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- ItemFacing disinformation in democratic backsliding: the role of courts in Brazil(2024) Iglesias Keller, Clara; Werneck Arguelhes, DiegoThis paper examines how democratic institutions respond to disinformation when it is weaponized by elected officials for illiberal purposes. It focuses on the role of courts in countering disinformation in Brazil from 2018 to 2022, when the country experienced threats to democracy, marked by the use of disinformation to undermine electoral and judicial checks. In response, Brazil’s High Courts took an array of measures against disinformation, including content removal, social media regulation, and criminal proceedings. While these actions were crucial in promoting democratic resilience, they also raised concerns about judicial aggrandizement and its implications. The paper discusses the tension between the courts’ role in protecting democracy and their institutional limitations as well as the potential impact on the public perception of courts and freedom of expression, of having judges taking the leading role in fighting disinformation.
- ItemHow Do Environmental and Methodological Factors Influence Study Participants’ Answers in Surveys on Risk Perception in the Context of Climate Change and Heat Stress?(2025) Holzen, Veronique; Heidenreich, Anna; Thieken, AnnegretResearch on climate change and impacts of natural hazards, such as heat waves, on human health has increased in recent years. Various approaches are used to study people’s attitudes and actions in this context, but little is known about the extent to which different modes or other environmental variables influence the results. Therefore, we ex- amined differences between surveys in three German cities, compared survey modes and investigated the influence of the temperature on the day of the survey and the previous days. We conducted two surveys on the topics of climate change risk perception and heat risk perception. In summer and autumn of 2019, in total 1,417 people from the three medium-sized German cities of Potsdam, Remscheid and Würzburg were surveyed via telephone or online. In sum- mer of 2020, 280 people were surveyed face-to-face in public parks in Potsdam. Climate change risk perception, the perception of heat waves as a health threat and the knowledge of heat warnings differed depending on place of resi- dence, survey mode and temperature. Participants of the online survey showed higher scores of risk perception than participants of the telephone and face-to-face surveys, indicating a self-selection bias. Increased temperature was associated with slightly higher levels of respondents’ heat wave risk perception and, among participants surveyed outside, climate change risk perception. The finding that both survey mode and environmental factors can influence survey results should be heeded when planning or interpreting and comparing studies.
- ItemLGDE: Local Graph-based Dictionary Expansion(2025) Schindler, Juni; Jha, Sneha; Zhang, Xixuan; Buehling, Kilian; Heft, Annett; Barahona, MauricioWe present Local Graph-based Dictionary Expansion (LGDE), a method for data-driven discovery of the semantic neighbourhood of words using tools from manifold learning and network science. At the heart of LGDE lies the creation of a word similarity graph from the geometry of word embeddings followed by local community detection based on graph diffusion. The diffusion in the local graph manifold allows the exploration of the complex nonlinear geometry of word embeddings to capture word similarities based on paths of semantic association, over and above direct pairwise similarities. Exploiting such semantic neighbourhoods enables the expansion of dictionaries of pre-selected keywords, an important step for tasks in information retrieval, such as database queries and online data collection. We validate LGDE on two user-generated English-language corpora and show that LGDE enriches the list of keywords with improved performance relative to methods based on direct word similarities or co-occurrences. We further demonstrate our method through a real-world use case from communication science, where LGDE is evaluated quantitatively on the expansion of a conspiracy-related dictionary from online data collected and analysed by domain experts. Our empirical results and expert user assessment indicate that LGDE expands the seed dictionary with more useful keywords due to the manifold-learning-based similarity network.
- ItemEpistemic authority in the digital public sphere. An integrative conceptual framework and research agenda(2025) Bartsch, Anne; Neuberger, Christoph; Stark, Birgit; Karnowski, Veronika; Maurer, Marcus; Pentzold, Christian; Quandt, Thorsten; Quiring, Oliver; Schemer, ChristianWe develop an integrative conceptual framework and research agenda for studying epistemic authorities in the digital age. Consulting epistemic authorities (e.g., professional experts, well-informed laypeople, technologies) can be an efficient fast-track to knowledge. To fulfill this functional role, those who claim epistemic authority need to be both subjectively recognized (have a perceived advantage in knowledge) and objectively justified (have an actual advantage in knowledge). In a digital media context, new and unconventional knowledge sources have emerged that can fulfill the functional role of epistemic authorities. But false authorities that disseminate misinformation have emerged as well while other sources with important knowledge remain unrecognized. We further analyze the functional role of epistemic intermediaries that can mitigate such problematic developments by correcting false authorities and by providing endorsement for unrecognized authorities. We conclude with a research agenda to study functional forms of epistemic authorities and epistemic intermediaries in the digital public sphere.
- ItemRadicalization or relief: Divergent impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown on incels by seniority(SAGE Publications, 2025) Wedel, Lion; Coufal, LindaIncels (involuntary celibates) base their identity on the inability to form romantic relationships. We conceptualize the ideology promoted by incels as misogynist extremism and explore the impact of the first COVID-19 lockdown on the radicalization of this online community. Based on computational measures, we conducted a multi-perspective exploration, comparing the prevalence of and participation in threads dealing with extremism, ideology and mental health on the incels.is forum between pre-lockdown, lockdown and post-lockdown periods. We found evidence of long-term and temporary radicalization. Moreover, we found that, specifically, older forum members increasingly post in extremist-themed threads triggered by the lockdowns. Crucially, we show that activity on mental health–themed threads temporarily decreased during the lockdown. These findings indicate that real-world social isolation reduces mental health complaints among incels but, at the same time, exacerbates misogynist extremism among active community members.