The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Yuzhou Tao, who encourages us to rethink framing. Conventional communication models followed a simple sender-message-receiver model; this was always overly simplistic, and communication is now shaped by algorithmic processes interacting with social networks. This now produces a three-phase power ecology.
The focus here is on body politics in China, which is affected by identity, visibility metrics, and governance. It explores which actor groups serve as primary frame sponsors, how such frames are contested, and how amplification provides persistence for such frames.
The focus here is on Weibo, which had a major spike in body positivity discussions following the broadcast of the monologue series Hear Her in November 2020, triggering sustained public discourse on appearance anxiety in China. It examined some 200,000 public posts on the platform.
Three frames emerge from this: the normative body frame, the body liberation frame, and the structural resistance frame. Anchor institutions here are media, government, and businesses; the instigators are influencers; and the masses are represented by ordinary users. Frames were coded by LLMs, structured temporally by weekly timeseries; with further predictive modelling.
Body guilt was the most prominent element in the normative body frames; broad conceptualisation of beauty were prominent in body liberation frames. These were unevenly distributed across different actor groups; ordinary users were especially strong on body guilt, for instance, while influencers especially pushed the structural resistance frame. Such framing can also affect other groups over time.
Framing does not merely spread, then: it is sponsored, contested, and governed. Frames compete for attention, adapt to shocks, and stabilise around the deepest gravitational pulls of the platform. It is important to understand this power ecology as we seek to understand framing processes and impacts.
