Government

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 …

And the lucky last speaker in the final session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library in Frankfurt is the excellent Giada Marino, whose interest is the operation of data access provisions under DSA Article 40.12. The focus here is on very large online marketplace platforms and the systemic risks they pose to minors.

Article 40.12 addresses access to publicly available data from Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines; this is coordinated across EU jurisdictions by the Expert Group on Access to Publicly Available Data (ECAT). The present project focusses on marketplace platforms such as …

And the next speaker at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Beatrice Cannelli, whose interest is in how national memory institutions’ social media archiving initiatives have been affected by changing data access regimes. Such activities are affected by national legal frameworks, available resources, collection policies and scope, technical limitations, and the Terms of Service of the various platforms.

The latter are justified by user privacy concerns and the protection of sensitive information, but in practice mostly protect the platforms’ own business interests. How these are formulated influences the extent to which content from such platforms …

The post-lunch session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library starts with LK Seiling and Sophia Graf, who discuss the Weizenbaum-Institut’s DSA40 Collaboratory project. The EU’s Digital Services Act provides for research access to public and non-public data via its articles 40(12) and 40(4), and in both cases this is limited to research that investigates what is called ‘systemic risks’, and to Very Large Online Platforms which serve at least 10% of the EU population, which translates to 45 million users.

If platforms are found to have failed to provide such access, the EU can (and …