DDC Pre-conference: Social Media Influence: Understanding digital influence infrastructure

Such opacity hinders effective mitigation against potentially harmful consequences. To effectively bolster democratic societies against information disorders and new forms of political influences, the Social Media Influence project is arranging a full-day pre-conference, bringing together leading researchers in the field to discuss the current state of research on this topic. Taking a societal perspective, the pre-conference will explore the topic of social media influence, with a special focus on big tech platforms as a central form of influence infrastructure.

We seek to highlight theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions to the field, and welcome submissions that are inter- or transdisciplinary as well as cross-country studies.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• Novel theoretical frameworks for understanding social media and other big tech platforms’ influence on democracies
• Descriptive, computational or experimental studies of the role of platforms in shaping public opinions, e.g. on algorithmic curation and boosting of content, moderation practices, platform affordances, economics, biases, dark participation etc.
• Digital opinion leadership and agenda-setting: How online political conversations are shaped by influencers, politicians, foreign agents, bots and other non-human or hybrid actors
• Methodological innovation for obtaining, analyzing or interpreting platform data and dynamics, such as: data donation, web-scraping, methods for multimodal analyses, Agent-Based Modeling with LLMs, MLLM-powered experiments etc.
• Patterns in online content engagement and participation in relation to: socio-demographic variables, psychological traits, attitudes, or wellbeing
• Studies on strategies to empower users of social media platforms to take part in debates, counter hostility and promote civic participation across political divides