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 do news audiences recognise such patterns, and what harms do they identify from such practices?
The approach here builds on computational grounded theory, combining qualitative and computational techniques; this is applied to data from the r/AssholeDesign subreddit which frequently highlights problematic Website designs. Participants here are expert auditors of Website designs, following a clearly defined evaluative workflow, and from this also build algorithmic folk theories.
The project focusses on subreddit data from 2014, and filtered these data by relevant keywords relating to news Websites; from an analysis of these posts it constructed several key categories. These include subscription traps, which make it easy to subscribe and difficult to unsubscribe from newsletters and other features: obstruction, forced action, interface interference, and infrastructural manipulation. Such interventions undermine journalistic credibility.
