Dr Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández awarded ZeMKI Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Bremen
Author Kathy Nickels
Date 3 April 2023
ADM+S researcher Dr Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández is one of 5 international researchers recently awarded a visiting research fellowship at ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen, Germany.
Dr Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández will spend four weeks at the ZeMKI research centre working with Prof. Christian Katzenbach, Head of the Platform Governance, Media, and Technology Lab, and Prof Cornelius Puschmann, Head of the Digital Communication and Information Diversity Lab on a research project that will investigate transparency of ‘soft moderation’ techniques under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA).
Dr Matamoros-Fernández says that platforms are increasingly using ‘soft moderation’ techniques to limit the visibility of objectionable content, and users are innovating with new collaborations to more actively participate in the assessment of content that has the potential to harm.
In the joint project at the University of Bremen, Ariadna will use Twitter Community Notes as a case study to understand how platforms can respond to the DSA obligations around transparency with the creation of innovative used-led ‘soft-moderation’ techniques.
“Twitter Community Notes are a crowdsourced fact-checking system that allows users to add context to tweets,” said Ariadna.
“This system is observable to external researchers–the data is free access, and its algorithm is open source and publicly available on GitHub, – which makes it a good case study to assess content moderation initiatives that go beyond takedowns and user bans.”
This research will help inform how ‘soft moderation’ works in practice, an area which is currently not well understood.
