User comments are a popular form of online participation, for example when citizens publicly discuss political news on social media platforms such as Facebook or in the comment sections of news media. Such discussions contain some democratic potential. However, it is not that potential that characterizes the public discussion currently, but rather hate speech, fake news, and insults.
Instead of positive effects such as opinion formation, public reasoning and public participation, democratic values seem to be threatened. Studies show that the poor quality of online discussion endangers social cohesion, polarizes citizens’ political opinions, promotes stereotypical thought patterns and prevents people from participating. Our research question therefore reads: How can the quality, impact and usability of political online discussions be improved? This points to their deliberative aspect which is to discuss politically relevant issues publicly and with mutual respect.
The aim of the research program is to investigate new techniques of moderating and aggregating public-policy communication and make them available in the form of computer-assisted systems. These techniques are intended to improve citizens’ participation and opinion formation and make public discussions more accessible to the media and politics. The research design combines qualitative and quantitative methods as well as computational methods. These are embedded in an interdisciplinary research program and put into practice in cooperation with various partners.
The junior research group is part of the Funding Program “Digital Society” of the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of NRW. More details about the project can be found here (only available in German).
Contact
Prof. Dr. Marc Ziegele (Speaker)
Board, Communication Studies, DIID-Team
Marc Ziegele has been Professor of Communication and Media Studies at HHU-Düsseldorf since February 2024. He previously held the Junior Professorship for Communication and Media Studies with a focus on “Political Online Communication”. At the same time, he is head of the junior research group “Deliberative Discussions on the Social Web” funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Previously, he was a research assistant at the Institute for Journalism at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and studied media economics at the same institute. His research focuses on participation and discussions of citizens on the Internet. In the junior research group based at DIID, he is investigating measures to improve the quality and impact of users’ public discussions about political media topics – so-called online public-political connection communication.
It also researches the causes and consequences of media trust as well as various aspects of citizens’ social web use at the interface of communication science and psychology.
Marc Ziegele was elected speaker of the Institute by the DIID General Assembly in December 2023.
Projects
Contact
Dominique Heinbach
Alumni, Communication Studies
Dominique Heinbach has been a research associate at the Department of General Communication Research at the Institute of Journalism at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since April 2023. From March 2018 to March 2023, she was a research assistant in the MKW NRW-funded junior research group “Deliberative Discussions on the Social Web” (DEDIS) in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at HHU-Düsseldorf. She studied journalism, film studies (B.A.) and communication studies (M.A.) in Mainz.
In her dissertation she researches the influence of moderation on the quality and incivility of online discussions as well as on perception and effects on the level of users. She is also part of the project “Partizipative Energiewende-Visualisierung und Kommunikation” (ENVIKO) funded by the BMWK. Her research focuses on online moderation and community management, online discussions, online participation and deliberation as well as media effects and persuasion research in the social web. AM DIID, she is particularly interested in online-based deliberation processes and the analysis of online discussions.