Research Interests

Research Areas

• Algorithms
• Social Media
• Political communication
• News consumption and exposure

Rasmus W. Schmøkel is a PhD student at the Digital Democracy Centre and the Department for Political Science and Public Management at SDU. 
He holds a master in political science from the University of Copenhagen. Before joining the DDC he has been a Data Scientist at PFA Asset Management and at the IT and Development Agency where he worked with fraud detection using artificial intelligence (Deep learning and Machine Learning).
His research focus on political communication, social media and algorithms. His research interest also include computational methods, ethical AI and the interplay between psychological mechanisms and Artificial Intelligence. 

PhD-project: The Social Media News Consumer

How do news consumers navigate social media when it comes to news? What are mechanisms of selection or avoidance? Also, what are mechanisms of news creation? Citizens’ news use on social media platforms has significant democratic implications.

The prominence of social media platforms in today’s hybrid media environment has made filtering and curating by learning algorithms central to understanding news creation and exposure. These algorithms have been a reason for increased concern about eroding journalistic norms, fake news, polarisation, filter bubbles, and news avoidance. At the moment we understand the algorithm as a linear construct or as frozen organisational discourse, and thereby do not fully capture the dynamic relationships between various social media actors.

In this project, we present a new framework conceptualising news creation and exposure on social media platforms as the product of a complex interplay between the algorithms and supply and demand side actors. Also, we empirically investigate how this interplay affect news exposure and the news creation, selection and avoidance mechanisms using a social media mock-up platform. A significant contribution of this project will be the development of a social media mock up platform.