The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jin Wan, whose interest is in how political efficacy conditions clicks on political content in algorithmic feeds. Political efficacy here means people’s belief in themselves within the political world: this includes internal efficacy (confidence to participate in politics) as well as external efficacy (confidence in the responsiveness of the political system).

How do people with different levels of such efficacy differ in their information selection approaches in algorithmic environments, then? Do they seek a different proportion of political content; do they seek different …

My next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the political role of search engines. During the 2024 US election, Donald Trump claimed that Google search engines and autocomplete search recommendations were favouring Kamala Harris; but we know far too little still on how search engines select their search results, and what effects these may have on their users’ information environments.

This particular paper explores how algorithmically selected information might affect users; this is also dependent on how users formulate their search queries, of course …

The next speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Pascal Schneiders and Andreas Riedl, whose interest is in diversity-oriented news recommender systems. Such ‘responsible’ recommender systems are being promoted as algorithmic solutions to ensuring that users receive a diverse diet of news content; they might pick up on popularity, content, and collaboratively created cues.

The aim here is to nudge audiences towards certain content, breaking through their ideologically shaped, one-sided news exposure and resulting in more diverse news consumption. Attitudes towards such systems depend on technological optimism, feelings of information overload, and …

The final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Merja Myllylahti, whose interest is in changes to how ongoing changes to search engines well beyond AI are changing Web traffic to news outlets. This takes a broader view of audience behaviours in relation to search, and of structural conditions in the search marketplace.

There have been significant concerns about a decline in traffic to news sites; however, the evidence for this decline remains limited at present. Comparing 2018 and 2025 traffic patterns for New Zealand, for instance, traffic from search seems fairly stable; it is the traffic …

My QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko is the next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, focussing on how search engines respond to searches about conspiracy theories. Search engines are a common pathway towards conspiracist information; they have the potential to affect their users’ understanding of such information. What people see when they search for such content also depends directly on how the query itself is formulated, so query variations also need to be studied systematically. Our Australian Search Experience 2.0 project within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society explores the impact of such query …

The final session on this first day of the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with my QUT colleague Shir Weinbrand, whose focus is on the emergence of AI Overviews in Google Search. These are a relatively new addition which fundamentally changes how search engines work: they provide an AI-generated synthesis of search results rather than pointing users to the search results themselves.

How are these changes being framed; how are different actors describing these changes – Google itself, technology journalists, and SEO marketers? This study engaged in computational concept mapping of the discourses around AI Overviews between May 2024 and May …

After the great excitement of AoIR 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, I’m now at my final stop on this conference trip, at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen which promises to be an equally stimulating event. The theme here is “20 years into the future”, and we start with a keynote by the great José van Dijck. Her focus is on digital sovereignty in Europe under the current and emerging global circumstances.

This responds to the platformisation of public communication in society; public participation via platforms is possible only after signing up to one or more (US-headquartered) platforms, for …