Friederike Quint

Friederike Quint

she/her

Doctoral candidate and research associate @Chair of Digital Governance, TUM

About

I am a doctoral researcher studying how online platforms govern speech—and how users perceive, interpret, and respond to content moderation decisions within broader and evolving patterns of social media use.

I am a third-year PhD candidate and research associate at the Chair of Digital Governance at the Technical University of Munich. My work is primarily situated within the project Transparency in Content Moderation, where we examine how moderation rules are designed, communicated, and understood in practice, and how these processes shape user behavior and trust in platform governance.

Beyond this project, I am involved as a research collaborator in the Content Moderation Lab, incubated at the TUM Think Tank (see more). The lab brings together academic research and policy-relevant work on platform governance, with a particular focus on translating empirical findings into actionable insights for regulators, civil society, and practitioners.

Across projects, my research combines survey experiments, observational data, and causal inference approaches, complemented by computational analyses. Together, these methods aim to deepen our understanding of platform use, moderation behavior, and the social and political implications of content moderation systems.

Alongside my academic work, I occasionally explore smaller, experimental side projects at the intersection of research, design, and tooling. My two most recent releases—apps for mood tracking (iOS and R Shiny)—are available under: Fun Projects.

Research Interests

  • Online content moderation: transparency, design, and societal impact
  • Public perceptions of moderation, free speech, and incivility
  • Platform governance and digital regulation
  • Political communication and political behavior (online and offline)
  • Survey experiments and causal inference
  • Computational social science

Recent publications

Quint, F., Theocharis, Y., Kosmidis, S., Gaafar, A., & Roberts, M. E. (Forthcoming). Bystanders and Reporters: Who Acts Against Illegal Online Content? Social Media + Society

Nahrgang, M., Weidmann, N. B., Quint, F., Nagel, S., Theocharis, Y., & Roberts, M. E. (2025). Written for Lawyers or Users? Mapping the Complexity of Community Guidelines.
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 19(1), 1295–1314.
https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v19i1.35873

Theocharis, Y., Kosmidis, S., Zilinsky, J., Quint, F., & Pradel, F. (2025). Content Warning: Public Attitudes on Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression.
https://osf.io/s3kcw