Results

Work Package 1: Theory of Democracy and Social Media

D1.1: Challenges To Liberal Democracy And Democracy Theory

The primary aim of Deliverable 1.1 is to establish a comprehensive theoretical framework for the project. It endeavors to bridge empirical research on social media with insights from the history of political thought and democratic theory, addressing the central question of whether the rise of social media is precipitating a crisis of democracy. This debate is not new; ever since the advent of political systems identifying as democratic, there have been persistent predictions of their imminent crisis. Yet, this raises pressing questions: Is the current diagnosis of crisis justified, and, if so, what distinguishes it from previous crises in the history of democracy? Democracy often appears as a "moving target," its intellectual history in the West characterized by a discordant array of claims about its essence, prerequisites, and dynamics. Fundamental questions remain contested: Who qualifies as a citizen? What conditions are essential for democracy to thrive? What institutions are indispensable for its sustainability? However, in much of the existing research on the interplay between social media and democracy, the concept of democracy is left largely undefined.
Deliverable 1.1 aims to engage with this "moving target" by identifying the core elements of liberal democracy necessary to evaluate the impact of social media on contemporary democratic systems. To do so, the analysis unfolds in two steps. First, it traces the historical evolution of democracy, exploring the tensions and debates that have shaped its development. By revisiting historical arguments—both critical and supportive—about democracy, the deliverable seeks to contextualize contemporary challenges. In this step, we assess the relevance of Robert Dahl’s concept of polyarchy as a framework for understanding liberal democracy, complemented by the perspectives of Jürgen Habermas. Second, these theoretical insights are connected to empirical studies examining how social media influences democratic societies and institutions. This dual approach—combining historical, theoretical, and empirical perspectives—aims to provide a nuanced understanding of whether the current challenges posed by social media signify a distinct crisis of democracy or a continuation of its perennial tensions.

Disclaimer: This deliverable is a draft and not yet approved by the Commission.

Work Package 2: Producing evidence: Measuring the impact of social media

D2.1: Attitudinally-positioned European sample dataset

This deliverable provides the first version of a dataset of attitudinally positioned populations together with the conceptual and methodological framework required to leverage attitudinal inference for large populations of social media users in Europe. Building on recent advancements on large-scale multi-dimensional political attitude inference in social networks and text, we show how to create a European sample of attitudinally-positioned users along a Left-Right and a Anti-elite dimension measuring attitudes towards elites and trust in institutions. These two dimensions are shown to be relevant to conduct both traditional political analysis on social media and analyses accounting for new forms of polarization related to democratic backsliding. This dataset of users will serve as a frame of reference for the development of case studies exploring different links between activity in online platforms, evidence and impacts in politics in other tasks of the project.

Work Package 3: Causal effects of digital media technologies

D3.1: Survey on experiments about trust and collaborative vs conflictual language

This survey aims at understanding how the empirical work done in the literature to understand the phenomenon of trust and the role of language may help understanding how social media contribute to the creation of trust in institutions, among citizens and representatives, and, more generally, in democratic processes (elections, referendums, etc.). By relying on a large body of literature developed in contexts that reach beyond social media, this survey targets regularities and key aspects of the trust building process in social media, focusing on causal mechanisms and identifying the appropriate tools fr the measurement of trust. This collection of causal triggers to trust may also help identify which features and dynamics within social media are responsible for the emergence of trust, the focus on cooperation or the resort to conflictual patterns.
This review will highlight that the different disciplines that have been concerned with measuring trust have used different methodological frameworks and tools, such as laboratory and field experiments, and surveys, each with unique strengths and weaknesses.

D3.2: A framework for systemic risk assessment with reliable computational models of online platforms

This report presents a road-map for building reliable computational models of online platforms in accordance with the procedures established through the Digital Services Act (DSA). It develops basic terminology to facilitate communication between scientists, policymakers and platform providers about systemic risk assessment using computational models. It outlines the different steps to be undertaken in DSA auditing processes, enhancing their accountability and reliability. In turn, following these procedures will lead the way to empirically reliable computational models for assessing the impact of digital policies and interventions.
We complement this general framework with a work-in-progress report on a real platform which serves as a use case for developing the methodology involved.

Disclaimer: This deliverable is a draft and not yet approved by the Commission.

Work Package 4: Boosting competent social media use

D4.1: Platform affordances

This deliverable presents an empirically-informed framework that connects social media affordances to the functions of the public sphere in liberal democracies. This framework will function as a basis for further systematic approaches to the study of how social media impact the public sphere. The deliverable reports on three papers or drafts of papers respectively in which aspects of this framework are developed. 

The report “Social media and the public sphere—An empirically-informed taxonomy of platform affordances” introduces the framework’s central concepts of technical affordances vs. social affordances, and illustrates these with examples from a large set of social media platforms. The report likewise includes an empirically-informed discussion of how these affordances might be measured. 

The published paper “A computational analysis of Telegram’s narrative affordances” offers an empirical investigation of how technical and social affordances shape the (politically extreme) narratives that propagate on the messaging platform Telegram.

Finally, the draft paper “A dynamical model of platform choice” (see here for the more recent preprint) offers a first step towards a model of usage dynamics of competing social media platforms with respect to two social affordances: news consumption and identity expression, and their corresponding user preferences for more or less diversity. Combined, these contributions constitute a conceptual and empirical foundation for futurework in the project, notably with regards to the empirical analysis of social media narratives, work on digital citizenship, and principles for evidence-based regulations of social media platforms.

Work Package 5: Digital Citizenship

The first deliverable in this work package is expected in March 2025.