Prof. Dr. Judith Möller

Joint Professorship with Universität Hamburg

Judith Möller has taken up the professorship “Empirical Communication Research, especially Media Use and Social Media Effects” at Universität Hamburg in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) on 1 February 2023. This is a joint appointment, which combines teaching at the University’s Institute of Journalism and Communication Studies with extensive research activities at the HBI.

Her research focuses on the effects of political communication, especially in social media. The focus is on two questions: (1) the impact of personalised political communication on individuals and society as a whole, and (2) the role of (new) media in the process of opinion formation, especially as part of political socialisation processes.

Judith Möller war Associate Professor of Political Communication at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science, University of Trondheim before. She is an associate member of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), the Center for Politics and Communication (CPC) and the Information, Communication, & the Data Society Initiative (ICDS).

In 2019, Judith Möller received a VENI Talent Track grant from the Netherlands Science Foundation (NWO). The project is entitled “Vocal, Visible and Vaulting? (Dis)connected Niche Audiences in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” and investigates the impact of algorithmic filtering systems and artificial intelligence on specific populations and niche audiences. Her work has been published in numerous international journals. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Communication and Political Communication and an ad hoc reviewer for leading journals in the field.

Transfer

The transfer of her research and collaboration with practitioners is of great importance to Judith Möller. She regularly participates in public debates or science festivals and is in constant dialogue with newspaper publishers, public broadcasters and media regulators. For the German media authority Medienanstalten, she contributed to an expert opinion on types of disinformation and misinformation, which looked at different forms of disinformation and their dissemination from a communication science and legal perspective. She is also regularly invited as an expert to meetings of media regulators and consumer and market authorities, such as the European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services (ERGA), the European Platform of Regulatory Authorities (EPRA), Medienanstalt Berlin-Brandenburg (mabb), Landesanstalt für Medien NRW, the Swiss Federal Media Commission (EMEK) or Election Observation and Democracy Support (EODS).

Contact information

Prof. Dr. Judith Möller

Joint Professorship with Universität Hamburg

Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI)
Rothenbaumchaussee 36
20148 Hamburg
Germany

Last update: 04.07.2024

Works by Prof. Dr. Judith Möller

Cover of Working Paper No. 75
Publikation Working Paper Available for Download

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.

Illustration: ein oranger Roboter sitzt inmitten schwarzer Figuren, die Menschen darstellen
Projekt Project of the DFG Research Group ComAI

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.

Cover of the online article on “Mediendiskurs”
Publikation Article on the Platform mediendiskurs

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.

Cover of a publication
Publikation Conversational Atmosphere Report

Information Ecosystems and Troubled Democracy

Do information ecosystems weaken democracy and promote the viral spread of mis- and disinformation? In the report “Information Ecosystems and Troubled Democracy: A Global Synthesis of the State of Knowledge on New Media, AI and Data Governance”, an international team of researchers assesses the role of information ecosystems.

Mit Dall-E generierte Illustration eines Newsrooms, den ein Roboter und ein Mensch betreten
Projekt Project of the DFG Research Group ComAI

Automation of News and Journalistic Autonomy

The project, which is part of the DFG research group ComAI, investigates communicative AI in journalism by analyzing the associated challenges for journalistic autonomy at the interactional, organizational, and societal levels.

Handydisplay mit mehren App-Icons Chat GPT
Projekt Project of the DFG Research Group ComAI

The Juridification of Communicative AI

The project, which is part of the DFG research group ComAI, is investigating the legal framework for communicative bots (in particular ChatGPT) and social bots (in particular X and Facebook) – on the one hand from the perspective of communication law, and on the other hand from the perspective of emerging AI regulation.

Cover des Impulspapiers
Publikation Discussion Paper for the Friedich-Ebert-Stiftung

How Can the Resilience of the German Media System Be Strengthened?

Tobias Mast has published a paper in the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's ‘FES Impuls’ series. The paper examines the legal and structural foundations of public broadcasting and makes it clear that reforms are necessary to ensure its independence in the long term.

Cover des Arbeitspapiers Nr. 74 "Jahr der Nachricht"
Publikation Working Paper No. 74 Available for Download

Experiences with Hands-On Actions in the Year of the News 2024

The "Year of the News 2024" project, part of the #UseTheNews initiative, aims to reach young people with a range of journalistic content and activities and get them involved in journalism. Leonie Wunderlich and Dr. Sascha Hölig researched how young people engage with the campaign and these activities.

Cover of issue 4 of the journal "Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft"
Publikation Available as Open Access

M&K 4/2024 Published

The articles in M&K 4/2024 focus, among other things, on the topics of media use research, satire and the role of news agencies. All content is available in open access via the eLibrary of the Nomos publishing house.

first page of the online article
Publikation Dossier of the Federal Agency for Civic Education

AI in Social Media

In the online dossier ‘When Appearances Are Deceiving – Deepfakes and Political Reality’ from the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb), Jan-Hinrik Schmidt explains how social media platforms have been using machine learning technologies for some time now to curate and moderate content.

Cover of Working Paper No. 73 SIKID
Publikation Working Paper Available for Download

Regulations for Empirical Research with Children

No data processing without the informed consent of the persons concerned. This is one of the conclusions of Sünje Andresen, Stephan Dreyer and Neda Wysocki, who have looked at the legal issues and imponderables in empirical research with children.

Der Schiftsteller Siegfried Lenz vor Hafenkulisse
Projekt Literature on the Radio

Siegfried Lenz: How the Author Uses the Media

The project examines the radio works of the renowned Hamburg author Siegfried Lenz (1926-2014) and documents in three extensive volumes what Lenz wrote for radio from the 1950s to the 1970s, mostly for the NDR.

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