Weizenbaum-Institut 2025

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 …

The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Yannick Fernholz, whose focus is on smart cities. Urban environments are being rapidly digitalised, and this also results in massive data collection; such smart cities promise increased efficiency, quality of life, security, and sustainability, but also result in a techno-deterministic top-down governance of citizens and the exclusion of non-digital populations rather than true engagement. What is missing is ethically grounded technology design.

What human values should be translated into the design principles for smart city technologies, then? What do the different stakeholder groups think, and how do their values conflict with …

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 Alexander Wilke, whose interest is in motivating users to care about their online security. Younger users – so-called ‘digital natives’ – often fall victim to cybercrime; they have low risk awareness, and lack fundamental knowledge about protecting themselves online.

Some studies show promising results from dedicated training in phishing detection, and gamified and interactive training models; but much more work needs to be done to understand effective means of delivering training and motivating users to protect themselves more actively. Protection motivation theory can help here: it shows that both the perception …

The final session on day one of the Weizenbaum Conference starts with a second paper by Victoria Vziatysheva, whose focus here is on how users perceive search engine bias. Search engines are amongst the most critical elements of Internet infrastructure, but are sometimes criticised for supposed biases in their results; this may affect how users engage with them.

Users tend to trust algorithmic systems more when they are perceived to be fair, and such trust is also affected by users’ knowledge about these systems: users with limited knowledge tend to be more trusting. Search engine users tend to have folk …

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 …

The next session at the Weizenbaum Conference starts with the great Curd Knüpfer, with an article on what he calls the logic of connective faction (see what he did there?). He begins by noting that online spaces empower some people more than others; they also enable networked propaganda, connect problematic groups through ‘deep stories’, and provide digital surrogate networks – often especially benefitting right-wing actors.

In other words, then, there is a logic of connection faction here, facilitating specific network ties based on communicative acts; this takes on quasi-organisational functions, and enables organisations to connect in digital surrogate networks; and …