Internet Technologies

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Michelle Kulig, whose focus is on perceptions of algorithmic recommender systems amongst news avoiders in the United States. The US political environment is characterised by terminal polarisation, with competitive news markets that incentivise outrage while being subjected to political pressures, and an absence of strong and trusted public service media that might function as an epistemic anchor.

News consumption here is now primarily via social media environments, which are to some extent algorithmically curated and therefore produce further epistemic disruption. There is …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the fabulous Raul Ferrer-Conill, whose focus is on the use of news in AI formats. This represents a new form of platform pressure, similar perhaps to earlier pressures to have news presented on social media platforms: now AI products are also being used to access news content, and news providers are forced to respond to this.

To date, news has appeared in AI largely because Ai companies have scraped news content from news Websites; this is governed (at least in principle) …

My next session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is on news influencers, and we start with Carlos d’Andréa. His focus is on the Google News Initiative and its impact on shaping journalism in Brazil. Such initiatives promote specific ideas of journalism and innovation; GNI started in 2018 and serves in a sense as a media patron that promotes particular journalistic norms and practices.

GNI emerged in the context of demands that digital tech giants should reimburse news publishers for their content, and Brazil hosts some 22% of projects funded by GNI grants between 2018 …

For the last stop of my current travels, I’m at the undisputed conference highlight of the academic year – the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City, which starts with a keynote by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil. She starts with the saying that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, a saying which is perhaps also applicable to our current sociotechnical situation – to the mixture of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. This is a mixture which cannot be separated any more; it is also a series of systems that beget each other: patriarchy creates colonialism, and …

The next speaker at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Joris Mulder, representing the Dutch LISS panel study which asked panel participants to donate their insights on energy use. LISS is a representative Dutch panel of some 7,500 participants; it includes a data donation element built on the Port software which only extracts the data points that are required.

However, in this study people were asked to directly upload their energy use insights as unstructured data to the survey. These may include screenshots, datasets, emails from energy providers, and other materials, and such participation was …

The second day at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg starts with a keynote by the fabulous Katrin Weller from GESIS, whose focus is on the European Union’s Digital Services Act and its implications for search studies. Much of this focusses on Article 40, which requires very large online platforms and search engines (VLOPs/VLOSEs) to provide data access to researchers – which is helpful, but not a perfect solution.

Very large here means over 45 million users in the EU (10% of the EU population), and some 25 platforms have been designated under the DSA by now; these include social …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Neil Thurman, whose focus is on age verification legislation across various states in the US, and its effect on the consumption of online pornography by under-18s. This is observed here via clickstream data.

Concerns about online pornography are as old as the Internet itself, and were instrumental in the development of the controversial US Communication Decency Act (CDA), signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996 and subsequently found to be unconstitutional; the US has not had any federal legislation to restrict online pornography since then …

The third day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a session on digital trace data, and a paper by Kyle van Gaeveren, whose interest is in digital trace data. He notes that digital log data have always been very smartphone-dependent, and comparisons of this with laptop-derived trace data are important.

His project provided laptops to some 100 knowledge workers, and used a tool called ActivityWatch to trace which laptop and smartphone apps people were using; this tracked duration, frequency, and fragmentation, but also switching between devices and user mood. Part of the …

The next speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Pascal Schneiders and Andreas Riedl, whose interest is in diversity-oriented news recommender systems. Such ‘responsible’ recommender systems are being promoted as algorithmic solutions to ensuring that users receive a diverse diet of news content; they might pick up on popularity, content, and collaboratively created cues.

The aim here is to nudge audiences towards certain content, breaking through their ideologically shaped, one-sided news exposure and resulting in more diverse news consumption. Attitudes towards such systems depend on technological optimism, feelings of information overload, and …