Social Media

And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Zhengyi Xu, whose focus is on news avoidance in Switzerland. News has a critical democratic role to play, of course, and news avoidance is a key concern in this context – but the relationship between news avoidance and political participation has not yet been tested fully. Indeed, many studies have merely tested whether or how much people avoid the news, but reality may be more complex, and the strategies by which people avoid news (at different times, in different contexts, etc.) should be taken into …

The second full day at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno starts with a session on news avoidance, and a paper by Krisztina Burai that focusses on Facebook. She begins by saying that citizens have agency in navigating political information, but that this has changed over time: through the choice of newspapers they read; through the choice of broadcast TV channels they watched; through the greater choice of channels in the network age; and finally through the abundance of information sources they can follow in the social media age, and the news feed curation tools available to them.

Social media …

And the final speakers in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno are Heidi Schulze and Kilian Bühling, presenting a systematic literature review on how to classify far-right ideology based on digital trace data. Far-right ideologies have risen in prominence in recent years, but the actors involved here remain diverse and somewhat underdefined; often, they are not directly affiliated with specific political parties or movements, making them harder to classify.

Indeed, the concept of the far right needs to be defined better. It includes the populist radical right, which is illiberal but democratic, and the extreme right, which …

And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Felix Gaisbauer, whose focus is on the supply of and demand for political content on TikTok. This is often tested here using sockpuppet studies that test what kind of content the TikTok algorithm serves users; here, sockpuppet accounts that displayed a right-leaning accounts have at times been found to receive more recommendations for politically aligned content than right-leaning accounts. This could also simply result if there is more right- than left-leaning account on the platform, though.

This ‘algorithmic supply’ thus intervenes between content supply and …

And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is the great Cornelius Puschmann, whose focus is on mapping mobile news pathways. It’s clear that the media landscape has shifted, and is continuing to shift: this has produced both fragmentation and convergence in what news people access, and how they do so – e.g. through various social media platforms and apps. These platforms now also provide a vastly expanded content ecosystem, blending diverse conventional and emerging sources and formats.

This is shaped by device and platform affordances that affect visibility, personalisation, network association, editability, and …

The last panel for today at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on cross-platform news exposure, and starts with Michael Bossetta, who introduces the Scroll Intercept project. This is a low-cost and reliable way to collect social media, which is necessary given the growing challenges with gathering social media data. Surveys have a recall bias; experiments cannot replicate personalised feeds; digital trace data as well as data donations are great but complicated.

So, instead, this project builds on the old-fashioned method of street intercepts, but actually asks people to open up their phones and show what’s in their social …

The final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Cristina Monzer, with a comparison of TikTok aesthetics in political videos between Norway and Romania. The first question, of course, is how we might do this, in practice – there are many new computational tools emerging for this now, but most of these also remain untested to date.

The use of TikTok for political communication is characterised by personalisation, a focus on everydayness, and uneven patterns between politicians of different genders. Politicians must use visual cues in such videos as identity markers that signal alignment with …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Nico Spreen, whose focus is on the use of TikTok by populist parties in Germany during the 2025 federal election. TikTok may be expected to be especially valuable as a campaigning tool for populist parties, given its personalised, emotionalised, and algorithmically amplified content processes. Also, both the left-wing Linke and far-right AfD are especially popular with voters under 25, so there is substantial overlap between their voter bases and the TikTok userbase.

What shape does their populist communication take, then? Such communication usually employs people-centrism, anti-elitism, and an exclusion …

It’s a sunny Wednesday in Brno, and we’re starting the ECREA 2026 conference proper now. I’m in a session on the political uses of TikTok, which begins with Eduard-Claudiu Gross, on the situation in Romania. Romania annulled the first round of its presidential election in December 2024, due to a massive Russian election interference campaign, and TikTok played a role in this; the re-run in May 2025 took place in this complicated and polarised political and media environment.

This study, then, gathered some 50,000 TikTok videos from June 2024 to March 2025, from 1,000 authors, and from these examined the …