Government

The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is my colleague Stephen Harrington, who begins by highlighting the importance of the attention economy in political communication; Donald Trump, for instance, is now also the Troll-in-Chief because he knows that even his most outlandish posts generate wall-to-wall media coverage.

But Trump himself can also be trolled, for instance by California governor Gavin Newsom, who has a dedicated communications team on Xitter, @GovPressOffice, that fights Trump’s fire with his own fire. This project scraped all of that account’s tweets, and categorised these as …

And the final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Mārtiņš Pričins, whose focus is on the campaigning of Latvian political parties on Facebook, comparing in particular the 2024 European parliamentary election and the 2026 Latvian national election.

The focus here is also especially on visual communication, and the potentially diverging campaigning styles of new political parties. Facebook (and YouTube) remain the top social media platforms in Latvia, and social media are now also a premier source of news and political information for Latvian users; the overall volume of posting has …

And the final speaker in our panel at the Social Media & Society conference is Risto Kunelius himself, focussing particularly on the loss and damage community which also emerged from our practice mapping of the COP27 climate summit Twitter data. COP27 instituted a Loss and Damage fund as a milestone outcome; this recognises the common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities across countries, and emerges from a much longer debate about climate change responsibility and justice.

This project filtered the COP27 dataset for mentions of the loss and damage efforts, then, and explored the dominant (and absent) actors and content …

The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Carlos Entrena-Serrano and Tom Wright, whose interest is in TikTok creators’ response to the Trump government’s efforts to affect how TikTok works. Both Trump and Biden pushed for a change in ownership in TikTok’s US operations during their Presidencies; this has the potential to profoundly affect millions of users, especially if it ends up changing what content is promoted by the platform.

TikTok is now a sociotechnical assemblage that is deeply embedded into the lives of its many users; efforts to change how it …

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Gordon Dimitrieff, whose focus is on platform non-market strategies as a form of power projection, with a particular interest in the music industry.

Platform regulation is now having a moment, with various regulatory approaches around the world, and platform providers increasingly have their own internal departments to deal with such regulatory interventions; Gordon’s focus here is on how streaming platforms have responded to Canadian regulatory developments.

Platforms do not exist in a vacuum, of course, but are companies operating within a market, which …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Bei Wang, whose focus is on China’s Global South narratives in government policies, via critical discourse analysis. China has continued to emphasise itself as both a developing country and a peer of the Global South, and a global leader in its own right; these do not go together well.

How has China’s governmental discourse managed to construct these positions at the same time? It has legitimised its leadership while maintaining the appearance of solidarity with the Global South. This employs cooperative rhetoric …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sally Boyani, whose focus is on discourse coalitions in global policy debates on the taxation of multinational companies. Such companies are well known for shifting profits to tax havens, costing countries billions of dollars. So far this has not been resolved, and various frameworks have been proposed to address this.

OECD-led frameworks historically have favoured developed countries, and it is unclear how actors dissatisfied with these approaches behave when such frameworks favour the interests of the developed world. International organisations play key roles …

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 …