Politics

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Baoning Gong, whose focus is on challenges to conventional journalism from the far right. Within hybrid media systems, such alternative media, including influencers, emerge as epistemic authorities in their own right. How do such actors position themselves in the hybrid media field?

This study distinguished right-wing news outlets, influencers, and anonymous Telegram channels as three groups of such actors, and examined their practices. How do they define what journalism is and should be; how do they reference legacy media; how …

The next speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Pascal Schneiders and Andreas Riedl, whose interest is in diversity-oriented news recommender systems. Such ‘responsible’ recommender systems are being promoted as algorithmic solutions to ensuring that users receive a diverse diet of news content; they might pick up on popularity, content, and collaboratively created cues.

The aim here is to nudge audiences towards certain content, breaking through their ideologically shaped, one-sided news exposure and resulting in more diverse news consumption. Attitudes towards such systems depend on technological optimism, feelings of information overload, and …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the fabulous Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam, whose focus is on the salience and contexts of racist language as it is reported in German news media. Such racist language is not limited to offensive terms only, but also includes terms that are related to racism through their meanings and origins, including slurs, metaphors, compound words, adjectives, and coded language.

News media (understood broadly here, thus also including alternative ‘news’ media) can reproduce, legitimise, or challenge such narratives; this depends on their political orientation and journalistic traditions …

The second speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are the fabulous Annett Heft and Kilian Bühling; their focus is on the coverage of conspiracy theories in far-right US media. Such media are anti-establishment, have a transgressive reporting style, and are overtly ideological and biased; they are frequently linked to the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories. In this, they also serve as bridging actors towards broader audiences.

The present study compares the coverage of conspiracy theories in legacy and far-right hyperpartisan media. It assumes that such content appears earlier in far-right media …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on right-wing polarisation in Germany and the United States, and we start with Maximilian Grönegräs, whose interest is in how the far right navigates the hybrid media system in Germany. This focusses on the neofascist AfD party, and particularly explores how the party makes sense of its relation to traditional media.

Traditionally, such studies have focussed only on the relationship between journalists and politicians, without any exploration of external circumstances; but external factors now often influence these relations, with various other actors also playing a significant …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Yangliu Fan, whose focus is on cross-positional agreement and disagreement in social media contexts – with a particular focus on climate discourse on Reddit.

The approach here explores discourse features to encode their complexity, structures, and dynamics within a higher-dimensional space. This extracts discourse features from each post and subsequent comments, and examines comments’ agreement or disagreement with the previous post of comments; from the embedding of these features in a higher-dimensional spaces it is then possible to construct several similarity …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Calvin Yixiang Cheng, whose focus is on conspiracy theories on social media. These often persist for a very long time, and in their diffusion change their linguistic forms. Such content change may in fact aid in their persistence.

This study examines such language mutation. It works with Twitter data from 2020-22, collecting tweets which match keywords from major fact-checking sources to identify relevant conspiracist posts, and clustered those posts based on the fact-checking information that debunks them. It also identified the shortest possible …

The next speaker in this high-density session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sujin Yoon, whose focus is on group polarisation. Her particular interest is in opinion and structural convergence, and she begins by noting the limitations of studying such convergence in experimental settings; work with observational data is required here, therefore.

Group polarisation means a convergence of groups towards their dominant views; this also conditions Intra-group and inter-group interactions. Emotional factors such as anger and pride can affect this.

The present study examines this for the r/conservative and r/democrats subreddits, over six months in …

The next paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is presented on behalf of Chao Wu and Michelle Seelig, and focusses on public discussions of the COP21 (2016) and COP25 (2020) climate conferences on Reddit, with a particular focus on climate-contrarian comments.

Climate-contrarian claims were identified through the CARDS framework and its claims classifiers; this sorts claims into five broad categories of typical climate change-denialist rhetoric. The project then also conducted topic modelling, and clustered topics by their affinity with each other. This showed clear distinctions between the two events, with more issued-centred …

As I wrap up my Mercator Fellowship at ZeMKI in Bremen, I’ve made a side trip to the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, which starts for me with a session on the application of network analysis to polarised contexts. We start with Shengyi Gao, whose interest is in group polarisation. She notes the growing fragmentation of social media environments, which creates structural holes in such networks; some users are ‘structural hole spanners’, however, who bridge such gaps by their activities.

The focus here is on Weibo, and the network is constructed from post forwarding activities; the posts …