The diffusion of artificial intelligence into educational processes in the form of social bots or personalizing algorithms is becoming increasingly relevant. For example, artificial entities such as Twitter bots that simulate human behavior are publicly suspected of disseminating political, health-related, or scientific (mis)information, thereby creating a bias in knowledge. Similarly, there is a suspicion that personalizing algorithms (for example, in search engines or on video-sharing platforms) display search results and make recommendations that promote a politically less balanced consumption of information. However, empirical research on this is still in its infancy - we are therefore interested in the following questions:

• Under what circumstances can artificial entities such as social bots influence political opinion climates and users’ perception thereof?
• How widespread is knowledge about social bots as well as how they function and work?
• To what extent do algorithms shape the balance of information processes when using social technologies?
• How can intelligent entities be used to support citizens in selecting and processing complex (e.g., scientific, political) information?

Röchert, D., Weitzel, M., Ross, B. (2020). The homogeneity of right-wing populist and radical content in YouTube recommendations. In International Conference on Social Media and Society (SMSociety ’20), Toronto, July 2020, 245-254. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3400806.3400835.

Ross, B., Pilz, L., Cabrera, B., Brachten, F., Neubaum, G., & Stieglitz, S. (2019). Are social bots a real threat? An agent-based model of the spiral of silence to analyse the impact of manipulative actors in social networks. European Journal of Information Systems, 28(4), 394-412. https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2018.1560920