Department of Communication
Room: E 003
Bispinghof 9-14
D-48143 Münster
Phone: +49 251 83-21051
Mail: tim.schatto-eckrodt@uni-muenster.de
Encryption: PGP-Key
Homepage: schatto-eckrodt.de
by appointment via mail
Tim Schatto-Eckrodt is a communication scientist, who researches methods to identify attempts to influence public opinion through online-propaganda. He worked as a tutor and student assistant at the Institute for Communication Science (IfK) at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, where he was, among other things, involved in the programming of data analysis tools. His master's thesis dealt with diffusion and the acceptance of new technologies. In October 2017, Tim Schatto-Eckrodt joined the BMBF-project “PropStop”, where he researched methods to identify attempts to influence public opinion through online-propaganda. Since May 2019 he works as a research assistant in the junior research group “Democratic Resilience in Times of Online Propaganda, Fake News, Fear and Hate Speech (DemoRESILdigital)”.
PropStop is a project funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) that aims at studying hidden propaganda disseminations via online media, in order to identify and prove accordant attempts. Throughout the project an interdisciplinary team of statisticians, communication scientists, IT-security researchers, journalists and IT-security companies works together. Besides a large-scale examination of propaganda characteristics online, huge quantities of public opinion statements in different areas of the digital public sphere will be analyzed for repeated semantic and technical patterns. The insights gained throughout the project will be used to enhance our detection of massive, hidden propaganda attacks, to develop technologies to identify these attacks, and to improve our abilities to verify propaganda attacks. Real-time simulations of massive hidden propaganda attacks will provide meaningful insights into the transdisciplinary applicability of the gained.
The digital society offers new possibilities for democratic participation as well as for disseminating manipulative content. Strategic agents are abusing the easy access to digitally generated publics to spread online propaganda, fake news, fear and hate speech. Such manipulative online content has been assumed to play a crucial role in radicalizing individuals, fostering social polarization, and weakening democracy per se.