Auflistung nach Forschungsbereichen "Weizenbaum Digital Science Center"

Gerade angezeigt 1 - 20 von 71
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    Algorithm dependency in platformized news use
    (2023) Schaetz, Nadja; Gagrčin, Emilija; Toth, Roland; Emmer, Martin
    Previous research has highlighted the ambiguous experience of algorithmic news curation whereby people are simultaneously comfortable with algorithms, but also concerned about the underlying data collection practices. The present article builds on media dependency theory and news-finds-me (NFM) perceptions to explore this tension. Empirically, we analyze original survey data from six European countries (Germany, Sweden, France, Greece, Poland, and Italy, n = 2,899) to investigate how young Europeans’ privacy concerns and attitudes toward algorithms affect NFM. We find that a more positive attitude toward algorithms and more privacy concerns are related to stronger NFM. The study highlights power asymmetries in platformized news use and suggests that the ambivalent experiences might be a result of algorithm dependency, whereby individuals rely on algorithms in platformized news use to meet their information needs, despite accompanying risks and concerns.
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    Algorithmic media use and algorithm literacy: An integrative literature review
    (2024) Gagrčin, Emilija; Naab, Teresa K.; Grub, Maria F.
    Algorithms profoundly shape user experiences on digital platforms, raising concerns about their negative impacts and highlighting the importance of algorithm literacy. Research on individuals’ understanding of algorithms and their effects is expanding rapidly but lacks a cohesive framework. We conducted a systematic integrative literature review across social sciences and humanities (n = 169), addressing algorithm literacy in terms of its key conceptualizations and the endogenous, exogenous, and personal factors that influence it. We argue that existing research can be framed in terms of experiential learning cycles and outline how this approach can be beneficial for acquiring algorithm literacy. Finally, we propose a future research agenda that includes defining core competencies relevant to algorithm literacy, standardization of measures, integrating subjective and factual aspects of algorithm literacy, and task- and domain-specific approaches.
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    Between Individual and Collective Social Effort: Vocabularies of Informed Citizenship in Different Information Environments
    (2023) Gagrčin, Emilija; Porten-Cheé, Pablo
    Information disorder and digital media affordances challenge informed citizenship as an ideal and in practice. While scholars have attempted to adapt the normative ideal to contemporary changes and challenges by introducing new metaphors and normative benchmarks, this study investigates citizens’ ideals and practices of informed citizenship by deploying the concept of citizenship vocabularies. Drawing on interviews with citizens from different information environments—Germany and Serbia—we offer a conceptual outline of informed citizenship as an individual and collective social effort. Our findings illustrate the role of the information environment in shaping citizenship vocabularies. We advance the idea of informed citizenship as a relational practice, arguing for a social ontological approach to theorizing informed citizenship today.
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    Beyond Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: The Integrative Potential of the Internet
    (ifpuk - Institute for Media and Communication Studies at FU Berlin, 2019) Mahrt, Merja
    Are online audiences today fragmented into echo chambers or filter bubbles? Do users only see what digital platforms (like search engines or social media) let them see? And if so, what are the consequences for the cohesion of a society? Concerns like these abound in recent years. They attest to widely held assumptions about a negative influence of digital media or even the Internet in general on society. Empirical studies on these phenomena are, however, not as unequivocal. To understand why results from previous research are so far inconclusive, this study investigates the role of the Internet for social integration from a more general point of view. The integrative potential of the Internet is assessed to compare it with other media and ultimately better understand to what degree and due to which factors the Internet may or may not help bring society together. Using survey data, clickstream data on actual usage of websites, and data on content structures, the present work investigates how user behavior and structural features of the Internet determine its positive or negative effects on social integration. The results reveal that the Internet in general is not as bad as popular accounts of digital fragmentation may suggest. How much integrative potential can be realized via online offerings, however, depends on numerous factors on the side of the users as well as content and platform providers.
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    Big Tech kontra Gemeinwohl. Die Pathologien des Technologiewettlaufs um Künstliche Intelligenz
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025-06) Butollo, Florian; Görnemann, Esther
    Der Technologiewettlauf um Künstliche Intelligenz hat Pathologien hervorgebracht, die durch die Dominanz weniger mächtiger Akteure und starke Informations- und Machtasymmetrien geprägt sind. Plattformunternehmen agieren als Gatekeeper für digitale Infrastrukturen und Wissen. Ihr umfassender Zugang zu Daten und Rechenkapazitäten verstärkt im Wettlauf um KI-Marktführerschaft die Machtkonzentration bei Tech-Konzernen und benachteiligt kleinere Akteure. Wohlstand und technologische Macht konzentrieren sich in den Händen weniger, während viele von den Chancen der KI-gestützten Wertschöpfung ausgeschlossen bleiben. Globale und soziale Disparitäten verschärfen sich. Der breite Einsatz starker KI in beruflichen und privaten Kontexten wird zudem mit rasant steigendem Verbrauch von Energie, Wasser und nicht erneuerbaren Ressourcen verbunden sein, wenn Lösungen zur Ressourcenschonung nicht konsequent mitgedacht werden. Die primären Ziele der KI-Entwicklung sind jedoch Marktbeherrschung und Profitmaximierung – ökologische, soziale und ethische Gesichtspunkte werden zurückgestellt. Dies verhindert eine konsequent gemeinwohlorientierte Ausrichtung von KI, die bei einer so weitreichenden technologischen Umwälzung jedoch notwendig ist. Digitale Infrastrukturen, gerade im Bereich KI, sind von technologischen Abhängigkeiten geprägt. In geopolitisch volatilen Zeiten verschärfen sich die damit einhergehenden Risiken, denn politische Akteure haben die Möglichkeit, den Zugang zu GKI zu beschränken oder an Bedingungen zu knüpfen. Darüber hinaus können Sprachmodelle gezielt eingesetzt werden, um öffentliche Diskurse zu beeinflussen. Sprachmodelle prägen, was sichtbar und sagbar ist, welches Wissen verbreitet wird und wie es bewertet wird. Auf welche Weise Modelle dies konkret tun, spiegelt auch die politischen Neigungen ihrer Entwickler wider. Hieraus entsteht Manipulationspotenzial. Es wird offensichtlich, dass es an einer demokratischen Aushandlung über den Einsatz generativer KI mangelt.
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    Big Tech Versus the Common Good. Pathologies of the Technology Race for Artificial Intelligence
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025-06) Butollo, Florian; Görnemann, Esther
    The technology race for artificial intelligence has produced pathologies that are characterized by the dominance of a handful of powerful players and strong information and power asymmetries. Platform companies act as gatekeepers for digital infrastructures and knowledge. In the race for AI market leadership, their extensive access to data and computing capacities increases the concentration of power among tech corporations and puts smaller players at a disadvantage. Wealth and technological power are concentrated in the hands of a few, while many remain excluded from the opportunities of AI-supported value creation. Global and social disparities are widening. A widespread use of strong AI in professional and private contexts will also be associated with rapidly increasing consumption of energy, water and non-renewable resources unless solutions to conserve resources are consistently taken into account. However, the primary goals of AI development are market dominance and profit maximization: ecological, social and ethical aspects are put on the back burner. This prevents AI from being consistently oriented towards the common good, a goal which is surely necessary for such a far-reaching technological revolution. Digital infrastructures, especially in the field of AI, are characterized by technological dependencies. In geopolitically volatile times, the associated risks are exacerbated, as political actors have the ability to restrict access to essential infrastructures or to attach conditions to them. In addition, language models can be used in a targeted manner to influence public discourse. Language models shape what is visible and sayable, what knowledge is disseminated and how it is evaluated. The specific way in which models do this also reflects the political inclinations of their developers. This creates the potential for manipulation. It is clear that there is a lack of democratic negotiation on the use of generative AI.
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    Bittersweet Symphony: Nostalgia and Melancholia in Music Reception
    (2023) Toth, Roland; Dienlin, Tobias
    Listening to music can cause experiences of nostalgia and melancholia. Although both concepts are theoretically related, to date they have not been analyzed together regarding their emotional and cognitive profiles. In this study, we identify their theoretical underpinnings and determine how they can be measured empirically. We analyze how listening to music causes nostalgia and melancholia, and whether both experiences are related to different behavioral intentions. To this end, we conducted an online experiment with 359 participants who listened to music they considered either nostalgic, melancholic, or neutral. Afterward, participants answered 122 questionnaire items related to nostalgia and melancholia. Using Structural Equation Modeling, and more specifically Multiple Indicators and Multiple Causes Modeling, we first developed two new scales: the Formative Nostalgia Scale and the Formative Melancholia Scale. Both scales consist of five items each. Results showed that listening to music indeed increased nostalgia and melancholia. Although considerably different, the concepts are related. Listening to nostalgic music increases melancholia, whereas listening to melancholic music does not increase nostalgia. Also, both experiences are related to different behavioral intentions. Whereas experiencing nostalgia was associated with a stronger intention to share the music and to listen to it again, experiencing melancholia revealed the exact opposite relation.
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    Digital Democracy — Do Social Media Steer Opinion Formation?
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2024) Mahrt, Merja
    With the spread of social media in recent years there has been growing concern about their e ects on opinion formation. Key suspects are fake news, radical content, and algorithms that mostly show users what they are already thinking, among others. Accordingly, researchers have worked on numerous studies that investigate the e ects of social media on democracy and its members. This compact overview focuses on opinion formation on the level of individual users. Opinion formation is the fundamental basis of democracy as a person’s opinion on political, social, or economic issues directly feeds into their voting behavior. The results of elections and referendums in turn determine which people or parties will make decisions during the next legislative period — decisions that are generally binding. If social media a ect this process, it should be clear whether users, for example, no longer perceive di erent opinions or become ever more radical in their own worldviews.
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    Digital Sovereignty
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2024) Görnemann, Esther
    The term “digital sovereignty” has become an integral part of current political discourse. Across party lines and administrative levels, there is consensus: Being digitally sovereign is desirable and important. However, it often remains unclear what it actually means to be digitally sovereign and how this desirable state should be achieved. Nearly every digital policy measure could be justified and rhetorically polished with the goal of digital sovereignty. Still, digital sovereignty is more than a meaningless buzzword. It allows us to experience the political dimensions of digital infrastructures in many facets. It clarifies the political dimensions of digital infrastructures and points us towards the scopes of action in which we ourselves can shape our digital future in a self-determined way. To illustrate digital sovereignty in its entirety, this compact overview addresses three central questions.
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    Digitale Demokratie – Lenken soziale Medien die Meinungsbildung?
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2024) Mahrt, Merja
    Mit der Verbreitung sozialer Medien wachsen in den letzten Jahren Befürchtungen, dass sie sich negativ auf die Meinungsbildung auswirken. Fake news, radikale Inhalte, Algorithmen, die einem vor allem zeigen, was man sowieso schon denkt, und anderes mehr gehören dabei zu den vermuteten Ursachen. Tatsächlich liegen hierzu in der Forschung zahlreiche Untersuchungen vor, die Auswirkungen sozialer Medien auf die Demokratie und ihre Mitglieder untersuchen. Dieser Kompaktüberblick nimmt dabei die individuelle Meinungsbildung in den Fokus. Sie gilt als Dreh- und Angelpunkt einer Demokratie, da die eigene Position zu politischen, gesellschaftlichen oder wirtschaftlichen Fragen und Problemen eine wichtige Grundlage für z.B. das Wahl- und Abstimmungsverhalten ist. Dieses wiederum beein usst, welche Personen oder Parteien in der nächsten Legislaturperiode Entscheidungen tre en, die dann für alle verbindlich gelten. Wenn soziale Medien in diesen Prozess eingreifen, sollte geklärt werden, ob Nutzer:innen z.B. andere Meinungen nicht mehr wahrnehmen oder in ihren eigenen Ansichten immer extremer werden.
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    Digitale Souveränität
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2024) Görnemann, Esther
    Der Begriff „digitale Souveränität“ ist aus dem politischen Diskurs nicht mehr wegzudenken. Man ist sich über Parteigrenzen hinweg einig: Digital souverän sein, das ist erstrebenswert und wichtig. Dabei bleibt aber unklar, was es eigentlich genau bedeutet, digital souverän zu sein und wie man diesen wünschenswerten Zustand erreicht. Fast jede digitalpolitische Maßnahme ließe sich heute mit dem Ziel der digitalen Souveränität rechtfertigen und rhetorisch aufpolieren. Trotzdem ist digitale Souveränität mehr als ein bedeutungsleeres Schmuckwort. Sie verdeutlicht die politischen Dimensionen digitaler Infrastrukturen und verweist auf Handlungsspielräume, in denen wir unsere digitale Zukunft selbstbestimmt mitgestalten können. Um digitale Souveränität in ihrer ganzen Bandbreite zu veranschaulichen, widmet sich dieser Kompaktüberblick drei zentralen Fragen.
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    Ethics of Data Work. Principles for Academic Data Work Requesters
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2025-06) Yang, Tianling; Strippel, Christian; Keiner, Alexandra; Baker, Dylan; Chávez, Alexis; Kauffman, Krystal; Pohl, Marc; Sinders, Caroline; Miceli, Milagros
    The growing use of machine learning (ML) in academic research has led to a rising demand for large, labeled datasets. While the field initially relied on the labor of students and research assistants to label data, as models grew larger and more complex, there was a shift towards relying on large-scale, low-cost platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to label data at scale. However, this shift comes with serious ethical concerns. Now part of a massive industry, many data work companies exploit workers, leaving many workers facing low wages and precarious working conditions, with little institutional oversight or protection. Despite the centrality of this labor to modern research, ethical codes and guidelines from academic societies rarely address the implications of outsourcing data work to platform-based workers. This paper advocates for the development of research ethics standards that ensure fair and responsible collaboration with data workers. We begin by defining the concept of “data work” and assessing how current ethical frameworks address it. We then highlight ongoing initiatives aimed at improving ethical regulation. Based on two focus groups and two expert workshops held at the Weizenbaum Institute in 2024, we propose a set of principles for academic data work requesters to guide ethical engagement with platform-based workers. Finally, we outline future steps for integrating these principles into scientific ethical codes and day-to-day research practices.
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    Feminist Identity and Online Activism in Four Countries From 2019 to 2023
    (2024) Boulianne, Shelley; Heger, Katharina; Houle, Nicole; Brown, Delphine
    The COVID-19 pandemic heightened burdens on caregivers, but also the visibility of caregiving inequalities. These grievances may activate a feminist identity which in turn leads to greater civic and political participation. During a pandemic, online forms of participation are particularly attractive as they require less effort than offline forms of participation and pose less health risks compared to collective forms of offline activism. Using survey data from four countries (Canada, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom) collected in 2019 (prior to the pandemic), 2021 (during the pandemic), and 2023 (post-pandemic), we examine the relationship between self-identifying as a feminist and signing online petitions ( n = 18,362). Our multivariate analyses show that having a feminist identity is positively related to signing online petitions. We consider the differential effects of this identity on participation for men, women, non-binary people; caregivers versus non-caregivers; and respondents in different countries with varying levels of restrictions due to the pandemic. A feminist identity is more important for mobilizing caregivers than non-caregivers, whether or not the caregiver is a man or a woman. While grievance theory suggests differential effects by country and time period, we find a consistent role of feminist identity in predicting the signing of online petitions across time and across countries. These findings offer insights into how different groups in varying contexts are mobilized to participate.
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    Feminist women’s online political participation. Empowerment through feminist political attitudes or feminist identity?
    (2022) Heger, Katharina; Hoffmann, Christian
    Citizens in modern democracies have a continuously expanding set of tools at their disposal through which they seek to exercise influence on politics, including digital modes of participation. However, the usage of these tools is still gendered to the disadvantage of women. Feminist attitudes have been shown to have a positive impact on women’s political participation, yet this effect is deeply interwoven with the empowering effect of a feminist identity. Based on an online survey of more than 300 German female Internet users self-labeling as feminists, we develop a comprehensive measure of a feminist identity and analyze the interplay of three distinct sets of feminist attitudes and a feminist identity on online political participation. To gain a fine-grained understanding of the impact of feminist cognitions on online political participation, we differentiate general political online behaviors from those geared toward women’s rights and feminist objectives. We find a feminist identity to be a strong predictor of both types of online political participation, with a stronger effect on feminist online participation. Our findings provide important insights into the empowering role of a feminist identity on women’s political behavior on the Internet.
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    Media Use and Political Engagement: Cross-Cultural Approaches| Media Use and Green Lifestyle Politics in Diverse Cultural Contexts of Postmaterialist Orientation and Generalized Trust: Findings From a Multilevel Analysis
    (2023) Leißner, Laura
    In lifestyle politics, citizens take political action by adapting their everyday lives to address transnational challenges, such as climate change. An important driver of lifestyle politics is exposure to media—both mass media, serving as important information sources, and social media, enabling discussion and expression. To explore how elements of culture shape this relationship, this study examines (a) the link between media use (measured by mass media and social media use) and lifestyle politics across 28 European countries and (b) how cultural context factors (measured by national levels of postmaterialist orientation and trust) moderate this relationship. Results of a multilevel analysis support the positive link between mass media use and lifestyle politics across all countries. However, the results also suggest that the relationship between social media use and lifestyle politics is positive only in countries with postmaterialist orientations and high levels of trust, underscoring the importance of cultural context factors.
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    Multidimensional Measurement of Mobile Media Use
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2021) Toth, Roland
    Just like all types of media use, mobile media use is usually measured using retrospective, self-reported indications of quantity in the form of duration and frequency. This is not only problematic due to the fact that people misjudge their own use to a great extent, but also because theoretical approaches predominantly suggest that mere contact is not sufficient for the description of media use. This especially holds for mobile media use, as specific contact episodes are not easily distinguishable anymore due to their short duration and high frequency. Mobile media use is rather characterized by circumstances surrounding the contact itself - they are used for countless purposes, in a habitual manner, and in various situations. In this paper, I am proposing a renewed, multidimensional measure of mobile media use that takes into account these characteristics in addition to well-known measures of quantity and suggest methods for assessing its convergent and content validity.
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    Notable enough? The questioning of women’s biographies on Wikipedia
    (2024) Martini, Franziska
    This study focuses on biographies nominated for deletion in the German-language Wikipedia and the encyclopedia’s core principle of notability. Results are presented from quantitative content analyses of deletion nominations, discussions, and decisions from the year 2020. It shows that women’s biographies are more often called into question but not deleted more often than men’s biographies. Additionally, women’s biographies are discussed more controversially. Neither a lack of notability criteria, a lack of external sources, nor individual misogynistic users seem to cause this increased questioning. Instead, the results suggest that the notability of women is collectively surveilled and contested with higher intensity due to biased perceptions. This can be explained by the fact that the concept of notability is not value-free or gender-neutral in the first place—even though it is based on rational discourse. The gender gap in biographies is contentiously discussed by users themselves, too, while overt sexism and gender-based devaluations are effectively countered by engaged users.
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    One App to Assess Them All: Combining surveys, experience sampling, and logging/data donation in an Android and iOS app
    (2023) Toth, Roland
    Smartphones have become popular tools for data collection in the social sciences due to their high prevalence and mobility. Surveys, experience sampling (ESM) and tracking/logging are among the most used smartphone data-collection methods. However, existing apps are either commercial solutions, require programming skills, collect sensitive data, or do not handle all three methods simultaneously. When two or more data collection methods are used simultaneously, it further burdens both researchers and participants. This paper introduces the app MART (Mobile Assessment Research Tool) that solves these problems and is available for Android and iOS devices. Content and data collection settings can be customized dynamically via a web interface without the need to compile a new version of the app when changes are made. While the logging functionality is only supported on Android devices, data donation via the app Screen Time is requested on iOS devices. MART is already functional, and the source code is open-source and available on GitHub. The necessary long-term revisions for its use in custom projects without reprogramming are currently under development.
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    Sharing is Caring - Addressing shared issues and challenges in hate speech research
    (Digital Communication Research, 2023) Strippel, Christian; Paasch-Colberg, Sünje; Emmer, Martin; Trebbe, Joachim
    This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research.
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    Smartphone Use in Germany in 2023: A Mixed-Method Investigation
    (SocArXiv, 2024) Toth, Roland; Parry, Douglas A.; Emmer, Martin
    Our understanding of typical smartphone behavior has only recently begun to advance due to the accessibility of increasingly valid data sources. Beyond analysing the frequency, duration, and content of smartphone activities, there is substantial value in understanding when people engage in particular forms of mobile media use, and data collection methods that go beyond simple retrospective self-reports provide the means to do so. This paper contributes to our understanding of contemporary smartphone usage patterns and their temporal dynamics by employing a mixed-method dataset obtained through Android logging, iOS data donation, and mobile experience sampling methods. This dataset captures both the quantity and quality of smartphone use among a large, quota-targeted sample of German adults (n = 2032). The findings provide a comprehensive view of smartphone use, examining both overall trends and daily rhythms. They reveal that smartphone usage is typified by frequent, short interactions, with younger users displaying more fragmented patterns compared to older counterparts, alongside variations in the gratifications derived across age groups. These findings lay the groundwork for further theorization about the causes, nature, and consequences of the observed usage patterns, while also offering essential contextual and methodological insights for researchers employing intensive longitudinal approaches to evaluate smartphone usage.