13 September was a special day for NEWSFLOWS: Mónika Simon defended her thesis “What happens on the fringes, stays on the fringes? Information flows in the contemporary media system. In her thesis, she studied how and under which circumstances information flows from the fringes of the mainstream. As the summary on the back of her thesis says:

The increasingly fragmented but at the same time interwoven nature of the contemporary information landscape poses new challenges to existing theory and methodology in understanding the information flows that shape public debate.

Through three empirical chapters, this dissertation seeks to unravel the intricate role of dark platforms in the contemporary media system. It not only sheds light on their multifaceted impact but also provides methodological and theoretical insights that can advance our understanding of information flows within the ever-evolving, multilayered information ecosystem.

Congratulations, Dr. Simon! We are incredibly proud of you!

Within the NEWFLOWS project, we develop methodological approaches to study news flows. As the project progresses, it’s time to share insights with others in form of workshops and lectures. In June, we organized such training workshops together with the COMPTEXT conference in Amsterdam and a COST Action “OPINION” training school in Salamanca. Amongst other activities, Johannes Gruber was teaching how to use locally run large-language models for analysing news events.

But we also use other channels to reach out. For instance, the podcast “What is it about computational communication science?” devoted a whole eposode (LINK) to Mónika Simon’s work on information flows in Telegram:

With a one-year corona-delay, we were this year able to participate in Lowlands Science. As one of the biggest and most popular music festivals in the Netherlands, the 60,000 tickets were sold out within minutes. At that festival, the NEWSFLOWS team had a stand in which visitors could explore their own data and get an idea in how far it represents a bubble – or not. If they chose so, they could donate data to us – and many more than we expected did so, we even had to print more forms in between! But above all, we also had many meaningful discussions with literally hundreds of people!

Reaching out beyond the communication science community, NEWSFLOWS was present at the European Political Science Association (EPSA) conference in Prague. Below the slides on Damian’s work on conceptual and theoretical considerations to move beyond the metaphors of echo chambers and filter bubbles.

Last week, we hosted a two-day workshop to discuss ways to study feedback loops in news recommendation. We discussed previous experiences on field experiments as well as ways forward. In particular, we worked on the development of a platform for field experiments on human-algorithmic feedback loops in news recommender systems. Building on earlier work from our group [1] [2], we worked towards further experiments to conduct within NEWSFLOWS and to further disseminate our approach to other interested researchers.

@article{Loecherbach2020,
abstract = {Abstract Today's online news environment is increasingly characterized by personalized news selections, relying on algorithmic solutions for extracting relevant articles and composing an individual's news diet. Yet, the impact of such recommendation algorithms on how we consume and perceive news is still understudied. We therefore developed one of the first software solutions to conduct studies on effects of news recommender systems in a realistic setting. The web app of our framework (called 3bij3) displays real-time news articles selected by different mechanisms. 3bij3 can be used to conduct large-scale field experiments, in which participants' use of the site can be tracked over extended periods of time. Compared to previous work, 3bij3 gives researchers control over the recommendation system under study and creates a realistic environment for the participants. It integrates web scraping, different methods to compare and classify news articles, different recommender systems, a web interface for participants, gamification elements, and a user survey to enrich the behavioural measures obtained.},
author = {Loecherbach, Felicia and Trilling, Damian},
doi = {10.5117/CCR2020.1.003.LOEC},
issn = {2665-9085},
journal = {Computational Communication Research},
number = {1},
pages = {53--79},
title = {{3bij3 ‐ Developing a framework for researching recommender systems and their effects}},
url = {https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/10.5117/CCR2020.1.003.LOEC},
volume = {2},
pdf = {https://computationalcommunication.org/ccr/article/view/11/11},
year = {2020}
}

@inproceedings{Loecherbach2021,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
author = {Loecherbach, Felicia and Welbers, Kasper and Moeller, Judith and Trilling, Damian and {Van Atteveldt}, Wouter},
booktitle = {13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021},
doi = {10.1145/3447535.3462506},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3447535.3462506},
file = {:home/damian/SURFdrive/literatuur-mendeley/Loecherbach et al.{\_}2021.pdf:pdf},
isbn = {9781450383301},
keywords = {acm reference format,damian trilling,diversity,felicia loecherbach,judith moeller,kasper welbers,news recommender systems},
month = {jun},
pages = {282--290},
publisher = {ACM},
title = {{Is this a click towards diversity? Explaining when and why news users make diverse choices}},
year = {2021}
}

After long years of lockdown and Covid19-restriction, we were finally able to present our results at the first major offline, real-world conference: The Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association in Paris.

• Damian gave a keynote at the pre-conference Understanding the Dynamics of (Ir)Responsible AI in Journalism and Algorithmically Shaped News Flows. You can find the slide below:

• Rupert presented first findings on information and toxicity flows on telegram. Slides:

• Also Monika looked into Telegram:
  

• Zilin presented a new method to conceptualize journalistic genres in a multidimensional space and operationalize this approach using BERT-based classifiers, allowing to score text from sources as diverse as podcasts, videos, and online news:
  

This week, Damian is visiting the Department of Information Science and Media Studies and the MediaFutures Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation at the University of Bergen, Norway. In particular, Damian and Erik Knudsen, the principal investigator of the project NEWSREC: The double-edged sword of news recommenders’ impact on democracy are discussing potential synergies and possibilities for cooperation. While both projects have a clearly distinct focus, both theoretically and methodologically, there are quite some connections. This could be a good chance for NEWSFLOWS to already after its first year have an impact.

Damian gave an invited talk at the Department of Communication and Media Research (IKMZ) at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. On 29 March, he talked (via zoom, due to corona) about “Modeling News Flows: How Feedback Loops Influence Citizens’ Beliefs and Shape Societies” not fully coincidentally also the title of the NEWSFLOWS project. He outlined the theoretical underpinnings of the project, insights from previous work, as well as the steps ahead that NEWSFLOWS is going to take.

On January 1, 2021, we officially started! NEWSFLOWS is the result of an idea I was walking around with for years – the idea that there must be a better way to describe how news spreads in the current media environment than common narratives like filter bubbles or echo chambers. Now, with the funding of an ERC Starting grant, we can finally investigate how news flows in our digital society look like with a team of multiple researchers for the coming five years. The first two PhD candidates started on February 1, 2021 – the fun can begin!