Social Media

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on crisis, conflict, and war, and starts with a paper presented by Aytalina Kulichkina which focusses on Ukraine-Russia wartime discourse on Telegram. Social media platforms have of course become essential platforms for political communication, and the use of these platforms varies based on context; during wartime they are used for both domestic and international communication, mobilisation, and manipulation.

Most studies to date have taken qualitative approaches and deal with short-term conflicts, however; there is a lack of systematic and comparative assessment of such platform use during …

The next speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Luisa Gehle, whose interest is in the asymmetry of congruence in mis- and disinformation engagement. People tend to accept information which aligns with their worldviews, and reject incongruent claims more strongly; however, this has been shown mostly for the atrophied two-party system of the US, and might translate differently to multi-party systems as they exist in many European countries.

This study explored motivated reasoning processes by conducting a two-wave survey in Germany to examine attitudes towards migration and the Russian war on Ukraine, testing the impact …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Ben Lyons, whose interest is in asymmetries in misinformation engagement across demographics, with a particular focus on older adults in the US. The US population above 65 years is rapidly growing, and these are also comparatively active voters; in every US election, the majority of voters are older than 50 years, for instance.

Such older adults are also most likely to share untrustworthy content online, in the US and elsewhere; this has been documented by study after study over the past years. Paradoxically …

The next speaker in this morning session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Florian Primig, whose interest is in user engagement with alternative media and disinformation in newsfeeds. From a democratic perspective, there is a strong desire for all citizens to be engaging well and open-mindedly with quality information, and divergence from such thinking styles is seen as problematic; such styles are often tested in surveys by testing for intellectual humility and open-minded thinking, and their opposite closed-minded thinking and conspiracy mentality, and are expected to lead to less or more engagement with mis- and …

The second day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a session on mis- and disinformation, and the first speaker is Xiaxin Huang. Her work asks how national identity shapes emotions towards the nation, and how such emotions in turn affect misinformation beliefs – and whether these pathways are different for Republicans and Democrats.

This builds on a multi-wave 2024 US survey, which asked about aspects like national identity, national pride, negative national affect, and misinformation beliefs (relating to the Hunter Biden laptop story and the 6 January 2021 coup attempt). National pride …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sreerupa Sanyal. Her focus is on incidental news exposure on social media platforms and its relationship to the strength of individual partisanship and political involvement.

Questions then are how partisanship strength influences political involvement, how political involvement affects incidental news exposure, and how both partisanship strength and political involvement affects incidental news exposure. This was tested through a multi-wave panel survey of some 500 respondents.

Partisanship strength did not predict political involvement; political involvement did predict higher incidental exposure; and strong partisans did …

As my battery runs out for today, I’m in a final session on partisanship at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, which begins with a paper by Harry Yan. His focus is on the alignment between news headlines and images; such alignment is especially important now that headlines and header images frequently circulate together as news is shared on social media platforms.

To the extent that these align, they may represent a form of multimodal media bias, and such bias might also result on differences in social media engagement. The project tested this for a dataset of …

The next session I’m attending at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Simon Kruschinski, whose focus is on political microtargeting in election advertising. This is now a growing practice in elections around the world, and the perception of such ads by their targets depends on the congruence between advertising approaches and the sociodemographics of target groups.

But we are still missing rich qualitative data on the situational perception and evaluation of such ads by users in a realistic social media setting. The present study explored this through a think-aloud protocol study with …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Baoning Gong, whose focus is on challenges to conventional journalism from the far right. Within hybrid media systems, such alternative media, including influencers, emerge as epistemic authorities in their own right. How do such actors position themselves in the hybrid media field?

This study distinguished right-wing news outlets, influencers, and anonymous Telegram channels as three groups of such actors, and examined their practices. How do they define what journalism is and should be; how do they reference legacy media; how …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on right-wing polarisation in Germany and the United States, and we start with Maximilian Grönegräs, whose interest is in how the far right navigates the hybrid media system in Germany. This focusses on the neofascist AfD party, and particularly explores how the party makes sense of its relation to traditional media.

Traditionally, such studies have focussed only on the relationship between journalists and politicians, without any exploration of external circumstances; but external factors now often influence these relations, with various other actors also playing a significant …