Eurosky is collaborating with SPRIND to test a non-toxic algorithm for the first time

Today, the European social media infrastructure project Eurosky, an initiative of Stichting Modal, and Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND) announce their collaboration to advance the development of a social media algorithm programmed to connect rather than divide. Under the project name ‘BridgEU’, an alternative to dominant ranking algorithms will be developed and tested.

“Following recommendations from both the EU’s Scientific Service and, most recently, the Expert Commission on Child Protection Online that Eurosky should receive public support, we are delighted that this has now developed into a concrete collaboration with the Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation,”

says Sebastian Vogelsang, founder of Eurosky & Flashes

The cooperation falls under the newly founded SPRIND.Society division, where Eurosky meets projects such as the welfare state app WeFix.Social and the Ed-Tech companies Magma Maths and LifeTeachUs. SPRIND.Society was founded last year to extend its successful approach of high risk technology investments to projects with socio-political goals. The aim is to support projects by innovative technology entrepreneurs that have the potential to generate a high social return and thus significantly relieve the burden on the German state.

“Eurosky are precisely the kind of ‘moonshot’ project that we want to add to our Society portfolio as their model is both competitive and scalable. The combination of open social media technology and cutting-edge research holds enormous potential for innovation,”

says Zarah Bruhn, Manager at SPRIND.Society

SPRIND.Society is initially supporting Eurosky as part of a validation project to explore the development of a non-toxic algorithm for social media. To this end, Eurosky will be collaborating with Philipp Lorenz Spreen’s team at TU Dresden. Under his leadership, the “Computational Social Science” team is conducting research into the “digitalisation of society”, with a specific focus on how increasingly complex forms of online discourse affect democracies.

“We are increasingly able to demonstrate the attention economy’s impact on our public discourse. Algorithms play a central role in digital information environments, which is why we want to start working on alternative concepts for algorithmic content selection and test them under realistic conditions,”

says Philipp Lorenz Spreen, research group leader at TU Dresden

As the project name suggests, the work with the TU Dresden team will build on the concept of ‘bridging’, which was initially researched and formulated by academics at Harvard.

“Bridging-based ranking” is an alternative algorithm for ranking content in social media feeds. Unlike dominant algorithms that classify and display content in the feed purely based on the number of clicks, likes, and other forms of engagement, this algorithm prioritizes content that receives positive engagement from people who typically disagree. The goal is to use content to build bridges between users who are currently stuck in echo chambers.

Facebook and X have already experimented with bridging approaches, but not yet in the main feed. The collaboration between SPRIND, Eurosky, and researchers at TU Dresden is therefore expected to be the first project worldwide to integrate a bridging algorithm into the main feed of a social media platform. Last month Eurosky launched its first app Mu (mu.social), in order to test new functionalities in social networks. The cooperation announced today is the next step on this journey.