Politics

And the next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Catherine Baker, whose focus is on scientific claims in the (Neo-)Manosphere. The far right is often described as anti-science, but this is too simplistic; instead, they are more selective in their engagement with scientific information.

The Manosphere is now well-established as an amalgamation of misogynist and anti-feminist groups, traditionally based in online fora and communities but increasingly also mainstreamed into generic social media and especially also streaming media sites. This has led to the rise of the term Neo-Manosphere to describe these new …

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Gordon Dimitrieff, whose focus is on platform non-market strategies as a form of power projection, with a particular interest in the music industry.

Platform regulation is now having a moment, with various regulatory approaches around the world, and platform providers increasingly have their own internal departments to deal with such regulatory interventions; Gordon’s focus here is on how streaming platforms have responded to Canadian regulatory developments.

Platforms do not exist in a vacuum, of course, but are companies operating within a market, which …

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 next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Giota Alevizou, whose interest is the role of online encyclopaedias in establishing epistemic authority. This role goes back to the early enlightenment period, in fact, when printed encyclopaedias first provided apparently authoritative knowledge, but also contributed to information overload.

But online encyclopaedias – chiefly, Wikipedia – are also under considerable threat now; this is in part because of its limited and shrinking contributor and editor base, a continuing lack of support from academia, and the threat of exploitation by AI. Every era finds a …

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 …

I was the next presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, presenting our study exploring how various communicative AI chatbots respond to a range of old and new conspiracy theories. This has also already come out as an article in Media and Communication:

Katherine M. FitzGerald, Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, Timothy Graham, and Daniel Angus. “'Just Asking Questions': Doing Our Own Research on Conspiratorial Ideation by Generative AI Chatbots.” Media and Communication 14 (2026). DOI: 10.17645/mac.11337.

Here are the slides for our presentation:

The next paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is by Inbal Klein-Avraham and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari; their focus is on multiple documents literacy: the ability to work with multiple content sources to evaluate information. This involves content evaluation, source evaluation, and corroboration or triangulation of information from trustworthy sources.

Exposure to conflicting texts creates a cognitive conflict which demands resolution; AI chatbots are increasingly used to help with such processes, but this requires new approaches. The key issue here is to allocate epistemic authority (to persons, institutions, or technologies), to support informed decision-making …

The final session for me at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is one in which I’ll present myself, but we start with a paper by Evelyn Jonas. Her focus is on the use of communicative AI to deal with opinion-challenging information. Users are frequently exposed to such information in online environments, of course, and this can create cognitive dissonance as well as more active information-seeking actions.

But traditional search engines are not the only way that this is addressed, and are not always helpful in identifying reliable sources; increasingly, people are also using AI chatbots to …

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 …