New prevention tasks

Since the way people interact with digital media is particularly relevant to my field of work, this is also one of the challenges in the area of crime and violence prevention, because new channels are created for strategic networking. Sometimes these are also shifted to channels that are no longer so visible, because we obviously have the case that quite a lot of our communication is recorded and monitored in digital contexts. In other words, ways are constantly being created of how to network across these monitoring mechanisms and sometimes also agree to risky behaviour. In fact, this is something that has taken on a new quality, because I can, of course, interact much more specifically with people who can perhaps reinforce this or who can also strengthen me in my mindset. Radicalisation, for example, is a very large field in this area. Because we can see that algorithms, which are sometimes very prejudiced and simply rank elements higher if they are very emotional, if they are very polarizing, if they promote a great deal of exchange, bring us into contact with radical positions more quickly. And of course it is very important to see how this actually influences people, especially young people. Because we know that teenagers consider it important when their more famous YouTubers, who they like and trust, have ideas about how they could behave in one place or another. That means to look there, okay, how can I get young people to be able to judge that, that they know from which direction comes which source, so that they do not let themselves be influenced in the negative direction.

• Judith Ackermann an der Fachhochschule Potsdam