Government

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 at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Martin Riedl, whose interest is in the ethics of disclosure by political influencers, with particular focus on the United States. Here, regulations for influencers are highly idiosyncratic; influencers do play a substantial role as a pathway towards news, especially for younger users, and are seen as helping to unpack current political issues.

Political influencers are defined here very broadly, and include influencers driven both by personal, political, and monetary motivations. Such influencers are sometimes also directly supported by political lobby and funding groups, and this is …

The final speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Rodrigo Seroubian and Belén Sosa, whose focus is on Uruguay. In particular, they focus on the subnational level: while Uruguay’s democracy is strong at the national level, below that level there are certain problematic dynamics, and this impacts on the capacity of citizens to form critical opinions.

This focusses on self-censorship as the voluntary withholding of information by journalists, but not as the result of violence, threats, or harassment, but through invisible omissions. Such self-censorship is not spontaneous: it reflects certain structural issues …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Uygar Altinok, whose interest is in online news consumption in Turkey. What happens to informed citizenship under a condition of authoritarian repression as it exists here, where participation is risky, surveillance is perceived to be ever-present, and institutional trust is low?

Turkey has high levels of social media usage, but also substantial digital surveillance and repression; its media and political environment is highly polarised. Information engagement here involves strategic participation or strategic silence, and it is unclear whether informational conditions still mobilise participation …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Lingyan Ma, whose interest is in self-censorship. Visibility on social media for Douyin content creators in China is both reward and risk: visibility provides legitimacy and creates labour and income opportunities, but this also comes with safety risks which are managed by self-censorship.

Creators translate layered constraints into routine production decisions and identity work; this is done through various strategies. These respond to governance cues, engage in interpretive learning and adaptive performance, and thereby produce and present a platform-compatible self. Visibility incentives create …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on censorship and self-censorship, and we start with a paper by Wenqing Cheng, whose focus is on platform censorship in China. Censorship typically produces backlash and chilling effects, yet in China many citizens remain apathetic towards censorship or even support it. This might be a sign that censorship has been normalised, but this explanation in itself may not be enough.

Citizens also experience censorship through how it is done; this might take the form of direct notifications, or more indirect shadowbanning. This may be affected by …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Bar Fishman, whose focus is on the use of atrocity tweets during the war in Gaza. Military conflicts have now become global image wars, with all sides using media images to win over public support. This seeks to produce legitimacy, sympathy, attention, and moral authority; it responds to the structural collapse of traditional public diplomacy in the wake of public debate on social media.

Ministries of Foreign Affairs therefore now have to work as round-the-clock public relations organisations; they must justify the use …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Xinyu Zhang, whose interest is in how commemorative practices on China’s national holidays shape popular attitudes towards war.

China marked the 80th anniversary of its victory against Japan in 2025, and this resulted both in expressions of national pride and more solemn reflections on the sacrifices of the past. What do such comments reflect, though: a benign sense of national identity and belonging, or a more aggressive sense of nationalism and negativity towards other countries?

This study explored people’s willingness to fight for …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Danny Yihan Jia, whose focus is on the global crisis in electoral legitimacy. The US is an obvious example here, with some 60 lawsuits relating to supposed electoral irregularities filed by Donald Trump after the 2020 election alone (all failed, of course); similar developments have taken place in Brazil, Kenya, and many other countries, and the ‘rigged election’ narratives are often translated from one country to another even though they lack any evidence.

Some of this can be credited to a ‘sore loser’ …

And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Hal Xu, whose interest is in the Democratic governance of artificial intelligence. To what extent do citizens participate in this process? Participatory governance is critical here, but there are few pathways towards this, and in countries like the US, citizen trust in government institutions is very low to begin with, further discouraging such participation.

There are two key structural asymmetries here: information asymmetry between AI providers and users; and power asymmetry between corporations, governments, and other elites on the one hand, and …