Do social media harm teenagers and our society?

Can we make them safer?

This project is an international collaboration funded by VolkswagenStiftung (Volkswagen Foundation) as part of the Artificial Intelligence and the Society of the Future funding initiative. The project partners include the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain), the Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche of the National Council of Research ITD-CNR (Italy), Hochschule Ruhr West (Germany) and the Rhine-Ruhr Institute for System Innovation (Germany).

This project brings together a multi-disciplinary consortium to develop novel approaches aimed at addressing some of the major challenges posed by social media to society and to young members of society in particular. The project aims to develop a ​ Virtual Social Media Companion that educates and supports teenage school students facing the ​threats of social media such as discrimination and biases as well as hate speech, bullying, fake news and other toxic content. The companion will raise awareness of potential threats in social media among students without being intrusive. It will apply gamification strategies and educative information selection algorithms. The project involves a substantial experimentation aspect in collaboration with multiple schools around Europe. It will thus provide a unique chance to perform interventions to test the validity of social interaction theories and governance methods.

The Essex team will drive two strands of this work, the machine-learning-based user modelling aspect and the process of analysing textual data drawing from our expertise in natural language processing (NLP). More specifically, we aim at developing Bayesian computational models of beliefs dynamics of social media users to support governance and educational strategies. These models will also be applied to evaluate socially relevant variables, such as trust and inclusion. We will build on and implement state-of-the-art NLP & AI methods to provide measurements of sentiment, bias, hatefulness, veracity, polarization, and sensationalism of social media content. In addition, we will drive forward the state of the art in detecting hate speech and biased content. The companion will actively counteract this kind of content, balancing it with opposite perspectives and proposing specifically themed challenges adopting ideas used in games.

A new international project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation with 1.5 million euros that began in April and is to last four years. Davinia Hernández-Leo is the principal investigator and her team includes the researchers Vicente Gómez, Anders Jonsson and Carlos Scolari.

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