Workshop on Platform Affordances

While social media make the public arena more open and thus more responsive, they are also considered to lead to new mechanisms of fragmentation and exclusion, erosion of norms in the public debate, and a loss of trust in traditional institutions. The SoMe4dem project will reconsider these diagnoses by (1) providing better empirical evidence for the impact of social media on society with respect to political debates, (2) understanding the main causal mechanisms of this impact and (3) developing tools that improve the capacity of social media to contribute to the functioning of the public arena in a liberal democracy, i.e., deliberation, legitimation and the self-perception of the democratic subject.

One of the key research goals of the project is thus to map platform affordances and assess their impact. The objective of this workshop is to bridge gaps between state-of-the art research on the mapping and monitoring of platform policies, affordances, and the computational analysis of social media discourse. To this end, the workshop brings together researchers working on 1) typologies of platform affordances, 2) platform regulations and policies, and 3) empirical investigations of platform vernaculars based on text and data mining. 

See https://www.brussels-school.be/output/events/some4dem-workshop-platform-affordances for the program.