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The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on influencers and politics, and starts with a paper by Christian Pipal. Influencers are of course often also political communicators now, and especially reach young audiences who do not follow the mainstream news; usually non-political influencers are especially influential when they post political content, in fact.

But we still don’t know nearly enough about the vast bulk of influencers, especially at the micro- and nano-level of influence activity. It is also important to do more work on how such content travels, and how audiences engage with …

The final speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Rodrigo Seroubian and Belén Sosa, whose focus is on Uruguay. In particular, they focus on the subnational level: while Uruguay’s democracy is strong at the national level, below that level there are certain problematic dynamics, and this impacts on the capacity of citizens to form critical opinions.

This focusses on self-censorship as the voluntary withholding of information by journalists, but not as the result of violence, threats, or harassment, but through invisible omissions. Such self-censorship is not spontaneous: it reflects certain structural issues …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Uygar Altinok, whose interest is in online news consumption in Turkey. What happens to informed citizenship under a condition of authoritarian repression as it exists here, where participation is risky, surveillance is perceived to be ever-present, and institutional trust is low?

Turkey has high levels of social media usage, but also substantial digital surveillance and repression; its media and political environment is highly polarised. Information engagement here involves strategic participation or strategic silence, and it is unclear whether informational conditions still mobilise participation …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Lingyan Ma, whose interest is in self-censorship. Visibility on social media for Douyin content creators in China is both reward and risk: visibility provides legitimacy and creates labour and income opportunities, but this also comes with safety risks which are managed by self-censorship.

Creators translate layered constraints into routine production decisions and identity work; this is done through various strategies. These respond to governance cues, engage in interpretive learning and adaptive performance, and thereby produce and present a platform-compatible self. Visibility incentives create …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on censorship and self-censorship, and we start with a paper by Wenqing Cheng, whose focus is on platform censorship in China. Censorship typically produces backlash and chilling effects, yet in China many citizens remain apathetic towards censorship or even support it. This might be a sign that censorship has been normalised, but this explanation in itself may not be enough.

Citizens also experience censorship through how it is done; this might take the form of direct notifications, or more indirect shadowbanning. This may be affected by …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Felicia Loecherbach, whose interest is in video-based data donation, in the specific context of TikTok. Data donation is now a growing trend in digital media studies, of course, and many workable approaches to this have been developed, but to work with this approach remains difficult in practice.

TikTok is a key target for this – both because of its current importance with certain user demographics, the limitations of its API, and the fact that API-based observations do not accurately represent the experience …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jiyoun Suk. Her interest is in whether engagement metrics on social media actually measure attention: the average engagement rate across the major platforms is below 2%; in the US, for instance, some 70% never post or comment about political or social issues. So do attention and engagement actually align, and under what conditions – and what does this mean for what we can draw from the data we have?

We can expect a gap between attention and engagement because engagement requires crossing an …

The next speaker in this panel at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Kilian Bühling, whose focus is on reconstructing deleted Telegram messages to prevent potential biases in data analysis. Message deletion and data loss is a common issue in working with digital trace data; the volume of deleted messages in a data sample increases over time, so data collected a substantial time after an even will miss quite a lot of messages.

This challenges the validity of analyses of such data, as well as the reproducibility of data analyses by other researchers; indeed, it is …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Ernesto de León, whose interest is in who donates digital trace data. Data donation studies have become increasingly popular in recent times, of course, but continue to be plagued by sample bias: some users are simply much more likely to be willing to donate data to researchers.

The focus of criticism has been on the willingness to debate, the lack of data on non-participants, and the limited efforts to scope the downstream effects from biased data donation samples. The present project addressed these …

The third day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a session on digital trace data, and a paper by Kyle van Gaeveren, whose interest is in digital trace data. He notes that digital log data have always been very smartphone-dependent, and comparisons of this with laptop-derived trace data are important.

His project provided laptops to some 100 knowledge workers, and used a tool called ActivityWatch to trace which laptop and smartphone apps people were using; this tracked duration, frequency, and fragmentation, but also switching between devices and user mood. Part of the …