Politics

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 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 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 …

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 …

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Lion Wedel, who begins by highlighting the definitional uncertainties about news and news actors online. This can lead to a misrepresentation of the news and information uses by particular demographic groups, such as young people.

One way to work around this is to focus on the informativeness of sources, rather than a more narrow definition of what is news; but how can this be assessed for a given source? This project worked with participant donations of data download packages from social media platforms, connected with a representative two-wave panel study of …

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Quentin Bukold, whose interest is in mass comment campaigns, for instance in response to European Union public consultation efforts. Such campaigns encourage large numbers of supporters to send a pre-formulated text in response to an online consultation effort; this is essentially spamming the consultation form, but might nonetheless represent some facet of public opinion.

Mass comment campaigns thereby jeopardise legitimate public consultation processes, but also provide information about the mobilisation potential of critical interest groups; however, there are few effective ways for identifying, describing, and responding to such campaigns.

This hinges …