Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 358.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-02-14 19:58:12+00:00
        From: Richard Rogers <rogers@govcom.org>
        Subject: Cfp: Digital Methods Summer School - Univ. Amsterdam

Digital Methods Summer School and Data Sprint 2025
Media Studies, University of Amsterdam 30 June - 11 July 2025

Call for Participation

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, is holding its annual
Summer School on 'Social media at a crossroads, and the sensitivity of
AI platforms'. The format is that of a (social media and web) data
sprint, with training tutorials as well as hands-on work for telling
stories with data. There is also a programme of keynote speakers. It is
intended for advanced Master's students, PhD candidates and motivated
scholars who would like to work on (and complete) a digital methods
project in an intensive workshop setting.

This year’s Digital Methods Summer School has two related themes. The
first is ‘social media at a crossroads’ and the second the ‘sensitivity
of AI platforms’; they are related given that mainstream social media
seem to have lost their normative compass while AI platforms strive to
improve theirs through enhanced content moderation. AI platforms are now
occasionally called ‘oversensitive’, however. This oversensitivity
charge is reminiscent of attacks on Dorsey’s Twitter and other social
media platforms with active content moderation. How to consider the
rising critique of the oversensitivity of AI platform moderation in
light of the turn to free-for-all expression on social media? The Summer
School takes up this larger question, but first breaks it down into the
two individual areas of study.

Social media at a crossroads

Does the current crisis in social media seem novel? Fake news, data
breaches, trolling, neo-reactionary takeovers and other style shifts and
infrastructural setbacks have long overtaken the participatory culture,
platform cooperativism, produsage, neo-pluralistic potentials and other
more buoyant notions from past digital cultures. But when Meta announced
in January 2025 it was re-orienting its content moderation policies to
filter only the most egregious violations of its standards and also end
its fact checking program, it perhaps marked a breaking point with
respect to any prospective redemption of social media. Dressed up in
masculine vitalism and aesthetics, Meta’s announcements follow on from
the trenchant criticism directed at X/Twitter. The EU has found it in
breach of its regulations by using ‘dark patterns’ in advertising and
blocking researcher data access, and a recent Berkeley study found that
since Musk’s takeover hate speech rose by 50%. And yet, Meta headily
pointed to X’s content moderation style as its own guide! Will Instagram
and other social media platforms follow X’s slide, empirical questions
we would like to explore through auditing and other projects at the
Summer School.

The sensitivity of AI platforms

The second theme is the so-called sensitivity of AI guardrails which
refer to the strength level of the moderation and filtering built into
AI platforms. AI chatbots, trained to be 3H’d (helpful, honest, and
harmless) can be sycophantic and overly polite. At the same time these
platforms, while racing for new performance levels, continue to build
content moderation APIs and other in-built measures to filter out a
variety of harmful and offensive content. The filtering work may be
easier to perform (compared to social media platforms) given that it’s
sentence completions rather than user posts that are affected. Users are
not cancelled, their posts are not shadow banned. (But they do
experience refusals to complete prompts.) Will the moderation backlash
experienced by social media platforms come to AI platforms? How to
attune AI platforms to the critique?

Content moderation research continues to find porous guardrails on AI
platforms. While Llama appears to be highly sensitive, Falcon seems to
be more permissive, for example. Will AI platforms follow social media
and position themselves on the free speech spectrum? Given the
challenges of universal moderation speech norms, will they turn to
personalisation as the answer? These and similar questions about the
state of content moderation online motivate the Summer School.

Applications: Key Dates

There are rolling admissions, and applications are now being accepted.
To apply please send a letter of motivation, your CV, a headshot photo,
100-word bio as well as a copy of your passport (details page only) to
summerschool [at] digitalmethods.net. Notifications of acceptance are
sent 1-2 weeks after application. Final deadline for applications is 19
May 2024. The full program and schedule of the Summer School are
available on or about 27 May 2025.

Tuition Fees

The fee for the Digital Methods Winter School 2025 is EUR 895, and upon
completion all participants receive certificates of completion or
transcripts (worth 6 ECTS).

Full call for participation and all additional information is here:
https://www.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SummerSchool2025

Prof. Richard Rogers
Media Studies
University of Amsterdam


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