Jan-Ole Harfst works as a Junior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut since August 2024. He conducts research in the project “DSA Research Network” which is supported by Stiftung Mercator.
Jan-Ole Harfst studied law at Universität Hamburg (supported by a scholarship from the Studienwerk Villigst) with a focus on information and communication.
Jan-Ole Harfst
Junior Researcher DSA
Leibniz Institut for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut
Rothenbaumchaussee 36
20148 Hamburg
Germany
Last update: 11.07.2025
The problematic role of the European Commission in enforcing the Digital Services Act (DSA) and possible alternatives are the focus of a blog post published by Jan-Ole Harfst, Dr. Tobias Mast, and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz on 16 July 2025 on the Verfassungblog.
Jan Rau, Moritz Fürneisen, and Gregor Wiedemann co-developed the concept of community data stewardship to facilitate the collaborative creation and utilization of sensitive data in communication science. By using the example of research into right-wing extremist online communication, they demonstrate how community data stewardship can be structured.
"What Can Audience Research findings tell us about the public value of public service media?" This question explored by Prof. Dr. Uwe Hasebrink and PD Dr. Jan-Hinrik Schmidt, who published their insights in the issue 2/2024 of the journal UFITA.
With this brochure. we take a look at the institute's development since 1950. While we do not claim to provide a complete history, we aim to highlight some of the institute's unique characteristics, showcasing moments in the past when these features were particularly evident.
On May 30, 1950, the Hans Bredow Institute was founded by the former Northwest German Broadcasting Corporation (the predecessor of NDR and WDR) and the University of Hamburg. This blog post describes the history of its founding and explains how the institute got its name.
Issue 2/2025 of Media & Communication Science has been published as a special issue entitled “Media Structures Revisited,” edited by Josef Seethaler, Marlis Prinzing, Petra Herczeg, and Mark Eisenegger. The entire issue is available open access via the Nomos eLibrary.
The final research report, jointly written as part of the NOTORIOUS research project, looks at how climate-related misinformation and disinformation spreads across different platforms. At the HBI, Philipp Keßling, Dr. Felix Victor Münch, Dr. Gregor Wiedemann, and Mattes Ruckdeschel worked on the report.
It is the most extensive publication the HBI has ever produced: the 1600-page commentary on the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), edited by Tobias Mast, Matthias C. Kettemann, Stephan Dreyer and Wolfgang Schulz. In addition to several current and former researchers from the institute, almost 30 other experts from Germany, Austria and Switzerland were recruited for the commentary project.
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz and Dr. Tobias Mast have provided their expert opinion on the State Treaty on the Reform of the Procedure for Setting the Broadcasting Fee (RFinÄStV). At the end of 2004, the federal states had decided to separate the pillars of the reform of public broadcasting and to adopt the draft reform first and to continue the process of reforming the procedure for setting the licence fee separately.
The publication "Der Schutz der Meinungsäusserungsfreiheit im Digital Services Act" [The Protection of Freedom of Expression in the Digital Services Act], to which Matthias C. Kettemann contributed significantly, is the first in a series of KommAustria publications on the DSA, which are intended to provide a basis for understanding the DSA and contribute to a more differentiated discussion.
The research project "Generative Artificial Intelligence for Information Navigation", funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), investigated to what extent, for what purposes and for what reasons the German population uses generative artificial intelligence in applications such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini. The findings can be downloaded as a working paper.
In the current issue of the Neue Zeitschrift für Verwaltungsrecht, Tobias Mast challenges the increasingly prominent view in legal literature that trusted flaggers under Art. 22 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) are public authorities in the sense of German administrative law.
