Polarisation

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on right-wing polarisation in Germany and the United States, and we start with Maximilian Grönegräs, whose interest is in how the far right navigates the hybrid media system in Germany. This focusses on the neofascist AfD party, and particularly explores how the party makes sense of its relation to traditional media.

Traditionally, such studies have focussed only on the relationship between journalists and politicians, without any exploration of external circumstances; but external factors now often influence these relations, with various other actors also playing a significant …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Yangliu Fan, whose focus is on cross-positional agreement and disagreement in social media contexts – with a particular focus on climate discourse on Reddit.

The approach here explores discourse features to encode their complexity, structures, and dynamics within a higher-dimensional space. This extracts discourse features from each post and subsequent comments, and examines comments’ agreement or disagreement with the previous post of comments; from the embedding of these features in a higher-dimensional spaces it is then possible to construct several similarity …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Calvin Yixiang Cheng, whose focus is on conspiracy theories on social media. These often persist for a very long time, and in their diffusion change their linguistic forms. Such content change may in fact aid in their persistence.

This study examines such language mutation. It works with Twitter data from 2020-22, collecting tweets which match keywords from major fact-checking sources to identify relevant conspiracist posts, and clustered those posts based on the fact-checking information that debunks them. It also identified the shortest possible …

The next speaker in this high-density session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sujin Yoon, whose focus is on group polarisation. Her particular interest is in opinion and structural convergence, and she begins by noting the limitations of studying such convergence in experimental settings; work with observational data is required here, therefore.

Group polarisation means a convergence of groups towards their dominant views; this also conditions Intra-group and inter-group interactions. Emotional factors such as anger and pride can affect this.

The present study examines this for the r/conservative and r/democrats subreddits, over six months in …

The next paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is presented on behalf of Chao Wu and Michelle Seelig, and focusses on public discussions of the COP21 (2016) and COP25 (2020) climate conferences on Reddit, with a particular focus on climate-contrarian comments.

Climate-contrarian claims were identified through the CARDS framework and its claims classifiers; this sorts claims into five broad categories of typical climate change-denialist rhetoric. The project then also conducted topic modelling, and clustered topics by their affinity with each other. This showed clear distinctions between the two events, with more issued-centred …

As I wrap up my Mercator Fellowship at ZeMKI in Bremen, I’ve made a side trip to the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, which starts for me with a session on the application of network analysis to polarised contexts. We start with Shengyi Gao, whose interest is in group polarisation. She notes the growing fragmentation of social media environments, which creates structural holes in such networks; some users are ‘structural hole spanners’, however, who bridge such gaps by their activities.

The focus here is on Weibo, and the network is constructed from post forwarding activities; the posts …

And the next session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library starts with Ofra Klein, who will outline the challenges of studying far-right mobilisation in spite of the constraints of social media data access regimes. The far right use social media very extensively to promote their propaganda, and this can lead to physical demonstrations, riots, and violence; as and when this happens, social media posts and accounts are then often removed by the perpetrators of the platforms, complicating any meaningful research.

In addition, the number of platforms used for far-right agitation have diversified substantially; in addition …