‘Fake News’

And the next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Catherine Baker, whose focus is on scientific claims in the (Neo-)Manosphere. The far right is often described as anti-science, but this is too simplistic; instead, they are more selective in their engagement with scientific information.

The Manosphere is now well-established as an amalgamation of misogynist and anti-feminist groups, traditionally based in online fora and communities but increasingly also mainstreamed into generic social media and especially also streaming media sites. This has led to the rise of the term Neo-Manosphere to describe these new …

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:

For the final paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town we are going back to Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the role of generative AI in representing history-related information. The vast volumes of historical information mean that AI is increasingly used to process such materials, and in recent years there has been a considerable increase in end-users engaging with AI chatbots to explore historical information.

But LLMs also generate new textual and visual content, which can make historical material more accessible but also raises questions about the fabrication of facts and information …

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 speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Luisa Gehle, whose interest is in the asymmetry of congruence in mis- and disinformation engagement. People tend to accept information which aligns with their worldviews, and reject incongruent claims more strongly; however, this has been shown mostly for the atrophied two-party system of the US, and might translate differently to multi-party systems as they exist in many European countries.

This study explored motivated reasoning processes by conducting a two-wave survey in Germany to examine attitudes towards migration and the Russian war on Ukraine, testing the impact …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Ben Lyons, whose interest is in asymmetries in misinformation engagement across demographics, with a particular focus on older adults in the US. The US population above 65 years is rapidly growing, and these are also comparatively active voters; in every US election, the majority of voters are older than 50 years, for instance.

Such older adults are also most likely to share untrustworthy content online, in the US and elsewhere; this has been documented by study after study over the past years. Paradoxically …

The next speaker in this morning session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Florian Primig, whose interest is in user engagement with alternative media and disinformation in newsfeeds. From a democratic perspective, there is a strong desire for all citizens to be engaging well and open-mindedly with quality information, and divergence from such thinking styles is seen as problematic; such styles are often tested in surveys by testing for intellectual humility and open-minded thinking, and their opposite closed-minded thinking and conspiracy mentality, and are expected to lead to less or more engagement with mis- and …

The second day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a session on mis- and disinformation, and the first speaker is Xiaxin Huang. Her work asks how national identity shapes emotions towards the nation, and how such emotions in turn affect misinformation beliefs – and whether these pathways are different for Republicans and Democrats.

This builds on a multi-wave 2024 US survey, which asked about aspects like national identity, national pride, negative national affect, and misinformation beliefs (relating to the Hunter Biden laptop story and the 6 January 2021 coup attempt). National pride …

The final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Ross Dahlke, whose focus is on exposure to untrustworthy Websites in the 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections. According to 2016 data, such exposure is actually fairly limited, but highly concentrated amongst a number of key groups: older adults and political partisans – but (how) has this changed in subsequent elections?

This project captured Web browsing data from a YouGov Pulse panel of some 1,100 participants for four weeks before and one after the respective election dates in 2020 and 2024; this is …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on AI and politics, and starts with a paper by Bohan Zhang and colleagues on AI-generate disinformation in the 2024 US presidential election. This election has been described as one of the first where AI content played a significant role; this included counterfeit AI video and audio on social media platforms.

Such content taps on existing political cynicism: this may both make some people more resistant to AI content due to their overall rejection of political propaganda, but also lead to others embracing AI content as …