While social media make the public arena more open and thus more responsive, they are also considered to lead to new mechanisms of fragmentation and exclusion, erosion of norms in the public debate, and a loss of trust in traditional institutions. The SoMe4dem project will reconsider these diagnoses 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.
One of the key research goals of the project is thus to map platform affordances and assess their impact. The objective of this workshop is to bridge gaps between state-of-the art research on the mapping and monitoring of platform policies, affordances, and the computational analysis of social media discourse. To this end, the workshop brings together researchers working on 1) typologies of platform affordances, 2) platform regulations and policies, and 3) empirical investigations of platform vernaculars based on text and data mining.
Programme
- 10:00 – 10:30 Welcome and Introduction
- 10:30 – 10:55 Nathalie Van Raemdonck (VUB) – A conceptual framework for the mutual shaping of platform features, affordances and norms on social media.
- 10:55 – 11:20 Eckehard Olbrich (MPI Leipzig) – The public sphere, democracy, and social media
- 11:20 – 11:40 Coffee Break
- 11:40 – 12:05 Stijn Peeters (UVA) – Affordance-driven social media data capture with Zeeschuimer
- 12:05 – 12:30 Luc Steels (VIU) - Value-aware social media platforms
- 12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
- 13:30 – 13:55 Tom Willaert (VUB) – A computational analysis of Telegram’s narrative affordances
- 13:55 – 14:20 Marc Tuters (UVA) - The conspiracy attractor: metadiscourse, metanarrative and the strange case of The Great Reset
- 14:20 – 14:40 Coffee Break
- 14:40 – 17:00 Plenary discussion and work plan
- 17:00 End of meeting and walk towards dinner
Registration
Please register for the event here