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The next speaker at the Bots Building Bridges workshop is Mathieu O’Neil; Mathieu begins by highlighting the challenge of information overload and is connection of mis- and disinformation. Media and information literacy are key tools for enabling people to better manage such information overload, and there are number of opportunities here.

These might preemptively build competencies for the longer or shorter term, provide better context for information, or react to the circulation of disinformation through debunking and fact-checking. Key here is also the development of better discernment abilities, enabling people to identify when they need further information; once this need …

The next speaker in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session is Ana Sofia Cardenal, who has recently finished a project on pathways to misinformation that built on Web tracking data. The results of this work also inform a new project which constructs simulated environments for online discussions in order to explore how different discursive settings affect the dynamics of such discussions.

The earlier project addressed the substantial problem of mis- and disinformation, across digital and social media environments and beyond. It showed that visits to fringe and problematic information sources are actually fairly rare, even though many people hold at …

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 …

It’s a Wednesday in Germany, and I’m in Bielefeld for a workshop of the Bots Building Bridges (3B) project. We start with an overview of the project’s activities to date, with Florian Muhle, Ole Pütz, Rob Ackland, and Matthias Orlikowski. The project focusses on online political discourse, and the dysfunctions in such discourse that are apparent in social media environments. This also addresses the questions of ‘echo chambers’, of polarisation, and of impacts on democratic discourse. Social media are not solely to blame for this: it may also be possible to support productive political discourse through social media, given the …

The final speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Marko Skoric, who begins by drawing parallels between the early cable TV and late social media eras: cable TV, in its early days, was similarly social and diverse in its programming.

Social media, though, can also enable the gathering of like-minded groups, as well as the unsocial exclusion of others whose interests do not match our own; but there is also a shift from networked to clustered publics, where members of the same cluster no longer necessarily know or are even aware of each other. These taste-based clusters maximise …

I was next at the Weizenbaum Conference, presenting on our efforts to develop a dynamic practice mapping of climate change debates in Australia. Here are the slides, and for more information on the practice mapping approach see my recent post introducing the approach, and our first article in Social Media + Society about it…

The next speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Felix Gaisbauer, whose interest is in pathways towards engagement with political content on TikTok. The platform has increasingly been identified as an important space for such engagement, with right-wing and far-right actors apparently especially active. This has caused some commentators to call for more non-extremist political content on TikTok, which assumes that such content does not already exist, that there is demand for it, and/or that the TikTok algorithm privileges extremist content.

To better understand this, we do need to distinguish more properly between the supply of and demand …

The second speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Julian Maitra, whose focus is on the German far-right’s plans for ‘remigration’: the forced expulsion of legal migrants from Germany. Notably, that term is now also used by the Trump administration as it plans its own mass deportations of residents from the US.

Ideas surrounding such remigration rhetoric connect affective publics and affective polarisation with cumulative racism, platforms racism, and digital populism. Julian explored these debates by gathering public social media posts from Facebook and Instagram on this concept, and is interested how they evolved over time. There were …

I’m presenting some early results of our large-scale dynamic practice mapping of Australian climate change discussions on Facebook later in this next session at the Weizenbaum Conference, but we begin with a paper by Konstantin Lackner, Markus Uhlmann, and Viktoria Horn. Their focus is on news navigation and recommendation: recommendations enable users to navigate information overload, but also create potential monetary gain for content sources.

Recommendations can be problematic because they optimise for retention and attention, and therefore for profit; this is also increasingly done through AI; and the result of such recommendations may be that users no longer …

The final speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is David Wegmann, who returns us to the Danish YouTube data donation study we discussed earlier: his work is to make sense of these data, with a particular focus on extracting features from the YouTube videos encountered by participating users.

Collectively, these users watched some 18 million videos; some 3 million of those are advertisements inserted into organic YouTube videos, though. This leaves some 7 million unique videos, indicating a typical long-tail distribution of user attention to these videos.

Details about what types of videos these data represent are more …