PhD Projects

Political actors use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to influence potential voters and other key audiences such as journalists and civil society actors. This research will examine the self-promotion strategy of politicians from the perspective of visual framing and textual framing on Instagram. For data analysis, supervised deep learning will be used to (…)

Disinformation and fake news are not new, but digitalization and mediatization have taken the problem to a new level. The dissertation project aims to gain a better understanding and possible solutions. Through a quantitative content analysis of fact checks by German organizations, Sami wants to find out what disinformation is actually about. Which topics are (…)

The internet is permanently changing the structure and logic of the political public sphere: the former gatekeeping position of traditional media is disappearing and new actors are entering the arena. Jan Rau’s dissertation project investigates how and to what extent German far-right and right-wing populist actors can exploit this transformation of discursive power relations. Specifically, (…)

When we think of political action, we often think of crowds of people pushing their way through the streets with flags, signs and slogans. However, this image of political action is incomplete. Political action takes place both in the ‘analog’ world and in the digital world in a wide variety of forms. Fridays for Future (…)