IMITATE3 participate in the 2026 Social Sciences Impact Conference
27 April 2026
IMITATE3 presented at the Social Sciences Impact Conference, “Impact in Motion: Navigating Uncertainty, Creating Change,” held at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, in March 2026.
The event brought together more than 300 delegates from over 50 universities, alongside policymakers, funders, third sector organisations, and business representatives.
In the panel session, “Challenges of Engagement in an Online World,” our contribution, “Information control, polarisation and politicisation: challenges for impact in digital social science,” explored the multiple growing pressures facing research that seeks to make a public difference. These pressures are not only academic, but political, technical, and ethical.
We highlighted how digital research increasingly takes place in a volatile geopolitical environment, where access to data can be limited, selective, or revoked, and where research itself may be challenged, restricted, or manipulated. At the same time, state-backed information manipulation is becoming more sophisticated, more targeted, and more difficult to detect. In the United States, political and legal pressures are reducing support for the study of disinformation and harmful speech, while major technology companies are stepping back from content moderation, weakening the resilience of our wider information ecosystem.
Against this backdrop, social science faces a difficult question: how can researchers share impactful findings on these topics without putting themselves, their collaborators, or their institutions at risk? Other panel contributions from Agnieszka Całek (Jagiellonian University in Poland) underlined the scale of information manipulation in the form of “AI slop,” using the Auschwitz Museum as a case study, while Hannah Yelin of Oxford Brookes University highlighted the lived experience of researchers who share their findings publicly.
