Government

The next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on conspiracy theories, with a focus especially on UFOs and UAPs. We start with an introduction by Marco Bastos. This has produces several hypotheses: especially, about UFOs as cover for military black ops; or about UFOs as a real, alien phenomenon. This hardly matters any more, though, because UFO claims also feed into an arms race in space technologies.

The rise of conspiracy theories also contributes to democratic backsliding: they tie into perceptions of a lack in transparency in democratic processes, especially in the US …

The next speaker in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Ann-Sofie Klareld, whose interest is in the Swedish initiative to invest in the development of a national archives search engine. Her Arkiv project is interested in technologies for accessing archives, and their intentions. Archives are often seen as lying dormant: they are available, but not necessarily very visible or widely used. Technology is being used to remedy this and make archives more accessible.

Search engines are one such technology: they can make archives considerably more accessible, but archival search also differs from Web search, as the …

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 …

Another week, another conference: I’ve made my way to the SEASON (Search Engines and Society Network) 2026 conference in Hamburg, which is now in ist second year, and we start with a keynote by Thomas Höppner, who brings a legal perspective to the question of search engines and their role in society. Search engines serve as gatekeepers to information, and therefore have a key role to play in democracy: information is the currency and lifeblood of democracy (and indeed today is the International Day of Democracy, as it turns out).

So, if information is the currency of democracy, then the …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Jose David Ortega Chávez, who shifts our focus to Colombia, and specifically to the peace narratives in the speeches of its four last presidents. The interest here is in which actors these narratives highlight, what political functions the narratives serve, and what view of the nation they construct.

This draws on the strategic narratives framework, which are understood as meaning-making devices employed by political actors. Their point is to influence the behaviour of others. This project gathered some 7,400 speeches from the four presidents, from both …

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 speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Bjarki Valtysson, whose focus is on regulating the cultural production of Danish influencers, with a case study of parents and child influencers Jas and Mika, who construct a platforms ecosystem based on perceptions of family life, authenticity, and intimacy, while promoting brands, products, and commercial ventures. This takes place in a legislative grey zone.

These influencers have some 317,000 YouTube subscribers, which has very large by Danish standards; they post long (~25 minutes) videos on YouTube and Instagram every Sunday morning (and their dog has his …

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 speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Neil Thurman, whose focus is on age verification legislation across various states in the US, and its effect on the consumption of online pornography by under-18s. This is observed here via clickstream data.

Concerns about online pornography are as old as the Internet itself, and were instrumental in the development of the controversial US Communication Decency Act (CDA), signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996 and subsequently found to be unconstitutional; the US has not had any federal legislation to restrict online pornography since then …

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 …