Invitation to the defense of Yarden Skop’s doctoral thesis

The SFB cordially invites you to the oral examination in the doctoral examination proceedings of Yarden Skop. The dissertation defense will take place on Thursday, 10 December 2026, from 13:00 p.m. to 15:00 p.m.

 

During the defense, Yarden Skop will present and academically defend the findings of the dissertation before the examination committee. The title of the dissertation is: “Making Online Speech Governable: Problematizations, Platforms, and Publics in Algorithmic Moderation Infrastructures”.

How is problematic speech online turned into something a machine can detect? Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across content moderation teams on news websites, fact-checking organizations and EU-funded AI consortia, Yarden Skop examines how counter-hate speech and counter-disinformation initiatives problematize speech in distinct ways in order to operationalize these definitions through ML technology. The media studies project follows four cases: Google’s Perspective API, Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking program, Full Fact and its Alpha tool, and the EU Horizon-funded VeraAI project. It draws on interviews, event ethnography and on participant observation of participatory design workshops. 

At its core are the research questions:

Who and what constitutes speech problems online, such as disinformation and hate speech – where did they come from, what are their specific constructions in the domains in which they are problematized?

Second, What forms of governing practices and social regulation are enabled when defining the problems as such?

Third, How are these governing practices executed in the building of software and machine learning tools for mediating said problems?

The central thesis of the dissertation is that definitions of problematic speech are not settled before technologies are built but are enacted, narrowed and stabilized in the tools, data practices and funding arrangements that claim to only apply them. These decisions are not neutral, and taken together, these projects can be seen as “moral infrastructures” built to define, identify and enforce the boundaries of acceptable speech.

 

The dissertation project is part of the SFB’s Integrated Graduate School and Skop is a member of project A07: “The Industry of Personal Data”. 

The examination will be conducted in English and will be chaired by Prof. Dr. Carolin Gerlitz (first examiner), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bernhard Rieder (second examiner), Prof. Dr. Marcus Burkhardt (member of the examination committee) and Prof. Dr. Dagmar Hoffman (member of the examination committee).