Elections

The final speaker ion this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jana Peters, whose paper compares opinion poll predictions related to the unexpected 2025 German federal election with predictions generated by ChatGPT. How reliable are AI-generated election polls?

This relates to concerns about the role of horse-race journalism coverage in shaping public opinion during election campaigns, as citizens’ encounters of such polls might lead them to shape their own voting intentions accordingly (variously through bandwagon or underdog effects, for instance). And election polls are themselves not necessarily reliable, although citizens tend to trust these …

And next up at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library are Marco Wähner and Jan Dennis Gumz, exploring the further use of Wikipedia data on the early German federal election in 2025. Because of the unusual circumstances of the election, following the failure of the governing coalition, there was an increased need for information about the election amongst voters, and Wikipedia (as the only public-interest Very Large Online Platform classified by the EU) played an important role here.

But as a collaboratively edited online platform, Wikipedia represents a particularly special information ecosystem; editing activity here also …

The final speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Kieran McGuinness, Hannah Adler, and Susan Grantham, further exploring the role of influencers in the TikTok and Instagram campaigns of the major parties during the 2025 Australian federal election. This project surveyed Australian voters for their experiences with political content on these platforms during the election, some months after the election. It received some 1661 responses from a diverse group of participants.

Participants used these platforms at minimum several time a week; around 50% used them several times a day or more. There were no substantial gender differences …

The third speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is the great Susan Grantham, focussing on the 2025 Australian federal election campaign on TikTok. TikTok is now also a political campaigning tool; it was present in the 2024 US election campaign, and again in the 2025 Australian election. This study collected some 289 TikTok posts from the Australian Labor Party, 112 from the Greens, and 154 from the Liberals; the interest here is in the content and communication strategies that such content reveals.

The Greens had some 80 positive and policy-focussed videos; some 46 covered traditional political procedures …

The next speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Dan Angus, focussing especially on political advertising during the 2025 Australian federal election. This work is also supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Computational advertising is ephemeral and targeted, individually personalised to the social media user; it is difficult to study these processes at scale. While platforms purport to provide some ad transparency libraries, these are limited, and can be enhanced through other approaches.

Some such approaches include data donations via browser plugins that capture the ads encountered by …

The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.

Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms …