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The final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Clara Schultz, presenting some of the results from the POLTRACK project on polarisation in the context of climate change debates in Germany. The specific question here is whether biased media portrayals of climate activists influence public attitudes towards such groups.

Negatively biased media cues may reinforce more extreme perceptions of climate protesters, or polarise previously neutral media users, while positive bias might produce backfire effects; neutral portrayals might also serve to depolarise more extreme attitudes.

POLTRACK studies this through a combination of multi-wave …

And the third speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Nayla Fawzi; she begins by noting that German society is not inherently polarised, but that certain debates – including climate change – serve as trigger points for polarisation. This does not necessarily question the existence of anthropogenic climate change as such, but certainly covers various preferences for whether and how to deal with it.

There are therefore also significant perceptions of polarisation on this topic in Germany; such perceived polarisation can be assessed by surveys of underlying feelings towards others’ positions, as …

And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Henri Mütschele, who continues our focus on polarisation around climate movements. Polarisation research in the social sciences is still lacking in various ways: the role of media, the motives of individuals, the implications for social groups, and the impact on these groups strategic communication all still require further research, and such work is often focussed solely on explaining opinion change through conformity.

The law of group polarisation suggests that members of a deliberating group predictably move forwards a more extreme point indicated …

I am chairing the final session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town today, which is a partner association session on (de)polarisation featuring members of the German DGPuK, and we start with Rico Neumann. His interest is in the role of opinion leaders as potential agents of (de)polarisation of debates on climate change. Climate change debates tend to be highly controversial and depolarised in Germany and elsewhere, of course, and are also conducted across social media platforms and messaging apps; this enables both collective and connective action logics.

Climate discourse is highly emotional, polarised, and polarising, featuring …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jasmine McNealy, who addresses the threat of ‘dark news’: how are news audiences evaluating issues with the technical design of news sites? This moves away from a focus only on the quality of news content, and prioritises user-centred harms.

This addresses dark patterns: designs that manipulate user choices in order to favour the platform itself; as the economics of news have changed, news organisations have changed their Website designs in order to increase stickiness and extract valuable information from users. To what extent …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Lucas Paulo da Silva, who reminds us that media outlets tend to chase large audiences. But can they do this across two ideological dimensions: economic and cultural? This might include left conservatives or right progressives, for instance.

Politically invested media actors tend to have very strongly correlated positions across issues, and so do party systems; if outlets are responsible to both economic and cultural dimensions, then this might make them less correlated over time, and this might also happen dynamically in response to …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Rupert Kiddle, whose interest is in encoder-produced news embeddings. This is an increasingly common technique, which helps analyse and categorise news articles both for internal journalistic purposes and for scholarly research. But they are not very sensitive to differences over time, and instead engage in a kind of temporal averaging of embeddings; this can be addressed, but remains difficult.

Most models also remain intransparent about their training data and weighting approaches, so there is a need to develop new approaches. This project draws …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Magdalena Wojcieszak, who is presenting work towards a news content quality classifier. The consumption of online news is diverse: people consume traditional news article,s blog content, YouTube news videos, news podcasts, and many different formats.

But how do we assess the quality of all this content? There are various different measures for this, and many of them are problematic, not least for their domain- rather than article-level assessments and their conflation of quality with ideological bias; some also include factuality and other features …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with Rongxin Ouyang, who will introduce us to a new social media measure called Bartik instrument. We have for many years discussed the bidirectional relationship between audience engagement and news production: news media set agendas for audiences, but news engagement by audiences also affects how news media select which topics they cover. The causal nature, direction, and strength of this relationship remains unresolved.

This study explores this relationship for Facebook and Twitter: it gathered data from CrowdTangle (2.2m posts) and the Twitter Academic API (4.5m posts) …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Hannah Fecher, with a paper on the impact of the algorithmic environments of short-video platforms on political communication. Political actors have begun to adapt their content to these platform cultures (or to how they understand them) in order to reach constituents.

But content distribution is highly personalised and optimised to platform engagement, and some video characteristic are associated with higher vitality. Users also report a mismatch between viral tendencies and their own content preferences, however, especially also with respect to political content …