The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Silva Heinonen, with a focus on harmful discourse on migration online. In Belgium, news media are frequently framing migration as a threat, use dehumanising language, and amplify populist and far-right policy responses. This creates negative emotions such as anger, fear, and anxiety, and is further disseminated via social media platforms.
The effects of such content is often tested through single-exposure effect studies, which is problematic; on social media, effects are more likely to occur through repeated exposures, and will be also be dependent on individuals’ threat sensitivity. This must be tested in a more realistic social media setting.
The present project explored this with some 740 participants in Flanders, who were first surveyed for their pre-existing demographics and attitudes, and then asked to log in to a simulated Facebook-style social media environment, which contained various experimental stimuli. They were then asked about their feelings of anger and anxiety as well as attitudes towards immigration. Stimuli varied between threat and neutral framings, and a control group without stimuli.
Emotional responses were somewhat higher for anger and anxiety, while attitudes remained quite stable; higher threat sensitivity in individuals produced more anxiety though not more anger. Overall, threat framing linked to greater anxiety, which linked to greater threat perception, and in turn to stronger attitudes; there is no provable causal connection here, however.
This simulated social media study remains artificial in many ways, of course; in more realistic settings the patterns may yet be different. Threat sensitivity deserves further attention in these contexts.
