SoMe4Dem, TITAN, ReMed (EU BONUS OZR)

Current diagnoses that democracy is in crisis at the beginning of the 21st century share a common argumentative reference point: the
(implicit) reference to the dysfunctional constitution of the political public sphere which is currently undergoing structural change.
The rise of social media platforms is considered as one of its main constituents. While social media make the public arena more open
and thus more responsive, these platforms also lead to new mechanisms of fragmentation and exclusion, an erosion of norms in
public debate and a loss of trust in traditional institutions.
The project will reconsider the diagnoses of this crisis by (1) providing better empirical evidence for the impact of social media on
society with respect to political debates, (2) understanding the main causal mechanisms of this impact and (3) developing tools that
improve the capacity of social media to contribute to the functioning of the public arena in a liberal democracy, i.e., deliberation,
legitimation and the self-perception of the democratic subject..

TITAN delivers an open, distributed and citizen engaging ecosystem which empowers the citizen itself to conduct effective and
efficient investigations for understanding whether statements at hand are true .

Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age (ReMeD) responds to the European Commission’s call HORIZON-CL2-2022-
DEMOCRACY-01-06: “Media for democracy – democratic media”, and will tackle existing challenges to a healthy relationship between
media and democracy, by taking a bold approach to improve relations between citizens, media and digital technologies. With an
interdisciplinary approach and an innovative methodology that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, ReMeD will gather,
analyze, compare and contrast data on professional journalists, alternative media content producers and citizens operating in
technologically mediated configurations, and on the media organizations, market structures and national and international
regulations that underpin media production, circulation and consumption in the contemporary media landscape.