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6th PCA Congress - Media and Society in the Age of Platforms, Algorhitms and Data,Gdańsk, 22-24.09.2022

The 7th PCA Congress

HUMAN AT THE CENTER OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA TRANSFORMATION


Katowice, September 22-24, 2025

Keynote speakers

Uniwersytet Gdański

Prof. dr Rachel Gibson, University of Manchester

Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include comparative studies of the impact of digital technologies on electoral campaigns and outcomes, with particular emphasis on developments in the UK, the US, Germany, Australia and France. She is leading a five-year research project, Digital Campaigning and Electoral Democracy (DiCED), funded by the European Research Council (ERC). She is also the Principal Investigator on the UKRI Smart Data Research (SDR) project DIGISURVOR, which addresses the methodological and ethical challenges of combining individual-level survey data with users’ digital footprints.

Election Campaigns in the Digital Era: Prof. Rachel Gibson at the 7th PTKS Congress

The internet, social media, and big data have become integral to contemporary political campaigns, fundamentally reshaping the way elections are fought. Rachel Gibson, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, has been studying these changes for more than two decades. She is also a special guest at this year's Congress of the Polish Society for Social Communication, which is co-organized by the Institute of Journalism and Media Communication at the University of Silesia.What do her findings reveal about the impact of new technologies on electoral processes?

Gibson is the author of numerous publications, including the influential book When the Nerds Go Marching In (2020), which provides a systematic analysis of the evolution of digital campaigning in the UK, Australia, France, and the United States. In other key works—such as Does Digital Campaigning Matter? (Gibson, Southern, Vaccari, Smyth & Musayev, 2024) and Scientific and Subversive: The Two Faces of the Fourth Era of Political Campaigning (Römmele & Gibson, 2020)—she examines the role of social media engagement in campaigns and explores the dual nature of digitalization: as a force for democratic participation, and simultaneously as a tool for political manipulation.

While digital technologies offer powerful tools for reaching voters, they can also deepen inequalities and consolidate the power of political elites (Gibson, 2020; Römmele & Gibson, 2020). In her research, Gibson analyzes the rise of a new technocratic class that increasingly steers campaign strategy, centralizing decision-making and transforming the internal dynamics of political organizations. Faced with these challenges, her work invites critical reflection on the role of digital literacy and the need for a conscious and ethical use of technology to safeguard democratic processes.

The plenary session with international guests: Professor Rachel Gibson (University of Manchester) and Professor Claes de Vreese (University of Amsterdam) will take place on the opening day of the PTKS Congress, 22 September 2025, at the Silesian Museum in Katowice. Professor Gibson will undoubtedly offer a compelling perspective on the future of digital electioneering and its implications for contemporary democracy. Join us for a conversation with a researcher whose work continues to shape how we understand politics in the digital age.

You are cordially invited!


Prof. Dr. Claes de Vreese, University of Amsterdam

He is a Distinguished University Professor of AI and Society at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in AI, media and democracy. He also holds the Chair of Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam. He co-directs the AI, Media and Democracy Lab and the national research program AlgoSoc. He is the founder and first scientific director of the Centre for Digital Democracy at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and a member of the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies.

The crisis of democracy through the eyes of media experts. The 7th PTKS Congress as a space for academic debate on the nature of the phenomenon

Disinformation, erosion of trust, polarization. The crisis of democracy is a problem that concerns not only political scientists, sociologists, and political philosophers, but also media experts, who undertake a media-centric reflection on the causes, effects, and nature of this complex phenomenon.

The 7th Congress of the Polish Society for Social Communication, which will take place on September 22-24 in Katowice, will provide a physical and ideological space for their discussion. The event is co-organized by the Institute of Journalism and Media Communication of the University of Silesia.

One of the special guests at the event will be Professor Claes de Vreese, a world-renowned researcher who has devoted many publications to the phenomena of polarization, disinformation, and the crisis of trust. These publications provide a substantive reference point for discussions that are often driven by emotion and fear in the public sphere.

Professor de Vos and his colleagues have drawn attention to the political instrumentalization of fear of disinformation. Researchers have noted that the far right is exploiting the fight against this problem for its own ends. The fight against disinformation then becomes a form of populism, leading to a widespread (universal?) erosion of trust (Gutterman, van den Hoogen, de Vreese 2025).

The Danish researcher is far from painting a catastrophic or apocalyptic picture. His research shows that users cope with disinformation better than one might think. The problem, therefore, is not so much their cognitive abilities—the ability or inability to distinguish between fact and fiction as a predisposition—but rather their motivation. Research conducted by Claes de Vreese and his co-authors shows that recipients of media messages about Russia's invasion of Ukraine are either resistant to disinformation or not, depending on their political sympathies (binary – pro-Russian or anti-Russian) (de Vreese, Koc-Michalska, Gehle et al. 2024).

However, the interpretation of the crisis of democracy that emerges from Claes de Vreese's research is not a naively optimistic one. The research of the Danish scholar and his colleagues shows that raising the competence of users of digital election campaigns (as something that could potentially promote effective participation in political realities) is not a necessary consequence of educational activities (de Vreese, Minihold, Lecheler et al. 2024). “Game over?” ask Claes de Vreese and his co-authors in the title of their research paper on this issue. And although the conclusions are not entirely negative, the research team seems to suggest that much remains to be done.

Claes de Vreese will be a special guest at the 7th Congress of the Polish Society for Social Communication, which will take place on September 22-24 in Katowice. As a keynote speaker, he will undoubtedly address these and other interesting topics that are so important for the future of the media and democratic (and undemocratic) societies. We cordially invite you to attend!