After the announcement in October 2022 that the microblogging platform Twitter had been acquired by Elon Musk, incidents both within the company and in the platform’s digital space began to spiral. Since then, many experts have been concerned that Twitter could become a communication platform where disinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories could take up a […]
Author: Annett Heft
Annett Heft, Dr. Phil., is head of the Dynamics of Digital Mobilization research group and senior researcher at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her main fields of research are the comparative study of political communication and mobilization in Europe with a focus on digital public spheres, right-wing communication infrastructures, transnational communication as well as quantitative methods and computational social science. Recent projects focus on right-wing digital news infrastructures in Western democracies, networked publics, and digital communication networks of pro- and anti-EU parties.
Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter could dramatically reshape the platform’s structures, potentially paving the way for more disinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories. In this analysis, Annett Heft examines how the design and features of social media platforms influence their usage and the dynamics of discourse. She delves into the potential impacts of this high-profile […]