• Kris Ruijgrok & Jaron Harambam

Participatory propaganda is a form of propaganda that involves active participation or engagement from the audience. Unlike traditional propaganda, where information is disseminated to the masses without much interaction, participatory propaganda involves recipients of the propaganda (often unwittingly) actively contributing to its spread.

• Marina Tulin and Myrto Pantazi

This study investigates how generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney relate to perceptions of disinformation. Given the potential misuse of these tools to fabricate false information, the study examines the extent to which awareness of these tools contributes to increased distrust and cynicism regarding political information. Despite a general tendency for people to trust the information they encounter, a phenomenon known as truth bias, this research explores whether AI tools can undermine this trust.

• Trevor Incerti and Tom Dobber

During the 2020 US election cycle, small donors comprised 25% of all political contributions, up from 15% four years earlier. Despite their growing significance, there is little empirical evidence exploring why non-elite small donors contribute and to whom they donate. If the preferences of small donors are not representative of the broader public, they may exert a biasing influence on politics. This study examines whether online microtargeting drives the increase in small donations and whether small donors undermine party control by increasing funding for extreme candidates.

Arad Ahi is Assistant Professor of Strategy and International Business at the Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam. His research focuses broadly on corporate political activities and social responsibilities of digital platforms. Particularly, he is examining how these platforms attempted to influence the two recent landmark EU legislations, the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, by exploring their interactions with the European Commission.

Dr. Bidisha Chaudhuri is an Assistant Professor of Government, Information Cultures and Digital Citizenship at Department of Media Studies (Archival and Information Studies) at the University of Amsterdam. She received her PhD from the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, Germany. Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, she taught at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB). Her current research interests include digital governance and infrastructures, politics of data and algorithms, political economy of digital technologies and work practices and AI ethics.

Elke Olthuis is an Assistant Professor of Law and Society. Her research interest lies in the role of the human element in the judicial decision-making process and the value it has in a democratic society with the judiciary as one of the three state powers. Instead of focusing on the beneficial elements of digitalising the judicial decision-making process she focuses on the value of the human aspect and what we lose if we transition towards a digitalised judiciary.

H. Can Kurban is a postdoc researcher in digital citizenship at the European Studies Department. His research interests revolve around the impacts of digital technologies on the organizational structure of political institutions, seeking to unravel how digital systems influence civic participation. His research on OpenStad plaform aims to find out the affordances and constraints in citizens' engagement regarding the digital infrastructure of the Amsterdam Municipality. Can's objective is to address the methodological and theoretical challenges emerging from the everyday changing digital media environment, with a particular focus on organizational theories. 

Jaron Harambam (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Media, Truth Politics and Digitalization at the Sociology Department of the University of Amsterdam. His research deals with public disputes over truth in a digitalized public sphere. More specifically, he studies conspiracy theories, news and platform politics, and AI (content moderation, search/recommender systems). Central to his research is the participation of multiple stakeholders to design our (future) digital worlds along democratic and public values.

Kris is a political scientist studying the information and communication environments that shape, and are shaped by authoritarian politics. He currently combines two postdoctoral positions: At the KITLV in Leiden he works on a project investigating online influence operations in Southeast Asia. At the UvA, he examines the politics behind internet shutdowns in India, and Russian participatory propaganda.

Lianne Hoek is an Assistant Professor at the Research Institute of Child Development and Education at the University of Amsterdam. Her research is focused on citizenship education in primary education, education in fundamental democratic values, young citizens' participation in democratic processes, and the conceptualisation and operationalisation of (digital) citizenship competences of students. She facilitates and assists schools in gaining insights into their students' citizenship competences to improve education further.

Mahsa Shabani is Associate Professor in health privacy law and innovation at the Law Center for Health and Life. Her research recolves around topics on health data sharing, biomedical research policy, digitalization of health and data ethics. Mahsa's objective is to investigate impact of digitalisation and innovation on the patients citizens rights.

Marco L. Rapp is Assistant Professor at the Leadership and Management Section and the Amsterdam People Analytics Center (APAC) at the Amsterdam Business School. He is also serving a visiting researcher at Aalto University, Finland. Marco is nearing completion of his PhD in Economics and Social Sciences (WU Vienna) and has an interdisciplinary background, holding Master's degrees in both Psychology and Management. His main research interests incorporate this academic background by investigating how the emergence of machine learning technologies and generative AI affects professions, employer-employee relationships and, more broadly, the world of work.

Marina Tulin is an Assistant Professor of Education, Citizenship and Democracy in a Digital World at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR). Her research interests include false information, fact-checking, media literacy as well as public trust in knowledge institutions like journalism and science. She co-leads the disinformation lab of the Dutch-Flemish hub of the European Digital Media Observatory (BENEDMO), which brings together academic researchers, journalists and fact-checkers to tackle the problem of disinformation.

Myrto Pantazi is an assistant professor in Digital Democracy at the Department of Psychology (Social Psychology Programme Group), University of Amsterdam. She studies psychological mechanisms of human belief and behaviour in the digital era, with a particular focus on the psychology of misinformation, belief in conspiracy theories and other aspects of information consumption and digital citizenship.

Ot is a researcher and lecturer in the field of privacy and security. He is also the founder of a law firm specialised in privacy and security, Root Legal. He wrote a PhD on the human rights-compatibility of the regulation of offensive and defensive information security technologies, focusing on quantum computing and encryption. Previously, he worked at the Dutch Data Protection Authority and relaunched the Dutch digital rights movement Bits of Freedom.

Selin Gerlek is assistant professor in philosophy of technology and politics. Her research focuses on digital citizenship, transformative processes in human-technology relations, mediated cultural practices, empirical ethics & value change, as well as embodied and hermeneutic relations. She has a background in (Post-)Phenomenology, Philosophy of Technology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Pragmatism, Practice Theory, Political Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy. She is Scientifique Coordinator of Empirical Ethics at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), member of the Platform for the Ethics and Politics of Technology (PEPT), Ex. Comm. Member of the Open Commons of Phenomenology and member of the project “Visual Education”.

Trevor Incerti is Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the University of Amsterdam. Trevor’s research is in comparative political economy, and broadly examines economic drivers of political behavior. This includes topics such as money in politics, business-government relations, corruption, interest group influence, and collective action. Among these topics, Trevor’s research has examined the role of digital tools in driving collective action, reducing corruption, decreasing support for democracy, and increasing financial support for extreme political candidates. He is also interested in ongoing efforts to regulate social media firms and the associated industry response.

Zahra Kashanizadeh is an Assistant Professor at the Amsterdam Business School of the University of Amsterdam. She works at the Innovation and Digital group in the section of Strategy and International Business, and she started working in the interdisciplinary program of Digital Citizenship in 2023. Her main focus in research involves investigating the technological and strategic framing of incumbent firms and new ventures concerning their legitimacy dynamics. She is also interested in examining the corporate purpose of firms and how they create value for all their stakeholders.