Politics

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Maria Grub, whose interest is in susceptibility to pro-Kremlin rhetoric. Her focus is on populist politics in eastern Germany, where the neofascist AfD is now one of the most popular parties across several federal states; this is related at least in part to these states’ current economic issues.

There is a strong sense of political neglect and injustice amongst populations in these states, which leads to more populist voting; but this also affects positions on a broader range of issues. Such issues also …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Danny Yihan Jia, whose focus is on the global crisis in electoral legitimacy. The US is an obvious example here, with some 60 lawsuits relating to supposed electoral irregularities filed by Donald Trump after the 2020 election alone (all failed, of course); similar developments have taken place in Brazil, Kenya, and many other countries, and the ‘rigged election’ narratives are often translated from one country to another even though they lack any evidence.

Some of this can be credited to a ‘sore loser’ …

The next session I’m attending at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Simon Kruschinski, whose focus is on political microtargeting in election advertising. This is now a growing practice in elections around the world, and the perception of such ads by their targets depends on the congruence between advertising approaches and the sociodemographics of target groups.

But we are still missing rich qualitative data on the situational perception and evaluation of such ads by users in a realistic social media setting. The present study explored this through a think-aloud protocol study with …

The final speaker ion this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jana Peters, whose paper compares opinion poll predictions related to the unexpected 2025 German federal election with predictions generated by ChatGPT. How reliable are AI-generated election polls?

This relates to concerns about the role of horse-race journalism coverage in shaping public opinion during election campaigns, as citizens’ encounters of such polls might lead them to shape their own voting intentions accordingly (variously through bandwagon or underdog effects, for instance). And election polls are themselves not necessarily reliable, although citizens tend to trust these …

And the next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Hal Xu, whose interest is in the Democratic governance of artificial intelligence. To what extent do citizens participate in this process? Participatory governance is critical here, but there are few pathways towards this, and in countries like the US, citizen trust in government institutions is very low to begin with, further discouraging such participation.

There are two key structural asymmetries here: information asymmetry between AI providers and users; and power asymmetry between corporations, governments, and other elites on the one hand, and …

The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on AI and politics, and starts with a paper by Bohan Zhang and colleagues on AI-generate disinformation in the 2024 US presidential election. This election has been described as one of the first where AI content played a significant role; this included counterfeit AI video and audio on social media platforms.

Such content taps on existing political cynicism: this may both make some people more resistant to AI content due to their overall rejection of political propaganda, but also lead to others embracing AI content as …

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Baoning Gong, whose focus is on challenges to conventional journalism from the far right. Within hybrid media systems, such alternative media, including influencers, emerge as epistemic authorities in their own right. How do such actors position themselves in the hybrid media field?

This study distinguished right-wing news outlets, influencers, and anonymous Telegram channels as three groups of such actors, and examined their practices. How do they define what journalism is and should be; how do they reference legacy media; how …

The next speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Pascal Schneiders and Andreas Riedl, whose interest is in diversity-oriented news recommender systems. Such ‘responsible’ recommender systems are being promoted as algorithmic solutions to ensuring that users receive a diverse diet of news content; they might pick up on popularity, content, and collaboratively created cues.

The aim here is to nudge audiences towards certain content, breaking through their ideologically shaped, one-sided news exposure and resulting in more diverse news consumption. Attitudes towards such systems depend on technological optimism, feelings of information overload, and …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the fabulous Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam, whose focus is on the salience and contexts of racist language as it is reported in German news media. Such racist language is not limited to offensive terms only, but also includes terms that are related to racism through their meanings and origins, including slurs, metaphors, compound words, adjectives, and coded language.

News media (understood broadly here, thus also including alternative ‘news’ media) can reproduce, legitimise, or challenge such narratives; this depends on their political orientation and journalistic traditions …

The second speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are the fabulous Annett Heft and Kilian Bühling; their focus is on the coverage of conspiracy theories in far-right US media. Such media are anti-establishment, have a transgressive reporting style, and are overtly ideological and biased; they are frequently linked to the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories. In this, they also serve as bridging actors towards broader audiences.

The present study compares the coverage of conspiracy theories in legacy and far-right hyperpartisan media. It assumes that such content appears earlier in far-right media …