The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Mykola Makhortykh, with a video presentation. His interest is in Russian propaganda curation on search engines. Russian propaganda has of course been a major concern since at least the 2016 US elections; its influence operations have only increased since the illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Much of this is driven by algorithmic information curation systems – via the Russian search engine Yandex, of course, but also through other mechanisms that affect western search engines. This project engaged in an agent-based algorithmic auditing of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and …
The last panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno starts with Morgan Wack, whose focus is on X’s Community Notes programme. Community Notes enables users of X to add notes to misleading posts, and these are then rated by other users; if these ratings show agreement even across partisan lines, the notes are publicly attached to posts, and reduce reposts and likes on the platform by nearly 50%.
YouTube, Meta, and TikTok are now implementing similar crowdsourced annotation approaches; this is part of their move away from professional and platform-funded fact-checking and moderation frameworks. But only 14% of all …
The final speaker in this morning session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Eva Mayerhöffer, whose focus is on the role of digital trace data in understanding exposure to alternative information. One point of departure for this is often to start with a list of alternative and problematic news outlets which are then identified in survey responses, data donations, or digital trace data; the focus here is then also often only on the top domains, i.e. the most frequently accessed sources.
But such a reduction to the most notorious sites substantially underestimates exposure, since there is a very …
The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Lucie Čejková, who shifts our focus to conspiracism as a now fairly common style of thinking, which has potential implications for democratic societies. The role of social media sites in all this has been especially highlighted here, in both academic research and public debate, and of course social media platforms remain a key source of news for a large part of the population, too.
The present study examines the link between social media use and individual conspiracism through a systematic literature review of some 160 articles …
And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Zhengyi Xu, whose focus is on news avoidance in Switzerland. News has a critical democratic role to play, of course, and news avoidance is a key concern in this context – but the relationship between news avoidance and political participation has not yet been tested fully. Indeed, many studies have merely tested whether or how much people avoid the news, but reality may be more complex, and the strategies by which people avoid news (at different times, in different contexts, etc.) should be taken into …
The second full day at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno starts with a session on news avoidance, and a paper by Krisztina Burai that focusses on Facebook. She begins by saying that citizens have agency in navigating political information, but that this has changed over time: through the choice of newspapers they read; through the choice of broadcast TV channels they watched; through the greater choice of channels in the network age; and finally through the abundance of information sources they can follow in the social media age, and the news feed curation tools available to them.
And the final speakers in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno are Heidi Schulze and Kilian Bühling, presenting a systematic literature review on how to classify far-right ideology based on digital trace data. Far-right ideologies have risen in prominence in recent years, but the actors involved here remain diverse and somewhat underdefined; often, they are not directly affiliated with specific political parties or movements, making them harder to classify.
Indeed, the concept of the far right needs to be defined better. It includes the populist radical right, which is illiberal but democratic, and the extreme right, which …
And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Felix Gaisbauer, whose focus is on the supply of and demand for political content on TikTok. This is often tested here using sockpuppet studies that test what kind of content the TikTok algorithm serves users; here, sockpuppet accounts that displayed a right-leaning accounts have at times been found to receive more recommendations for politically aligned content than right-leaning accounts. This could also simply result if there is more right- than left-leaning account on the platform, though.
This ‘algorithmic supply’ thus intervenes between content supply and …
The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Milin Zhang, whose focus is also on digital media use; it is critical to measure such use accurately, but self-reporting is often a dubious measure and correlates poorly with direct tracking data. This is true for any kind of media use, but political media use is of particular interest and relevance in our field. If both measurement sources have their problems, then, it is difficult to know which to trust, and the empirical consequences of such choices also remain unclear.
This project, then, explores how well these two sources …
And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is the great Cornelius Puschmann, whose focus is on mapping mobile news pathways. It’s clear that the media landscape has shifted, and is continuing to shift: this has produced both fragmentation and convergence in what news people access, and how they do so – e.g. through various social media platforms and apps. These platforms now also provide a vastly expanded content ecosystem, blending diverse conventional and emerging sources and formats.
This is shaped by device and platform affordances that affect visibility, personalisation, network association, editability, and …
