Department of Communication
Room: E 226
Bispinghof 9-14
D-48143 Münster
Phone: +49 251 83-23002
thorsten.quandt@uni-muenster.de
by arrangement via mail.
Prof. Dr. Thorsten Quandt, * 1971, is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Münster.
He was holding the Chair of Online Communication and Interactive Media at the University of Hohenheim from 2009-2012, where he also served as the Director of the Institute of Communication Studies in 2012. From 2007-2008, he was an Assistant Professor of journalism research at the Free University Berlin, where he also served as a Guest Professor in 2006. Furthermore, he has been working as a lecturer and researcher at various other universities, including the LMU Munich, the Berlin University of the Arts, and the Technical University Ilmenau. He was also a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Oxford, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and a visiting scholar at the Indiana University, Bloomington.
He (co)published more than 200 scientific articles and several books. His work was awarded with several scientific prizes, including various Top Paper Awards and the dissertation award of the DGPuK. Quandt is a two-time ERC grantee and a Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA).
His research and teaching fields include online communication, media innovation research, digital games and journalism.
The online world of adolescent nerd communities, once a refuge for enthusiasts of digital games, technology, and fandom, has taken a troubling turn. Previously harmless niche groups have evolved into ‘dark nerd communities,’ where exclusionary ideologies, misogyny, and extremist views have taken root. Events like GamerGate and the ‘incel’ movement exposed sexism, anti-liberalism, and connections to alt-right ideologies, raising critical questions about the processes behind this shift.
This research project aims to explore the mechanisms by which these communities degrade into toxic environments. It seeks to map the diversity within dark nerd communities and dissect the processes driving their toxic evolution, including individual and structural features, group dynamics, and the influence of manipulators (so-called ‘dark agents’). Unlike previous studies focusing on either generalized online risks or extreme cases like incel hate crimes, this project will examine the social and communicative structures within specific nerd communities, providing a nuanced understanding of how everyday degradation occurs.
The project will proceed in three phases: defining and identifying dark nerd communities; analysing the communicative and social processes behind their toxic transformation; and testing intervention strategies to mitigate these effects. Methodologically, the project will employ a combination of computational, traditional quantitative, and in-depth qualitative methods.
By addressing toxic degradation within dark nerd communities, this research will contribute to a deeper understanding of these communities and provide insights for preserving the safety and integrity of online spaces during a critical transitional life phase. The outcomes are expected to lay the foundations for stemming the tide of toxicity and extremism within the adolescent technosphere.
In the ongoing social debate about social issues, hashtag campaigns such as #metoo or #blacklivesmatter have gained massive importance in recent years. They draw attention to a socially relevant problem (such as sexism or racism) and position it as a social issue. This social issue is shared (using hashtags) on social media and spreads virally. Once the social issue has gone viral, it attracts the attention of traditional media, which make the addressed social problem accessible to a broad public and to the discourse of society. This process is called social issue emergence (SIE) and takes place in the hybrid media system with interaction between analog and digital media logic. But what are the dynamics behind this process? To what extent can actors control and influence the career of a social issue? And what role does the seemingly uncontrolled viral spread of social issues play? The goal of the project is to develop a model based on theoretical and empirical findings that can be used to reconstruct, simulate, understand, and predict the dynamics of social issue emergence.
In light of recent crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the investigation of online groups that disseminate conspiracy theories and oppose the social mainstream is of great importance. These movements range from harmless, esoteric groups to overtly anti-democratic movements that exploit social issues and adopt them into a collective ideology, with religion frequently serving as a basis for argumentation. The internet's networking capabilities facilitate these movements' recruitment and mobilization, as well as their interaction with the broader society. Religious elements often play a significant role, with differing and sometimes opposing ideologies being conflated.
This project aims to examine online networked ideological movements with religious overtones. Initially, a theoretical foundation will be established, and new ideological movements will be mapped empirically in order to explore the content dimensions of conspiracy theories and disinformation disseminated online, as well as associated recruitment and mobilization attempts, and the interconnections at the personal and content levels. The project will also require the methodological further development of established practices of text and network analysis.
Recent research in the field of online communication has increasingly focused on the negative effects of social media usage in recent years. Particularly, the spread of disinformation during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine conflict has been of interest, as the risks to liberal democracies have become abundantly clear. A significant challenge for research lies in the analysis of images and videos that are often included in communication data. Current techniques for image analysis require extensive image information and are often unable to process the vast amounts of data in real-time. The presented project pursues an innovative idea to address these challenges. Instead of analyzing the complete image content, image analysis should be optimized using human attention mechanisms. The use of this technique would significantly improve the efficiency of image processing in data streams. The goal of the project is to develop a prototype that can be used in future research projects on disinformation and security research.
Disinformation has been the focus of research and public debate for some time. Incidents such as the manipulation of journalistic forums during the early days of the Ukraine conflict, the suspected influence of disinformation in the Brexit referendum, or the use of automated communication in the 2016 U.S. election have drawn public and political attention to the issue. This leads to the central question: How do disinformation campaigns behind all these incidents work?
Since the above-mentioned events, research has increasingly focused on automated communication, fake news and hate speech, and how to detect them. Many citizens face these phenomena on a daily basis. The intensive study of disinformation strategies has revealed that, in addition to automated communication, there are sometimes covert aspects and actors that make a disinformation campaign powerful in the first place. In order to identify, understand, and combat the sometimes concerted disinformation campaigns, it is also necessary to take into account human actors, content, and timing.
While smartphones play a central role in students' everyday lives, their use in the classroom is viewed critically. Nevertheless, targeted use for learning purposes could bring positive effects in terms of learning success and motivation. The question of how smartphones could be advantageously integrated into school lessons is still largely unanswered. The project therefore investigates the conditions for the successful use of smartphones in mathematics and science lessons.
Identification, detection, and mitigation of covert propaganda attacks via online media/PropStop (05/2016 - 04/2019)
Social and political developments are discussed and commented on worldwide on social media. In addition to the desired public, anonymous and free expression of opinion, however, these services also offer scope for controlled manipulation. Semi-automated to fully automated systems known as propaganda bots or social bots use the easy access to the technical infrastructure of social media to covertly disseminate certain opinions and boost public perception in a one-sided manner. To this end, sophisticated artificial profiles are created, fake discussions are generated between users, real opinions are undermined, and unwanted criticism is suppressed. The distorted image of the online public in turn influences social debates and can also influence media coverage, resulting in significant social damage.
Groundbreaking technologies change not only our daily lives and habits but also affect our perceptions, feelings, communication structures, and self image. Never before, however, has the discussion of the impact of a technological development on mental health been as intense as it has been since the introduction of the internet. One would expect psychiatric experts to take the lead in this discussion. At present, most of the commentary by psychiatrists and psychologists seems to be as influenced by their own attitudes towards modern technology as it is by empirical data and scientific insight. There are reasons for this. While one need not look far for inflammatory discussions of „internet addiction,“ a scientific debate amongst psychiatric professionals on this topic is seldom to be found. Despite the fact that many of the accusations found in the media about internet use can be disproven, they continue to enjoy great popularity.
The research training group examines how trust can be developed and maintained under the conditions of new forms of communication. Digitized means of communication change the structure and sustainability of trust because firstly, familiar face-to-face communication is replaced by digitized interactions, secondly, virtual social and office networks emerge and finally, because new forms of relationships between the public, organisations and individuals develop. The postgraduate programme analyses the consequences of these processes for the establishment of trust relationships by the example of four prototypical areas: media, economy, science and sports.
Manual and automated methods for analyzing social networks on the Internet are the focus of the project "Discourse Analysis in Social Media". The goal is not only a thematic examination of the content, but also the development of new methods of analysis. This is a collaborative project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with the computer linguist Professor Manfred Dtehle (Potsdam), the business information scientist Professor Stefan Stieglitz (Münster) and the communication scientist Professor christoph Neuberger (Munich).
Since January 2010, this major EU-funded project has been conducting extensive research into the real-world and game-world experiences of online gamers. Project components include representative panel surveys over a total of three survey waves, social network analysis, in-game-observations, guided interviews, and focus groups. As part of the five-year project, a dedicated working group and observation lab (GameLab) were established. The EU 's European Research Council supports high-risk, cutting-edge research by young scientists with its "Starting Grants" program. In contrast to other EU programs, the ERC funds individual proposals submitted by a single Principal Investigator (PI). In this way, the funding remains solely with the PI and his or her home insitution.
The aim of the project is to comprehensively research the phenomenon of cyberbullying, its influencing factors, specific patterns and effects, especially in the particularly relevant youth sector. In addition to the individual level, a multi-level analysis takes into account structural and systematic factors. Furthermore, the dynamics of the cyberbullying process will be the subject of a longitudinal analysis. To achieve these goals, a 3-wave panel survey will be conducted among students and teachers at different schools. In addition to personal variables, this survey includes the reconstruction of social structures at the schools with the help of social network analyses.
Organization of a conference on the above-mentioned topic, supported by the funding program "International Scientific Events" of the German Research Foundation.
The two-year project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), examined the production, content and reception of foreign news on television. It was part of a large international project conducted simultaneously in about 20 countries. The project was coordinated by Akiba Cohen (U Tel Aviv), the German project partner was Jürgen Wilke (Mainz). Other distinguished colleagues were also involved in the global project, including David Weaver (U of Bloomington), Paolo Mancini (U of Perugia), and Von hwei-Lo.
The perception and embedding of user-generated content in mainstream online journalism was analyzed in this international comparative project. For this purpose, content/structure analyses were conducted with the editors-in-chief, online editors and community managers of the respective market leaders in ten countries. The online offshoots of Le Monde, The Times, New York Times, El Pais and Der Spiegel, for example, took part. Project partners included Jane Singer (U Central Lancashire), Ari Heinonen (U Tampere), David Domingo (U Tarragona), and Zvi Reich (Ben Gurion U). Parts of the study were supported by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation.
The DFG-funded network "Integrative theoretical concepts in communication science" aimed to find solutions for the integration of previously separate theoretical strands and perspectives in communication studies. Fifteen German communication scientists took part in the network, discussing and advancing proposals in regular workshops. A classic example of the aforementioned integration efforts were the so-called 'micro-(meso-)macro-links' between theories at different levels of observation and extension. The network paid particular attention to these.