Congratulations to @danielwiesner.bsky.social on getting the Top Student Paper Award from the @polcomm.bsky.social at #ICA2026 🥳🥳 we couldn’t be prouder!

#ICA2026 has come and gone with amazing presentations from our team members and valuable discussions with colleagues from around the world. From content moderation to science communication and censorship, we are proud to share our work with this community and can’t wait to see what’s next! 🥳

🌍 POLCOM is heading to Cape Town for #ICA2026! Our team will present new research from content moderation to misinformation, science communication and political communication. Hope to see you there! Full schedule here: polcom.univie.ac.at/news/news-de...

Last week, PhD candidate Lena Pohlmann presented her topic "Towards Sustainable AI" at the #CHI-26 workshop, which brought together researchers to map the grand challenges and opportunities at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and #AI #sustainability. 👏✨ #DigitalHumanities

📄🥳 New #OA paper by Melanie Haberl, @dominikhokamp.bsky.social, Marína Urbániková, Lenka Císařová, Folker Hanusch & @solecheler.bsky.social discuss "emotional communities" as an integrated lens to analyze the journalism–politics fields & explore new research avenues: 🔗 doi.org/10.1177/1464...

📄📣 New study from PhD candidate @clmron.bsky.social co-authored by @solecheler.bsky.social & POLCOM alumnae Dr. Jana Laura Egelhofer studied how scientists understand & communicate uncertainty about their research through 28 interviews in 🇦🇹. The #OA paper is avaialble w/ @natureportfolio.nature.com.

📣📄 A new #OA study by @hosseinkermani.bsky.social investigates how Iranian Telegram channels coordinated messaging during the 12 day Israel–Iran war, showing how infrastructural and leisure-oriented channels are incorporated into wartime influence operations. 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/1933...

📄 📣 New #Data-DrivenCampaigning research led by @xiaotongchu.bsky.social w/ contributions from @solecheler.bsky.social & co-authors reviews evidence on effects and outlines a research agenda on message tailoring, voter awareness, cross-national contexts and more. 🔗 academic.oup.com/anncom/advan...

📄📣 A new study led by @hosseinkermani.bsky.social analyzed 36,255 Persian tweets from the Women, Life, Freedom movement. It found pro-regime users were the most uncivil, while anti-regime incivility functioned as resistance—driven mainly by ideology, not identity. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@hosseinkermani.bsky.social took part in the #LunchtalksSommersemester2026 at the #ParisLodronUniversitätSalzburg about how authoritarian regimes such as in Iran use incivility and false information to suppress online democratic movements. More on the talks here: lnkd.in/ejuyE255 👏📣

📄 📣 @hosseinkermani.bsky.social co-authored a new study in #TheCommunicationReview that analyzed over 78K Farsi tweets after the death of Mahsa Amini to map anti-regime, reformist, and pro-regime dynamics on #Twitter. Read here 🔗 www-tandfonline-com.uaccess.univie.ac.at/doi/full/10....

👏 Shout-out to Lena Pohlmann-PhD in the Vienna Doctoral College on #DigitalHumanism-for her insights at the #CEU debate series “AI vs. Planet: Peril or Opportunity?” tackling how AI shapes planetary futures and sustainability from a humanistic lens. #AI #Planet #DigitalHumanism #CEU

See the 📚Launch: "Twitter Activism in Iran" at #ECPR! Exploring how Iranians use Twitter under restrictions to mobilize, shape discourse & challenge authoritarians. 🗓 13 Feb 2026, 09:00 GMT Presenter: Dr. @hosseinkermani.bsky.social Discussant: Dr. Gi Yeon Koo #SocialMedia #Iran #PoliticalScience

#IPKW welcomed ~80 guests for the alumni #ScienceSlam on “The Future of Truth–How Fact-Checking Must Change in the Age of #AI, #Deepfakes and Social Media.” Great contributions by @gngeorgarakis.bsky.social, Claudia Wilhelm @jamoeberl.bsky.social and more! Looking forward to another event soon!👏🔬

We at the POLCOM team wish you a happy, successful and fulfilling new year! We look forward to new opportunities, growth, exchange, and meaningful collaborations in 2026! ✨ 🥳 ✨

📊 A new @jmcquarterly.bsky.social study by @teresaelena.bsky.social, @jlegelhofer.bsky.social and @solecheler.bsky.social compared how deepfakes, cheapfakes, and decontextualized videos influence perceptions, finding distinct effects. Read the full #OA paper: doi.org/10.1177/1077...

Congratulations to Dr. @andreawiesner.bsky.social, who successfully defended her PhD thesis, “Drawing Lines in Gray Areas: Toward Feasible, Accepted, and Effective Content Moderation” supervised by Professor @solecheler.bsky.social and Assistant Professor Svenja Schäfer. 🤩🥳 Congrats, Dr. Wiesner!

New publication out in #IJPP! 📑 We study how audience expectations of journalism 📰 shifted during COVID-19 in Austria 🇦🇹 – showing both short-term rally effects & longer-term recalibration 🔄. Led by @clmron.bsky.social & @danielwiesner.bsky.social , w/ @andreasriedl.bsky.social & me. 1/n

ONLINE FIRST! This article by Dominika Betakova et al. uses a comparative online experiment to test whether nudges could help with #news avoidance. Available with OPEN ACCESS. ➡️ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

1/ I’m thrilled (and a little proud 🤗) to share my first single-authored publication! It’s now out open access in Information, Communication & Society: 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/1369...

🚫📰 Can we use nudges to mitigate news avoidance? Yes and no — it depends on what nudges we use! Together with @hajoboo.bsky.social & @solecheler.bsky.social I wanted to test whether nudges can reduce news avoidance as limited news consumption—and to do so beyond established Western democracies. 🧵👇

📣👀Early-Career Researchers @ ECREAs PolComm Section Conference 2025! A few last-minute spots for the ‪@yecrea.bsky.social‬ pre-conference workshop just opened. Want to join a great lineup of speakers on early-career profile building, network development, and transience? Just drop us a message! 🙂

🚨📝 New publication: Svenja Schäfer w/ Lea Gorski and PolCom members @hannahgreber.bsky.social + @solecheler.bsky.social explored whether solutions are effective in sustainability communication and examined the attribution of responsibility through an experiment. 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/1751...

Today @ #ViennaChildren'sUniversity 🧒 How can YOU stay safe on social media? 🤔 Our @solecheler.bsky.social & @amplanitzer.bsky.social, with @julianeidhardt.bsky.social & @allanhanbury.bsky.social, explored counter speech 🗣️ & algorithmic moderation 🤖 via roleplay, annotation games & a kindness wall 💛

@ipk-univie.bsky.social is wrapping up #ica25 in Denver! From awards to withdrawn presentations, we‘ve had it all this year. Sending warm greetings & thoughts to all colleagues who could not participate 🫶✨

Thanks #ICA25 for a great panel on Science in Political Contexts. It was a pleasure to present our latest findings to such an engaged and insightful audience. w/ @jamoeberl.bsky.social & @solecheler.bsky.social

Another windowless room (but this time way bigger) in which I got to present first preliminary findings on how strategic politicians can *actually* be about their emotions in election campaigns 📷 @amplanitzer.bsky.social

What are the content-level characteristics of selectively avoided news? 🤔 @dbetakova.bsky.social presenting her impressive two-study research using computational text analysis and baysian modelling /w @solecheler.bsky.social & @hajoboo.bsky.social at an engaging #ICA25 panel on news avoidance 👏

What kinds of content do users themselves want to see moderated on platforms? 👀 Surprisingly, it's less about the incivility of language and more about authorial intention, target vulnerability and platform affordances /w @solecheler.bsky.social, @pia-p.bsky.social & Svenja Schäfer 🙂 #ICA25 #PolComm

📰 Empathy in journalism - meant to connect us, but can it also divide? @hannahgreber.bsky.social presents findings on the unintended side-effects of empathy-driven journalism at #ICA25 w/ @jesperstromback.bsky.social & @solecheler.bsky.social 👏

@polcomvienna.bsky.social at the #ica25, come see our presentations!

I will be presenting first findings on how Austrian politicians are building their emotional capital to meet the increasing need for personalisation and emotionalisation on Monday at 12 noon ✨ But also come and see all the other inspiring research findings from our team 💫

YES! Come see me presenting our paper “The shadow side of empathy? Eliciting empathy in journalism and its (potentially) unintended side-effects on polarization”- w. @solecheler.bsky.social & @jesperstromback.bsky.social Sunday, 13:30, Mineral G #ica25

Presenting in the coziest corner of #ICA25 including a weird neck tilt to see the screen ✅ w/ the one and only @andiisto.bsky.social, co-authored with @solecheler.bsky.social & Svenja Schäfer. Come watch me do that move again! 📅 Monday, 10:30 📍 Mineral G (again) 🗣️ „Science on the Political Stage“

I won something at #ica25 🥹❤️

Welcome to the ICA conference!

Our team showed up strong for the #PolcommPreconference25 🥳 @dominikhokamp.bsky.social shared his work on emotional ties of journalists & politicians, @amplanitzer.bsky.social presented her work on personalised algorithmic platform moderation and @solecheler.bsky.social was a discussant & panelists👏

These are the participants of the #PoliticalCommunicationPreconference25. It was an amazing day, full of interesting insights and great research. Although it's hard to say goodbye to a great day, #ICA25 is now officially starting! Let's enjoy the conference together! ❤️

📣 POLCOM Vienna @ #ICA25 Happy to see eight of our team members at ICA in Denver, CO this week - mentoring and sharing their latest research 🙂 Come say 👋 if you are around!

So proud of former PhD candidates at @polcomvienna.bsky.social , @hannahgreber.bsky.social and @teresaelena.bsky.social, who won the dissertation award of the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences this year! Absolute 🌟🌟!

At #DigHum2025 conference this week in Vienna's MuseumsQuartier🌞 and excited to kick off Day 2 themed around AI, platforms & power! Happy to also contribute by discussing our ongoing project on algorithmic content moderation /w @pia-p.bsky.social @solecheler.bsky.social @julianeidhardt.bsky.social 🙂

It was a pleasure having you with us in Vienna, @academiuhhh.bsky.social! Thank you for the fantastic presentation 🤩🗣️ and best of luck to the entire INEQNEWS team 🗞️ with all your projects 🍀 We're happy to host you anytime!

Thrilled to share that I've started a new position as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Journalism at the SDU! 🥳🇩🇰 Together with Morten Skovsgaard & @kimandersen.bsky.social we'll test the effects of solutions-oriented journalism 🌱 📰 on various behavioral outcomes (so stay tuned 🧠 🧪 !)

Submitted my dissertation two weeks ago 🎉 and I could not be more grateful for my amazing supervisors, @solecheler.bsky.social & @hajoboo.bsky.social, and two wonderful teams @compcommlab.bsky.social & @polcomvienna.bsky.social, of which I was a proud member for the last four years 💪🏼

Even though COMPTEXT2025 closed last weekend, its spirit will live on in the splendid photography of our dedicated group of colleagues from the University of Vienna: @jamoeberl.bsky.social, @amplanitzer.bsky.social, @apeksha.bsky.social! We thank and appreciate their work!

Absolutely fascinating and packed panel on enhancing and (critically) evaluating LLM performance at #COMPTEXT2025 this morning. w/ great work by @zacdgreene.bsky.social, Laura Liebig, Lukas Erhardt, and @christianpipal.bsky.social. Excellently chaired by @amplanitzer.bsky.social! 👏

Happening now at #COMPTEXT2025 in a fantastic panel on "Advances in Misinformation, Toxicity & Hate Speech Detection" 👏 @pia-p.bsky.social presenting our latest work on how a more Perspectivist approach to NLP for algorithmic moderation could account for users’ differing views on what is harmful 🤔

📣 PolCom Vienna @ #COMPTEXT2025 Happy to see six of our team members at COMPTEXT this week - organizing, chairing, and sharing their latest research on text-, image-, and video-as-data. Come say 👋 if you are around! 🙂

Congrats to our @andiisto.bsky.social on winning the Top-Student-Paper Award of the Communication & Technology Division of ICA for her second dissertation paper on user preferences for moderating incivility and misinformation! 🎉

Wie kann man einen öffentlichen Diskurs schaffen, der unserer Demokratie nicht schadet? Eine große Frage, die @polcomvienna.bsky.social an der @univie.ac.at motiviert, und die wir hoffentlich auch in den kommenden Jahren noch erforschen dürfen. #IchForscheGernInWien #TopForschungWien #Wien