Keno C. Potthast has successfully defended his dissertation on ‘The Law of Party Political Communication. Constitutional Guidelines for the Technical-Distributive Dimension of Political Parties’ Communication on Social Media Platforms’. We are very happy for him!

In his dissertation, Keno C. Potthast addressed questions regarding the use of social media platforms by political parties: How can parties communicate on the platforms? When does party communication tip over into undue influence? He developed guidelines for legislators to use as a basis for regulatory action based on these conditions.

The focus was on the technical-distributive dimension of communication, incorporating insights from communication studies. He paid particular attention to the phenomena of microtargeting, astroturfing and the use of social bots.

The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz (on the right in the picture).

Keno C. Potthast was a junior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) from 2019 to 2023. He worked on online political communication from a jurisprudential perspective. His activities were part of Research Program 1 “Transformation of Public Communication: Journalistic and Intermediary Functions in the Process of Opinion Formation”.

He previously studied law with a focus on information and communication at Universität Hamburg.

On 25 October 2020, the German federal states agreed on a reform of public broadcasting, but failed to resolve the question of financing. In a commentary in Legal Tribune Online (LTO), HBI Director Wolfgang Schulz predicts cuts with an uncertain outcome and a new broadcasting judgment on the horizon.

Read the commentary by Wolfgang Schulz on LTO (in German).

When relaunching its website, the HBI placed great emphasis on making the website barrier-free and thus accessible to everyone. This has also been verified by a test. In the BIK BITV test (web), the federal ordinance on barrier-free information technology, 7 out of 7 pages of an independent, representative page selection were evaluated as BITV-/EN 301 549-compliant.

The website https://leibniz-hbi.de/en is thus largely compatible with the requirements of the HmbBITVO (and the requirements of EU Directive 2016/2102).

You can access the audit report in German here: https://report.bitvtest.de/6e304dba-67c0-4647-9584-1c3b24a2bd54.html#results-summary.

Not all content has been migrated from the old site to the new one yet, but we’re working on it!

Since October 2024, Kristina Kobrow has been the new host of our BredowCast and a member of the HBI’s science communication team. Thank you for joining us!

Kristina Kobrow studied “Cultural Studies – Culture, Arts and Media” at Leuphana University Lüneburg and graduated with a Master’s degree in 2018. Prior to this, she completed a Bachelor’s degree in “Music and Dance Studies” in Salzburg and Nice.

Her career path has led her to the Hamburg Department of Culture and to Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR).

Prof. Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann has been appointed to the Internet Governance Task Force by the German Federal Ministry of Digital Affairs and Transport (BMDV). The task force has six months to develop future scenarios for the development of German digital policy up to the year 2040.

A second task force is dedicated to the topic of “AI Governance”. In each task force, 14 scientists, business representatives and representatives of technical committees will develop a strategy paper for the German government’s international digital policy.

The two kick-off events took place on 6 September 2024 in Berlin.

For a special issue on “The Datafication of Communication – New Methodological Approaches and Challenges” in our journal “Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft” (Media & Communication Studies), we invite submissions in German and English. Guest editors are Julia Niemann-Lenz, Tim Schatto-Eckrodt, Emese Domahidi and Merja Mahrt.

The ongoing digitalization of mass and interpersonal communication processes has led to an unprecedented level of datafication—where various aspects of (social) life are transformed into data. Today, virtually all types of media content and user interactions generate data that can be collected and analyzed. This growing availability of digital traces offers new ways to address traditional and contemporary questions in digital communication research. However, the datafication of human behavior is not only reshaping the subject matter of media and communication studies, but also transforming the discipline itself—primarily through new forms of data access and methods. Computational communication science has emerged as a research field that places digital trace data at the center of media and communication research (Domahidi et al. 2019).

Central to this discourse on the datafication of both communication and the field of media and communication studies lies a methodological question: (How) can large datasets be used for reliable and valid measurements of social reality? As a discipline that has been conceptualizing and investigating these processes of datafication since its inception, media and communication studies are well placed to make significant contributions. Innovations and expansions in methods, such as data donation, AI-supported content analysis procedures, and other machine learning techniques, offer new possibilities for analyzing social phenomena. For instance, generative AI holds great potential in creating stimulus material for media effects experiments and in automating the coding of media content. These methodological improvements not only provide deeper insights into the dynamics of a datafied society but also help develop t models that better capture the complexity of social interactions.

However, critics challenge the idea that human behavior can be neutrally and objectively represented through data alone (boyd and Crawford, 2012). Large online platforms’ role in this process has been described as “data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019), a theoretical concept that likens the exploitative, extractive practices of historical colonialism to the abstract quantification methods of computer science. Additionally, the ideological basis of datafication is characterized in the literature as “dataism” (van Dijck, 2014), or the misguided belief in the objectively and neutral quantifiability of all human actions through digital systems. The inclusion of new types of data in research or media production raises new legal and ethical concerns (Spirling, 2023).

This special issue of M&K aims to bring together current topics related to datafication, particularly in relation to the methods of media and communication studies, and to foster reflection on how the discipline is evolving as a result of these innovations. The editors welcome methodological and empirical contributions that address questions such as:

• Data Accessibility and Availability: How can researchers gain access to relevant and meaningful data? How can data be collected transparently? How can it be archived and reused in the spirit of open science while respecting copyright and personal rights? What collaborative efforts are necessary or desirable within the discipline?
• New Methods and Research Areas: What new research methods and approaches do the availability of large datasets and advances in the field of machine learning (e.g. large language models) offer for communication research?
• Measuring Change in Communication Processes: How can the effects of datafication and data-processing algorithms on social communication, public opinion, and social interactions be captured?
• Ethics and Accountability: Who collects, processes, enriches, uses, and protects data, and for what purposes? What role do transparency and control play in the use of algorithms in communication?
• Reflection on the Topic: Does the datafication of communication also imply a quantification of the subject? What is the ongoing role of qualitative methods and paradigms?

Contributions in both English and German are welcome.

Scholars wishing to contribute to this special issue are invited to send an extended abstract of their manuscript proposal (max. 6,000 characters including spaces) to the editorial team by November 30, 2024. On the basis of the abstracts, the editorial team, together with the guest editors, will develop a concept for the issue and invite the respective authors to submit a manuscript by the end of March 2025. Decisions on the acceptance of manuscripts will be made according to M&K’s usual review process. The special issue is planned for publication in the 4th quarter of 2025.

Address: Editorial Office Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, Christiane Matzen, c.matzen@leibniz-hbi.de

References

boyd, d., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical Questions for Big Data. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 662–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878

Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford University Press.

Dijck, J. van. (2014). Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology. Surveillance & Society, 12(2), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776

Domahidi, E., Yang, J., Niemann-Lenz, J., & Reinecke, L. (2019). Computational Communication Science | Outlining the Way Ahead in Computational Communication Science: An Introduction to the IJoC Special Section on “Computational Methods for Communication Science: Toward a Strategic Roadmap”. International Journal of Communication, 13. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/10533

Spirling, A. (2023). Why Open-Source Generative AI Models Are an Ethical Way Forward for Science. Nature, 616(7957), 413. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01295-4

Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

Wiebke Loosen talks about Kant’s philosophical question “What can I know?” as well as about fake news, journalistic conventions and what is worth arguing about in the science TV magazine “scobel” on 3sat.

Wiebke Loosen‘s lively discussion with Maren Urner and Marcus Willaschek, as well as host Gerd Scobel, can be viewed in the media library until 29 August 2029 at https://www.3sat.de/wissen/scobel/scobel—was-kann-ich-wissen-100.html.

Information about the Program

Human knowledge is constantly increasing. But the more we know, the more we also realize what we do not know. And ignorance often leads to social upheaval. Conversely, knowledge – and thus an enlightened society – is the basis for a stable democracy. “What can I know?” is one of Kant’s philosophical questions. And it is more relevant than ever.

There is no absolute truth that applies equally to everyone. There are only approximations of reality. This applies to science as much as it does to journalism. Approximations of reality can be more or less successful. Part of scientific work is to identify uncertainties or limitations. Ideally, journalists reveal their perspective on reality.

Broadcasters are no longer dependent on broadcasting companies or publishers. They are seeking out their own channels to spread their truths. Social media channels such as TikTok and Telegram are easy to use without effort. A selection of news that has been checked according to universally valid rules is becoming increasingly insignificant. The way is clear for countless truths on countless channels.
Science is facing a similar problem: scientific work is becoming less and less dependent on publications in scientific journals. Their authors are also seeking their own paths to recipients and thus evading the usual review processes of the scientific apparatus.

Are we facing a world without journalism? Is science losing its credibility – and thus its value to society? Gert Scobel talks about these issues with his guests.

Guests

Wiebke Loosen is a senior researcher in journalism studies at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut and a professor at Universität Hamburg. She is head of the research program “Transformation of Public Communication,” which examines how the public is created and opinion-forming is made possible under the conditions of digitalization.

Maren Urner‘s research focuses on mental and neuronal information processing and the consequences of reporting that predominantly addresses negative knowledge. The neuroscientist is a professor of sustainable transformation at the Münster University of Applied Sciences and a co-founder of “Perspective Daily”.

Marcus Willaschek is an internationally renowned Kant expert and teaches as a professor of modern philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. At the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, he is jointly responsible for the scientific standard edition of Kant’s writings.

In his guest commentary on Legal Tribune Online (LTO) on 22 August 2024, Wolfgang Schulz explains the “delicate balancing act” between protecting the rule of law and ensuring the freedoms guaranteed by fundamental rights, which the decision of the Federal Administrative Court of 14 August 2024 regarding the so-called “Compact” ban has achieved. The constitutional state must fight its enemies, but it must not sacrifice its principles in doing so.

The Federal Administrative Court had suspended the ban on the magazine “Compact” (among others) for the time being. Wolfgang Schulz considers the decision to be a calm response to the anti-democratic attacks on the constitutional state, which were also initiated by the magazine “Compact”. However, he warns that the protection of freedom of the press must be guaranteed in the future on the basis of clearer standards. Beyond the case of the “Compact” ban, this would also require specific media law regulations.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz holds the Chair of Media Law, Public Law and Legal Theory at Universität Hamburg, is Director of the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut, Director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and holds the UNESCO Chair on the Freedom of Communication and Information.

Read the guest commentary on Legal Tribune Online (LTO)