Social Media

The next speakers at the Bots Building Bridges project workshop are Zlata Kikteva and Arthur Romazanov, representing the DeLab (or Deliberation Laboratory) team at the University of Passau. Their team has developed a bot to take on moderation tasks.

This builds on research by members of the team on how humans moderate online discussions, which has explored key moderation strategies – soft moderation such as probing for elaborations, tone policing, social norm policing, agenda control, fact-checking, inviting experts top contribute; as well as hard moderation such as removing content and users from the discussion.

But can we delegate such moderation …

The final session of the Bots Building Bridges workshop project in Bielefeld starts with Gabriella Lapesa and Julia Romberg, whose focus is on e-deliberation as a digitally augmented version of direct democracy. This is said to have huge potential, but as yet does not scale up effectively: quality declines as scale increases. One solution to this is moderation, but human moderation is time-consuming and therefore costly.

Moderators must first decide whether an action must be taken to intervene in the discussion, and if so what type of intervention – policing, quality control, fact-checking, mediation, new idea introductions, summarisation – should …

The last speakers in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session are Felix Gumbert and Rob Ackland. Felix starts by outlining three hypothesis about political talk on social media: first, social media might provide a space for productive deliberation; second, social media might serve as a hostile environment where constructive deliberation is impossible; and third, social media might create isolated communication environments (‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’) were people with different views no longer even encounter each other.

Empirical research on these possibilities tend to employ a classical sender-receiver model of communication, and utilise fairly simplistic datasets of online communication (e.g. hashtag …

I’m the second speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld, presenting our work on destructive polarisation and the practice mapping approach as a method to identify its symptoms. Here are the slides, and more information about the practice mapping approach is available in our recent article in Social Media + Society. I’ve also provided an introduction to the approach in this blog post from a few weeks ago.

The second day at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld starts with Dennis Frieß, whose interest is in AI and deliberation. He notes the importance of online publics for deliberation; however, they often do not live up to the ideal norms of deliberation, due to a lack of equality, rationality, and reciprocity as well as problems with incivility.

There have been various attempts to counter this, through law enforcement, moderation, civil society initiatives, and other means; most recently, there is considerable interest in using artificial intelligence to support high-quality, deliberative online discussions.

What problems are there …

The final speaker at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project for today is Florian Muhle, who begins by highlighting the transformation of social media bot detection approaches to take into account a much more complicated and hybrid environment.

Bot detection was already very difficult, and is no universal solution: human users also engage in inauthentic content amplification, for various commercial, political, and other reasons. It is therefore more useful to focus on the effects of such artificial amplification: and here, a continuing focus on single platforms is no longer useful since many such amplification efforts aim at dispersing …

The next speakers in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session are Ozgur Can Seckin and Bao Truong, who begin by outlining the issue of political polarisation – especially in the United States. They distinguish between polarisation on specific issues on the one hand, and affective polarisation between the partisans supporting various political groups on the other; this latter form of polarisation is therefore a problem of in-group and out-group exposure and engagement.

Some approaches have sought to address this by increasing exposure to out-group content and perspectives; some have attempted to encourage people to imagine the views of the other …

The workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld continues with a final session for today, which starts with Christian Grimme. His focus is on the role of AI in creating as well as fighting artificial communication. Artificial agents – bots – are not new, of course: there were email bots, Twitter bots, and there are many other forms of social bots, which are now also increasingly integrated with and driven by Large Language Models. There are also prosocial bots which are used to counter more problematic bots.

Automation can mean various things, though. Closed-loop systems use feedback mechanisms …

The post-lunch session at the Bots Building Bridges workshop starts with Lars Rinsdorf, whose focus is on regaining the initiative in defending pluralistic society. Pluralistic democracy is built on diversity and inclusion, and seeks to empower all citizens to participate in societal processes and structures; but this also implies an intense debate on the challenges and frictions of diverse society.

Such processes are threatened by societal polarisation and disintegration; these undermine trust in societal institutions, and lead to dysfunctional public debate and the rise of counter-knowledge orders. How can we push back against such disinformation, and enhance the resilience of …