Marco Dürr

Brief description of my doctoral project

The spread of anti-democratic content on social media poses enormous challenges for our society. To protect democracy in the digital sphere, it is not enough to remove harmful posts only after the fact. My dissertation focuses on the development and evaluation of digital “prebunking” interventions. These interventions are designed to build users’ resistance to manipulative, authoritarian content. I demonstrate how everyday interventions can build cognitive resistance against these harmful contents. The expected results of this dissertation are crucial for understanding how we can empower users through proactive moderation mechanisms and for gaining a new perspective on protecting our decision-making autonomy in the digital space.