The second day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a session on mis- and disinformation, and the first speaker is Xiaxin Huang. Her work asks how national identity shapes emotions towards the nation, and how such emotions in turn affect misinformation beliefs – and whether these pathways are different for Republicans and Democrats.

This builds on a multi-wave 2024 US survey, which asked about aspects like national identity, national pride, negative national affect, and misinformation beliefs (relating to the Hunter Biden laptop story and the 6 January 2021 coup attempt). National pride …

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 session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on AI and politics, and starts with a paper by Bohan Zhang and colleagues on AI-generate disinformation in the 2024 US presidential election. This election has been described as one of the first where AI content played a significant role; this included counterfeit AI video and audio on social media platforms.

Such content taps on existing political cynicism: this may both make some people more resistant to AI content due to their overall rejection of political propaganda, but also lead to others embracing AI content as …

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 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 …

Day Two at the Social Media Access Days in Frankfurt starts with my keynote, taking stock of how we access and engage with social media data nearly ten years after the drastic changes to many platforms' data access regimes following the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. Back then, I wrote an article for Information, Communication & Society about the APIcalypse; how have things developed since then?

Here are my slides from the talk: