Polarisation

Up next in this Weizenbaum Conference session are Sabine Barthold and Richard Joos, whose interest is in fighting dark participation through digital vigilantism. Dark participation is a growing threat to online communities; it undermines functioning online communities and turns them into toxic and dysfunctional spaces, for political reasons. Such attacks are often orchestrated amongst large groups of actors.

Traditional counter-strategies are platform governance, but its effectiveness is strictly limited; and societal responses, but these often fail due to limited resources and understanding amongst law enforcement organisations. Instead, a further option may be to employ DIY defence approaches and swarming techniques …

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Victoria Vziatysheva; she begins by noting that pre-existing beliefs affect what information we engage with – this is selective exposure. But studies have also shown that the use of search engines can reduce selective exposure; whether this is the case also depends on the way search queries are formulated in the first place, however.

Victoria’s project explored this in the context of a Swiss referendum on a responsible economy within the planet’s limits (which was ultimately rejected); this connected voting intentions on this referendum with search queries that reflected attitudes for …