Svenja Boberg, Thorsten Quandt, Tim Schatto-Eckrodt and Lena Frischlich published the white paper “Pandemic Populism: Facebook Pages of Alternative News Media and the Corona Crisis – a Computational Content Analysis” on the platform arxiv.org. The study analyzes the spreading of disinformation and conspiracy theories in an initial computational content analysis of alternative news media’s output on Facebook during the COVID-19 pandemic , based on a large German data set from January to the second half of March 2020. Using computational content analysis, methods, reach, interactions, actors, and topics of the messages were examined, as well as the use of fabricated news and conspiracy theories. The analysis revealed that the alternative news media stay true to message patterns and ideological foundations identified in prior research. While they do not spread obvious lies, they are predominantly sharing overly critical, even anti-systemic messages, opposing the view of the mainstream news media and the political establishment. With this pandemic populism, they contribute to a contradictory, menacing, and distrusting worldview. Reviews of the study can be read here.

Lena Frischlich will work as interim professor for media change at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich during the summer semester 2020.

Lena Frischlich and Johanna Klapproth participated in the 65th annual conference of the German Communication Association at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. The conference dealt with the topic “#Media #Human #Society. Questions and answers of communication and media science in times of rapid media change” and the DemoRESILdigital team presented various talks. The conference program can be read here.

The conceptual paper “Alternative news media” which Lena Frischlich published with Kristoffer Holt (Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait) and Tine Ustadt Figenschou (University of Oslo) in the journal Digital Journalism got multiple nominations as one of the outstanding articles of 2019 as the journal announced on Twitter in February 2020.

© Lena Frischlich

Lena Frischlich and Tim Schatto-Eckrodt joined the first 24-Hours of Political Psychology – an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the FernUniversität Hagen from 17 to 18 January 2020. The conference focused on the discussion of power and domination structures and the question of how the individual moves and behaves within them. In particular, it was discussed how xenophobia and nationalism develop, what motivates people to protest and why people adapt to systems of domination.

© AWK NRW – Andreas Endermann

As first communication scholar since its foundation in 2006, Lena Frischlich has been accepted for the prestigious Young College (“Junges Kolleg”) of the North-Rhine Westphalian (NRW) Academy of Science and Arts. The official ceremonial act with NRW ministry of science Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen will take place at the 14st of January during the new years concert of the academy. Memebers of the college receive a stipend of 10.000€ per year for a period of up to four years and are provided with the opportunity to discuss their research in interdisciplinary teams within the college.

DemoRESILdigital PI, Lena Frischlich, opens the eleventh international congress of online journalism (XI Congreso Internacional de Ciberperiodismo) in Bilbao in Spain with a talk about “Journalism between “alternative news media”, “fake news” and “social bots”: New actors and opportunity structures for manipulation in shared media spaces”. For media announcements, see The World News, eitb.eus or europa press.

From the 4-6th September, the 11th meeting of the German association of Mediapsychology takes place in Chemnitz. Research Group PI Lena Frischlich presents initial insights into the moderating role of generalized ideological attitudes for the credibility and effects of distorted news articles and takes part in the public expert discussion about “Trust in the media? Information in the age of social media platforms”. The conference program can be found here.

 

Research group PI Lena Frischlich visits this week the 2019 version of the European Symposium Series on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science (#euroCSS) where she had been invited as discussant for data & societies’ media manipulation team leader Prof. Alice Marwick from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their session on Disinformation in Context: Understanding Qualitative Approaches to Social Media Manipulation opened the main event on tuesday, 3rd of September. But Frischlich also was part of the selection comitee for the “Dataset Challenge 2019 –Machine Behavior Datathon” the day before.