Politics

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 final speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project is Holger Heppner, whose focus in on counterspeech to problematic information. Counterspeech techniques include behavioural (referencing social norms and warning of the consequences of breaking them), emotional (empathy, humour, retaliation), and cognitive approaches (debating, and pointing out inconsistencies); in addition, there are also more mechanical approaches like direct regulation and indirect interventions like downvoting or flagging problematic content.

Picking some of these options – highlighting inappropriateness (behavioural), evoking compassion for targets (emotional), and presenting additional facts (cognitive) –, Holger then tested the effectiveness of counterspeech …

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 …