Marten Risius

Neu Ulm University of Applied Sciences · Department of Information Management

While blockchain technology is commonly considered potentially disruptive in various regards, there is a lack of understanding where and how blockchain technology is effectively applicable and where it has mentionable practical effects. This issue has given rise to critical voices that judge the technology as over-hyped. Against this backdrop, this...

This study investigates how fake news shared on social media platforms can be automatically identified. Drawing on the Elaboration Likelihood Model and previous studies on information quality, we develop and test an explorative research model on Facebook news posts during the U.S. presidential election 2016. The study examines how cognitive, visual...

Social media platforms provide unique opportunities for brands to directly engage with customers and advertise their products. As the largest social network, Facebook gains the majority of its revenue by having companies pay for their messages to appear in the users' newsfeeds. The foundation for most marketing activities has been shown to be prope...

Recently, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have developed substantial influence as a funding mechanism while being largely neglected by research. In parallel, microblogs were identified as a source of organizational legitimacy and underpricing in Initial Public Offerings. In this paper, we investigate the influence of different types of social media,...

Many organizations are looking at blockchain technologies. However, the drawbacks of blockchain databases (e.g., scalability, capacity, latency, privacy) mean that the technology is not always appropriate. This article presents a ten-step decision path that can help determine whether the application of blockchain is justified and, if so, which kind...

Blockchain is a core technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is a distributed ledger technology that allows automating transactions and storing tamper-evident records. Strategic leadership plays an essential role in the adoption of blockchain technologies to unfold their disruptive potential. This chapter aims to guide strategic leadersh...

In this Insight, we report and analyse “Substitution” as a new form of IHS. Recently, we observed extremists using “Substitution” by propagating hateful rhetoric against a target group (e.g., Jews) while explicitly referencing another label group (e.g., Chinese). We show that Substitution not only effectively spreads hate but also exacerbates engag...

The alarming growth of hate speech on social media platforms has caused serious consequences for individuals, online communities, and society. While the majority of related work focuses on explicit hate speech, research on implicit hate speech (IHS) is still in its infancy. IHS is a more subtle form of hate that poses considerable challenges for vi...

Social media platforms use content moderation practices to prevent or contain the dissemination of harmful content online. These practices can be initiated by the user (e.g. reporting, blocking) or by the platform (e.g. content or account removal, visibility reduction) and can be carried out overtly or covertly (i.e., with or without notifying user...

To counter the side effect brought by the proliferation of social media platforms, hate speech detection (HSD) plays a vital role in halting the dissemination of toxic online posts at an early stage. However, given the ubiquitous topical communities on social media, a trained HSD classifier easily becomes biased towards specific targeted groups (e....

Australia's eSafety commissioner has sent legal notices to Google, Meta, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) asking them to show what they're doing to protect Australians from online extremism. The six companies have 49 days to respond. The notice comes at a time when governments are increasingly cracking down on major tech compan...

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are supercharging the problem of misinformation, disinformation and fake news. OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and various image, voice and video generators have made it easier than ever to produce content, while making it harder to tell what is factual or real. Malicious actors looking to spread d...

We evaluate the use of the existing Microsoft Vale framework to guarantee correctness of low level Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode, while affording smart contract developers higher-level language and reasoning features. We encode EVM-R (a subset of EVM semantics and instruction set) into F*, and raise the EVM-R into Vale design-by-contract...

Scholars studying online extremism and terrorism face major challenges, including finding safe access to hostile environments where members evade law enforcement. Protective measures, such as research ethics, often overlook the safety of investigators. Investigators, including Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) analysts, encounter emotional harm, abu...

Hate speech on social media platforms has severe impacts on individuals, online communities, and society. Platforms are criticized for shirking their responsibilities to effectively moderate hate speech on their platforms. However, Various challenges, including implicit expressions, complicate the task of detecting hate speech. Consequently, develo...

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Grant, has found X (formerly Twitter) guilty of serious non-compliance to a transparency notice on child sex abuse material. The commissioner has issued X with an infringement notice for A$610,500. The commissioner first issued transparency notices to Google, X (then Twitter), Twitch, TikTok and Discord in F...

Online extremism remains a persistent problem despite the best efforts of governments, tech companies and civil society. Digital technologies can induce group polarization to promote extremism and cause substantial changes to extremism (e.g., create new forms of extremism, types of threats or radicalization approaches). Current methods to counter e...

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) and initial exchange offerings (IEOs) are distinct blockchain-based token offerings. Following multiple frauds associated with decentralized and unregulated ICOs, IEOs are emerging as a novel pathway that relies on centralized crypto exchange platforms acting as intermediaries. However, the question as to how this shif...

Tech platforms use recommender algorithms to control society's key resource: attention. With these algorithms they can quietly demote or hide certain content instead of just blocking or deleting it. This opaque practice is called "shadowbanning". While platforms will often deny they engage in shadowbanning, there's plenty of evidence it's well and...

Contemporary blockchain platforms differ in their technological features and are under active development as open-source projects. Nonetheless, they have the potential to fuel substantial socioeconomic changes. The scale of such changes, however, requires not only blockchain platforms but also organizations that develop and provide services on top...

In late 2019 about a dozen BISE chairs from the German-speaking community met around ICIS to discuss the ethical challenges arising from the current construction, deployment, and marketing of Information Systems (IS). It turned out that many were and are concerned about the negative implications of IS while at the same time being convinced that dig...

Online extremism and radicalization on social media are major concerns of governments, social media companies, and civic organizations worldwide. Online extremist threats are further amplified through conspiracy theories surrounding the current pandemic, increased social isolation, and more time spent online. Evidenced by the recent extremist attac...

Online extremism and radicalisation on social media (SM) are significant concerns of governments, SM companies, and society. The 2021 attack on the US Capitol illustrates the severity of extremism fuelled through SM communications. The literature suggests the removal of extremist messages from SM to limit online extremism. However, scholars argue t...

The 21st century has introduced the 4th Industrial Revolution, which describes an industrial paradigm shift that alters social, economic, and political environments simultaneously. Innovative technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, and advanced mobile networks power this digital revolution. These technologies provide a unique comp...

We propose to extend the current binary understanding of terrorism (vs. non-terrorism) with a Dynamic Matrix of Extremisms and Terrorism (DMET). DMET considers the whole ecosystem of content and actors that can contribute to a continuum of extremism (e.g., right-wing, left-wing, religious, separatist, single-issue). It organizes levels of extremism...

We conducted a multidisciplinary literature review on terrorist and violent extremist use of the internet.

We conducted a systematic literature review of Terrorist and Violent Extremist Use of the Internet. In our review, we systematically compared our findings in the literature to the real-world incidence as expressed by Google search statistics. We found that the focus of academic research and the real-world incidence of Cyber-extremism diverge. Since...

Online companies exploit mindless compliance during users’ privacy decision making to avoid liability while not impairing users’ willingness to use their services. These manipulations can play against users since they subversively influence their decisions by nudging them to mindlessly comply with disclosure requests rather than enabling them to ma...

Internet users commonly agree that it is important for them to protect their personal data. However, the same users readily disclose their data when requested by an online service. The dichotomy between privacy attitude and actual behaviour is commonly referred to as the "privacy paradox". Over twenty years of research were not able to provide one...

The salient features of blockchain technology, such as transparency, immutability, availability of a historical log, and programmability, have led to the emergence of numerous innovative use cases across industries, many of which are still in a development and testing stage. Feasibility of a new project is important to determining the potential suc...

The three cutting-edge technologies virtual reality, blockchain, and 5G have increasingly attracted public attention. While virtual reality became a popular concept in the 1990s, recent technological advances and decreased costs have created a resurgence in the technology. With significant funding and early adoption, blockchain and 5G have begun to...

RESEARCH SUMMARY Social media is a powerful medium for examining strategic leaders’ novel interactions and influence within and outside the firm. But, while studies on social media are popping up like kettle corn across disciplines, no conceptual framework for organizing, guiding, and inspiring research on social media engagement among strategic le...

Framing and default effects have been studied for more than a decade in different disciplines. A common criticism of these studies is that they use hypothetical scenarios. In this study, we developed a real decision environment: a Facebook application in which users had to decide whether or not they wanted to be automatically publicly tagged in the...

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are a novel form of funding mechanism that is based on blockchain technology. While ICOs are already the dominating financing paradigm in the blockchain industry, they might also disrupt well-established industries that rely on traditional funding systems. ICOs are a recent phenomenon. Hence, research on the topic is s...

In financial markets it is common for companies and individuals to invest into foreign companies. To avoid the double taxation of investors on dividend payment – both in the country where the profit is generated as well as the country of residence – most governments have entered into bilateral double taxation treaties, whereby investors can claim a...

Social Trading platforms combine the trading functionalities of classical online broker services with the communication and interaction features of social networks. Next to following other users’ profiles, a main characteristic of social trading platforms is the possibility to follow other users by automatically copying their trades. By being a tec...

Especially due to the recent expansion of social media platforms, researchers and practitioners exert ever growing efforts to advance big data analytics techniques to derive actionable insights from social networks. Although a substantial body of research has shown that readability is of vital importance for the success of text-based communication,...

With the growing importance of social media, companies increasingly rely on social media management tools to analyze social media activities and to professionalize their social media engagement. In this study, we evaluate how social media management tools, as part of an overarching social media strategy, help companies to positively influence the p...

This study applies social media analytics to investigate the impact of different corporate social media activities on user word of mouth and attitudinal loyalty. We conduct a multilevel analysis of approximately five million tweets regarding the main Twitter accounts of 28 large global companies. Thereby, we empirically identify different social me...

The way in which people communicate affects their relationship building, social network structures and ultimately the knowledge they receive through their connections. For organizations, an effective knowledge exchange among employees is crucial for the competitive performance. Therefore, companies rely increasingly on social media platforms to fac...

Through the way in which people communicate they can affect their relationships, social network structures and ultimately the social capital acquired through their connections. We understand social capital from an ego-centric point of view as the resources obtained through the relationships among people within social networks. Social capital is a k...

Organizational Mindfulness (OM) can support management and employees working in increasingly dynamic, mobile work environments driven by cloud computing or mobile devices. Specifically, in mindful organizations, reliable outcomes arise from cognitive processes of revealing and redirecting events and their potential negative consequences in the face...