Weizenbaum Library (Weizenbaum Institute)
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Sustainability powered by digitalization? (Re-)politicizing the debate
Full text linkAs ecological crises escalate, various stakeholders frame digitalization as a key solution for sustainability transformations. Besides incremental optimization, this promise has not materialized yet. We argue that digital solutions toward sustainability objectives are shaped by and reinforce power structures that effectively undermine sustainability outcomes. Academic discourse and governance are often dominated by a technology-centric framing in contrast to technologically informed, power-centric approaches. In this article, we develop an interdisciplinary framework to analyze three interconnected dimensions of power at the sustainability-digitalization-nexus and reveal how they obstruct sustainability. We locate power at the levels of environmental knowledge, governance, and technological materiality. First, digital technologies create representations of the environment that reinforce, reconfigure, or clash with preexisting ones, striving for more and better digital real-time data for technological control. Second, the spread of digital technologies is facilitated by emerging actor coalitions that promote digitalization while employing a reductionist understanding of sustainability. This narrows the policy space to optimization and incremental solutionism, which reproduces the status quo. Finally, the designs and material infrastructures of current digital technologies create path dependencies and lock-in effects while the underlying colonial resource and wealth flows remain hidden. We advocate for a (re-)politicization of digitalization across these dimensions to leverage its potential for sustainability transformations. We conclude that digitalization cannot spare us from political conflicts and deliberation processes about desirable sustainability futures. The debate should re-center fundamental questions about what kind of sustainable futures we want, where technology has a role to play, and where it does not
Behind the Screens: How Algorithmic Imaginaries Shape Science Content on Social Media
Full text linkBased on an ethnography of the development and production of science YouTube videos – a collaboration between a German public broadcaster and social science scholars – we identify three intermediary steps through which recommendation algorithms shape science content on social media. We argue that algorithms induc
Can't LLMs Do That? Supporting Third-Party Audits Under the DSA: Exploring Large Language Models for Systemic Risk Evaluation of the Digital Services Act in an Interdisciplinary Setting
Full text linkThis paper investigates the feasibility and potential role of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to support systemic risk audits under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). It examines how automated tools can enhance the work of DSA auditors and other ecosystem actors by enabling scalable, explainable, and legally grounded content analysis. An interdisciplinary expert workshop with twelve participants from legal, technical, and social science backgrounds explored prompting strategies for LLM-assisted auditing. Thematic analysis of the sessions identified key challenges and design considerations, including prompt engineering, model interpretability, legal alignment, and user empowerment. Findings highlight the potential of LLMs to improve annotation workflows and expand audit scale, while underscoring the continued importance of human oversight, iterative testing, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. This study offers practical insights for integrating AI tools into auditing processes and contributes to emerging methodologies for operationalizing systemic risk evaluations under the DSA
TechDo Digest 3x2: June 2025
Full text linkThe TechDo Digest is the literature overview of the research group "Technology, Power and Domination" at the Weizenbaum Institute. Every two to three months, the group curates a list of relevant new publications within their field, focussing on analyses of structures of power and domination in digitalized societies, changes to democratic processes, regulation of and through technology, and the contestation of digital technologies.The Weizenbaum Institute is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF
The Politics of Risk in the Digital Services Act: A Stakeholder Mapping and Research Agenda
Full text linkThe EU’s 2022 Digital Services Act requires large online platforms to regularly assess and mitigate ‘systemic risks’ to various public-interest goals, including fundamental rights, civic discourse, public health and security. Drawing on social constructionist understandings of risk, this article theorizes systemic risk management under the DSA as an arena for political power and contestation, since translating its broadly-defined abstract principles into actionable risk management procedures will entail making many contestable political decisions about how online platforms should be governed. This raises the question: who will exercise power in these decision-making processes? Providing some first answers to this question, this article makes three key contributions. First, it maps the key stakeholder groups involved, and the legal and institutional mechanisms through which they can participate in DSA systemic risk management. Second, it critically analyzes the power dynamics and unequal resources that will structure stakeholder participation. Third, this stakeholder mapping provides a foundation for future research on the politics of DSA systemic risks. The article concludes with reflections on directions for future research on the political agendas, priorities and strategies that shape platform governance.The Weizenbaum Institute is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF
An uncertain elite: Professional differences and similarities between engineers and tech workers in times of digital transformation
No full textThe digital transformation of industries has given rise to new categories of tech workers, such as software engineers and UX/UI designers, who now work alongside traditional engineers. This study explores the evolving relationship between these groups, focusing on work processes, status perceptions and professional interactions. The research questions addressed include: how has digitalisation affected these two groups’ work processes? what strategies do they use to maintain or improve their career paths? and how do their roles converge or diverge? Using qualitative data from interviews and workshops in a German automotive company undergoing a digital and electric mobility transformation, the study finds both competition and cooperation between engineers and IT professionals, with the former adopting some IT work methods and the latter adjusting to the highly structured processes of the industrial sector. Despite growing overlaps, distinct professional identities nevertheless remain
Shaping uncertain journeys into digital futures - perspectives on the digital and socio-ecological transformation
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Weizenbaum Report 2024: Politische Partizipation in Deutschland
Full text link**Deutsch**
Der Weizenbaum Report ist eine jährlich erscheinende Publikation zur politischen Partizipation in Deutschland. Er stellt Befunde der bevölkerungsrepräsentativen Befragung der Forschungseinheit Weizenbaum Panel vor, die seit 2019 durchgeführt wird. Im Zentrum steht die Untersuchung verschiedener Formen politischer Partizipation im Zeitverlauf und ihre Entwicklung unter Digitalisierungsbedingungen. Die fünfte Welle der Befragung im Jahr 2023 legte dabei einen besonderen Schwerpunkt auf die Bewertung und Nutzung künstlicher Intelligenz (KI). Die Ergebnisse geben Einblick in die digitale Kluft der politischen Mediennutzung, die Wahrnehmung und Meldung von Falsch- und Hassnachrichten, in die skeptischer werdende Haltung gegenüber KI sowie in Trends traditioneller und digitaler politischer Partizipationsformen.**English**
The Weizenbaum Report is an annual publication on political participation in Germany. It presents findings from a survey representative of the population conducted by the Weizenbaum Panel research unit since 2019. The focus is on investigating various forms of political participation over time and their development against the backdrop of digitalization. The fifth wave of the survey in 2023 focused on the evaluation and use of artificial intelligence (AI). The results provide insights into the digital divide in political media use, the perception and reporting of fake and hate news, the increasingly skeptical attitude towards AI, and trends in traditional and digital forms of political participation.Der Weizenbaum Report 2024 „Politische Partizipation in Deutschland“ wurde durch das Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) gefördert (Förderkennzeichen 16DII131 – Deutsches Internet-Institut). Die Datenerhebung fand in Kooperation mit der Freien Universität Berlin statt
Headlines, Pictures, Likes: Attention to Social Media Newsfeed Post Elements on Smartphones and in Public
Full text linkScrolling through a social media newsfeed has become almost ubiquitous. Yet, it remains unknown what specific post elements people pay attention to and whether this varies depending on how they access social media newsfeeds. In an eye-tracking experiment among university students (N = 201), we compare user attention to specific post elements like source, title, or picture, in a dynamic Facebook newsfeed by device (desktop vs. mobile) and smartphone usage environment (private vs. public). Significant attentional differences occur at the level of the newsfeed post elements. Users pay less attention to visual information on the mobile newsfeed and more attention to textual post elements in a public setting