Polarisation

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 last speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Andrea Carson, whose focus is on Facebook response to the assassination of far-right US political activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk was killed during a public appearance, and this was widely assumed in the media to be a case of left-wing political violence, though this has yet to be established.

It produced considerable public reaction, with some controversial statements resulting in the sackings or suspensions of various journalists; social media responses ran the gamut from grief through outrage to political blame, and show …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Florian Töpfl, whose focus is on the news repertoires of Russian speakers in Germany. Past work on this has found four key sub-types here: those with a politically motivated news repertoire, who tend to choose either pro-Western or pro-Kremlin news repertoires; those with a truth-seeking news repertoire, who actively compare diverse news sources; and those with a situationally motivated news repertoire, who are relatively limited news users overall.

This study extended on this by interviewing some 25 Russian speakers during September …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on crisis, conflict, and war, and starts with a paper presented by Aytalina Kulichkina which focusses on Ukraine-Russia wartime discourse on Telegram. Social media platforms have of course become essential platforms for political communication, and the use of these platforms varies based on context; during wartime they are used for both domestic and international communication, mobilisation, and manipulation.

Most studies to date have taken qualitative approaches and deal with short-term conflicts, however; there is a lack of systematic and comparative assessment of such platform use during …

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 …

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 …