The complexity of platform power

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• Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Dresden University of Technology, and Max Planck Institute for Human Development
• Friday 06 March 2026, 12:00-13:30
• Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Psychology Reception.

Information and communication technology has undergone dramatic developments over the last two decades. Increasing interconnectedness has led to more self-organized public debates, platforms and their algorithms have gained new power over discourse, and generative AI has made content fabrication easier than ever. In this talk I argue that power over discourse in these environments increasingly resides not in top-down control of content, but in the structural levers encoded in platform architectures. Drawing on insights from complexity science, behavioral science and our recent empirical syntheses, this talks develops potential ways to explain why digital platforms produce beneficial democratic outcomes in some political contexts while exacerbating polarization, mistrust, and autocratic resilience in others. Failure to conceptualize this structural platform power and it interplay with human behaviour, we argue, will hinder efforts to build democratic alternatives, which work differently to commercial U.S. platforms or state-controlled autocratic ones. I will conclude with a research agenda grounded for studying online platforms and their power in the digital age.

Host: Dr Lee De-Wit

This talk will be recorded and uploaded to the Zangwill Club Youtube channel in due course.

This talk is part of the Zangwill Club series.

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