CSS Seminar – Felix Gaisbauer : Voice and silence in public debate on Twitter, and a glimpse beyond

Seminar series in Computational Social Science – at Centre Marc Bloch Berlin  Session 11 with Felix Gaisbauer (Weizenbaum Institut Berlin): Wednesday, May 10th, 5-6pm, Centre Marc Bloch, Friedrichstr 191 Berlin, (U Stadtmitte), Georg-Simmel Room, 3rd floor. „Voice and silence in public debate on Twitter, and a glimpse beyond“ In this talk, I will present an overview of my PhD thesis, which dealt with modelling and measuring differences in willingness of opinion expression in online public debate. I will elaborate on its empirical part in detail, which examined ideological differences in willingness to discuss with others on Twitter. There, a network-based method was developed with which these differences can be estimated; the method was applied in two case studies that concerned discussions about Saxon politics which attracted country-wide attention. For both events, users retweeting far-right parties and politicians were significantly more active. They also acted more confrontational in the sense that they replied mostly to users from different groups, while the contrary was not the case. Additionally, I will briefly present work in progress concerned with trending topics and news sharing. About the speaker Felix Gaisbauer is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Weizenbaum Institute in the research group „Digital News Dynamics“, and a guest researcher at Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, where he completed his PhD in the fall of 2022. He studies online public debate with computational methods, especially news-driven communication. His core research areas are network theory, complex systems modelling and theory-guided quantitative analysis of platform communication. He is also interested in qualitative approaches.