Social media for democracy – understanding the causal mechanisms of digital citizenship

Projektinformationen

SoMe4Dem

ID Finanzhilfevereinbarung: 101094752

DOI

10.3030/101094752

Projekt abgeschlossen

EK-Unterschriftsdatum 12 Dezember 2022

Startdatum 1 März 2023

Enddatum 28 Februar 2026

Finanziert unter

• Culture, creativity and inclusive society

Gesamtkosten

€ 3 376 955,34

EU-Beitrag

€ 3 376 955,09

Koordiniert durch

MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER WISSENSCHAFTEN EV
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SoMe4Dem (Social media for democracy – understanding the causal mechanisms of digital citizenship)

Berichtszeitraum: 2023-03-01 bis 2024-02-29

Zusammenfassung vom Kontext und den Gesamtzielen des Projekts

Current diagnoses that democracy is in crisis at the beginning of the 21st century share a common argumentative
reference point: the (implicit) reference to the dysfunctional constitution of the political public sphere which
is currently undergoing structural change. The rise of social media platforms is considered as one of its main
constituents. While social media make the public arena more open and thus more responsive, these platforms also
lead to new mechanisms of fragmentation and exclusion, an erosion of norms in public debate and a loss of trust in
traditional institutions.
The project will reconsider the diagnoses of this crisis by (1) providing better empirical evidence for the impact
of social media on society with respect to political debates, (2) understanding the main causal mechanisms of this
impact and (3) developing tools that improve the capacity of social media to contribute to the functioning of the
public arena in a liberal democracy, i.e. deliberation, legitimation and the self-perception of the democratic subject.

Arbeit, die ab Beginn des Projekts bis zum Ende des durch den Bericht erfassten Berichtszeitraums geleistet wurde, und die wichtigsten bis dahin erzielten Ergebnisse

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.

Fortschritte, die über den aktuellen Stand der Technik hinausgehen und voraussichtliche potenzielle Auswirkungen (einschließlich der bis dato erzielten sozioökonomischen Auswirkungen und weiter gefassten gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen des Projekts)

There are no results yet.