Facebook and other social media platforms are increasingly used to exchange opinions on political, social, and scientific topics. Younger people, in particular, consider them a primary means of accessing current debates. To explore opportunities for participation in digital public spheres, we must examine the circumstances in which private individuals express their opinions. We should also consider which groups of people can exert particular influence as opinion leaders. Individual users' attitudes towards current topics will be modeled from a reception perspective. This will be done by presenting journalistic content and voices from the audience simultaneously via comments in social networks or by supplementing traditional media use with a second screen, such as social TV. The research will examine the extent to which the characteristics of the digital public sphere trigger a form of information processing that is generally more oriented toward social desirability, and under what circumstances this can lead to an increased susceptibility to misinformation ("fake news").

Key publications:

Hirschhäuser, V., & Winter, S. (2025). Moral comments in social media: Analyzing the role of ideology-matching moral framing and impression motivation in the persuasive effect of user comments on YouTube. Mass Communication and Society, 28(5), 779-804.doi:10.1080/15205436.2024.2415019

Winter, S., Vos, A., Remmelswaal, P., & Neijens, P. (2024). How social are self-effects? The impact of feedback on the internalization of expressed opinions in online communication. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 13, 100365. doi:10.1016/j.chbr.2023.100365.

Winter, S. (2023). Verschwörungstheorien in sozialen Netzwerkseiten und Messenger-Diensten aus medienpsychologischer Perspektive [Conspiracy theories in social networking sites and messenger services from a media psychology perspective]. In R. Imhoff (Hrsg.), Die Psychologie der Verschwörungstheorien – Von dunklen Mächten sonderbar belogen... (S. 83-100). Göttingen: Hogrefe

Winter, S. (2020). Do anticipated Facebook discussions diminish the importance of argument
quality? An experimental investigation of attitude formation in social media. Media
Psychology, 23, 79-106. doi:10.1080/15213269.2019.1572521