itself calling for violent action, but it is amplified through mass or social media, and this normalised radical ideas to the extent that some individuals take it upon themselves to commit violent, terrorist acts …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Ross Dahlke, whose focus is on exposure to untrustworthy Websites in the 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections. According to 2016 data, such exposure is actually fairly limited, but highly concentrated amongst a number of key groups: older adults and political partisans – but (how) has this changed in subsequent elections?

This project captured Web browsing data from a YouGov Pulse panel of some 1,100 participants for four weeks before and one after the respective election dates in 2020 and 2024; this is …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Danny Yihan Jia, whose focus is on the global crisis in electoral legitimacy. The US is an obvious example here, with some 60 lawsuits relating to supposed electoral irregularities filed by Donald Trump after the 2020 election alone (all failed, of course); similar developments have taken place in Brazil, Kenya, and many other countries, and the ‘rigged election’ narratives are often translated from one country to another even though they lack any evidence.

Some of this can be credited to a ‘sore loser’ …

The next session I’m attending at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Simon Kruschinski, whose focus is on political microtargeting in election advertising. This is now a growing practice in elections around the world, and the perception of such ads by their targets depends on the congruence between advertising approaches and the sociodemographics of target groups.

But we are still missing rich qualitative data on the situational perception and evaluation of such ads by users in a realistic social media setting. The present study explored this through a think-aloud protocol study with …

The final speaker ion this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jana Peters, whose paper compares opinion poll predictions related to the unexpected 2025 German federal election with predictions generated by ChatGPT. How reliable are AI-generated election polls?

This relates to concerns about the role of horse-race journalism coverage in shaping public opinion during election campaigns, as citizens’ encounters of such polls might lead them to shape their own voting intentions accordingly (variously through bandwagon or underdog effects, for instance). And election polls are themselves not necessarily reliable, although citizens tend to trust these …

And next up at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library are Marco Wähner and Jan Dennis Gumz, exploring the further use of Wikipedia data on the early German federal election in 2025. Because of the unusual circumstances of the election, following the failure of the governing coalition, there was an increased need for information about the election amongst voters, and Wikipedia (as the only public-interest Very Large Online Platform classified by the EU) played an important role here.

But as a collaboratively edited online platform, Wikipedia represents a particularly special information ecosystem; editing activity here also …