What is your professional background, and what is your primary area of research?
"I have a thoroughly interdisciplinary background with a bachelor's degree from RUC in Philosophy and Psychology and a master's degree in Cognitive Semiotics from Aarhus University. At RUC, I became deeply interested in how technologies and apps can shape our society, how power structures are inscribed in algorithms, and how surveillance technologies such as the smittestop app affect people's understanding of each other and the society they live in. To gain more empirical tools to continue my research, I applied to AU, where the program in cognitive semiotics gave me a good insight into social psychology, computational linguistics (NLP), and basic statistical methods. Now I use my theoretical and technical skills to study social media in a field that can best be described as ‘digital social science’."

What is your current SHAPE research project, "Misinformation and Low-Quality Content on Social Media", about?
"My PhD project is part of Anja Bechmann's Social Media Influence project, which investigates how social media helps shape beliefs and behavior in the population. My project focuses mainly on Facebook, where I examine who is exposed to what types of misinformation and how misinformation changes in line with offline events. In addition, I examine how changes in Facebook's moderation practices and the spread of artificial intelligence affect the types of misinformation that circulate on the platform.

Common to my studies is that they are based on large datasets of digital footprints that we all leave when we go online, and that they use digital methods such as network analysis, which can be used to map relationships between users, and computational linguistics, where statistical methods can be used to create an overview of large amounts of text. Right now, I am particularly interested in what Facebook's decision to drop its collaborations with professional fact-checkers in favor of a user-driven moderation system may mean for the types of information we as users are presented with on the platform."

What impact do you expect your project to have on society or your field of research?
"My project involves a great deal of basic research and mapping of what misinformation looks like in Europe and who is exposed to it. Most other studies of misinformation originate in the US, and the studies we have from Europe often focus on individual countries in specific time periods. With my research, I hope to show that the cultural, media systemic, and political differences between the US and Europe mean that we cannot always transfer knowledge directly from the American context to our own. My studies help form the basis for a better understanding of the actual spread of misinformation in a European context. I hope that they will inspire other researchers and legislators to understand misinformation as a situated phenomenon and base new studies and solutions on the specific challenges we face in Europe, rather than on a one-dimensional understanding of the concept that assumes it is the same everywhere."