• What have been the experiences of people who have tried to establish alternatives to Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc.? What problems have they faced? What challenges, limits, and problems do platform co-operatives face? Are there ways for such limits to be overcome?
• What kind of class are professional YouTubers? What kind of class consciousness do they have? How do they think about capitalism, entrepreneurship, neo-liberalism, freelancing, and precarious labour?
• How has marketing and advertising based on big data and social media changed the film and music industries? What do artists think about these changes? What is the role of precarious labour among artists in the social media age?
• How do right-wing parties and social movements (Trumpism, pro-Brexit movement, Front National, nationalists, racists, xenophobes, etc.) use targeted advertising, big data, and social media to advance their ideologies? How do they use social media as forms for political communication? What do everyday users think about such advertisements and right-wing online communication?
• How does marketing and targeted advertising change with the rise of the Internet of Things? What dangers do such forms of advertising entail? What do actual or potential users think about these dangers?
• What are the limits and problems of big data? How do users think about big data based advertising and targeted advertising? How do they think about noncommercial, commons-based, non-profit alternatives?
• How can an alternative paradigm to big data positivism and computational social science be established? What critiques can be levelled at these largely quantitative approaches? What alternative critically oriented social media research methods do we need to develop and how can they be applied to ideology critique?
• How are specific forms of ideologies expressed on social media?
• What policies are needed for advancing non-commercial, non-profit, commonsbased social media?
• How can the logic of social media and online communication be decelerated and the political public sphere thereby be best advanced? What are slow media 2.0? What are the potentials of slow media 2.0?
• What are the dangers of branded online content and native online advertising? How does branded online content and native online advertising make use of big data? What do users think of branded online content? What are the dangers for journalism stemming from these forms of content?
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Themes