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!