On March 4, 2025, Dr. Annett Heft (Freie Universität Berlin and Weizenbaum-Institut) presented at and moderated the panel “Dynamics of Digital Mobilization and Interference in Platform Ecosystems” during “How digitalization shapes Elections and Democracies”, a joint event of Weizenbaum-Institut and Oxford Internet Institute.
The event, which was held at St. Anne´s College in Oxford, included discussions on the effects of digitalization during the super-election year 2024 and democratic processes in general, as well as a keynote speech by Prof. Ralph Schroeder (University of Oxford) on online politics in India and the US.
The panel “Dynamics of Digital Mobilization and Interference in Platform Ecosystems”, chaired by Dr. Annett Heft, invited to critically discuss the struggle over legitimate knowledge and mobilization by means of disinformation and conspiracy theories, among other forms of networked opinion manipulation and defamation. Of particular interest was the question of how anti-democratic, extreme, and populist political actors establish alternative digital infrastructures and successfully use the affordances of the platform ecosystem for political mobilization.