DigiMoD
The year of 2025 began with an engaging fellow talk by Dr. Daniela Mahl on January 14th at the Weizenbaum Institute, where she presented her work on Fringe Dynamics: Studying Anti-Democratic Movements at the Margins of Platform Ecosystems. Her talk was inspired by the growing uncertainty surrounding the epistemic standards by which reality is approached […]
In an interview with Leonie Dorn from the Weizenbaum Institute, Dr. Kilian Buehling and Baoning Gong (both Freie Universität/Weizenbaum Institute) explore how right-wing politicians used Telegram during state elections in East Germany to mobilize supporters. Their ongoing study combines quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how Telegram’s platform architecture enables extremist actors to manipulate their […]
The Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance (CDDGG) at the University of Canberra, Australia, is a globally recognized leader in deliberative governance research, dedicated to exploring how inclusive and reflective communication can empower people in political decision-making. The center explores the impact of public deliberation in polarized and post-crisis contexts and advances theoretical debates […]
In the latest episode of the NEOVEX podcast, Maik Fielitz from the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, responsible for the area of right-wing extremism and democracy research at the IDZ, sits down with Dr. Kilian Bühling, a researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, working on the researching diffusion dynamics […]
The Research Monitor (fyi 15) published on the 4th of June a new edition which compiles seven studies and an interview with Dr. Annett Heft. The publication entails the current state of research on right-wing movements, highlighting why they pose a serious threat to democracy and suggesting which efforts can be made to counteract them. […]
On April 18th and 19th, we hosted the workshop “CLOUD-C: Climate, Social Media, and Transnational Research” at the Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin, co-organized with the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH). The Cloud-C Project is an international collaboration developed by the HSSH, focused on analyzing the discourse on climate politics in social media. This […]
From March 13th to 15th the University of Erfurt hosted the 69. Annual Conference of the German Society for Journalism and Communication Studies (DGPuK). This year’s theme, “Visions for a Better Life,” aimed to stimulate a debate on the social relevance and future of communication science research. By exploring the roles that communication and media […]
Citizen-generated populist content is flourishing in the comments sections of online news. The factors that shape the extent of such populist communication from below are still under-researched. The recent publication of Daniel Thiele (Freie Universität Berlin & Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin) focuses on the COVID-19 crisis to examine how contextual and media-related factors are related to […]
On February 7 and 8, the NEOVEX subprojects consortium meeting took place at the Munich School of Politics of the Technical University of Munich. The main focus was on exchanging ideas and planning future collaboration. During the one-day workshop, the subproject teams gathered to update the consortium and funding agencies on their current project work. […]
On January 23, 2024, Prof. Dr. Pablo Jost (Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich) presented and discussed our collaborative work on Mapping a Dark Space: Challenges in Sampling and Classifying Non-Institutionalized Actors on Telegram, co-authored by Dr. Annett Heft and Dr. Kilian Buehling (both Freie Universität and Weizenbaum Institute), Maximilian Zehring and Emese Domahidi (both Ilmenau Technical University) as well as Heidi […]
Kilian Buehling and Annett Heft (both Freie University of Berlin/Weizenbaum Institute) published an article on the Pandemic Protesters on Telegram: How Platform Affordances and Information Ecosystems Shape Digital Counterpublics in Social Media + Society. Their research investigates the role of platform affordances, their adoption by movement actors, and the strategic use of information ecosystems in […]
On December 13, 2023, Daniel Thiele (Freie Universität Berlin & Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin) presented his research titled “Vox Populi(st): Contexts and Consequences of Populism in User Comments on News Media Facebook Pages” at the Helsinki Conference on Emotions, Populism and Polarization at the University of Helsinki. The conference was organized by the Helsinki Hub on […]
We were honored to have Prof. Dr. Shelly Boulianne, Professor of Digital Political Communication at the Université Catholique de Lille and currently a Research Fellow in our research group, giving a talk on her latest research on November, 28. In her talk “Pandemic activism in comparative perspective: Exploring the roles of digital media uses, misinformation, […]
November 14th a collaborative article Mapping a Dark Space: Challenges in Sampling and Classifying Non-Institutionalized Actors on Telegram with two members of our team was published in the journal Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft! Written by Pablo Jost (Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich), Annett Heft (Free University of Berlin), Kilian Buehling (Free University of Berlin), Maximilian Zehring (Ilmenau Technical University), […]
We were happy to conduct the workshop titled “Alternative Platforms/Platform Alternatives: Comparisons and Transnational Flows” on October 20th and 21st at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin in collaboration with the Free University of Berlin! The workshop gathered approximately 20 international researchers, creating an intimate and relaxed atmosphere that fostered networking and great knowledge exchange. The […]
In today’s digital landscape, the proliferation of online platforms and the rapid evolution of communication technologies present unique challenges for researchers. A recent study by Dr. Annett Heft, Dr. Kilian Buehling, Xixuan Zhang, Dominik Schindler, and Miriam Milzner (2023) investigates these complexities, focusing on the collection of conspiracy-related communication data across various digital platforms. Published […]
Whether a radical right party is in opposition or in government significantly influences the digital communication of its actors and supporters. This is a central finding of the latest publication “Mobilization and support structures in radical right party networks. Digital political communication ecologies in the 2019 European parliament elections” by Annett Heft, Susanne Reinhardt and […]