Polarisation

The final session for me at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is one in which I’ll present myself, but we start with a paper by Evelyn Jonas. Her focus is on the use of communicative AI to deal with opinion-challenging information. Users are frequently exposed to such information in online environments, of course, and this can create cognitive dissonance as well as more active information-seeking actions.

But traditional search engines are not the only way that this is addressed, and are not always helpful in identifying reliable sources; increasingly, people are also using AI chatbots to …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Yuzhou Tao, who encourages us to rethink framing. Conventional communication models followed a simple sender-message-receiver model; this was always overly simplistic, and communication is now shaped by algorithmic processes interacting with social networks. This now produces a three-phase power ecology.

The focus here is on body politics in China, which is affected by identity, visibility metrics, and governance. It explores which actor groups serve as primary frame sponsors, how such frames are contested, and how amplification provides persistence for such frames.

The focus …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Silva Heinonen, with a focus on harmful discourse on migration online. In Belgium, news media are frequently framing migration as a threat, use dehumanising language, and amplify populist and far-right policy responses. This creates negative emotions such as anger, fear, and anxiety, and is further disseminated via social media platforms.

The effects of such content is often tested through single-exposure effect studies, which is problematic; on social media, effects are more likely to occur through repeated exposures, and will be also be dependent …

The second session on this final morning at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on framing and politics, and begins with a paper by Ying Qi Pan, whose focus is on media framing in the context of gender equality. This matters because media framing shapes how people understand social issues.

This often works through advantage or disadvantage framing, which respectively emphasise the systemic privilege of advantaged groups or highlight the underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups. Research to date focusses mainly on majority groups; there is relatively less evidence on the minority groups involved.

Gender is a salient …

The next paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is by Haoshuang Wang, and the focus is on how media organisations build professional authority. This is addressed here especially in the context of climate communication, in authoritarian contexts.

This can be addressed by combining theory on gradual institutional change and discursive legitimation; through this, we can understand discourse itself as an institution. Symbolic structures evolve in parallel to material ones.

This project works with 570 climate articles over a 24-year period, modelled using LDA and exploring semantic networks. The headline finding is that …

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 second speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jing Zhu, who begins by reintroducing us to the spiral of silence theory, and in this context asks what we mean by ‘opinion climate’: this is said to influence opinion formation and expression in individuals.

Contextual factors are critical in these processes, then, and one key such factor is stigmatisation. Some views are dismissed as representing low education or knowledge, gendered perspectives, or other aspects; this creates a fear of isolation, and may result in emotional arousal, limited expression efficacy, and other factors …

The final day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a paper by Laura Liebig, exploring the German discourse around arms deliveries to Ukraine. She begins by outlining the issues around media criticism: such criticism is warranted at times, but can also be weaponised to elevate critics’ own positions and undermine trust in the media.

In Germany, critics have repeatedly accused mainstream media of one-sided coverage of arms support for Ukraine since Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion in 2022, and requested more viewpoint diversity. Such diversity is valuable in principle, and one of the …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Clara Schultz, presenting some of the results from the POLTRACK project on polarisation in the context of climate change debates in Germany. The specific question here is whether biased media portrayals of climate activists influence public attitudes towards such groups.

Negatively biased media cues may reinforce more extreme perceptions of climate protesters, or polarise previously neutral media users, while positive bias might produce backfire effects; neutral portrayals might also serve to depolarise more extreme attitudes.

POLTRACK studies this through a combination of multi-wave …

And the third speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Nayla Fawzi; she begins by noting that German society is not inherently polarised, but that certain debates – including climate change – serve as trigger points for polarisation. This does not necessarily question the existence of anthropogenic climate change as such, but certainly covers various preferences for whether and how to deal with it.

There are therefore also significant perceptions of polarisation on this topic in Germany; such perceived polarisation can be assessed by surveys of underlying feelings towards others’ positions, as …