Our Projects

Digital media has changed the way public spheres function around the world, specifically in the information environment of the internet. Moving from mostly one-to-many communication to a many-to-many system has increased its complexity. In addition, big platforms are curating information flows algorithmically and optimize them for engagement. Our goal is to better understand how those transitions are affecting democracies globally and political behaviour in particular.

Across the globe, worries are growing about the unchecked power of social media and emerging digital platforms. As the viral content is believed to shape public opinions, the question of how exactly these forces influence individual and collective beliefs, attitudes, and behavior has never been more urgent.

Big data and computational power are growing fast, and it’s not just the big tech companies making use of it. Social sciences are also benefiting from these advances. Natural Language Processing (NLP) has come a long way, and now researchers can analyze text data in ways that were impossible just a few decades ago. Social media posts, transcripts of political debates, and parliamentary speeches are now valuable data sources for studying human behavior, political discourse, and societal trends. This opens up a bunch of new questions and gives us new ways to study them.