FoDiRa-Project: "(Not) welcome to digital Germany"? Causes and mechanisms of cyber-discrimination.

As a concomitant symptom of the coronavirus pandemic, the digital arena has rapidly expanded as a locus of social interaction - both in Germany and globally. Hand in hand with this development, questions about everyday digital discrimination are becoming more important, both socially and academically. To date, however, hardly any research has been conducted on (I) the situational causes of "cyber-discrimination" as well as (II) the situational mechanisms that lead to everyday discriminatory actions on the Internet (e.g. based on ethnicity, but also religion and/or gender).

In the project "(Not) welcome to digital Germany"? Causes and mechanisms of cyber-discrimination, we address these central research areas. Specific research questions posed in this project are: (1) What situational causes - for example, threats or fairness norms - and mechanisms influence discrimination in digital space? (2) What role do ingroup and outgroup categorizations play in such processes? (3)  Who discriminates against whom? (4)  Beyond "cause and effect," how do everyday discrimination mechanisms play out in digital space? (5) To what extent are the contexts of discrimination in digital and "real" social spaces similar and different? These questions will be investigated, for instance, by means of an online survey experiment.