Social Media

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Yuzhou Tao, who encourages us to rethink framing. Conventional communication models followed a simple sender-message-receiver model; this was always overly simplistic, and communication is now shaped by algorithmic processes interacting with social networks. This now produces a three-phase power ecology.

The focus here is on body politics in China, which is affected by identity, visibility metrics, and governance. It explores which actor groups serve as primary frame sponsors, how such frames are contested, and how amplification provides persistence for such frames.

The focus …

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 …

The second speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jing Zhu, who begins by reintroducing us to the spiral of silence theory, and in this context asks what we mean by ‘opinion climate’: this is said to influence opinion formation and expression in individuals.

Contextual factors are critical in these processes, then, and one key such factor is stigmatisation. Some views are dismissed as representing low education or knowledge, gendered perspectives, or other aspects; this creates a fear of isolation, and may result in emotional arousal, limited expression efficacy, and other factors …

And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Henri Mütschele, who continues our focus on polarisation around climate movements. Polarisation research in the social sciences is still lacking in various ways: the role of media, the motives of individuals, the implications for social groups, and the impact on these groups strategic communication all still require further research, and such work is often focussed solely on explaining opinion change through conformity.

The law of group polarisation suggests that members of a deliberating group predictably move forwards a more extreme point indicated …

I am chairing the final session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town today, which is a partner association session on (de)polarisation featuring members of the German DGPuK, and we start with Rico Neumann. His interest is in the role of opinion leaders as potential agents of (de)polarisation of debates on climate change. Climate change debates tend to be highly controversial and depolarised in Germany and elsewhere, of course, and are also conducted across social media platforms and messaging apps; this enables both collective and connective action logics.

Climate discourse is highly emotional, polarised, and polarising, featuring …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with Rongxin Ouyang, who will introduce us to a new social media measure called Bartik instrument. We have for many years discussed the bidirectional relationship between audience engagement and news production: news media set agendas for audiences, but news engagement by audiences also affects how news media select which topics they cover. The causal nature, direction, and strength of this relationship remains unresolved.

This study explores this relationship for Facebook and Twitter: it gathered data from CrowdTangle (2.2m posts) and the Twitter Academic API (4.5m posts) …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Hannah Fecher, with a paper on the impact of the algorithmic environments of short-video platforms on political communication. Political actors have begun to adapt their content to these platform cultures (or to how they understand them) in order to reach constituents.

But content distribution is highly personalised and optimised to platform engagement, and some video characteristic are associated with higher vitality. Users also report a mismatch between viral tendencies and their own content preferences, however, especially also with respect to political content …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Yingdan Lu, whose focus is on the impacts of social media algorithms on the curation of state-created content in China. Authoritarian governments are of course increasingly leveraging algorithmic systems for their digital propaganda; this both censors critical information, promotes pro-regime materials, and floods social media spaces with politically irrelevant content in order to make critical content less easy to find.

The focus here is on recommendation algorithms, and explores algorithmic promotional curation processes which systematically amplify state-created content. In China, social media platforms …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jin Wan, whose interest is in how political efficacy conditions clicks on political content in algorithmic feeds. Political efficacy here means people’s belief in themselves within the political world: this includes internal efficacy (confidence to participate in politics) as well as external efficacy (confidence in the responsiveness of the political system).

How do people with different levels of such efficacy differ in their information selection approaches in algorithmic environments, then? Do they seek a different proportion of political content; do they seek different …

I missed the first speaker in the next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, so we’re straight on to a paper by the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on partisan alignment, journalistic quality, and algorithmic amplification on Facebook. How do URLs that are shared the same number of times on Facebook reach audiences of vastly different sizes?

This study explores the impact of partisanship and quality on amplification and reach on Facebook, and also takes into account shifts in Facebook’s algorithmic governance design over the years. The structure of Facebook’s social networks is relatively …