Postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Digital (m/w/d)

Munich School of Politics and Public Policy

The Munich School of Politics and Public Policy (HfP) combines excellence in political science with a commitment to dialogue between politics, society, business, and technology. As an institution affiliated with and supported by the Technical University of Munich (TUM), we address pressing political issues and explore the societal opportunities and challenges presented by emerging technologies.

The Content Moderation Lab is a joint research initiative of the Technical University of Munich and the University of Oxford, housed at the TUM Think Tank, and co-directed by Yannis Theocharis (TUM) and Spyros Kosmidis (University of Oxford). The Lab is dedicated to the empirical study of platform governance, online speech regulation, and content moderation, and works in partnership with civil society organizations and major state institutions like the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. Its work sits at the intersection of political science, communication, law, and computer science, and is guided by the conviction that the regulation of online speech is one of the defining political challenges of our time.

Your responsibilities:

• •Develop and pursue an independent, high-quality research agenda within the Chair’s and the Lab's intellectual scope.
• •Publish original research in leading peer-reviewed journals independently and collaboratively.
• •Participate actively in the intellectual life of the Chair and the Content Moderation Lab, including working on ongoing research projects, contributing to the drafting and submission of grant applications for external funding submitted by the Chair and the Lab (DFG, ERC, etc.), organizing and participating in workshops, and attending and leading Lab meetings.
• •Contribute to and help develop the Lab's research infrastructure (datasets, experimental platforms, computational pipelines).
• •Teach courses relevant to the Chair's and the Lab's research areas at the Bachelor's and/or Master's level (5 SWS – typically 2 courses per semester).
• •Engage with the broader academic and policy community through conferences, policy briefs, and public-facing outputs where relevant.

Research topics of particular interest:

• •Content moderation: How citizens evaluate the fairness, accountability, and democratic authorization of platform governance decisions; the role of transparency and appeals mechanisms.
• •Freedom of speech in the algorithmic age: The empirical study of speech norms and their variation; public attitudes toward platform authority over speech; partisan and ideological dimensions of free speech commitments.
• •AI governance and automated moderation: The deployment of large language models (LLMs) and machine learning classifiers in content moderation; human-AI interaction in moderation workflows and its implications for political behavior.
• •Platform regulation: Compliance behavior, implementation, and the political and behavioral consequences of the EU's Digital Services Act and related regulatory frameworks including Section 230 in the US; regulatory legitimacy; cross-national comparative analysis across regulatory regimes.
• •Behavioral consequences of moderation: Effects of content removal, demotion, and labelling on user behavior; platform migration; radicalization and disengagement.

Your qualifications:

• •A PhD (or very close to completion) in political science, communication, computational social science, or a closely related discipline.
• •Strong computational skills: proficiency in text-as-data methods, NLP, and/or machine learning approaches to large-scale text. Experience with LLMs and transformer-based models is a plus.
• •Experience with experimental research design and/or causal inference methods (survey experiments, conjoint analysis, natural experiments, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, etc.).
• •A record of, or clear potential for, high-quality research output in top internationally visible venues.
• •Ability to work