The automatization of workflows or the increasing use of artificial intelligence confronts society with several challenges. The digital transformation of our communication and the advent of ubiquitous social media lead to the continuous generation of huge amounts of heterogeneous social data (various media formats, upcoming new platforms, changing communication concepts in social media) and a feeling of information overload among a lot of people. It is obvious that the change in our communication behavior leads to the exponential development of anti-social phenomena such as hate speech, propaganda dissemination (through bots) or fake news. The diffusion of wrong information is especially harmful in situations in which social media is used to, for example, assist emergency service agencies during a crisis e.g. a terrorist attack or a pandemic. RISE_SMA has contributed to a better understanding of the influence of roles and actors and the evolvement of topics and dynamics to protect societies in the EU to be damaged by these developments. And, at the same time, RISE_SMA has uncovered potentials for improving public discourses and communication processes in crisis situations will not be exploited.
The extraction and understanding of relevant information from social media data is not only difficult for organizations and individuals, but also for academics. RISE_SMA has advanced the field of research by combining useful methods and theoretical concepts from various disciplines to address these challenges. RISE_SMA has gathered the necessary researchers to make significant steps forward in this underdeveloped field and it consolidates efforts from specialists from information systems, computer engineering, and communication and media science with different national backgrounds and created new methods and a better understanding of the current societal dynamics related to social media. RISE_SMA generates high impact in the EU by providing organizations with newly developed innovative software tools, designed to gather, analyze, and condense social media data for organizations on the society-level (such as municipalities) and crisis communication (such as emergency service agencies).
