The Kingsman National Institute’s Centre for Digital Ethics & Governance (CDEG) has formally launched a new research initiative designed to bring academic scrutiny to one of the most pressing and least understood forces shaping modern society: the algorithmic curation of public information.
The new “Algorithmic Discourse Observatory” (ADO) is a cross-faculty unit that unites researchers from our School of Computational Science with philosophers and political theorists from our PPL (Philosophy, Politics & Law) faculty. Its mission is to move beyond the simplistic study of “fake news” or bot networks and instead analyse the systemic impact of the core recommendation and moderation algorithms used by major digital platforms.
The initiative is co-directed by Professor Elias Kouris, Director of the CDEG, and Dr. Sofia Costa, a Lecturer in Applied Ethics with a joint appointment in PPL.
“The classical Agora in Athens was an open space where citizens could debate, flawed as it was. The modern Agora is digital, and it is not open; it is a meticulously curated space, and the curators are commercial algorithms whose goals are not aligned with democratic health,” explained Professor Kouris. “We are not just looking for ‘bots.’ The ADO is being built to map the far more subtle, and perhaps more powerful, influence of the platforms themselves. How do they choose what narratives to amplify? Which viewpoints are systemically ‘down-ranked’ into invisibility? These are computational questions, but they are, at their heart, questions of political philosophy.”
The Observatory’s primary work involves the development of a suite of custom-built data analysis tools. Postgraduate students from the MSc in Computational Science and the Aegean Informatics Laboratory (AIL) are building a system to analyse large-scale public data from various platforms. This system uses advanced computational linguistics and network analysis to identify emerging narratives and, more importantly, to model the “amplification factor”—how quickly a piece of information spreads relative to its organic support, suggesting algorithmic intervention.
However, the technical analysis is only half of the project. Dr. Sofia Costa and her students from the PPL faculty provide the critical qualitative framework.
“The data alone is meaningless. It can tell you what is trending, but not why it matters,” Dr. Costa noted during the unit’s launch seminar. “The computational team can identify a cluster of amplified narratives, but the PPL team must analyse its content. Is this algorithm, in its quest for ‘engagement,’ inadvertently promoting social fragmentation? Is it prioritizing outrage over reasoned argument? Our students are trained in critical debate and ethical theory, and they are applying those skills not to ancient texts, but to the data-driven output of these models.”
The ADO, which operates with a necessary degree of imperfection due to the “black box” nature of proprietary algorithms, will not claim to have all the answers. Its primary goal is to provide a much-needed, independent academic benchmark.
The unit’s first major output will be a quarterly “Discourse Report,” mapping these algorithmic trends in the European information ecosystem. This report is intended for policymakers, journalists, and the public, providing a transparent, data-driven look at the forces shaping what we read and debate. This initiative places the Kingsman National Institute at the forefront of applying rigorous, classical methods of inquiry to the most complex digital challenges of our time.
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