Digital Methods Summer School 2025

Social media at a crossroads, and the sensitivity of AI platforms

30 June - 11 July 2025

New Media & Digital Culture
University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
the Netherlands

Digital Methods Summer School and Data Sprint: Call for Participation

Social media at a crossroads, and the sensitivity of AI platforms

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 lost their normative compass while AI platforms strive to improve theirs through enhanced content moderation. AI platform 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 Meta’s other platforms follow X’s slide, empirical questions we would like to explore at the Summer School.

The sensitivity of AI platforms

The second 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 (harmless, helpful, honest) 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?

Content moderation critique 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.

Important Links (work-in-progress)

1. Welcome package (includes the Schedule)
2. Schedule
3. Join the Mattermost channel! (Alternative to Slack)
4. Project descriptions (join a project!)
5. Tutorials
6. Template for final poster
7. Template for project reports. And DMI wiki project write-up template

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 2025. The full program and schedule of the Summer School are available on or about 27 May 2025.

Tuition Fees, Completion Certificates & Accommodations

The fee for the Digital Methods Summer School 2025 is EUR 895, and upon completion all participants receive transcripts and certificates (worth 6 ECTS). To complete the Summer School successfully all participants must co-present the one final presentation (poster session) and co-author one final project report, evidenced by the presentation slides or poster as well as the final report(s) themselves. Final reports should appear on this wiki (handy template) and contain a link to the final presentation slides or poster. They are due on 11 August, or four weeks after the end of the Summer School. There are no other attendance or completion certificates issued other than the transcripts.

Payment information is sent along with the acceptance notification. Students at the University of Amsterdam do not pay fees. Members of Dutch Research Schools and alumni of the University of Amsterdam pay half fees. There are no other scholarships or discounts.

The Summer School is self-catered. The venue is in the center of Amsterdam with abundant coffee houses and lunch places.

We have available accommodations at this hotel:

The Social Hub Amsterdam
Jan van Galenstraat 335
1061 AZ Amsterdam
(Arrival: 29 June 2025; Departure: 12 July 2025)
https://www.thesocialhub.co/amsterdam-west/
Use discount code: DIGITALMETHODS15 (It only works for Arrival: 29 June 2025; Departure: 12 July 2025. For different dates, contact the hotel directly.)

We also have accommodations available at
The Volkshotel
Wibautstraat 150
1091 GR Amsterdam
https://www.volkshotel.nl/en/
Use discount code: Digimeth

To avoid disappointment, please contact them as early as possible.

Please bring your laptop computer, your European plug as well as the HDMI/USB-C adaptor for connecting to the projector.

About DMI

The Digital Methods Summer School is part of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, dedicated to developing techniques for Internet-related research and to the study of the natively digital. The Digital Methods Initiative also holds the annual Digital Methods Winter Schools, which are intensive and full-time undertakings in January.

There is a practical textbook, Doing Digital Methods (Sage, 2024 - 2nd edition). The Digital Methods book (MIT Press, 2015) provides the methodological outlook that frames and informs the work of the DMI. It is accompanied by a companion volume about mapping social and political issues with digital methods: Issue Mapping for an Ageing Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), which is also freely available on the web as an open access monograph. Further information and resources about digital methods can be found at digitalmethods.net - including links to example projects, publications, tools, an introductory "founding narrative" about the Digital Methods Initiative as well as short bios of the affiliated researchers.

The coordinators of the Digital Methods Initiative are Prof. Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) and Dr. Esther Weltevrede (New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam), and the director is Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam.

About Digital Methods as a Concept

Digital methods is a term coined as a counterpoint to virtual methods, which typically digitize existing methods and port them onto the Web. Digital methods, contrariwise, seek to learn from the methods built into the dominant devices online, and repurpose them for social and cultural research. That is, the challenge is to study both the info-web as well as the social web with the tools that organize them. There is a general protocol to digital methods. At the outset stock is taken of the natively digital objects that are available (links, tags, threads, etc.) and how devices such as search engines make use of them. Can the device techniques be repurposed, for example by remixing the digital objects they take as inputs? Once findings are made with online data, where to ground them? Is the baseline still the offline, or are findings to be grounded in more online data? See R. Rogers (2009), The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Social

We are using the #DMI24 hashtag. Some pictures from a past Winter School. Here is the Facebook Group from one year, and from a Summer School. Here are pictures from a variety of DMI Summer and Winter School Flickr streams.

EU Project

This Summer School is part of the EU Project, SoMe4Dem. It also has participants from the EU projects, SoBigData++ and Vera.ai.