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This week I’m in Glasgow for the biennial Social Media & Society conference, and after a morning of workshops the first session I’m attending has started with Qianzao Yang, whose focus is on the phenomenon of the ‘hot nerd’ as constructed on social media in China. This concretises and reconstructs contemporary cultural capital, and valorises university credentials, the STEM disciplines, and international experience in desirable locations.

It appreciates a ‘scholarly aura’, expressed through visible middle-class taste and lifestyles; intelligence and knowledge are transferred here into visible signs of attractiveness, and this reflects broader hierarchies of education and social status. At …

And the final paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is presented by Matthias Kast and Martin Bürger, exploring the way that communicative AI technologies are being discussed in the German news media, with particular focus on the frames, actors, and topics.

New technology is often presented as either threat or progress, and various risk and progress frames can be defined here; a more general frame might also be identified. Their co-occurrence with actors and topics in communicative AI news coverage is also important to examine.

The study examined some 3,800 articles from …

I was the next presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, presenting our study exploring how various communicative AI chatbots respond to a range of old and new conspiracy theories. This has also already come out as an article in Media and Communication:

Katherine M. FitzGerald, Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, Timothy Graham, and Daniel Angus. “'Just Asking Questions': Doing Our Own Research on Conspiratorial Ideation by Generative AI Chatbots.” Media and Communication 14 (2026). DOI: 10.17645/mac.11337.

Here are the slides for our presentation:

The next paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is by Inbal Klein-Avraham and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari; their focus is on multiple documents literacy: the ability to work with multiple content sources to evaluate information. This involves content evaluation, source evaluation, and corroboration or triangulation of information from trustworthy sources.

Exposure to conflicting texts creates a cognitive conflict which demands resolution; AI chatbots are increasingly used to help with such processes, but this requires new approaches. The key issue here is to allocate epistemic authority (to persons, institutions, or technologies), to support informed decision-making …

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 Sayan Dey, whose focus is on India: how do similar media structures here generate different framing patterns and political legitimacy in this multi-ethnic society? His study compares this for the 2023 elections in the northeastern states of Nagaland and Tripura. Nagaland is mostly populated by ethnic Naga, while Tripura has a mostly Bengali population.

This project builds on framing theory, social identity theory, and governmentality and political economy; it examines media structures at the macro level, framing practices at the meso level, and …

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 …