Elections

The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Umberto Famulari, whose interest is in the use of Instagram in Italian politics, with a particular focus on the 2024 regional elections. This is driven especially by the continued lack of focus on the multimodal integration of images and text in political campaigning. Indeed, studies of Instagram treat posts there as cohesive messages; the way text and images work together or against one another here is far less extensively explored.

Italian regional elections provide a particularly interesting context for this, since they often involve …

The morning session of Day Two at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow starts for me with a presentation by Gil Sharon, on the MAGA movement’s presence on TikTok. The 2024 US election was the first election where TikTok played a significant role, and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement used the platform extensively for its campaigning.

Charlie Kirk was one of the most significant MAGA figures on TikTok, and believed that there was something about the platform that particularly managed to reach potential Trump supporters. This also involved a substantial collaborative effort; it engaged not only in top-down messaging …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sayan Dey, whose focus is on India: how do similar media structures here generate different framing patterns and political legitimacy in this multi-ethnic society? His study compares this for the 2023 elections in the northeastern states of Nagaland and Tripura. Nagaland is mostly populated by ethnic Naga, while Tripura has a mostly Bengali population.

This project builds on framing theory, social identity theory, and governmentality and political economy; it examines media structures at the macro level, framing practices at the meso level, and …

And the final presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Eva-Maria Vogel, who begins by noting the significant deficit in political influencer support which had been identified for the US Democrats ahead of the 2024 presidential election; they actively sought to attract more influencers to their cause ahead of the election in order to combat the impact of Republican influencers.

Why do audiences believe political influencers, though? Audience perceptions of expertise, trustworthiness, and benevolence may all play a significant role here; perceived politician authenticity is also critical, of course, and may manifest …

The third presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Nuppu Pelevina, whose focus is on the democratic participation of social media influencers in Nordic countries. The focus here is on commercial lifestyle influencers who go political; these may have impact on their often young followers’ political views, and possibly also increase their political and democratic participation; they may increase awareness of political issues, but also cynicism towards formal politics.

Such influencers may not directly seek to influence their followers’ political views, but may shape it towards the imagined interests and positions of …

My next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the political role of search engines. During the 2024 US election, Donald Trump claimed that Google search engines and autocomplete search recommendations were favouring Kamala Harris; but we know far too little still on how search engines select their search results, and what effects these may have on their users’ information environments.

This particular paper explores how algorithmically selected information might affect users; this is also dependent on how users formulate their search queries, of course …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Chiara Vargiu, who takes us back to Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech which preceded the coup attempt at the US Capitol. Can political leaders’ violent rhetoric contribute to a radicalised mindset which produces partisan violence, then?

This can be described as stochastic terrorism: leaders’ inflammatory rhetoric is not in itself calling for violent action, but it is amplified through mass or social media, and this normalised radical ideas to the extent that some individuals take it upon themselves to commit violent, terrorist acts …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Ross Dahlke, whose focus is on exposure to untrustworthy Websites in the 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections. According to 2016 data, such exposure is actually fairly limited, but highly concentrated amongst a number of key groups: older adults and political partisans – but (how) has this changed in subsequent elections?

This project captured Web browsing data from a YouGov Pulse panel of some 1,100 participants for four weeks before and one after the respective election dates in 2020 and 2024; this is …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Danny Yihan Jia, whose focus is on the global crisis in electoral legitimacy. The US is an obvious example here, with some 60 lawsuits relating to supposed electoral irregularities filed by Donald Trump after the 2020 election alone (all failed, of course); similar developments have taken place in Brazil, Kenya, and many other countries, and the ‘rigged election’ narratives are often translated from one country to another even though they lack any evidence.

Some of this can be credited to a ‘sore loser’ …

The next session I’m attending at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Simon Kruschinski, whose focus is on political microtargeting in election advertising. This is now a growing practice in elections around the world, and the perception of such ads by their targets depends on the congruence between advertising approaches and the sociodemographics of target groups.

But we are still missing rich qualitative data on the situational perception and evaluation of such ads by users in a realistic social media setting. The present study explored this through a think-aloud protocol study with …