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In recent years, much research has—more or less candidly—asked whether the use of social media platforms is “making us dumber” (Cacciatore et al., 2018). Likewise, discussions around constructs such as the news-finds-me perception or illusions of knowledge point to concerns about social media users being inadequately informed. This assessment of inadequacy, explicitly or implicitly, builds on the ideal of the informed citizen with a broad interest in current affairs who knows about all important societal issues. However, research has largely ignored what citizens themselves understand as “being informed.” Accordingly, this research project asks what people actually want to be informed about, which user characteristics predict different self-concepts of informedness, and how both of these aspects relate to feelings of being informed in the context of social media platforms. Based on a preregistered, national representative survey of German social media users (n = 1,091), we find that keeping up with news and political information is generally less important for people than staying informed about their personal interests and their social environment. However, feelings of being informed through social media are most strongly predicted by how suitable a given social media platform is perceived to be for keeping up-to-date with current affairs. This suggests that while information needs are diverse and related to different sociodemographic and personal characteristics, most people indeed seem to associate “being informed” with political information and news.

As search engines' share of (informational) media use grows, more and more people in Germany particularly turn to Google to search for information before an election. In the realm of Germany's general federal election in 2021, the campaign race is as tight as it has not been in decades, thus calling even more for orientation and information before voting. This study seeks to answer in great detail, how people use search engines in light of such a large and impactful political event and how Google responds to varying search strategies. Thereby, the study seeks to take geographical (local) and device-dependent algorithmic curation into account. It combines a state-level survey (carried out in each of Germany's 16 states) and a state-level agent-based testing setup to investigate Google search engine behavior.

Online-Anhang zum Disserationsprojekt "Selektives Googeln Die Online-Informationssuche zwischen Glaubwürdigkeit, Einstellungskonsistenz und Bequemlichkeit"

Research has shown that user comments influence peoples’ perceptions, with recent evidence suggesting that comment presentation order (e.g., whether comments are presented prior to/after the commented item) may alter the strength of comments’ effects. Considering the implications of this finding for content producers, the informed design of experiments, and the interpretation of prior studies, this study aims (1) to replicate a recent study on comment presentation order (Kümpel & Unkel, 2020), and (2) to identify why (negative) comments presented after an article seem to have stronger effects on users’ perceptions. More specifically, we aim to test the role of the availability heuristic (i.e., comments have an effect because they are readily available and easy to be recalled) and the role of the bandwagon heuristic (i.e., comments have an effect because users believe they reflect the majority’s opinion and thus jump on the proverbial bandwagon) in a pre-registered experiment.

Democratic elections need a well-informed public. With the media environment increasingly influenced by algorithms, science and society need new tools to evaluate such algorithmic influence. In this work in progress paper, we study search engine bias in the context of the German federal elections in 2021. We combine a representative survey (N = 1,641) focused on information strategies and large-scale automated retrieval of search results by agent-based testing (ABT; 293,474 searches with 2,498,764 search results) to introduce an audience-centered approach to algorithmic auditing. This approach allows us to study both how voters use search engines in the run-up to elections and the content of the results they are shown. Preliminary results point towards a strong influence of different information-seeking strategies (i.e., looking for specific party, candidate, or issue information, or more general election guidance) on the structural diversity of search results. 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Audiences’ TV series entertainment experiences are increasingly shaped not only by the events on the ‘first screen’ but also by discussions on social media. While an extensive body of research has examined practices of ‘second screening,’ especially on Twitter, online discussions before and after the live broadcast and on other platforms have received less attention. On Reddit—one of the most important platforms for Social TV—discussions often take place in temporally structured threads that allow users to discuss an episode before (pre-premiere thread), during (live premiere thread), and after (post-premiere thread) it airs. In this project, we examine whether these spaces mainly indicate temporal preferences among users or are associated with different usage practices and motives. To do so, we conducted two case studies of the Reddit community r/gameofthrones: a survey about usage motives (n = 417) and an automated content analysis of approximately 1.2 million comments left on the episode discussion threads in which we examined thread use over time, interactions between users, and discussion content. The results revealed differing usage motives and practices for the three thread types, illustrating the distinct function that these communication spaces fulfil for users.

Experimental research project investigating how subdimensions of incivility (profanity | attacks towards arguments) and intolerance (offensive stereotyping | violent threats) in user posts influence participants’ perceptions of the post (regarding its offensiveness and harm to society) as well as their intention to delete the post.