Polarisation

The first paper session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg that I’m attending is on search engines and political information, and starts with Íris Damião, whose focus is on political bias in search engines and Large Language Models. Search engines have evolved a lot since they emerged in the 1990s, of course, but continue to be very widely trusted by their users – even when searching for some very sensitive information.

This is the case for instance when searching for election information, where people also search for information on election procedures, party programmes, and even whom to vote for …

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 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 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 …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Lucie Čejková, who shifts our focus to conspiracism as a now fairly common style of thinking, which has potential implications for democratic societies. The role of social media sites in all this has been especially highlighted here, in both academic research and public debate, and of course social media platforms remain a key source of news for a large part of the population, too.

The present study examines the link between social media use and individual conspiracism through a systematic literature review of some 160 articles …

And the final speakers in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno are Heidi Schulze and Kilian Bühling, presenting a systematic literature review on how to classify far-right ideology based on digital trace data. Far-right ideologies have risen in prominence in recent years, but the actors involved here remain diverse and somewhat underdefined; often, they are not directly affiliated with specific political parties or movements, making them harder to classify.

Indeed, the concept of the far right needs to be defined better. It includes the populist radical right, which is illiberal but democratic, and the extreme right, which …

And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Felix Gaisbauer, whose focus is on the supply of and demand for political content on TikTok. This is often tested here using sockpuppet studies that test what kind of content the TikTok algorithm serves users; here, sockpuppet accounts that displayed a right-leaning accounts have at times been found to receive more recommendations for politically aligned content than right-leaning accounts. This could also simply result if there is more right- than left-leaning account on the platform, though.

This ‘algorithmic supply’ thus intervenes between content supply and …

And the final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Floriane van Alphen. She begins by pointing out the challenges for climate journalism: by some accounts, news media do not do enough to alert audiences to the challenge of climate change; by others, they are complicit in confusing their audiences about how to address it. Nonetheless, climate journalists remain relatively well trusted, compared to other journalists, even in spite of the flood of climate mis- and disinformation that floods this space.

The challenge with addressing any of this is that it may be renegotiating the …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Quirin Ryffel, whose interest is in the impact of argument exposure on polarisation. Affective polarisation between two opinion groups based on issue-specific positions is in part driven by a horizontal dislike between those groups; individuals in one group perceive other groups to be different from them, and this can generate out-group animosity as well as increase in-group favouritism.

Wheat happens when these groups encounter each other’s arguments, then? Intercrop contact theory suggests that groups might lead to a recognition of commonalities and a reduction of fear …