On Monday, March 11th, we had the pleasure of hosting Anja Bechmann as a guest speaker in the IPKW Research Talk Series. Anja Bechmann introduced her presentation by delineating various theoretical frameworks influencing her research agenda. Drawing from the study of collective behavior in evolutionary biology, she explained how scholars can make use of digital trace data and web traffic data for comprehending collective behaviors, both online and offline, particularly in the face of democratic challenges and crises. Her primary focus lies on dark collective behavior, encompassing collective emotions and the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms. In her talk, she walked us through different papers that exemplify studying collective behavior with trace data in combination with other methods and discusses the methodological considerations and challenges for past, present and future research. For example, as part of her ongoing research, she shared insights from a recent study published in PLOS ONE, in which the authors used large language models to infer emotional expressions on Twitter concerning crisis topics like COVID-19 and misinformation.
Title: The Dark Landscape of Social Media Exposure and Engagement Across National Populations in Times of Crises
Abstract:
The pandemic and the Ukrainian war have accelerated the spread of false information and propaganda in the EU and now the mitigation against an non-transparent information landscape is challenged by generative AI as an improved tool for fast, convincing and low-cost deep fake, multi-version content spread. This presentation will present research from DATALAB at Aarhus University in Denmark with a special focus on how to study emotions and verified (by factcheckers) false content on social media across countries using computational analysis. The presentation will both exemplify this research area by drawing on our published, submitted and work-in-progress research to discuss limitations, obstacles and potential research design solutions.
About Anja Bechmann
Anja Bechmann (she/her) is professor at Media Studies and director of the interdisciplinary research center DATALAB - Center for Digital Social Research at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her research examines digital and social media communication and collective behavior using large-scale data collection and applied machine learning. She is the PI of Nordic Observatory for Information Disorders and of the Independent Research Fund Denmark project Social Media Influence. She is a member of the Royal Danish Academy and the Academy of Technical Sciences and former member of the EU High Level Group on Disinformation.
Twitter: @anjabechmann
Mail: anjabechmann@cc.au.dk
