My Books

   

In Collections

Blogs

Alignment of Polarised Structures in Trending Topic Discussions in the German Twittersphere

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Eckehard Olbrich, whose focus is on the evidence for polarisation in the German Twittersphere. This seeks to evaluate the claims about the role of social media as a driver of polarisation, and to address the negative impacts of such polarisation if such polarisation is indeed present. Polarisation might exist at issue, ideological, or affective levels, and these levels also intersect with each other, of course.

Conceptualising Digital Intermediaries on Digital Platforms

The final panel at this excellent Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Jakob Ohme, whose focus is on digital intermediaries in knowledge processes on digital platforms. Such platforms lead to context collapse, a levelling of epistemically hierarchies, and a disintegration of formerly fixed sequences in the knowledge process; through this, for instance, journalism has lost its gatekeeping function and information monopoly, actors have switched roles in the information process, and the amount of unverified information that is circulating has increased substantially.

From an Isolation to a Conflict Paradigm for Understanding Polarisation in Social Media Spaces

Day two at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium begins with the great Petter Törnberg, who begins with a brief review of the changing understanding of the public sphere. With the arrival of the Web and (later) social media, there was early optimism about a new democratic renaissance – an opportunity for more inclusive and diverse public debate after the mass mediatisation of public debate through commercial print and broadcast media.

Analysing the Visuals Shared by the Different Sides of a Polarised Conflict

The final speaker on this first day of the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the great Luca Rossi, presenting some of the outcomes of the PolarVis project to map online debate around climate change from a visual perspective.

Silicon Sampling: Using LLMs to Simulate Social Media Conversations

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is Ethan Busby, zooming in from Utah. His focus is especially on the use of Large Language Models in research, and current research focusses especially on the analysis of conversations in social media spaces, and the potential for automated tools to interact with such conversations.

How Is Scientific Work Referenced in YouTube Videos?

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with the wonderful Katrin Weller, who begins by noting that her institution, GESIS, is now also launching DP-REX, the Data Portal for Racism and Right-Wing Extremism Research. But her talk is actually about assessing the impact of scientific impact through altmetric scores, with a particular focus on the engagement with scientific content that takes place in YouTube videos. The project uses data from Altmetric.com, who identified links to scientific articles in the descriptions of YouTube videos between 2006 and 2017.

Making Sense of the Intersections between Alternative News and Conspiracy Theories

The afternoon at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium in Hamburg starts with the excellent Lena Frischlich, who shifts our focus to the question of conspiracy theories as they circulate in transnational counterpublic spheres. The digital environment provides many opportunities for new political movements, and many of them are positive in nature, but there are also many opportunities for what Thorsten Quandt has described as ‘dark participation’.

Approaches to Disinformation Detection amongst German Elite Journalism and Business Professionals

The third speaker in this Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium session is Christian Stöcker, whose interest is in Germans’ perceptions of disinformation. Germans generally see disinformation as a threat to democracy, and are concerned about their own ability to detect disinformation when they come across it. But how do German business and journalism elites detect and verify such online disinformation?

What Drives Online Searches for German Politicians and Parties

The next speaker at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium is the great Cornelius Puschmann, presenting work from the excellent POLTRACK project on polarisation and individualised online information environments, which has been conducting a longitudinal panel study as well as tracking participants’ online activities in Germany over a period of 20 months since March 2023.

Polarised Debates about Climate Protests in German News and Social Media

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with a presentation by Hendrik Meyer, whose focus is on polarised debates around climate protests by groups like Letzte Generation or Extinction Rebellion. Such debates do not take place in a vacuum, however, but are informed and framed by media reporting. Is such reporting polarising these debates? What might this polarisation lead to?

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - blogs