Gemma Newlands and Christoph Lutz presented two papers at the 2019 Weizenbaum Conference. The conference took place in Berlin from 16-17 May 2019 and was organized by the Weizenbaum Institute, the German Internet Institute. It convened about 200 international researchers in the interdisciplinary area of Internet and society under the conference theme "Challenges of Digital Inequality. Digital Education | Digital Work | Digital Life".
Gemma's talk covered ongoing research, in collaboration with Christoph Lutz, on the role of mobile devices in crowdwork. In the presentation, the limitations of crodwork platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, for mobile devices were discussed and the role of the requesters was problematized. Taken together and based on rich survey data from the US and India, the findings indicate that mobile first and mobile only users are systematically disadvantaged on mainstream crowdwork platforms. The presentation was well attended and positively received.
Christoph Lutz presented a paper in collaboration with Christian Hoffmann from the University of Leipzig. In their survey-based study, Christoph and and Christian investigated how privacy concerns affect German Internet users' online political participation. Given the expressive nature of online political participation, particularly on social media, a negative effect of privacy concerns on online political participation was expected. However, the results showed a positive effect.