On October 5, 2026, the Flemish-Dutch network against disinformation BENEDMO will host a webinar on AI in the verification ecosystem. In this webinar, CPC members Marina Tulin and Michael Hameleers, joint by experts from fact-checking and AI organizations, will discuss how AI is currently affecting the proliferation of disinformation and explore how it can be used to “fight fire with fire”. The discussion will be moderated by Teresa Weikmann.

More information and the sign-up link can be found here: https://benedmo.eu/event/benedmo-webinar-ai-in-the-verification-ecosystem/

* Image used: Deborah Lupton / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

CPC members Linda C. Bomm and Bert N. Bakker regularly attend science festivals to talk to children about how they view social issues. A recent clip gives an insight into one of these science outreach activities, at the Dutch children’s science festival ExpeditieNEXT. 

Watch the full clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5M-4bITq6A

On October 3, CPC members will also be at the Weekend van de Wetenschap in the UvA University Library with these and other activities. Come and visit!

That story no longer holds. Audiences are fragmented across niche platforms; feeds are flooded with short videos, emotional imagery, and AI-generated content. Platform companies are powerful, commercial, and openly political. Data extraction has displaced communication as their core logic. European regulation is pushing back, but its reach remains uncertain. Shifts in perceptions, use, business models, ideology, and regulation mark the beginning of a new platform era and demand a new research agenda.

Lina Buttgereit is a postdoctoral researcher in the Political Communication & Journalism group at ASCoR. Currently, she is part of a project on the role of social norms in shaping the acceptance of negative campaigning led by Dr. Corinna Oschatz. This project investigates how voters’ social environments and the media representation of political negativity display social norms and shape their attitudes towards negative campaigning. Additionally, it looks into the consequences of norm transgressions from political elites.

In her doctoral work, Lina investigated the intersection of misinformation as an informational, discursive, and perceptual phenomenon. Aside from her research activities, she has been teaching methods and statistics in the Bachelor program. Additionally, Lina supervises several Master theses. 

Keywords: Political disinformation; Social norms; Media criticism; Incivility 

Email:

The report was recently handed over to MP Lisa Westerveld in the Tweede Kamer. The project brought together partners from SYNC Lab (EUR), Healthy Start, Media Minds (UvA), CoDe Lab (Leiden University), Stichting TIME OUT, Stichting STAD, Lieve Mark, NJR, and Albeda mbo.

The full report can be found here. A summary of the findings can be found on the UvA website and as a blog post on Stuk Rood Vlees.

The workshop brought together nine fantastic international speakers – Claudi Bockting, Mark Brandt, Brett Ford, Noga Arikha, Manos Tsakiris, Mariana Von Mohr, Luca Bernardi, Olaf Borghi, and Beth Landi – and discussed research spanning political communication, political psychology, social psychology, clinical psychology, political science, social neuroscience, and philosophy.

Across presentations and discussions, participate explored urgent questions around politics and well-being: How do people experience and feel about socio-political developments?  How can citizens process and cope with these experiences? And how do we identify and leverage factors that help individuals and communities deal with socio-political stress and uncertainty more effectively?

It was great to bring together experts working on these questions and learn from each other’s perspectives.

Funder: NWO VIDI grant

Researchers: Bert N. Bakker, Linda C. Bomm, Delaney Peterson

Start date: 01.01.2022

End date: 31.12.2028

CPC members played an active role in the program. Kicking off the day in Utrecht, Marina Tulin delivered a keynote on the impact of disinformation on democracy. Later on, Michael Hameleers joined a dynamic roundtable discussion featuring a range of stakeholders, moderated by Claes de Vreese.

With an engaged audience and interactive format, the event fostered meaningful dialogue and collaboration across fields and institutions, helping to shape future efforts in the fight against disinformation.

PhD Candidate

Jakob Kasper is a third-year PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), affiliated with the MSCA doctoral network ‘Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Adolescence and Democracy’ and the HotPoliticsLab. His work centers on affective polarization. He investigates how it can be measured in multi-party systems by focusing on subsets of large and ideologically diverse political groups. In addition, he aims to bridge research on affective polarization in political science with psychological theories of affect by developing new theoretical frameworks and measurement approaches that better capture the ‘affective’ nature of polarization. Finally, he studies how affective polarization develops during adolescence to better understand its origins and address concerns about increasing polarization among younger generations.

Before joining ASCoR, Jakob received a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and spent one year as a graduate exchange student at Cornell University (USA).

Keywords: affective polarization

Across the globe, commercial journalism is under pressure due to declining advertising revenues and consumers’ reduced willingness to pay for news. These tensions are driving processes of media concentration, whereby media outlets are converging into the hands of a few owners. While media concentration may offer economic benefits, it is generally considered to pose substantial risks to news production, such as unfair competition and diminished pluralism.

This PhD project explores the consequences of ownership concentration for journalists, audiences, and journalism more broadly. Particular attention is paid to how journalists navigate pressures resulting from concentration and construct their own autonomy. The research focuses on the Netherlands, a democratic system where strong safeguards for editorial independence coexist with rapid market concentration.