Social Media

The first full session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts for me with a session on algorithmic media, which kicks off with Susanne Eichner. She notes the impact of digitisation on the fragmentation, individualisation, personalisation, and automation of media and users; this has led to research in critical data studies (focussing on the datafication of users and the surveillance capitalism that results from it), as well as in more user-oriented approaches that also acknowledge users’ datafied agency and resistance to such datafication.

How might we bridge these two seemingly opposed logics that variously see audiences as helpless or …

It’s mid-July and comfortably warm outside, so I must be in Singapore for the IAMCR 2025 conference. After some very warm welcomes, including from a Chinese lion dance troupe, we begin with a keynote by Ang Peng Hwa, addressing the theme of climate change which is central to this conference. He notes the increasingly obvious impact of climate change on countries in this region – less predictable weather, more severe weather events, and conflicting ideas about solutions. Climate change in this sense is a wicked problem – and one of the characteristics of such wicked problems is organised irresponsibility.

Singapore …

And the final speakers at the Bots Building Bridges workshop project are Mathias Orlikowski and Tony Veale, who begin by noting that bots can have a positive impact on online discussion by facilitating an increase in viewpoint diversity. Such bots might emphasise rational debate, but could also introduce more humorous perspectives.

One example of a polarised debate in Germany is the ongoing discussion about the introduction of a stricter speed limit on German freeways; in online discussions about this, a discussion bot could intervene by presenting an opposite point of view. Some such arguments could be pre-written responses to well-known …

The next speakers at the Bots Building Bridges project workshop are Zlata Kikteva and Arthur Romazanov, representing the DeLab (or Deliberation Laboratory) team at the University of Passau. Their team has developed a bot to take on moderation tasks.

This builds on research by members of the team on how humans moderate online discussions, which has explored key moderation strategies – soft moderation such as probing for elaborations, tone policing, social norm policing, agenda control, fact-checking, inviting experts top contribute; as well as hard moderation such as removing content and users from the discussion.

But can we delegate such moderation …

The final session of the Bots Building Bridges workshop project in Bielefeld starts with Gabriella Lapesa and Julia Romberg, whose focus is on e-deliberation as a digitally augmented version of direct democracy. This is said to have huge potential, but as yet does not scale up effectively: quality declines as scale increases. One solution to this is moderation, but human moderation is time-consuming and therefore costly.

Moderators must first decide whether an action must be taken to intervene in the discussion, and if so what type of intervention – policing, quality control, fact-checking, mediation, new idea introductions, summarisation – should …

The last speakers in this Bots Building Bridges workshop session are Felix Gumbert and Rob Ackland. Felix starts by outlining three hypothesis about political talk on social media: first, social media might provide a space for productive deliberation; second, social media might serve as a hostile environment where constructive deliberation is impossible; and third, social media might create isolated communication environments (‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’) were people with different views no longer even encounter each other.

Empirical research on these possibilities tend to employ a classical sender-receiver model of communication, and utilise fairly simplistic datasets of online communication (e.g. hashtag …

I’m the second speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld, presenting our work on destructive polarisation and the practice mapping approach as a method to identify its symptoms. Here are the slides, and more information about the practice mapping approach is available in our recent article in Social Media + Society. I’ve also provided an introduction to the approach in this blog post from a few weeks ago.

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 …