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The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is Felipe Mano, whose focus is on the regulation of digital platform work in the context of the UN’s Agenda 2030. The Agenda provides ethical guidelines for digital platform work; such work might be addressed by formal legal regulation, direct government intervention, soft regulation through agreements between public and private entities, and transnational regulation, and the focus here is on legal regulation.

Felipe’s study explored digital platform work by examining types of work platforms, their materialities, actors and stakeholders, and business models; the latter can be analysed by exploring their financialisation frameworks, data …

The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is the great Jessica Walter, presenting a large data donation study involving YouTube users in Denmark. Such data donations are increasingly prominent in light of the decline of social media data APIs; they are enabled in Europe also by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which enables users to claim a copy of their digital data from the platforms they engage with.

These data packages can then be donated to researchers, and provide considerable detail about user activities and experiences on such platforms; the insights they provide are also skewed somewhat by …

The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is Valentin Ihßen, whose focus is on the use of metrics in digital political campaigning. The focus here is especially on digital advocacy organisations’ campaigns, which exist in various national settings from democracies to autocracies. Such organisations use the digital media toolkit for online and offline campaigns, and draw centrally on digital data and metrics to determine whether and how they should pursue their campaigns.

At the backstage of these campaigns there are some fairly sophisticated metrics dashboards, therefore – these include opening and click-through rates for campaign mail-outs, for instance, and such …

The first speaker on the second day of the Weizenbaum Conference is Victo Silva, whose focus is on the idea of digital public infrastructure (DPI). How should states intervene in the digital economy, if at all? States might provide alternatives to Big Tech options, and such alternatives could then also adopt open technology standards and support innovation; this might produce public benefits.

Three main systems are widely seen as comprising the core of DPI: digital identity systems, payment and financial infrastructures, and data sharing platforms; however, other platforms (including social media) might also be considered. Such DPI platforms, it is …

The final speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Gözde Söğütlü, whose interest is in the role of social media in peacebuilding, focussing here especially on Nigeria. Social media can be an important source of information, and promote dialogue; this can contribute to reconciliation, build bridges, enhance civil society, and build peace.

This can happen across diverse social media platforms, but also depends on the specific affordances of such platforms; such platforms can motivate action to promote peace. Social media use in Nigeria has grown substantially over time, especially amongst young people; social media have been used to facilitate engagement …

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Yannick Fernholz, whose focus is on smart cities. Urban environments are being rapidly digitalised, and this also results in massive data collection; such smart cities promise increased efficiency, quality of life, security, and sustainability, but also result in a techno-deterministic top-down governance of citizens and the exclusion of non-digital populations rather than true engagement. What is missing is ethically grounded technology design.

What human values should be translated into the design principles for smart city technologies, then? What do the different stakeholder groups think, and how do their values conflict with …

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 Alexander Wilke, whose interest is in motivating users to care about their online security. Younger users – so-called ‘digital natives’ – often fall victim to cybercrime; they have low risk awareness, and lack fundamental knowledge about protecting themselves online.

Some studies show promising results from dedicated training in phishing detection, and gamified and interactive training models; but much more work needs to be done to understand effective means of delivering training and motivating users to protect themselves more actively. Protection motivation theory can help here: it shows that both the perception …

The final session on day one of the Weizenbaum Conference starts with a second paper by Victoria Vziatysheva, whose focus here is on how users perceive search engine bias. Search engines are amongst the most critical elements of Internet infrastructure, but are sometimes criticised for supposed biases in their results; this may affect how users engage with them.

Users tend to trust algorithmic systems more when they are perceived to be fair, and such trust is also affected by users’ knowledge about these systems: users with limited knowledge tend to be more trusting. Search engine users tend to have folk …

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 …