News
Reports, Publications, Projects, Blog Posts & Podcasts from the Institute
How Do Young Voters Inform Themselves?
Classic media such as radio and television continue to play a role in political education, but they are increasingly being supplemented – and in some cases replaced – by social media. What does this mean for the upcoming federal election? How do young voters inform themselves? Leonie Wunderlich discusses all of this in the new episode of “Tonspur Wissen – der Podcast von Rheinischer Post und Leibniz-Gemeinschaft".
“We Do Not Have to Sound the Death Knell for Democracy”
How dangerous are disinformation campaigns? Legal expert Matthias Kettemann questions the often-invoked link between misinformation and the “threat to democracy”. In an interview with Anna Henschel on the Wissenschaftskommunikation.de portal, he refers to recently published research findings.
When Filtering Distorts Body Image
Due to beauty filters, young people are often confronted with unrealistic beauty ideals on social media. This can lead to body image disorders as well as eating disorders. So should edited images be labeled? Not a good idea, says an expert opinion by the HBI on behalf of the KJM: The legal requirements for an enforceable legal regulation are high, and the positive effects of labeling are controversial. Instead of a legal labeling requirement, the algorithms of the platforms could be adapted to promote more diverse and realistic body representations.
Labeling of Edited (Influencer) Photos: Necessity, Effect, Regulatory Approaches
Do digitally edited photos in social media have to be labeled? On behalf of the Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media (KJM), the HBI investigated the necessity of a legal labeling requirement for edited photos and videos. The expert opinion was presented to the public on 5 February 2025 and is available for download here as a working paper.
How German-Speaking Memorial Sites Engage with TikTok to Preserve Remembrance
How are concentration camp memorials using the platform TikTok for remembrance work? Liv Ohlsen and Dr. Hans-Ulrich Wagner take a look at the so-called Historytoks for Generation Z and show in a three-part blog series how concentration camp memorials are taking up this new form of digital remembrance work on their TikTok accounts.
Influence of Extreme Right-Wing Accounts on Elon Musk’s View of Europe
How much influence do far-right accounts have on Elon Musk's perception of Europe? Quite a lot, as the French newspaper Le Monde has pointed out in a recent article. Jan Rau was interviewed as an expert on the topic of “the extreme right and social media”.
Communicative AI and Deliberative Quality
What impact do social bots that use Large Language Models (LLMs) have on the quality of political discourse? The project investigates communicative AI in the social domain of political discourse using discourse monitoring and discourse intervention and thus with a largely experimental approach. The case studies are debates in German on the topic of climate change on X, Mastodon and Bluesky.
About Constant Dripping and the Sum of Its Parts
The article by Stephan Dreyer and Sünje Andresen examines the challenges that arise for the regulatory framework of child and youth media protection as a result of “micro content” and the cross-platform media use of children and young people, and investigates whether and how regulation can do justice to these new realities.
Spotlight: Community Notes Instead of Fact-Checking
The first edition of the new online discussion series “Spotlight” at HIIG focused on Mark Zuckerberg's decision to end the cooperation with external fact-checkers on all of Meta's platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Threads) in the US and to rely on “Community Notes” instead. The guest was Matthias C. Kettemann, and Katharina Mosene moderated the discussion.