Increasingly, communication technologies such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal are being used to consume news about political current events, to form political opinions and to exchange political attitudes. In public debates, a number of concerns are expressed with regard to the impairment of democratic processes, such as the political homogenization of online networks (e.g., through filter bubbles) or the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. In this context, a deeper understanding of users' political media literacy and how their political reflection and judgment skills can be strengthened seems essential. We are interested in the following questions:

• How do users shape their political communication environment in the online world?
• How and when do people generate political knowledge through the use of social media?
• To what extent does the use of social media suggest the feeling of having a high level of political knowledge?
• What form of social technology use promotes users' political interest, factual knowledge, and judgment?
• Under what circumstances do users participate in online political discourse?
• How must a social networking platform be designed so that users can willingly engage in constructive political debates

Junior Research Group "Digital Citizenship in Network Technologies".
The Hitchhiker's Guide to a Less Prejudiced World: Evaluation of a mobile app for learning effective political counter-speech (practical project in WS 2020/21)
Dissertation projects

Cargnino, M. (2020). The interplay of online network homogeneity, populist attitudes, and conspiratorial beliefs: Empirical evidence from a survey on German Facebook users. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 33 (2), 337–353. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edaa036

Cargnino, M., & Neubaum, G. (2021). Are we deliberately captivated in homogeneous cocoons? An investigation on political tie building on social networking sites. Mass Communication and Society, 24 (2), 187-209. https://doi.org/doi:10.1080/15205436.2020.1805632

Neubaum, G., & Weeks, B. (2022). Computer-mediated political expression: A conceptual framework of technological affordances and individual tradeoffs. Journal of Information Technology & Politics. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2028694

Neubaum, G. (2021). “It’s going to be out there for a long time“ The influence of message persistence on users’ political opinion expression via social media technologies. Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650221995314

Röchert, D., Neubaum, G., Ross, B., & Stieglitz, S. (2022). Caught in a networked collusion? Homogeneity in conspiracy-related discussion networks on YouTube. Information Systems, 102, 101866. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2021.101866

Röchert, D., Neubaum, G., Ross, B., Brachten, F., & Stieglitz, S. (2020). Opinion-based homogeneity on YouTube: Combining sentiment and social network analysis. Computational Communication Research, 2, 81-108. https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2020.1.004.ROCH