The first half of our 3-year project has passed. So, it was time to come together as a consortium, share our progress and discuss the next steps.
Hosted by Marko Grobelnik and his team, we met at Jozef Stefan Institute’s partner organization, the Center for Advanced Academic Studies, in beautiful Dubrovnik. After an opening keynote by Prof. Marko Tadić who is a linguist at the University of Zagreb, we updated each other on the status of the TWON and decided to build a demonstrator – the Twonny! The Twonny will help us to communicate the results and insights of our complex research project ot a wider public. Apart from that we discussed the design of our case studies with Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and Slovenska tiskovna agencija (STA) and planned our work in the coming months.
The last day was kicked off with a workshop by the FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik on stakeholders and policy recommendations. The advisory board member Judith Peterka delivered an input and the team worked on policy recommendations, that participants of DialoguePerspectives’ TWON Citizen Lab had drafted. The day ended with a hackathon to find and fix bugs together.
Of course we also enjoyed the sea, went for a swim and had excellent Croatian seafood – and took the opportunity to grow together as a team and recharge our batteries for the work ahead.
The MODIS 2024 workshop, recently held as part of the Horizon Europe projects TWON and SoMe4Dem, successfully gathered experts from various fields to explore the role of online social networks (OSN) in shaping public opinion and democracy. Attendees discussed the latest research on misinformation, AI’s influence on digital platforms, and strategies to counter harmful narratives. The event highlighted key advancements in modeling user behavior and fostering resilience to propaganda, paving the way for future innovation in this critical area. OSNs were once believed to have an enormous potential to foster democratic debates and processes. In recent years, however, OSNs have been associated with various challenges for democracies and public discourse. These debates are often structured around key words such as echo chambers and filter bubbles and have garnered immense public attention. Research from computational social sciences, on the other hand, has painted a more nunanced picture. The symposium brought together insights from a broad range of research approaches, reflecting on methodologies and discussing future pathways and research agendas.
TWON’s Michael Mäs opened the workshop with his introduction. Later in the workshop he provided insights into his work as part of the TWON consortium, highlighting the scientific, technical, and ethical challenges that are linked to building a Twin of an Online Social Network (TWON).
After nearly a year and two consortium meetings in Amsterdam and Karlsruhe, the TWON team met again on March 11. to March 13. 2024 in Trier. University Trier (UT) planned two intensive days to collate previous developments and direct the project into the first simulation phase. However, before diving into the workshops and presentations, UT hosted an auxiliary welcome dinner where early arrivals could taste regional produce in a nostalgic setting beside the old-town cathedral.
The TWON consortium in Trier
Lifted by the ancient Roman spirits and their legacy, the team started the first day by providing updates about the work of each partner. The presentation showed that the team came a long way from their theoretical proposals defined in the last consortium meeting to the first experiments and insights. As planned, the team formed independent working groups to maximize their efficiency during the TWON implementation. Concerning the user simulation, Michael Heseltine presented the first analysis of the human-perceived authenticity of synthetic content across European languages as a joint work with Simon Münker. Michael Mäs and his team proposed a recommendation system, a global white-box approach as a baseline, and Sjoerd B. Stolwijk an initial definition to assess the discourse quality. The modules allow separate usage for fundamental research and utilization in similar scenarios. However, without a technical backbone, their usability is limited. Abdul Sittar presented a refined version of this backbone, almost ready for the first simulation.
Besides focusing on direct project progress, Achim Rettinger, the host of this meeting, invited the UT law department. To broaden the perspective of the team members, the law department discussed the upcoming regulations in the EU concerning AI and social media networks (OSN). While not having a direct influence, this interlude presented opportunities for TWON to possibly engage with OSN providers to request data. Dripping like soaked sponges full of impressions, the team stopped for some last nuggets, this time drinks and food, at a local winery.
Not only educated by yesterday’s presentations but also the numerous ingenious conversations between wine and dinner, the team gathered for the second day to plan the next steps. With a focus on the upcoming case study, the research group split into breakout sessions to decide the experiment’s boundary conditions and subsequent steps. Thus, in unanimous agreement, the team decides to conduct the controlled field study in a hybrid setup, with humans and agents, discussing the upcoming Ukrainian elections.
The meeting ended with a guided exploration of the historic city center and famous Roman architectural buildings. Trier, the oldest city in Germany, residuals reminiscent of its long-gone power as the capital of the Roman Empire, is now possibly a stone in the pathway toward human-centric AI. The next meeting will occur in Dubrovnik, a place equally historically impactful!
Six months after our project kick-off in Amsterdam, the TWON consortium gathered for its second consortium meeting in Karlsruhe on October 5th and October 6th of 2023. The hosts, FZI and KIT, planned two jam-packed days of workshops, presentations and activities to catch each other up-to-speed on the different developing pieces and work packages comprising TWON.
The TWON consortium in Karlsruhe
We spent the majority of the day on Thursday learning from each other about the progress and challenges of each work package. Thursday morning, Prof. Michael Mäs (KIT) presented his progress on the modelling of TWON based on social network theory and computational sociology, and Simon Münker (University of Trier) layed out his preceding and upcoming work regarding the data collection to estimate our TWON. Krisztian Buza and Abdul Sittar (both JSI) then presented to us their progress on actually building the digital twin of an online social network (OSN), which will be the backbone of the project.
In the afternoon, Sjoerd Stolwijk and Michael Heseltine from the University of Amsterdam presented the metrics they are developing for the evaluation of democratic debates in OSNs. They also gave their insights on how they will be examining the impact of filter bubbles and disinformation campaigns on opinion dynamics and the spread of disinformation. Collectively, we then brainstormed ideas on how to best implement the case studies. We ended the day with a delicious dinner at Il Caminetto in Karlsruhe.
The consortium brainstorms case study implementation
On Friday, our work mostly revolved around the question of how to communicate our results with the public and specific stakeholders, and how to disseminate findings effectively in the scientific community. Jonas Fegert (FZI) kicked us off with a presentation of the strategies developed by the FZI-led work package on dissemination activities, and presented strategies for reaching citizens, social actors, stakeholders and politicians at different levels and through different channels. We subsequently broke out into groups to garner feedback from the consortium members – each contributing to the workshop by providing their own unique scholarly, regional, and personal perspectives.
Dr. Jonas Fegert presents the dissemination strategy
The consortium meeting ended on a high note, namely the Renaissance 3.0 exhibition at Karlsruhe’s Center for Art and Media (ZKM). The exhibition – all about the interconnectivity of research, artistry, and their social impacts – was an inspiration to the consortium, and we left Karlsruhe ready to hit new milestones in our work packages. The next consortium meeting will take place in Trier in March of 2023 – until then, make sure to follow us on Twitter and Mastodon and check our blog for updates on the progress of the project.
