Politics

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Yingdan Lu, whose focus is on the impacts of social media algorithms on the curation of state-created content in China. Authoritarian governments are of course increasingly leveraging algorithmic systems for their digital propaganda; this both censors critical information, promotes pro-regime materials, and floods social media spaces with politically irrelevant content in order to make critical content less easy to find.

The focus here is on recommendation algorithms, and explores algorithmic promotional curation processes which systematically amplify state-created content. In China, social media platforms …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jin Wan, whose interest is in how political efficacy conditions clicks on political content in algorithmic feeds. Political efficacy here means people’s belief in themselves within the political world: this includes internal efficacy (confidence to participate in politics) as well as external efficacy (confidence in the responsiveness of the political system).

How do people with different levels of such efficacy differ in their information selection approaches in algorithmic environments, then? Do they seek a different proportion of political content; do they seek different …

I missed the first speaker in the next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, so we’re straight on to a paper by the brilliant Fabio Giglietto, whose focus is on partisan alignment, journalistic quality, and algorithmic amplification on Facebook. How do URLs that are shared the same number of times on Facebook reach audiences of vastly different sizes?

This study explores the impact of partisanship and quality on amplification and reach on Facebook, and also takes into account shifts in Facebook’s algorithmic governance design over the years. The structure of Facebook’s social networks is relatively …

And the final presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Eva-Maria Vogel, who begins by noting the significant deficit in political influencer support which had been identified for the US Democrats ahead of the 2024 presidential election; they actively sought to attract more influencers to their cause ahead of the election in order to combat the impact of Republican influencers.

Why do audiences believe political influencers, though? Audience perceptions of expertise, trustworthiness, and benevolence may all play a significant role here; perceived politician authenticity is also critical, of course, and may manifest …

The next presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Siyu Zhang, whose focus is on political livestreaming. Such livestreams typically consist of the live video itself, alongside a live chat feed; some platforms also provide ‘super chat’ message functionalities which receive greater visibility and may also be picked up by the influencer themselves during the livestream.

Influencers themselves may signal their political identity through visible paraphernalia, express identity through their background settings, show relevant recent chat messages, and call for donations. Such monetary participation by audiences captures a behaviour that other metrics …

The third presenter in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Nuppu Pelevina, whose focus is on the democratic participation of social media influencers in Nordic countries. The focus here is on commercial lifestyle influencers who go political; these may have impact on their often young followers’ political views, and possibly also increase their political and democratic participation; they may increase awareness of political issues, but also cynicism towards formal politics.

Such influencers may not directly seek to influence their followers’ political views, but may shape it towards the imagined interests and positions of …

The next speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Martin Riedl, whose interest is in the ethics of disclosure by political influencers, with particular focus on the United States. Here, regulations for influencers are highly idiosyncratic; influencers do play a substantial role as a pathway towards news, especially for younger users, and are seen as helping to unpack current political issues.

Political influencers are defined here very broadly, and include influencers driven both by personal, political, and monetary motivations. Such influencers are sometimes also directly supported by political lobby and funding groups, and this is …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on influencers and politics, and starts with a paper by Christian Pipal. Influencers are of course often also political communicators now, and especially reach young audiences who do not follow the mainstream news; usually non-political influencers are especially influential when they post political content, in fact.

But we still don’t know nearly enough about the vast bulk of influencers, especially at the micro- and nano-level of influence activity. It is also important to do more work on how such content travels, and how audiences engage with …

The final speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Rodrigo Seroubian and Belén Sosa, whose focus is on Uruguay. In particular, they focus on the subnational level: while Uruguay’s democracy is strong at the national level, below that level there are certain problematic dynamics, and this impacts on the capacity of citizens to form critical opinions.

This focusses on self-censorship as the voluntary withholding of information by journalists, but not as the result of violence, threats, or harassment, but through invisible omissions. Such self-censorship is not spontaneous: it reflects certain structural issues …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Uygar Altinok, whose interest is in online news consumption in Turkey. What happens to informed citizenship under a condition of authoritarian repression as it exists here, where participation is risky, surveillance is perceived to be ever-present, and institutional trust is low?

Turkey has high levels of social media usage, but also substantial digital surveillance and repression; its media and political environment is highly polarised. Information engagement here involves strategic participation or strategic silence, and it is unclear whether informational conditions still mobilise participation …