AoIR Flashpoint Symposium 2025: Lab Platform Governance, Media and Technology

Date: 03.06.2025 - 04.06.2025
Conference / symposium
Format: hybrid
Location: Bremen, Germany
Event Fee: Free

Organizer(s):
AoIR Association of Internet Researchers , Centre for Media , Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) , University of Bremen

The study of platform governance and generative AI has become increasingly critical as these technologies significantly (re)shape public discourse, societal norms, and policy-making processes. By determining how information is created, shared, and consumed, these technological systems raise complex questions of accountability, fairness, transparency, contestability, and ethics. The AoIR Flashpoint Symposium 2025 in Bremen aims to contribute to these discussions on governance and normative questions. We are seeking papers and panel proposals that focus on analytical concepts, empirical methods, and robust data approaches that are instrumental for studying tech governance. The advent of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT has resurfaced challenges long associated with social media platforms, including misinformation, bias, hate speech, discrimination, power and agency. In this context we have learned that how platforms recommend and regulate content and interactions constitutes an essential part of what they are, and strongly defines their role and responsibility in contemporary societies. What can we learn from these debates for generative AI? We need to assume that generative AI with its technologically advanced forms of automation embedded in complex digital infrastructures will rather exacerbate than relieve those challenges. Understanding these dynamics will be vital for informing public debate and developing regulatory frameworks that uphold human rights and democratic values. The 2025 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium seeks to gather researchers and experts on this topic at a critical time. While we see public attention and daily routines partly move from social media platforms to generative AI, meaningful regulatory activities will be crucial in that space in 2025. The EU advances governance frameworks based on risk assessments and fundamental human rights through the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the AI Act. At the same time, the future of tech regulation in the U.S. remains uncertain at the onset of a second Trump presidency. Meanwhile, around the world, governments aim to reign in both the excesses as well as the freedoms of social media, and global and regional bodies such as the UNESCO develop normative frameworks for the future of social media and generative AI. In addition to these public initiatives, companies’ product policies, ethical principles, and standardization efforts give rise to highly complex governance regimes and normative frameworks for technological systems. In this context, researchers face various challenges when they seek to collect, store, analyze, or share data on platform and AI governance. Platforms change data access requirements and options for researchers regularly, putting established data collection processes at risk. While corporations employ skilled research teams, their findings are typically kept private or focused on advancing corporate interests rather than serving the public good. Government policies have the potential to enable academic and independent research, but poorly designed or enforced regulations may inadvertently obstruct it. Some recent statutory data-sharing rules (e.g., DSA) promise to provide new opportunities for robust research but are currently only in their infancy. As a result of different initiatives, there is now an increasing number of large- and small-scale datasets available such as the EU Transparency Database, the Zuckerberg Files, the Platform Governance Archive, or the FBarchive. However, systematic research and sustained collaborative approaches in this area remain limited. To achieve this, academics, policymakers, and other stakeholders must work together to build the necessary expertise to develop and sustain much-needed infrastructures. The AoIR Flashpoint Symposium 2025 seeks to address these critical challenges by bringing together researchers of various disciplines, practitioners, and policymakers for a two-day symposium. The aim of the symposium is to foster collaboration and critical discourse concerning generative AI and social media platforms, and to enable the research community to more effectively produce robust and independent knowledge about these socio-technical systems and their effects.

https://platform-governance.org/aoir-flashpoint-symposium-2025/

Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein