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:

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!