Politics

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Milin Zhang, whose focus is also on digital media use; it is critical to measure such use accurately, but self-reporting is often a dubious measure and correlates poorly with direct tracking data. This is true for any kind of media use, but political media use is of particular interest and relevance in our field. If both measurement sources have their problems, then, it is difficult to know which to trust, and the empirical consequences of such choices also remain unclear.

This project, then, explores how well these two sources …

And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is the great Cornelius Puschmann, whose focus is on mapping mobile news pathways. It’s clear that the media landscape has shifted, and is continuing to shift: this has produced both fragmentation and convergence in what news people access, and how they do so – e.g. through various social media platforms and apps. These platforms now also provide a vastly expanded content ecosystem, blending diverse conventional and emerging sources and formats.

This is shaped by device and platform affordances that affect visibility, personalisation, network association, editability, and …

The last panel for today at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on cross-platform news exposure, and starts with Michael Bossetta, who introduces the Scroll Intercept project. This is a low-cost and reliable way to collect social media, which is necessary given the growing challenges with gathering social media data. Surveys have a recall bias; experiments cannot replicate personalised feeds; digital trace data as well as data donations are great but complicated.

So, instead, this project builds on the old-fashioned method of street intercepts, but actually asks people to open up their phones and show what’s in their social …

And the final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Floriane van Alphen. She begins by pointing out the challenges for climate journalism: by some accounts, news media do not do enough to alert audiences to the challenge of climate change; by others, they are complicit in confusing their audiences about how to address it. Nonetheless, climate journalists remain relatively well trusted, compared to other journalists, even in spite of the flood of climate mis- and disinformation that floods this space.

The challenge with addressing any of this is that it may be renegotiating the …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Quirin Ryffel, whose interest is in the impact of argument exposure on polarisation. Affective polarisation between two opinion groups based on issue-specific positions is in part driven by a horizontal dislike between those groups; individuals in one group perceive other groups to be different from them, and this can generate out-group animosity as well as increase in-group favouritism.

Wheat happens when these groups encounter each other’s arguments, then? Intercrop contact theory suggests that groups might lead to a recognition of commonalities and a reduction of fear …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Niels Mede, whose interest is in public trust in climate scientists; his paper builds on data from a global survey on trust in science, including climate science. Overall, trust in science is actually quite solid, but is also turning increasingly polarised in parts of the population; climate science is a particular battlefield here.

What people, and what publics, are divided about climate science, then? Divisions largely follow partisan ideological lines; elite cues and identity sustain that divide, and fuel this division. Trust in climate scientists is …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins, whose focus is on evidence use in polarised climate reporting. Climate news is highly polarised, and this mirrors broader polarisation in the news landscape. However, such polarisation is not always a problem – agitation for progress is entirely legitimate, for instance, and diverging views are a natural part of healthy political debate. However, this can turn to destructive polarisation.

The analysis of news polarisation is often focussed on polarisation amongst news audiences; the assessment of news content for evidence of polarisation …

The next panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on polarisation around climate change, and starts with my colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski. She begins by outlining recent developments in climate policy in Australia, and especially the discussions and disinformation about net zero policy, renewable energies, and the role of nuclear power in the energy mix.

Carly engaged in an LLM-assisted discourse analysis of submissions to the Australian federal parliament’s recent inquiry into nuclear power; she worked with the Claude LLM to code the submitters and their stances, the claims about nuclear and other energy sources being made, and the …

The final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Cristina Monzer, with a comparison of TikTok aesthetics in political videos between Norway and Romania. The first question, of course, is how we might do this, in practice – there are many new computational tools emerging for this now, but most of these also remain untested to date.

The use of TikTok for political communication is characterised by personalisation, a focus on everydayness, and uneven patterns between politicians of different genders. Politicians must use visual cues in such videos as identity markers that signal alignment with …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Nico Spreen, whose focus is on the use of TikTok by populist parties in Germany during the 2025 federal election. TikTok may be expected to be especially valuable as a campaigning tool for populist parties, given its personalised, emotionalised, and algorithmically amplified content processes. Also, both the left-wing Linke and far-right AfD are especially popular with voters under 25, so there is substantial overlap between their voter bases and the TikTok userbase.

What shape does their populist communication take, then? Such communication usually employs people-centrism, anti-elitism, and an exclusion …