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Professor Christian Katzenbach

Professor Christian Katzenbach

Visiting Professor

Department of Media and Communications

Email
katzenbach@uni-bremen.de
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Website

Languages
English, German, Spanish
Key Expertise
platform governance; social media; tech discourses; AI

About me

Christian Katzenbach is Professor of Communication and Media Studies with a focus on media governance and platform economics at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen. Prof Katzenbach is head of the Lab “Platform Governance, Media, and Technology“ at ZeMKI and associated researcher at Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), Berlin. From 2008 to 2012, Prof Katzenbach was a research associated at the Freie Universität Berlin. He completed his doctorate there with a dissertation thesis on “Governance, Technology and Communication” (2016, summa cum laude). The thesis was awarded the two-year dissertation prize of the DGPuK and the dissertation prize Media-Culture-Communication. It was published in book form as "Die Regeln digitaler Kommunikation”.

From 2011 onwards, Prof Katzenbach established the Internet Policy and Governance research group at the HIIG together with Director Prof. Dr. Jeanette Hofmann. From 2017 to 2021, he headed (together with Dr Thomas Christian Bächle) the interdisciplinary programme area Digital at HIIG Society. From 2016 to 2020, Prof Katzenbach was spokesperson of the DGPuK’s section “Digital Communication”, and from April 2018 to March 2019 he represented the professorship for Communication Policy and Media Economics at the Free University of Berlin. In the academic year 2020-21, Katzenbach was a Fellow at the Canadian Institute National de Recherche Scientifique (INRS) and the Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST).

His research examines the interrelationships of communication, technology and politics in the context of the digitalisation of society. The focus is on the conceptual and empirical investigation of the regulation and governance of the internet and platforms, the role of data, algorithms and infrastructures for the (re-)organisation of societal communication, as well as discourses and regulation of “artificial intelligence”. Prof Katzenbach leads large international third-party funded projects on these topics, funded by the DFG, the EU’s H2020 framework programme, the BMBF, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (BpB).

During his time at LSE, Prof Katzenbach will be working with Dr Jean-Christophe Plantin.

Expertise Details

platform governance; social media; tech discourses; AI

Selected publications
  • Dergacheva, D., & Katzenbach, C. (2023). “We Learn Through Mistakes”: Perspectives of Social Media Creators on Copyright Moderation in the European Union. Social Media + Society, 9(4), 20563051231220329. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231220329
  • Quintais, J. P., Katzenbach, C., Schwemer, S. F., Dergacheva, D., Riis, T., Mezei, P., Harkai, I., & Magalhães, J. C. (2024). Copyright Content Moderation in the European Union: State of the Art, Ways Forward and Policy Recommendations. IIC - International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40319-023-01409-5
  • Hepp, A., Loosen, W., Dreyer, S., Jarke, J., Kannengießer, S., Katzenbach, C., . . . Schulz, W. (2023). ChatGPT, LaMDA and the hype around Communicative AI: The automation of communication as a field of research in media and communication studies. In HMC, 6, 41-63. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4
  • Dergacheva, D., & Katzenbach, C. (2023). Mandate to Overblock? Understanding the impact of the European Union’s Article 17 on copyright content moderation on YouTube. In Policy & Internet, online first, 28.11.23. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.379
  • Hepp, A., Loosen, W., Dreyer, S., Jarke, J., Kannengießer, S., Katzenbach, C., Malaka, R., Pfadenhauer, M., Puschmann, C., & Schulz, W. (2022). Von der Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion zur kommunikativen KI. Publizistik, 67(4), 449–474. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11616-022-00758-4
  • Katzenbach, C. (2022). Der „Algorithmic turn“ in der Plattform-Governance. KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 74, 283–305. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-022-00837-4
  • Liebig, L., Güttel, L., Jobin, A., & Katzenbach, C. (2022). Subnational AI policy: Shaping AI in a multi-level governance system. AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01561-5
  • Katzenbach, C. (2021). “AI will fix this” – The Technical, Discursive, and Political Turn to AI in Governing Communication. Big Data & Society, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211046182
  • Bareis, J., & Katzenbach, C. (2021). Talking AI into Being: The Narratives and Imaginaries of National AI Strategies and Their Performative Politics. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 47(5), 855–881. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211030007
  • Gorwa, R., Binns, R., & Katzenbach, C. (2020). Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance: Big Data & Society, 7(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719897945
  • Magalhães, J. C., & Katzenbach, C. (2020). Coronavirus and the frailness of platform governance. Internet Policy Review, 1. https://policyreview.info/articles/news/coronavirus-and-frailness-platform-governance/1458
  • Katzenbach, C., & Ulbricht, L. (2019). Algorithmic governance. Internet Policy Review, 8(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1424
  • Hofmann, J., Katzenbach, C., & Gollatz, K. (2017). Between coordination and regulation: Finding the governance in Internet governance. New Media & Society, 19(9), 1406–1423. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816639975
  • Katzenbach, C. (2017). Die Regeln digitaler Kommunikation. Governance zwischen Norm, Diskurs und Technik. Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-19337-9

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