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

Project Information

SoMe4Dem

Grant agreement ID: 101094752

DOI

10.3030/101094752

Project closed

EC signature date 12 December 2022

Start date 1 March 2023

End date 28 February 2026

Funded under

• Culture, creativity and inclusive society

Total cost

€ 3 376 955,34

EU contribution

€ 3 376 955,09

Coordinated by

MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER WISSENSCHAFTEN EV
Germany

CORDIS provides links to public deliverables and publications of HORIZON projects.

Links to deliverables and publications from FP7 projects, as well as links to some specific result types such as dataset and software, are dynamically retrieved from OpenAIRE .

Deliverables

Documents, reports (5)

Attitudinally-positioned European sample dataset

This deliverable will provide the first version of the data set together with the conceptual and methodological framework required to leverage attitudinal inference for large populations of users in Europe.

Survey on experiments about trust and collaborative vs conflictual language

The survey will focus on different experimental paradigms and the implications of previous experimental work for understanding the causal antecedents of trust and conflictual language in social media.

Platform affordances

This deliverable presents an empirically-informed taxonomy of platform affordances.

Democracy theory and social media

Research paper on Democracy theory and social media: Challenges to liberal democracy and democracy theory

Dissemination and Exploitation Plan

Plan for dissemination and exploitation including communication activities. Itwill be periodically updated.

Data Management Plan (1)

Data Management Plan

This deliverable will establish the management of the data with in the project, establishing the protocols for anonymization, pseudonymization, collection, treatment, transfer, storage, encryption, and publication (for reproducibility of results in articles).

Publications

Peer reviewed articles (50)

Nature Communications

Author(s): Maertens, R; Roozenbeek, J; Simons, JS; Lewandowsky, S; Maturo, V; Goldberg, B; Xu, R; van der Linden, S
Published in: Nature Communications, 2025, ISSN 2041-1723
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
DOI: 10.1038/S41467-025-57205-X

Knowledge refracted. A bibliometric analysis of conspiracy texts on Telegram

Author(s): Willaert, Tom; Meyer, Trisha
Published in: Radices, 2024, ISSN 2736-7770
Publisher: CUTA
DOI: 10.21825/RADICES.91992

Dodging the autocratic bullet: Enlisting behavioural science to arrest democratic backsliding

Author(s): Abels, Christoph M.; Huttunen, Kiia Jasmin Alexandra; Hertwig, Ralph; Lewandowsky, Stephan
Published in: Behavioural Public Policy, 2024, ISSN 2398-0648
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
DOI: 10.1017/BPP.2024.43

The continued influence of AI-generated deepfake videos despite transparency warnings

Author(s): Simon Clark, Stephan Lewandowsky
Published in: Communications Psychology, Issue 4, 2026, ISSN 2731-9121
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
DOI: 10.1038/S44271-025-00381-9

Computational analysis of US congressional speeches reveals a shift from evidence to intuition

Author(s): Segun T. Aroyehun; Almog Simchon; Fabio Carrella; Jana Lasser; Stephan Lewandowsky; David Garcia
Published in: Nature Human Behaviour, Issue 9, pages 1122–1133, 2025, ISSN 2397-3374
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.2405.07323

The role of epistemic drift in online civic discourse about science

Author(s): Stephan Lewandowsky, David Garcia
Published in: Current Opinion in Psychology, Issue 68, 2026, ISSN 2352-250X
Publisher: Elsevier BV
DOI: 10.1016/J.COPSYC.2026.102266

Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation

Author(s): Anastasia Kozyreva; Philipp Lorenz-Spreen; Stefan M. Herzog; Ullrich K. H. Ecker; Stephan Lewandowsky; Ralph Hertwig; Ayesha Ali; Joe Bak-Coleman; Sarit Barzilai; Melisa Basol; Adam J. Berinsky; Cornelia Betsch; John Cook; Lisa K. Fazio; Michael Geers; Andrew M. Guess; Haifeng Huang; Horacio Larreguy; Rakoen Maertens; Folco Panizza; Gordon Pennycook; David G. Rand; Steve Rathje; Jason Reifler; Philipp Schmid; Mark Smith; Briony Swire-Thompson; Paula Szewach; Sander van der Linden; Sam Wineburg
Published in: Nature Human Behaviour, Issue 8, 1044-1052, 2024, ISSN 2397-3374
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.1038/S41562-024-01881-0

Challenges in Understanding Human-Algorithm Entanglement During Online Information Consumption

Author(s): Lewandowsky, Stephan; Robertson, Ronald E.; DiResta, Renee
Published in: Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2023, ISSN 1745-6924
Publisher: SAGE Publications
DOI: 10.1177/17456916231180809

‘Dark metrics’ and the mainstreaming of political extremism on Dutch-speaking Telegram: A comparative reading of platform affordances

Author(s): Stijn Peeters, Tom Willaert
Published in: Platforms & Society, Issue 3, 2026, ISSN 2976-8624
Publisher: SAGE Publications
DOI: 10.1177/29768624261421758

Polarization in Social Media: A Virtual Worlds-based Approach

Author(s): Dennis Jacob and Sven Banisch
Published in: Journal of artificial societies and social simulation, Issue 26, 2023, ISSN 1460-7425
Publisher: University of Surrey
DOI: 10.18564/jasss.5170

A Formal Model of Affiliative Interpersonality

Author(s): Stefan Westermann; Sven Banisch
Published in: Clinical Psychological Science, 2024, ISSN 2167-7034
Publisher: Sage
DOI: 10.1177/21677026241229663

The governance & behavioral challenges of generative artificial intelligence’s hypercustomization capabilities

Author(s): Christoph M. Abels, Ezequiel Lopez-Lopez, Jason W. Burton, Dawn L. Holford, Levin Brinkmann, Stefan M. Herzog, Stephan Lewandowsky
Published in: Behavioral Science & Policy, Issue 11, 2026, ISSN 2379-4607
Publisher: SAGE Publications
DOI: 10.1177/23794607251347020

How Science Gets Drawn Into Global Conspiracy Narratives

Author(s): Marc Tuters, Tom Willaert, Trisha Meyer
Published in: Issues in Science and Technology, Issue 29, 2023, ISSN 0748-5492
Publisher: Arizona State University
DOI: 10.58875/POZR1536

PLoS ONE

Author(s): Cassells, Duncan; Vendeville, Antoine; Tabourier, Lionel; Ramaciotti, Pedro
Published in: PLOS One, Issue 20(12): e0338486, 2025, ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher: Public Library of Science
DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/783HB

Disentangling participation in online political discussions with a collective field experiment

Author(s): Lisa Oswald, William Small Schulz, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen
Published in: Science Advances, Issue 11, 2025, ISSN 2375-2548
Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
DOI: 10.1126/SCIADV.ADY8022

Liars know they are lying: differentiating disinformation from disagreement

Author(s): Stephan Lewandowsky; Ullrich K. H. Ecker; John Cook; Sander van der Linden; Jon Roozenbeek; Naomi Oreskes; Lee McIntyre
Published in: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2024, ISSN 2807-5390
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.31234/OSF.IO/Q7VBR

Co-evolution of groups and opinions in an agent-based model

Author(s): Duncan Cassells, Antoine Vendeville, Lionel Tabourier, Pedro Ramaciotti
Published in: PLOS One, Issue 20, 2025, ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
DOI: 10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0338486

A bias towards neutrality? How LLM guardrail sensitivity affects classification

Author(s): Rogers, R.; Zhang, X.
Published in: Communication and Change, Issue 1(13), 2025, ISSN 3059-2011
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.1007/S44382-025-00013-0

Seeing is Believing: The Continued Influence of Known AI-Generated ‘Deepfake’ Videos

Author(s): Simon Clark; Stephan Lewandowsky
Published in: Communications psychology, 2024, ISSN 2731-9121
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.31234/OSF.IO/T7JFK

Revolution by other memes: on the playful subcultures of r/PoliticalCompassMemes

Author(s): Tuters, M.; Mueller, G.
Published in: Information, Communication & Society, 2024, ISSN 1468-4462
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2024.2423340

Multidimensional political polarization in online social networks

Author(s): Antonio F. Peralta, Pedro Ramaciotti, János Kertész, and Gerardo Iñiguez
Published in: Physical Review Research, Issue 6, 2024, ISSN 2643-1564
Publisher: American Physical Society
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.013170

Thinking clearly about misinformation

Author(s): Li Qian Tay, Stephan Lewandowsky, Mark J. Hurlstone, Tim Kurz & Ullrich K. H. Ecker
Published in: communications psychology, Issue 2, 2024, ISSN 2731-9121
Publisher: Nature Portfolio
DOI: 10.1038/s44271-023-00054-5

Mapping the e-petition ecosystem through Social Media: mobilization in the EU across issues and ideologies

Author(s): Carlo Romano Marcello Alessandro Santagiustina, Pedro Ramaciotti
Published in: Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, Issue 6, 2026, ISSN 2673-8813
Publisher: Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media
DOI: 10.51685/JQD.2026.001

Boosting: Empowering Citizens with Behavioral Science

Author(s): Stefan M. Herzog, Ralph Hertwig
Published in: Annual Review of Psychology, Issue 76, 2026, ISSN 0066-4308
Publisher: Annual Reviews
DOI: 10.1146/ANNUREV-PSYCH-020924-124753

Validating Argument-Based Opinion Dynamics with Survey Experiments

Author(s): Sven Banisch and Hawal Shamon
Published in: Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 2024, ISSN 1460-7425
Publisher: University of Surrey
DOI: 10.18564/jasss.5305

How Influencers and Multipliers Drive Polarization and Issue Alignment on Twitter/X

Author(s): Armin Pournaki, Felix Gaisbauer, Eckehard Olbrich
Published in: Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Issue 19, 2025, ISSN 2334-0770
Publisher: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
DOI: 10.1609/ICWSM.V19I1.35890

Blinding to Circumvent Human Biases: Deliberate Ignorance in Humans, Institutions, and Machines

Author(s): Ralph Hertwig, Stefan M. Herzog, Anastasia Kozyreva
Published in: Perspectives on Psychological Science, Issue 19, 2025, ISSN 1745-6916
Publisher: SAGE Publications
DOI: 10.1177/17456916231188052

Mapping the political landscape from data traces: Multidimensional opinions of users, politicians and media outlets on X

Author(s): Antoine Vendeville, Jimena Royo-Letelier, Duncan Cassells, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Maxime Crépel, Tim Faverjon, Théophile Lenoir, Béatrice Mazoyer, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou, Armin Pournaki, Hiroki Yamashita, Pedro Ramaciotti
Published in: Data in Brief, Issue 65, 2026, ISSN 2352-3409
Publisher: Elsevier BV
DOI: 10.1016/J.DIB.2026.112615

Critical ignoring when information abundance is detrimental to democracy

Author(s): Stephan Lewandowsky, Ralph Hertwig
Published in: Current Opinion in Psychology, Issue 66, 2026, ISSN 2352-250X
Publisher: Elsevier BV
DOI: 10.1016/J.COPSYC.2025.102128

The social dilemma of online segregation: A dynamical model of platform choice

Author(s): Sven Banisch, Dennis Jacob, Tom Willaert, Eckehard Olbrich
Published in: Rationality and Society, 2026, ISSN 1043-4631
Publisher: SAGE Publications
DOI: 10.1177/10434631261428850

Different honesty conceptions align across US politicians' tweets and public replies

Author(s): Fabio Carrella, Segun T. Aroyehun, Jana Lasser, Almog Simchon, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky
Published in: Nature Communications, Issue 16, 2025, ISSN 2041-1723
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
DOI: 10.1038/S41467-025-56753-6

A computational analysis of Telegram’s narrative affordances

Author(s): Tom Willaert
Published in: PLoS ONE, 2023, ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher: Public Library of Science
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293508

Inoculation and accuracy prompting increase accuracy discernment in combination but not alone

Author(s): Gordon Pennycook; Adam J. Berinsky; Puneet Bhargava; Hause Lin; Rocky Cole; Beth Goldberg; Stephan Lewandowsky; David G. Rand
Published in: Nature Human Behaviour, Issue 8, pages 2330–2341, 2024, ISSN 2397-3374
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.1038/S41562-024-02023-2

Why Misinformation Must Not Be Ignored

Author(s): Ullrich K. H. Ecker; Li Qian Tay; Jon Roozenbeek; Sander van der Linden; John Cook; Naomi Oreskes; Stephan Lewandowsky
Published in: American Psychologist, 2024, ISSN 1935-990X
Publisher: APA
DOI: 10.1037/AMP0001448

Artnodes

Author(s): Marco Paladini,Carlo R. M. A. Santagiustina, Costanza Sartoris, Giulia Saya, Michele Schiavinato, Gabriella Traviglia
Published in: artnodes, Issue 33, 2024, ISSN 1695-5951
Publisher: Barcelona: Fundació per la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
DOI: 10.7238/artnodes.v0i33.417840

A focus shift in the evaluation of misinformation interventions

Author(s): L. Tay, S. Lewandowsky, M.J. Hurlstone, T. Kurz, U. K.H. Ecker
Published in: Harvard Misinformation Review, Issue 4, 2023, ISSN 2766-1652
Publisher: Harvard Kennedy School
DOI: 10.37016/mr-2020-124

Coupled infectious disease and behavior dynamics. A review of model assumptions

Author(s): Andreas Reitenbach; Fabio Sartori; Sven Banisch; Anastasia Golovin; André Calero Valdez; Mirjam Kretzschmar; Viola Priesemann; Michael Mäs
Published in: Reports on Progress in Physics, 2024, ISSN 1361-6633
Publisher: IOP
DOI: 10.5445/IR/1000179516

Investigating the role of source and source trust in prebunks and debunks of misinformation in online experiments across four EU countries

Author(s): Hendrik Bruns, François J. Dessart, Michał Krawczyk, Stephan Lewandowsky, Myrto Pantazi, Gordon Pennycook, Philipp Schmid, Laura Smillie
Published in: Scientific Reports, Issue 14, 2024, ISSN 2045-2322
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-024-71599-6

Extracting narrative signals from public discourse: a network-based approach

Author(s): Pournaki, Armin; Willaert, Tom
Published in: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2025, ISSN 2807-5390
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.2411.00702

Generative artificial intelligence–mediated confirmation bias in health information seeking

Author(s): Ezequiel Lopez‐Lopez, Christoph M. Abels, Dawn Holford, Stefan M. Herzog, Stephan Lewandowsky
Published in: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Issue 1550, 2025, ISSN 0077-8923
Publisher: Wiley
DOI: 10.1111/NYAS.15413

Auditing the audits: evaluating methodologies for social media recommender system audits

Author(s): Bouchaud, Paul; Ramaciotti Morales, Pedro
Published in: Applied Network Science, Issue 59(9), 2024, ISSN 2364-8228
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.1007/S41109-024-00668-6

Issues in Science and Technology

Author(s): Tuters, Marc, Tom Willaert, and Trisha Meyer
Published in: Issues in Science and Technology, Issue 39, ISSN 0748-5492
Publisher: University of Texas at Dallas
DOI: 10.58875/POZR1536

How citizens’ experience of democracy can actually pave the way to democratic backsliding

Author(s): Ralph Hertwig, Stephan Lewandowsky
Published in: Communications Psychology, Issue 3, 2025, ISSN 2731-9121
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
DOI: 10.1038/S44271-025-00327-1

Warning people that they are being microtargeted fails to eliminate persuasive advantage

Author(s): Fabio Carrella; Almog Simchon; Matthew Edwards; Stephan Lewandowsky
Published in: Communications Psychology, 2025, ISSN 2731-9121
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.1038/S44271-025-00188-8

Effects of preemptive empathy interventions on reply toxicity among highly active social media users.

Author(s): Lisa Oswald
Published in: Technology, Mind, and Behavior, Issue 6, 2025, ISSN 2689-0208
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
DOI: 10.1037/TMB0000178

The Misalignment of Incentives in Academic Publishing and Implications for Journal Reform

Author(s): Trueblood, Jennifer S.; Allison, David B.; Field, Sarahanne M.; Fishbach, Ayelet; Gaillard, Stefan D. M.; Gigerenzer, Gerd; Holmes, William R.; Lewandowsky, Stephan; Matzke, Dora; Murphy, Mary C.; Musslick, Sebastian; Popov, Vencislav; Roskies, Adina L.; ter Schure, Judith; Teodorescu, Andrei R.
Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024, ISSN 1091-6490
Publisher: PNAS
DOI: 10.1073/PNAS.2401231121

Inoculation reduces social media engagement with affectively polarized content in the UK and US

Author(s): Fintan Smith; Almog Simchon; Dawn Holford; Stephan Lewandowsky
Published in: Communications Psychology, 2023, ISSN 2731-9121
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.1038/S44271-025-00189-7

From denazification to the Golden Billion: an inductive analysis of the Kremlin’s weaponisation of digital diplomacy on Telegram

Author(s): Willaert, Tom; Tuters, Marc
Published in: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2025, ISSN 2807-5390
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.1057/S41599-025-05382-X

Flooding the Feed: The Politics of Social Media Sharing Among Defensive Publics

Author(s): Katharina Tittel, William Allen, Pedro Ramaciotti
Published in: Political Communication, 2025, ISSN 1058-4609
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2025.2588248

Scientific Reports

Author(s): Hendrik Bruns; François J. Dessart; Michal Wiktor Krawczyk; Stephan Lewandowsky; Myrto Pantazi; Gordon Pennycook; Philipp Schmid; Laura Smillie
Published in: Scientific Reports, 2023, ISSN 2045-2322
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-024-71599-6

Conference proceedings (4)

Discovering ideological structures in representation learning spaces in recommender systems on social media data

Author(s): Tim Faverjon, Pedro Ramaciotti
Published in: 2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, 2023
DOI: 10.1145/3625007.3627336

Modeling Both Pairwise Interactions and Group Effects in Polarization on Interaction Networks

Author(s): Duncan Cassells; Lionel Tabourier; Pedro Ramaciotti
Published in: Springer Proceedings in Complexity, 2024, ISBN 978-3-031-57515-0
Publisher: Springer Nature
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-57515-0_4

The Candide model: How narratives emerge where observations meet beliefs

Author(s): Paul Van Eecke, Lara Verheyen, Tom Willaert, Katrien Beuls
Published in: Proceedings of the 5th workshop on narrative understanding, 2023
Publisher: Association for Computational Linguistics
DOI: 10.18653/v1/2023.wnu-1.7

Emoji, Language Games and Political Polarisation

Author(s): Sara Luxmoore, Pedro Ramaciotti Morales, Jonathan Cardoso-Silva
Published in: Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2023, 2023, ISSN 1613-0073
Publisher: ceur-ws.org

Monographic books (3)

The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars' Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding

Author(s): Lewandowsky, Stephan; Kempe, Vera; Armaos, Konstantinos; Hahn, Ulrike; Abels, Christoph M.; Wibisono, Susilo; Louis, Winnifred; Sah, Sunita; Pagel, Christina; Jankowicz, Nina; DiResta, Renee; Markolin, Philipp; Schönemann, Henrik; Hertwig, Ralph; Crull, Henry; Mauer, Barry; Holford, Dawn; Lopez-Lopez, Ezequiel; Cook, John
Published in: EU Open Research Repository, 2025
Publisher: European Commission
DOI: 10.5281/ZENODO.15696097

Memory in the Digital Age: Bridge or Battlefield?

Author(s): Marjan Horvat; Jan Babnik; Darko Darovec; Angelika Ergaver; Jure Koražija; Urška Lampe; Žiga Oman; Tadej Škvorc; Polona Tratnik
Published in: 2026
Publisher: Institute IRRIS for Research, Development and Strategies of Society, Culture and Environment

Das Anti-Autokratie-Handbuch: Ein Leitfaden für Forschende zum Umgang mit erodierenden Demokratien

Author(s): Lewandowsky, Stephan; Kempe, Vera; Armaos, Konstantinos; Hahn, Ulrike; Abels, Christoph M.; Wibisono, Susilo; Louis, Winnifred; Sah, Sunita; Pagel, Christina; Jankowicz, Nina; DiResta, Renee; Markolin, Philipp; Schönemann, Henrik; Hertwig, Ralph; Crull, Henry; Mauer, Barry; Holford, Dawn; Lopez-Lopez, Ezequiel; Cook, John
Published in: 2025
Publisher: zenodo
DOI: 10.5281/ZENODO.17627568

Other (1)

Cultural Memory from Antagonism to Deliberation in (Social) Media: AI Approach

Author(s): Horvat, Marjan; Koražija, Jure; Babnik, Jan; Skvorc, Tadej; Robnik-Šikonja, Marko
Published in: 2025
Publisher: zenodo
DOI: 10.5281/ZENODO.15669714