Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Designing Social Media Recommendation Algorithms for Societal Good

Objective

Social media platforms are central for civic discourse yet evidence is mounting that they play a causal role in deteriorating social cohesion.
User behaviour on social media platforms is governed by content recommendation algorithms that maximise engagement, leading to unintended consequences such as the promotion of outrage.
The EU's newly enacted Digital Services Act mandates social media platforms to assess their systemic risks for society.
However, the current challenge lies in translating abstract risks to concrete platform design changes that reduce such risks.
We will bridge this gap by combining approaches from social science and computer science to incorporate the reduction of risk to civic discourse into content recommendation algorithms of social media platforms.
To this end, we will employ a participation-based approach to develop novel algorithms that consider various aspects of civic discourse, such as information quality and diversity, and the civility of language.
We will develop Open Source digital twins of social media platforms to enable experimentation with new algorithms independent of platform companies.
To balance the reduction of risk to civic discourse and freedom of expression, we will solicit people's preferences in different scenarios such as a public health crisis and elections, and develop balanced algorithms.
Lastly, we will develop a scenario-based risk assessment framework to assess algorithms and provide policy recommendations for interventions in content recommendation algorithms.

The originality of DeSiRe stands out in that to date democratic values and fundamental rights played no role in the design of content recommendation algorithms.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG

See all projects funded under this call

Host institution

UNIVERSITAET GRAZ
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 2 037 464,00
Address
UNIVERSITATSPLATZ 3
8010 GRAZ
Austria

See on map

Region
Südösterreich Steiermark Graz
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 2 037 464,00

Beneficiaries (1)

My booklet 0 0