Social Media

The second day at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg starts with a keynote by the fabulous Katrin Weller from GESIS, whose focus is on the European Union’s Digital Services Act and its implications for search studies. Much of this focusses on Article 40, which requires very large online platforms and search engines (VLOPs/VLOSEs) to provide data access to researchers – which is helpful, but not a perfect solution.

Very large here means over 45 million users in the EU (10% of the EU population), and some 25 platforms have been designated under the DSA by now; these include social …

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 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 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 …

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 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 …

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 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 …