Jonas Kaiser is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Assistant Professor at Suffolk University, and member of the Spotify Safety Advisory Council.
At BKC, Jonas heads the Misinformation Working Group. His research is located at the intersection of digital and political communication. Jonas’ research interests are online extremism, public sphere theory, online misinformation, algorithmic recommendations, and how these things can be measured (computational social science) as well as governed (content moderation).
Jonas earned his PhD (Dr. phil.) at Zeppelin University for his thesis about climate change skepticism in Germany. His work has been published in journals like International Journal of Communication, Digital Journalism, PLOS ONE or Information, Communication & Society and has been featured in German, U.S. and other international news media.
At BKC, Jonas is thinking about the role social media platforms play in creating a networked public sphere and is trying to understand where and how the German and U.S. far-right is trying to establish their topics in the public sphere. He has, for example, written about the role YouTube’s recommendation algorithms play in fostering filter bubbles, what topics (far-)right media outlets are covering during before domestic elections, or how journalists and academics might overestimate Twitter’s relevance for society, the diffusion of mis- and disinformation from fringe to center, and bot detection on Twitter.
