Digital Publics, Emerging Technologies & Governance

Core themes: My research examines how digital communication shapes politics, power, and technological change. A central question running through my work is how digital publics interpret, contest, and negotiate political issues and emerging technologies, and how these dynamics influence democratic processes and innovation governance.

Methods: My work relies on computational social science approaches to analyse large-scale digital communication. These include:

• Social media analytics

• Natural Language Processing (NLP), including stance detection, sentiment analysis, toxicity and hate speech classifiers, and dictionary-based approaches

• Topic modelling

• Network analysis of communication and interaction structures

• Statistical analysis of survey data

These methods allow the systematic analysis of communication dynamics, actors, and narratives across digital platforms.

Digital Political Communication and Electoral Campaigns:

A first line of research investigates how political actors use digital platforms during election campaigns and how these communication dynamics shape political competition. This work focuses on:

• Monitoring and analysing electoral campaigns on social media platforms (e.g., X, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram)

• Issue competition and agenda-setting in digital campaigning

• Strategic communication by political actors, including negative campaigning

• Interactions between political actors and citizens on social media

Digital Publics, Polarisation, and Political Discourse:

A second line of research examines how political discourse evolves within digital publics and how online communication environments shape participation, representation, and conflict. Key topics include:

• The evolution, politicisation, and radicalisation of digital discourse in times of polycrisis (e.g., Covid-19, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)

• Individual and contextual factors enabling online political participation across countries

• Dynamics of intra-party conflict and public deviations from the party line in digital communication

• The rise of extreme right parties as digital frontrunners in political communication

Emerging Technologies, Narratives, and Innovation Governance:

More recently, my research has increasingly focused on how emerging technologies are interpreted, debated, and legitimised in digital public spheres. Technological innovation is not only a technical process but also a social process of meaning-making, in which narratives about risks, opportunities, and societal implications play a central role. This research therefore investigates:

• How emerging technologies (e.g., quantum technologies) are discussed across public discourse, organisational communication, and policy debates

• How narratives around new technologies shape public expectations, legitimacy, and technology adoption

• How communication dynamics around emerging technologies may support anticipatory approaches to innovation governance

This work forms the core of the CSSInnoRadar project, which develops computational approaches to map technology narratives across digital publics and innovation ecosystems.

Digital Power Structures and Elite Communication:

A further line of research explores how political and economic elites shape digital discourse and influence public debates. This includes:

• Ideological positioning and worldviews of political and economic elites (e.g., members of the European Parliament, party elites, technology elites)

• Communication strategies of influential actors in digital environments

• Power asymmetries within digital communication infrastructures