On the theoretical side we developed the conceptional framework for understanding the impact of social media on liberal democracy based on a literature review in the field of social media studies and identified three aspects that are pivotal for the relationship between social media and liberal democracies: (1) inclusivity (2) reliable information and (3) freedom of expression. Complementarily, we identified four "social affordances" of social media platforms as particularly relevant for the public discourse: (1) information, (2) deliberation, (3) collective action and (4) collective identity. This conceptual framework will inform our further work on the impact of social media along the dimension of participation, polarization and trust.
In order to provide better empirical evidence for discussing the impact of social media the project aims for methodological innovations in a) measurement, b) experimentation and c) modelling. In the first year we created data-set containing an attitudinal embedding of a sample of Twitter users from 9 European states along two dimension (Left-Right, Anti-Elite) in order to study the interaction between polarization and trust. We started pilots for the experiments on the relationship between participation and polarization and on the impact of social media on trust. In the context of modeling the dynamics on and of social media platforms we stablished our general framework for model validation.
Finally, we produced first insights regarding improving the design of social media platforms: In an ongoing study on existing Twitter data we observed promising results fort the use of exogenous cues for improving recommendation algorithms.
