Published on: 04.07.2024
All blog articles
HBI 75: Founding History
How the Institute Got Its Name
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.
RISC Blog Article
Elon Musk, the AfD and the Agenda-Setting of the Radical Right in the 2025 German Federal Election
The article explains how Elon Musk's communication interventions increase the media presence of Alice Weidel and the AfD, and how these dynamics are driven by the mechanisms of the digital attention economy.
Platform Governance
Can Platforms Cancel Politicians?
An international study led by the HBI provides a first comparative overview of how societies and governments in 15 countries react to private power over political actors.
Twitter, Trump and The Taliban – The Need for Better Rules for Online Speech Governance
How come the Taliban have access to social media while former President Trump does not? The short answer is that Trump has deliberately violated the internal speech rules of social media companies before being banned while certain Taliban and Taliban-affiliated accounts have not done so recently or consistently. They are, however, often banned and/or suspended. But things are complicated.
Platform Governance
Making Courts Count in Global Content Governance
Technological change poses new challenges for courts, while their decisions and the quasi-judicial structures of digital platforms increasingly shape the rules of digitality.
Media Research Blog
Trump’s social media ban
Trump’s ban from social media, while gaining significant media attention, does not represent an isolated case. Preventing individuals from accessing social media platforms or parts of them is a common phenomenon today. Edoardo Celeste terms it ‘social media exclusion’ and argues that it is possible to distinguish three types of this phenomenon on the basis of the actors and specific underlying factors determining the users’ exclusion.
Polarization in the US
Democracy at Stake: The Capitol Siege as a Digital Crisis?
The attack on the institutional heart of one of the oldest democracies of the world was a major shock, for the United States and democracies all over the world. How were social media conducive to the Capitol siege and what should we learn from it?
Blogpost
Who is Zoom to Judge?
Why Engaging in Content Governance is Not a Good Idea for the Successful Video Conferencing Platform.