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Toxic Entertainment?
Funding for new research project by Yannis Theocharis
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The research project "Using AI to Increase Resilience against Toxicity in Online Entertainment (ToxicAInment)", by Prof. Dr. Yannis Theocharis (Chair of Digital Governance), funded by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (BIDT), explores the spread of extremist, conspiratorial and misleading content on social media, investigating how this content is embedded through entertaining content. It aims to deepen the understanding of the impact of this content on user behavior by combining entertainment theories, visual communication and toxic language with AI methods. This project makes an important contribution to analyzing and combating online toxicity. More information can be found on the project page or in the BIDT press release.

TL;DR

This project brings together theories of entertainment, visual communication and toxic speech to understand how and why toxicity becomes more permissible when it is masked as entertainment. It deploys AI methods to identify, classify and map toxic entertainment at scale, qualitative methods to study its characteristics, and experimental methods to understand its effects on individual behavior.