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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 …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Yingdan Lu, whose focus is on the impacts of social media algorithms on the curation of state-created content in China. Authoritarian governments are of course increasingly leveraging algorithmic systems for their digital propaganda; this both censors critical information, promotes pro-regime materials, and floods social media spaces with politically irrelevant content in order to make critical content less easy to find.

The focus here is on recommendation algorithms, and explores algorithmic promotional curation processes which systematically amplify state-created content. In China, social media platforms …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jin Wan, whose interest is in how political efficacy conditions clicks on political content in algorithmic feeds. Political efficacy here means people’s belief in themselves within the political world: this includes internal efficacy (confidence to participate in politics) as well as external efficacy (confidence in the responsiveness of the political system).

How do people with different levels of such efficacy differ in their information selection approaches in algorithmic environments, then? Do they seek a different proportion of political content; do they seek different …

I missed the first speaker in the next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, so we’re straight on to a paper by the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on partisan alignment, journalistic quality, and algorithmic amplification on Facebook. How do URLs that are shared the same number of times on Facebook reach audiences of vastly different sizes?

This study explores the impact of partisanship and quality on amplification and reach on Facebook, and also takes into account shifts in Facebook’s algorithmic governance design over the years. The structure of Facebook’s social networks is relatively …