Review and results
Based on the current state of research and a methodological introduction to investigative digital ethnography, students of media and communication studies and political science analysed self-selected case studies on disinformation and conspiracy narratives in this project. The first section of the course focussed on the socio-technical conditions of origin, the supporters and argumentative characteristics of political conspiracy narratives from an interdisciplinary perspective.
In the second section, structured and unstructured data on the case studies was then collected via the Telegram api and the Telegram monitoring tool of the transfer partner Kollektiv data4transparency. The images, videos, texts and metadata were analysed using Jupyter notebooks. As the publicly accessible data was collected and analysed without the explicit consent of the senders, questions of ethics and data protection were also considered. In this way, the participants developed an understanding of disinformation and conspiracy narratives, data infrastructures and data analyses as well as data protection and IT security in the context of social platforms. By visualising the results, the participants also learned how to present their findings to the public.