Moderation: Leonie Wunderlich
News audiences today are confronted with the heterogeneity and hybridity of media messages. New, peripheral, or non-journalistic content creators are establishing themselves as epistemic authorities on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. This structural change of the public sphere is not only reflected in a changed understanding of news, but presumably also affects opinion-forming processes. In 32 guided interviews, Pascal Schneiders and Daniel Stegmann investigated the question of which criteria users applied to define sources and content as relevant to opinion-forming. From the results, seven types of opinion formation can be derived, depending on the strength and activity of opinion formation. At the end of the talk, implications for the regulation of opinion power will be discussed.
Pascal Schneiders has been a research assistant at the Institute of Journalism at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since February 2018. His dissertation addresses the platformisation of the news ecosystem and its implications for media and platform governance from different perspectives.
Daniel Stegmann has been a research assistant at the Institute of Journalism at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since January 2020, where he conducts research on the topics of opinion power and diversity, fragmentation, and media trust. He is writing his dissertation on the question of what role the media play in social cohesion.
Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung | Hans-Bredow-Institut
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