Over the past few decades, democracies globally have seen a rise in support for more extreme, right-wing policies and politicians. Growing support for these beliefs is facilitated and encouraged by the popularity of right-wing media actors online that often promote conspiratorial or factually inaccurate narratives, exacerbating political tensions and polarization. Drawing from several recent studies, this keynote will reflect upon digital surrogates in the public sphere, focusing on their political, financial, cultural, and digital capital.
Session Chair: Jessica Walter
mail: jewalter@cc.au.dk
Social Media as Artificial Selection: The Cultural Evolution of Conspiracy Theories
Morgan Wack (Eva-Maria Vogel, Christian Pipal)
Who Is Exposed to Migration Content on YouTube and TikTok? A Data Donation Study
Silva Heinonen (Chiara Caterina Arena, Benjamin Nangle, Brahim Zarouali)
Seeking Truth with Low Trust – How Politically Alienated Citizens Navigate Mainstream and Alternative Media in Germany
Carolin-Theresa Ziemer & Pietro Leonardo Nickl
Global Crisis or Overblown Problem? Three Tools to Clarify Contentious Issues in Misinformation Research
Mubashir Sultan & Pietro Nickl
Strategic Social Media (Non-)Use by Diaspora During War
Mohammad Javad Imani Khoshkhoo (Arul Chib, Mona Jormand)
Can cross-cutting exposure and echo chambers coexist? An agent-based-modelling approach
Jens Ulrik Hansen (Eva Mayerhöffer, Frederik Henriksen)
Inside partisan environments: The influence of congruence in news environments on veracity judgments and partisan attitudes
Ilse L. Pit (Mubashir Sultan, Lisa Oswald, Alan Tump, Ralf Kurvers)
Session Chair: Lasse Lindekilde
mail: lindekilde@ps.au.dk
Do citizens engage in content moderation of toxic speech against historically marginalized groups?
Jesper Sommer Rasmussen (Lasse Lindekilde, Tanja Marie Hansen, Simon Tobias Karg)
Protecting financial stability in the age of social media – are online platforms our only hope?
Katarzyna Parchimowicz-Ujma
Theories of risk in the Digital Services Act
LK Seiling
From Participation to Presence: Informal and Ephemeral Citizenship in the Age of Social Media
Jakob Linaa Jensen
Concepts for the Democratic Ramifications of Social Media Platforms – A Scoping Review
Ulrikke Dybdal Sørensen (David Budtz Pedersen, Joachim Wiewiura)
Considering neural reward mechanisms in regulating social media algorithms to reduce polarizing content
Michael Cohen (Jean Decety)
Corporate Motive Positioning in Online Dating: A Norm-Based Ethical Perspective
Michelle Ølgaard (Lina Jacobsen and Carsten Bergenholtz)
Session Chair: Anton Holt
mail: aeholt@cc.au.dk
Grassroots Infrastructures of Influence: Multimodal Memes as a Defensive Communication Strategy in Wartime Ukraine
Hanna Starkova (Iryna Ivanova, Svitlana Sadrytska, Oleksandra Yehorova)
Understanding the Visual Discourse on Climate Action: A Semantic Clustering Approach
Luigi Arminio (Luca Rossi)
Seen but Not Named: Cross-Modal Candidate Visibility on Political TikTok
Eva-Maria Vogel (Christian Pipal, Morgan Wack, Frank Esser)
Memetic Warfare and the Politics of Influence: From Ukraine to Iran
Tine Munk
Session Chair: Anja Bechmann
Panelists:
Session Chair: David Wegmann
mail: david.wegmann@cc.au.dk
Looking for an Original Synth: Synthenticity and Authenticity in GenAI Content Creator Tutorials
Tanja Wiehn (Christoffer Bagger)
Anticipatory (non)compliance: How AI streamers exploit the content moderation game
Blake Hallinan (CJ Reynolds)
Audience Emotional Responses to AI-Generated Social Media Content
Beste Budan Erdoğan
Fact-Checks Can Help Inoculate LLMs Against Disinformation
Morgan Wack (Eva-Maria Vogel, Christian Pipal)
How Political Narratives Are Shaped and Distributed by Large Language Models
Esther Omemu
Artificial Voices, Real Impact: The Rise of AI-Driven Political Influencers in Poland
Malgorzata Szumna
Session Chair: Miriam Brems
mail: miriam.brems@cc.au.dk
Assessing Advice on FinTok: A Digital Ethnography Study of Audience Judgements of Finfluencer Credibility
Casper Danholt Iuulm
Beyond Ideology: Understanding Engagement with Tradwife Content on Instagram Reels
Lydia García Vaquero
From Burgers to Brokerage: The Financialization of the Creator-Audience Relationship
CJ Reynolds (Jacob Ørmen, Andreas Gregersen)
Gendered Online Ecosystems and Extremist Mobilisation: Towards a Youth-Centred Understanding of Digital Influence
Katrine Krogh Pedersen
A Grift in the Manosphere: entrepreneurial masculinity in Danish influencer communities
Jakob Kleofas (Kai Roland Green)
Performative Activism or Alliance of Change? Walking the Line as a DEI-Influencer on LinkedIn
Vera Schwarz (Manuel Menke)
Over the recent years members of DATALAB poked and prodded at the question of how influence is exerted through social media – across platforms, they innovated in data acquisition and analysis, ran experiments and pushed forward the understanding of how digital platforms shape society. In this panel the members of DATALAB, Jessica Walter, Miriam Brems, Anton Holt, and David Wegmann assemble the individual research projects under the Social Media Influence umbrella. Hosted by Anja Bechmann, they retrace the steps taken and point towards what lies ahead.
The panel presents findings from a range of studies, from online experiments comparing influencers’ and news media’s effects on political opinions, to large scale data trace studies of misinformation exposure, multimodal methods for video analysis, and large data donation studies.
Over the past two decades, digital platforms have reorganized public discourse: algorithms curate what billions of people see, attention has become contested, and generative AI makes content easier to produce than ever. Together, these shifts have added complexity to the information environment through dynamic interactions between algorithms, users, and content. This talk asks what computational social science knows (and can know) about the causal consequences for political behavior. Drawing on a series of projects, I show that digital media's effects depend on the level of analysis and are heterogeneous and context-dependent, but that mechanisms can be identified when considering the complexity of the system at hand. I then turn to behavioral interventions and platform designs that could help these influence infrastructures strengthen, rather than erode, democratic life.
(image copyright: Sven Ellger)
