Politics

And the final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Claudia Thoms, who will present a semantic analysis of party competition in Germany. She begins by noting that political competition is also a competition over language, with parties trying to establish a distinct political profile. Issue emphases and positioning leave races in language, while strategic framing also shapes political perception itself.

Different parties want to associate themselves with different issues, to emphasise their competence on these issues; this also responds to ebbs and flows in public attention to specific issues. But issue relevance does not …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Jose David Ortega Chávez, who shifts our focus to Colombia, and specifically to the peace narratives in the speeches of its four last presidents. The interest here is in which actors these narratives highlight, what political functions the narratives serve, and what view of the nation they construct.

This draws on the strategic narratives framework, which are understood as meaning-making devices employed by political actors. Their point is to influence the behaviour of others. This project gathered some 7,400 speeches from the four presidents, from both …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Guillem Lloret i Triola, whose focus is on the analysis of metaphors in the Catalan electoral campaign of 2021. This builds on a complete corpus of speeches during the campaign, which took place after the annulled independence referendum and the exiling of pro-independence political leaders. This marked the end of the independence cycle, also against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The analysis of the speeches during the election builds on critical discourse analysis and critical metaphor analysis, and translates this to political communication in the …

The post-lunch session on this last day at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on computational methods for political discourse analysis, and starts with Felipe Barreto-Storandt. He begins by noting the growing adoption of LLMs in communication research, but also highlights that there are no standard methodologies for using them yet; this is experimental at this point, and not a planned feature by their designers.

Often they are simply run once over a dataset, though, and this creates only one data point. But because LLMs are stochastic, they will produce different scores every time; this means that multiple runs …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is by Leon Xiao, whose focus is on the regulation of Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines (VLOPs and VLOSEs) by the EU Digital Services Act; these are defined as having more than 45 million active users in the EU (10% of the total EU population). 25 such platforms had already been identified (two of those VLOSEs, the remainder VLOPs); three more were added recently (including ChatGPT, as a VLOSE).

Under DSA Article 39, these now need to provide a publicly accessible, transparent, and searchable repository of advertising on …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Neil Thurman, whose focus is on age verification legislation across various states in the US, and its effect on the consumption of online pornography by under-18s. This is observed here via clickstream data.

Concerns about online pornography are as old as the Internet itself, and were instrumental in the development of the controversial US Communication Decency Act (CDA), signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996 and subsequently found to be unconstitutional; the US has not had any federal legislation to restrict online pornography since then …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Ruth Wendt, who highlights the many uses that social media can be put to, and the many risks which critics have identified: opportunities for networking, social connection, peer support, information retrieval, etc. are juxtaposed with concerns about cyberbullying, child exploitation, misinformation, etc.

Studies to date have found only very weak association between time spent on social media and wellbeing, but studies on minors remain rare; social media bans in Australia and elsewhere are an unfortunate natural experiment which will shine further light on this. There are …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is my QUT colleague Kim Osman. She presents a project by the Centre for the Digital Child, which actually consulted children and young people about their perspectives on the impending social media ban; this took place against the uncertain and shifting background of Australian policy-making, which was (and remains) unclear about the definition of ‘social media’ and prevaricated about which platforms would even be included in the ban (Facebook is; 4chan is not…).

In the end, this project conducted some 86 30-minute interviews with young people aged …

The next morning at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno starts with our panel on the social media bans of young people in Australia and beyond, and our first speaker is the fabulous Sonia Livingstone, who focusses on the question of children’s rights. Bans of children from social media platforms are ultimately against children’s rights: they ban children rather than banning technologies (and in fact the UK government has now proposed a nightly curfew for children, too).

Such bans started with the one in Australia, but similar initiatives are also away across many European nations, as well as countries around …

And the final speaker in this panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Moritz Bürger, whose focus is on the communication strategies of political actors as they legitimate their violence. This builds on a concept of legitimacy that emphasises conformity with existing rules, adherence to shared beliefs, and consent to power relationships.

Legitimisation statements can be analysed for speaker, object of legitimisation, evaluation, and argument; and hegemonial and subaltern positions can be distinguished here: hegemonial and subaltern decision-makers, insider challengers, and outsider challengers.

The focus here is on several contexts, where decision-makers include the US and Ukrainian president …