Polarisation

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 …

And the final paper in this final session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town for today is by Weiying Shi, whose focus is on partisan perceptions of the fairness of judicial sentences in Hong Kong. What determines such perceptions, and when does this partisan divide widen?

This analysis is especially important in the context of Hong Kong, given its recent legal history; the 2019 Extradition Law Amendment Bill has been widely seen as part of mainland China’s gradual dismantling of Hong Kong’s judicial independence, and judicial decisions have therefore been scrutinised increasingly critically.

This is also …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Christiane Eilders, whose interest is in the communication styles and conflict resolution processes within mainstream parties in Germany. The core focus here is on factionalism within political parties, then, where parties divide into ideological subgroups that pursue specific policies or strategic goals; such factionalism can be an important safety valve which prevents parties from splitting apart altogether. Factionalism also affects electoral successes, the efficiency of governing coalitions, and the stability of the overall party system, however.

How do party factions communicate and interact …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sreerupa Sanyal. Her focus is on incidental news exposure on social media platforms and its relationship to the strength of individual partisanship and political involvement.

Questions then are how partisanship strength influences political involvement, how political involvement affects incidental news exposure, and how both partisanship strength and political involvement affects incidental news exposure. This was tested through a multi-wave panel survey of some 500 respondents.

Partisanship strength did not predict political involvement; political involvement did predict higher incidental exposure; and strong partisans did …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Chiara Vargiu, who takes us back to Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech which preceded the coup attempt at the US Capitol. Can political leaders’ violent rhetoric contribute to a radicalised mindset which produces partisan violence, then?

This can be described as stochastic terrorism: leaders’ inflammatory rhetoric is not in itself calling for violent action, but it is amplified through mass or social media, and this normalised radical ideas to the extent that some individuals take it upon themselves to commit violent, terrorist acts …

As my battery runs out for today, I’m in a final session on partisanship at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, which begins with a paper by Harry Yan. His focus is on the alignment between news headlines and images; such alignment is especially important now that headlines and header images frequently circulate together as news is shared on social media platforms.

To the extent that these align, they may represent a form of multimodal media bias, and such bias might also result on differences in social media engagement. The project tested this for a dataset of …

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 speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Maria Grub, whose interest is in susceptibility to pro-Kremlin rhetoric. Her focus is on populist politics in eastern Germany, where the neofascist AfD is now one of the most popular parties across several federal states; this is related at least in part to these states’ current economic issues.

There is a strong sense of political neglect and injustice amongst populations in these states, which leads to more populist voting; but this also affects positions on a broader range of issues. Such issues also …