Riedl Selected as Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Visiting Fellow
School of Journalism and Media Assistant Professor Martin Riedl was selected as a Center for Advanced Studies visiting fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany starting this winter.
Riedl will join a team of international researchers analyzing the role of encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp in online extreme speech cultures globally.
“I’m excited to join a group of researchers who have been thinking about issues of harassment, violence, and extreme speech on WhatsApp for a long time,” Riedl said. “Our work focuses on analyzing how platforms and their affordances compound harms and power imbalances in society and thinking of ways in which those harms can be mitigated. Studying this in the specific context of WhatsApp is particularly challenging due to the end-to-end encrypted nature of the platform.”
Riedl will be working alongside individuals from academia and industry representing fields such as anthropology, information sciences, journalism and media, and communication. He will be in Munich in December and January where he will meet the team and will continue to work remotely with the research group over a longer period.
The research will culminate in a policy report commissioned by UN Peacekeeping that outlines pressing issues when it comes to WhatsApp and extreme speech.
“WhatsApp is a critical infrastructure for more than two billion people around the globe—but it yields idiosyncratic challenges when it comes to the mitigation of harms, harassment, violence, and extreme speech,” Riedl said. “Identifying successful approaches to harm mitigation, foregrounding how WhatsApp is used in parts of the world where it fulfills an important infrastructural role in people’s day-to-day life, is the goal here.”
Riedl joined the School of Journalism and Media faculty in fall 2023. He received his doctorate in journalism and media from the University of Texas at Austin, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Media Engagement. He has a master’s in media management from Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media, and a master’s in social sciences from Humboldt University of Berlin.
His research investigates platform governance and content moderation, digital journalism, and the spread of false and misleading information on social media, and his work has been published in venues such as New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Digital Journalism, and Computers in Human Behavior[MR1] .
“As a scholar who is interested in articulating the public importance of my research, I welcome opportunities like this one to do translational work—to get research into places where it makes a difference[MR2] ,” Riedl said. “UN Peacekeeping is one such place. I hope to take away new research ideas, and the prospect of future collaborations.”
To learn more about the research group visit the Center for Advanced Studies website here.
Riedl Selected as Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Visiting Fellow written by Ernest Rollins and originally published on the College of Communication & Information site.