Fake news is pervasive, raising growing concerns about its impact on social and political events. However, to date, there is no concrete quantitative measurement of its influence, such as in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Yet, there is broad consensus that fake news poses a major threat to both democratic and non-democratic societies. In response, substantial efforts and investments have been directed toward fact-checking platforms to identify, label, and ultimately suppress misinformation on social media. However, the acquisition of Twitter (now X) by Elon Musk and the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election have disrupted this trend, introducing a destabilizing alternative: the removal of regulations in the name of free speech. The dismantling of many safeguards against misinformation presents an immediate challenge, exploited by various hostile entities. In this work, I propose a novel approach to addressing fake news—one that neither relies on strict regulation nor outright bans. Instead, I advocate for a system that sequesters misinformation within small, self-contained networks, preventing its large-scale spread. To assess the feasibility of this approach, I employ the sociophysics-based Galam Majority Model (GMM) of opinion dynamics. It is important to emphasize that, at this stage, the proposal is purely theoretical and implemented within a model. At this stage, a practical application in social media remains a distant prospect. Reference Serge Galam, Fake News: “No Ban, No Spread—With Sequestration”, Physics 2024, 6(2), 859-876 (2024)

Serge Galam is a renowned physicist and theorist of disordered systems, recognized as a major pioneer in sociophysics and currently serving as an emeritus CNRS Senior Research Fellow. He earned his Doctorat in physics from Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris in 1975, and later received a Ph.D. in physics from Tel Aviv University in 1981. Galam’s international career spans research and teaching roles, including five years as a research assistant at Tel Aviv University, two years as a research fellow at the City College of New York, and two years as an assistant professor at New York University. He then returned to France as a full-time CNRS researcher, where he worked successively in several physics laboratories at Pierre and Marie Curie University. For two decades, he pursued a successful career in physics while simultaneously developing sociophysics on the side. But in 2003, convinced that certain social and political behaviors obey quantifiable, discoverable laws, he decided to dedicate himself entirely to sociophysics by joining the CREA-Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée de l’École Polytechnique. At the end of 2013, he broke new ground by joining the CEVIPOF-Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po, becoming the first—and to date, only—physicist in the institution. Galam’s work represents a profound human and scientific adventure, marked by methodological, epistemological, and cultural challenges. His ongoing goal is to contribute to establishing a rigorous, refutable hard science framework capable of producing measurable predictions alongside the social sciences. Notably, Galam made the first successful prediction of a highly improbable event based on his opinion dynamics model, forecasting the very unlikely victory of the 'no' vote at the 2005 French referendum on the proposed European constitution several months before the vote. He later defied all expectations by predicting Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. Although his 2020 prediction narrowly missed anticipating a narrow Trump victory, it was still commendable given that the election ultimately resulted in a narrow Biden win. Within sociophysics, his research themes include heterogeneous systems, minority opinion dynamics, voting prediction, rumors, terrorism, radicalization, coalition formation, decision-making, fake news, and polarization. As of 2024, ScholarGPS ranks him among the top 0.06% of world scientists

For decades, TA wasn’t perceived as an academic discipline in Germany. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary pattern of TA seemed the counterpart of academic disciplines based on its traditional premises with regard to generating and resolving “scientific problems”. However, economic, political and societal developments in the last decades have created “big problems” on global scale, which cannot be longer resolved by disciplinary approaches. A new type of scientific research, the “problem oriented research” has been developed and have fostered scientific approaches like Environmental Research, Climate Research or/and TA. These approaches aiming to frame, to analyze and to resolve its research questions by integrating the multitude of disciplines as well as by integrating different stakeholders with their interests, positions and visions of future developments. The talk will provide an insight into the development of TA as an academic discipline at KIT in Germany, providing the historic development as well as introducing new conceptional pattern of teaching and reflection on the relationship of Society and Technology.

Armin Grunwald is a Full professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Technology at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He is director of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis at KIT (ITAS) and Director of the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag. His professional backgrounds include technology assessment, ethics of philosophy, theory of sustainable development, and the philosophy of the digital transformation. Armin Grunwald is member of several advisory commissions and committees in various fields of the technological advance, e.g. in the field of nuclear waste disposal.

In my talk, I will argue that agent-based models are well suited to understanding many of the effects and problems of contemporary public discourse. There are a number of prominent models of opinion formation. My starting point will be the so-called bounded-confidence model. In this model, agents only consider the opinions of others that are not too far removed from their own. Simple extensions of the basic model make it possible to analyse phenomena such as polarisation, radicalisation, but also the chances of finding the truth under conditions of systematic disinformation. What is disturbing and irritating, however, is that these models almost always have a dual-use character: They can also be used to develop effective disinformation campaigns or even polarisation strategies.

Rainer Hegselmann studied philosophy, sociology, and political sciences at Bochum University. He received his doctorate at the University of Essen (today: University of Duisburg-Essen) and habilitated in philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe (today: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, KIT). After professorships at the Universities of Bremen and Bayreuth, he became senior professor at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Hegselmann initiated the Philosophy & Economics degree program in Bayreuth, which he then directed from 2000 onwards. From 2010 to 2015, he was also director of the Bayreuth Research Center for Modelling and Simulation of Socioeconomic Phenomena (MODUS). He was a fellow at various advanced study institutions, including the Netherlands Institute For Advances Studies (NIAS), the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF, Bielefeld University), and the Alfred Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg (Greifswald).

The idea of TA was founded in the US in the 1960s, where numerous environmental problems like water and air pollution as a side effect of technological progress more and more came into public awareness. Social movements arose and protested massively against these developments. At a first glance, political institutions seemed defenseless against these dynamics, but quickly realized that they need information, interdisciplinary knowledge and new instruments in order to address these problems. In the US, The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was founded in 1974, the objective was to provide congressional members with “objective” analysis of the complex scientific and technical issues. This model rapidly was transferred to European Countries, where in Germany the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag (TAB) was founded in 1990. This history shows, that the functions of TA primarily were settled in the field of political advice. AT the same time, scientific knowledge seemed the necessary precondition in offering robust knowledge with regard to political decision making processes in the long run.

Bettina-Johanna Krings, M. A.; Dr. phil., Lecturer at KIT, is a sociologist with long scientific experience in research and project management. From 2009 - 2019 she was co-heading the research department: Knowledge Society and Knowledge Policy at ITAS. Since 2019 she is coordinating the TA-teaching at KIT. Since more than two decades, she is working in the field of “Work and Technology”, where she has conducted and led numerous projects. Her research field focus on the dynamics of change based on digitization of work, whereas she is analyzing and observing changes of work organization, work pattern as well as the change of professions in service sector, industry and health care sector. Furthermore, her research fields “Methods and Theory of TA”, “Transformation Research” addressing social innovation pattern including ethical, social and cultural dimensions in order to explore innovative research frames.

Paying people to participate in biomedical research is an increasingly common practice in various types of studies involving healthy volunteers and patients. However, it continues to raise numerous ethical and practical controversies. It is still unclear (i) what the ethical rationale for paying research participants is; (ii) whether there is a moral obligation to pay participants or merely an ethical permissibility; and (iii) how fundamental principles of research ethics apply to and shape the practice of research payment. In my talk, I will address these three questions in a systematic and principled way. I will argue that researchers have a prima facie moral obligation to offer payment to research participants, stemming from the principle of social beneficence. This principle constitutes an ethical "backbone" of the practice. Other ethical principles of research ethics, i.e., respect for persons/autonomy, beneficence/nonmaleficence, and justice/fairness, form an ethical "skeleton" of morally sound payment schemes, and provide additional moral reasons for offering participants (1) reimbursement of direct expenses incurred; and (2a) remuneration conceptualized as a reward for their valuable contribution, provided (i) it meets standards of equality, adequacy and non-exploitation, and (ii) it does not constitute undue inducement; or (2b) remuneration conceptualized as a market-driven price, provided (i) it is necessary and designed to help the study achieve its scientific and social goals, (ii) it does not reinforce wider social injustices and inequalities; (iii) it meets the requirement of non-exploitation; and (iv) it does not constitute undue inducement. Finally, I will argue that the principle of justice/fairness provides a strong ethical reason for not offering compensation for lost wages (or other reasonably expected benefits).

Joanna Różyńska PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Ethics, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw (Poland) and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Bioethics & Biolaw of the University. She holds academic degrees in philosophy, law, sociology and bioethics. Her research interests focus on research ethics, and human rights and biomedicine.