Dr. Ruben Bach, postdoctoral researcher at the Professorship for Statistics and Methodology, successfully applied for a postdoctoral fellowship of the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung within the framework of their elite program for postdocs. His project “Filter Bubbles, Alternative News and Political Polarization” will be funded with 139,900 Euro for a period of two years.
In his project, Ruben will investigate whether social media and search engines lead to homogeneous news diets and how and where citizens are exposed to alternative media and factually dubious content. Moreover, it analyses the consequences of homogeneous news use and alternative media for citizens’ trust in democracy, political institutions and the media. It uses a combination of survey data and web-tracking data that allow for the unfiltered observation of users’ news exposure on a fine-grained level.