Projekt

If a core element of European integration is to create a single, deliberative, public sphere, then recent events suggest that the project is set to fail. Far from a Europe-wide sphere of "public reason", social media such as Twitter or comments on news sites suggest a growing crisis: especially when it comes to matters of identity, users repeatedly attack each other in highly emotional terms, with no sensitivity to differences across cultures, focusing on what divides people, not what unites them. By developing a virtual moderator that can detect the different cultural signals of disagreement and conflict, the project team will be able to test the conditions under which citizens and groups evaluate what they see as trustworthy and believable in online communication. This moderator is created in Deliberation Laboratory (DeLab), a transformative online experimentation environment, that will allow to explore the nature, causes, and consequences of citizens' perceptions in public, online dialogue across languages. The project focuses on the Aristotelian rhetorical triad - logos (logic), ethos (speaker character), pathos (emotion) - as each of these rhetorical strategies have been shown to shape citizens' perceptions. Finally, the DeLab will be taken into the wild with a conversational AI intervention system that enhances constructive, reasonable and responsible engagement on social media.

• Prof. Dr. Annette Hautli-Janisz

  Universität Passau
  Fakultät für Informatik und Mathematik
  Passau