The Lab “Platform Governance, Media, and Technology” does research, teaching and knowledge transfer at the intersection of governance, digital communication and new technologies. We are particularly interested in platforms and their governance, as well the discursive, political and technological construction of “artificial intelligence” (AI). This website is to showcase a repertoire of our activities. Please also visit our official page at our home institution, the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI), University of Bremen.
Digital platforms and new infrastructures, algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and data are currently fundamentally (re)organising communication, the public sphere and society. At the same time, these media, their technologies and economic structures are themselves (still) in a process of formation that is shaped by governance, regulation and public debate. How should platforms like Facebook and YouTube deal with disinformation campaigns and hate speech? What challenges does the increasing use of automation and AI bring? And how do public debates and perceptions of problems in turn impact back on regulation and technology development?
In several large international third-party funded projects on these topics, funded by the DFG, the EU’s H2020 framework programme, the BMBF, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (BpB), we collaborate with partners in France, UK, Canada, Switzerland, and Italy. In empirical studies, the Lab integrates computational methods and qualitative approaches. We attach great importance to the development of open data infrastructures (Platform Governance Archive), especially in the notoriously non-transparent research field of platform governance.