On February 11, 2021, Prof. Dr. Pfeffer, organized a virtual event, where the student of his “Computational Social Science” class presented their research. This class was motivated by his research around the development and propagation of negative dynamics on social media and this semester it focused on Polarization and Radicalization.
The students investigated some really interesting research topics such as the Polarization of the US Media sources: CNN and FOX, the spread of anti-vaccine conspiracies on Reddit as well as the presence of conspiracy theories in German Newspapers in 2019/2020, among the many. This interdisciplinary class encourages students to use computational social science methods to analyze the complex phenomena of the development and spread of online firestorms, fake news, conspiracy theories and hate speech online.
