Christoph Lutz (second from left on the photo) won the best paper award at the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society (#SMSociety) for the full paper contribution "Spiral of Silence 2.0: Political Self-Censorship among Young Facebook Users". In addition, Christoph presented a work-in-progress paper on escapism and political participation on Facebook as well as a poster on participation divides on Airbnb. All contributions were well received. The full paper and the work-in-progress paper are available in the ACM conference proceedings under the respective links.
Now in its eight edition, the conference was organized by a team of researchers at Ryerson University. It convened leading experts in the field of social media studies and had several hundred attendants. The program included keynotes by renowned scholars Lee Rainie (director of the Pew Research Center on Internet & Technology) and Ron Deibert (director of the Citizen Lab), a range of practical workshops, panels, and paper discussion sessions on topics related to social media. Many attendants tweeted heavily under #SMSociety and a conference recap is available here.
Next year's edition of the conference will take place at Copenhagen Business School and more information on the conference and the best paper award are available on the official website.