Politics

The next speaker in this high-density session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Sujin Yoon, whose focus is on group polarisation. Her particular interest is in opinion and structural convergence, and she begins by noting the limitations of studying such convergence in experimental settings; work with observational data is required here, therefore.

Group polarisation means a convergence of groups towards their dominant views; this also conditions Intra-group and inter-group interactions. Emotional factors such as anger and pride can affect this.

The present study examines this for the r/conservative and r/democrats subreddits, over six months in …

The next paper in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is presented on behalf of Chao Wu and Michelle Seelig, and focusses on public discussions of the COP21 (2016) and COP25 (2020) climate conferences on Reddit, with a particular focus on climate-contrarian comments.

Climate-contrarian claims were identified through the CARDS framework and its claims classifiers; this sorts claims into five broad categories of typical climate change-denialist rhetoric. The project then also conducted topic modelling, and clustered topics by their affinity with each other. This showed clear distinctions between the two events, with more issued-centred …

As I wrap up my Mercator Fellowship at ZeMKI in Bremen, I’ve made a side trip to the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, which starts for me with a session on the application of network analysis to polarised contexts. We start with Shengyi Gao, whose interest is in group polarisation. She notes the growing fragmentation of social media environments, which creates structural holes in such networks; some users are ‘structural hole spanners’, however, who bridge such gaps by their activities.

The focus here is on Weibo, and the network is constructed from post forwarding activities; the posts …

The final speaker in this session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Susmita Gangopadhyay, presenting a project that has engaged in a continuous crawl of Telegram’s public channels. Telegram is a platform that has grown substantially in recent years, with some 950 million users.

The platform has an API which can be used to gather data from the platform, and this tends to focus on groups (which are many-to-many, may be public or private, and have distinct administrators) and channels (which are one-to-many only, with named administrators). Otherwise there are some functional similarities between …

And the next session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library starts with Ofra Klein, who will outline the challenges of studying far-right mobilisation in spite of the constraints of social media data access regimes. The far right use social media very extensively to promote their propaganda, and this can lead to physical demonstrations, riots, and violence; as and when this happens, social media posts and accounts are then often removed by the perpetrators of the platforms, complicating any meaningful research.

In addition, the number of platforms used for far-right agitation have diversified substantially; in addition …

Day Two at the Social Media Access Days in Frankfurt starts with my keynote, taking stock of how we access and engage with social media data nearly ten years after the drastic changes to many platforms' data access regimes following the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. Back then, I wrote an article for Information, Communication & Society about the APIcalypse; how have things developed since then?

Here are my slides from the talk: