Dear blog readers, please note that future blog posts will be uploaded on a quarterly basis.
13.07. – New Publication
In the middle of July, Dr. Kilian Bühling (Universität Tübingen & Weizenbaum-Institut), together with colleagues Dr. Olga Pasitselska (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) and Dr. Emilija Gagrčin (Universität Mannheim & University of Bergen, Norway), published their paper “Chat groups as local civic infrastructure: A case study of “Solidary neighborhood help”” in the journal New Media & Society. Their research explores how messaging groups on Telegram afforded a space for civic action during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. How exactly such groups facilitate civic self-organization was studied through their hybrid online/offline, public/private, and local/global dynamics. The results illustrate various mechanisms of how digital platforms can support or hinder community solidarity under heightened pressure for collective action.
The full paper is available as an open access publication. The paper, “Chat groups as local civic infrastructure: A case study of “Solidary neighborhood help” Telegram groups during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany” was published in the journal New Media & Society and can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251349426
13.07. – Presentation
The Dynamics of Digital Mobilization Research Group was represented at this year’s World Cogress of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) in Seoul, South Korea by Dr. Daniel Thiele (Weizenbaum-Institut). During the four-day-long Congress, Dr. Thiele presented research on the polarization in European Party Systems and Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRP), as well as results for an upcoming article on the coordinated manipulation of user comments on YouTube during the 2024 European Parliamentary Elections.
17.07. – Presentation
Dr. Kilian Bühling and Prof. Dr. Annett Heft (both from Universität Tübingen and Weizenbaum-Institut) had the opportunity to share insights from their study of visual framing of climate denialism on Reddit, Twitter, and 4chan at the 2025 International Association for Media and Communication Research in Singapore, represented by the third co-author of the article – Prof. Dr. Jing Zeng (Universität Zürich, Switzerland).
29.07. – Presentation
In late July, Dr. Kilian Buehling, Prof. Dr. Annett Heft, and Xixuan Zhang’s (Weizenbaum-Institut) Local Graph-based Dictionary Expansion (LGDE) method was presented at the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025) in Vienna by project co-author Dr. Juni Schindler (Imperial College London). This method allows for data-driven discovery of semantic neighborhoods of words and the authors demonstrate its applications using a real-world case from communication science.
29.07. – New Publication
By the end of the month, Baoning Gong, Prof. Dr. Annett Heft, Miriam Milzner, Prof. Dr. Barbara Pfetsch, and Dr. Daniel Thiele’s article “Attributing Coordinated Social Media Manipulation: A Theoretical Model and Typology” was published in the journal New Media & Society. The text acknowledges the research gap in attributing principals behind coordinated social media manipulation (CSMM) and addresses it by synthesizing existing research and developing a theoretical model for understanding CSMM. The authors propose a consolidated definition of CSMM, as well as a typology of CSMM campaigns with an invitation for interdisciplinary and comparative research on such campaigns.
The full paper is available as an open access publication. The paper, “Attributing coordinated social media manipulation: A theoretical model and typology” was published in the journal New Media & Society and can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251350100
04.09. – Presentation
This year’s political communication section interim conference of the ECREA included multiple inputs from members of the research team. During the panel on Artificial Intelligence, for example, Prof. Dr. Annett Heft, together with colleagues Rita Gsenger (Weizenbaum-Institut & Freie Universität Berlin), Christian Donner and Maik Fielitz (both from Institut für Demokratie und Zivilgesellschaft (IDZ), Jena) discussed AI-generated political imagery and the systemic risks it poses by presenting a case-study of far-right Telegram channels during German regional elections.
04.09. & 05.09. – Transfer
On the 4th and 5th of September, the yearly conference of the Research Institute Social Cohesion (FGZ) was partly held at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society (IDZ) in Jena. This year, the title of the event was Kompetenzen der Widerständigkeit: Demokratische Zivilgesellschaft zwischen Polarisierung & Zusammenhalt (in English: “Competencies of resistance: democratic civil society between polarization and cohesion”) with a specific focus on East-German realities and nationwide trends. Prof. Dr. Annett Heft was at the conference and gave a presentation on digital mobilization within the far-right and its consequences, providing an introductory overview into the multidimensional consequences of the extreme right on the Internet.