Technocolonialism: when technology for good is harmful
With Prof Mirca Madianou
Mirca will unearth the colonial power relations which shape ‘technology for good’ initiatives as well as the practices of resistance.
Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now
With Prof Timothy Wu and Cory Doctorow
Join Tim Wu and Cory Doctorow, for a lively, infuriating and invigorating exploration of the forces that drove the internet to its current miserable state, and a prescription for taking it back and making a new, good internet that is fit for purpose
Nutrition, not calories: Findings from the largest open-source dataset of video game behaviour and health
With Nick Ballou
Drawing from 50k+ linked survey responses on wellbeing, stress, social play, cognitive performance, and more, I will share how games are used to compensate for a bad day, how late-night play relates to sleep, and how play habits changes as we age.
Oxford Internet Institute study finds lower-quality news gets more engagement
With Dr Mohsen Mosleh
An Oxford Internet Institute-led study has analysed 10 million posts across seven social media platforms – and found big differences in what news gets shared and how people engage with it.
OII Halloween Lecture 2025. Bayes vs. the Invaders (Revivified): A Bayesian Analysis of 70 Years of UFO Sightings
With Dr Joss Wright
We tremblingly revisit a Bayesian analysis of seventy years of UFO sightings, drawn from a dataset collected by the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC)
Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms
With Dr Mohsen Mosleh
e examine the relationship between user engagement and news domains’ political orientation and quality across seven platforms: X/Twitter, BlueSky, TruthSocial, Gab, GETTR, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.
Why social sciences matter in the age of AI
With Dr Carl Benedikt Frey, Professor Helen Margetts, and Dr Keegan McBride
Watch OII experts Prof. Carl Frey and Prof. Helen Margetts as they explore social sciences' critical role in preparing us for the future.
Updating Purpose Limitation for AI – a normative approach to AI regulation
With Professor Hannah Ruschemeier and Professor Rainer Mühlhoff
In this talk, we present our interdisciplinary approach to AI regulation by updating purpose limitation for AI. We address a critical blind spot in EU digital legislation: the secondary use of anonymised training data and pre-trained AI models.
Beyond Misinformation: Understanding Cognitive Bias in Complex Media Landscapes
With Dr Jennifer Allen and Reed Orchinik
"No need to lie: Falsehoods offer no persuasive advantage over biased facts" Dr Jennifer Allen "Beliefs and Adaptive Rationality: How Information Environments Shape Cognition" Reed Orchinik
OII Pride Lecture
With Dr Madeleine Steeds and Dr Rebecca Swift
This year's Pride Lecture featured talks from Dr Madeleine Steeds and Dr Rebecca Swift on the topics of "Queer Joy as a Digital Good: Centring Joy in Research" and "Visual depictions of genders – Is advertising imagery getting any better?"
The Memeplex. The three regimes of online communication
With Prof Tommaso Venturini
Tommaso will discuss the “New World Order” super-conspiracy theory to illustrate why it is so difficult to make sense of contemporary digital communication.
Field Events: Re-Conceptualizing the Field through Research with Digital Technologies
With Dr Tanja Ahlin
Based on experience with fieldwork by phone, webcams and through various communication applications, this talk explores ways in which the technologies that researchers engage with influence our field that cannot be clearly defined in spatial terms.