PD Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann has been elected to the Management Board of the
Sustainable Computing Lab at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He will be the head of the research group
Platform and Content Governance.
The research group focuses on a better understanding of the development and application, legitimacy and contestation of norms regulating user-generated content on platforms. The eight members of the research group are investigating public, private and hybrid online communication spaces and their impact on democracy and the rule of law, the fundamental rights of online users as well as social cohesion.
Matthias Kettemann,
Anna Sophia Tiedeke and a team of the research group are currently working on the HBI-funded project
"T-REx – Taxonomy of Rights and Expressions for Freedom of Expression Governance Research", which empirically examines the practice of deleting online platforms. This project will develop a taxonomy of deleted postings from the online forums of the Austrian daily newspaper "Der Standard" and the question and answer portal "gutefrage.net". For this purpose, a dataset of 1,000 deleted postings will be analysed.
Other projects of the research group
Platform and Content Governance are planned in partner institutions in Hamburg and Brussels, Berlin and Helsinki, Vienna and Jena. The members delve deeply into the emerging, controversial normative orders being developed by private platforms that have an impact on the way people communicate online.