Projekt description
Social media have become essential tools for political communication, social interaction and information exchange. But while use of these platforms in general has been associated with a number of positive democratic outcomes, significant concerns have been raised about how video- or image-based platforms like TiKToK, YouTube and Instagram can be used to effectively disseminate toxic, extremist, conspiratorial, and misleading content. Such content has been shown to have detrimental effects on psychological functioning and on citizens’ well-being. This project brings together theories of entertainment, visual communication and toxic speech into a novel and empirically testable theoretical framework. It aims to map the scale, and study the characteristics, of entertainment-based visual toxic content seeking to understand its consequences on user attitudes and behaviors towards it. Its research design relies on AI methods for automated content classification and survey experiments for the uncovering of causal effects of toxic entertainment.
Project team
Prof. Dr. Yannis Theocharis
Professor, Chair of Digital Governance | TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology | Technical University of Munich
Prof. Dr. Diana Rieger
Professor, Lehrstuhl für Kommunikationswissenschaft | Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich
Prof. Dr. Carsten Schwemmer
Professor, Computational Social Sciences | Institut für Soziologie | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Dr. Andreas Nanz
Postdoctoral Researcher, Chair of Digital Governance | Technical University of Munich
Ursula Kristin Schmid
Research Associate, Department of Media and Communication | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich