Polarisation

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 next speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Martin Riedl, whose interest is in the ethics of disclosure by political influencers, with particular focus on the United States. Here, regulations for influencers are highly idiosyncratic; influencers do play a substantial role as a pathway towards news, especially for younger users, and are seen as helping to unpack current political issues.

Political influencers are defined here very broadly, and include influencers driven both by personal, political, and monetary motivations. Such influencers are sometimes also directly supported by political lobby and funding groups, and this is …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on influencers and politics, and starts with a paper by Christian Pipal. Influencers are of course often also political communicators now, and especially reach young audiences who do not follow the mainstream news; usually non-political influencers are especially influential when they post political content, in fact.

But we still don’t know nearly enough about the vast bulk of influencers, especially at the micro- and nano-level of influence activity. It is also important to do more work on how such content travels, and how audiences engage with …

For the final paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town we are going back to Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the role of generative AI in representing history-related information. The vast volumes of historical information mean that AI is increasingly used to process such materials, and in recent years there has been a considerable increase in end-users engaging with AI chatbots to explore historical information.

But LLMs also generate new textual and visual content, which can make historical material more accessible but also raises questions about the fabrication of facts and information …

The next speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Javier Amores, whose focus is on toxicity, hate speech, and engagement in Spanish parties’ tweets about gender and sexuality. Sexual and gender identity, sexual freedom, and related topics have been a matter of considerable debate in Spain, even though Spain has made great advances in liberalisation and inclusivity in recent years; there is a need to examine how this has affected how parties communicate about these issues on social media platforms, and what engagement this produces.

This project explores this for tweets between 2015 and 2023 …

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 last speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Andrea Carson, whose focus is on Facebook response to the assassination of far-right US political activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk was killed during a public appearance, and this was widely assumed in the media to be a case of left-wing political violence, though this has yet to be established.

It produced considerable public reaction, with some controversial statements resulting in the sackings or suspensions of various journalists; social media responses ran the gamut from grief through outrage to political blame, and show …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Florian Töpfl, whose focus is on the news repertoires of Russian speakers in Germany. Past work on this has found four key sub-types here: those with a politically motivated news repertoire, who tend to choose either pro-Western or pro-Kremlin news repertoires; those with a truth-seeking news repertoire, who actively compare diverse news sources; and those with a situationally motivated news repertoire, who are relatively limited news users overall.

This study extended on this by interviewing some 25 Russian speakers during September …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on crisis, conflict, and war, and starts with a paper presented by Aytalina Kulichkina which focusses on Ukraine-Russia wartime discourse on Telegram. Social media platforms have of course become essential platforms for political communication, and the use of these platforms varies based on context; during wartime they are used for both domestic and international communication, mobilisation, and manipulation.

Most studies to date have taken qualitative approaches and deal with short-term conflicts, however; there is a lack of systematic and comparative assessment of such platform use during …

The next speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Luisa Gehle, whose interest is in the asymmetry of congruence in mis- and disinformation engagement. People tend to accept information which aligns with their worldviews, and reject incongruent claims more strongly; however, this has been shown mostly for the atrophied two-party system of the US, and might translate differently to multi-party systems as they exist in many European countries.

This study explored motivated reasoning processes by conducting a two-wave survey in Germany to examine attitudes towards migration and the Russian war on Ukraine, testing the impact …