Dear colleagues, Join us in Siegen for the collaborative event "Synthetic Social Media: Studying Platform-Embedded AI". When & Where? 22-25 September 2026, CRC Media of Cooperation, University of Siegen About the Event Social media platforms are increasingly shaped by the integration of generative AI alongside long-standing analytical and predictive models. Today's algorithmic systems are moving from the background infrastructure to the forefront of digital social life – where autonomous AI agents operate in coexistence with (or independently of) human users. They intervene in the content feeds as conversational agents like xAI's Grok, reshape identity play through synthetic likenesses of OpenAI's Sora-2, and expand the social ecosystem itself through experimental projects like Butterflies AI and Moltbook. As these developments rapidly outpace existing research frameworks, the need for mixed critical methodologies to explore the nested integration of GenAI into platforms grows more urgent. The 2026 Autumn School edition of the CRC “Media of Cooperation” explores these developments by focusing on generative AI as an infrastructural, cultural, and regulated component of social media platforms across three intersecting dimensions: At the cultural level of everyday use, it refers to the routinized practices of prompting or interacting with platform-embedded generative systems through multimodal inputs. Infrastructurally, it signals a shift in agency, as platforms keep multiplying affordances that nudge us into co-producing synthetic outputs. Finally, it foregrounds research techniques for probing AI models in their entanglements with the platform governance and moderation regimes. Call for Contributions Please submit a proposal (max. 500 words) outlining how your work engages with the event’s main theme, inspired by, though not limited to, one of the following "how to" prompts: ● How to account for the ambiguities emerging from human-machine co-creation ● How to rethink walkthrough methods in light of platforms’ generative affordances ● How to study AI moderation as platform policy in action ● How to approach cultural biases conditioned by AI systems and prompt cultures ● How to explore platform agency and its steering ideologies ● How to integrate screenshots as a method for capturing synthetic situations ● How to repurpose AI personas as research personas ● How to develop non-extractive approaches to researching AI platforms Submission Deadline: 30. April 2026. Accepted proposals will be grouped into thematic sessions and discussed in a collaborative, dialogue-focused format. Presentations (max. 15 mins) should raise questions or provocations rather than present finished research. We encourage especially Early Career Researchers to apply. For full details, including the submission link, please visit our website: https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de/en/autumn-school-synthetic-social-media-... Event Highlights The event opens with a one-day conference and moves into hands-on workshops and project work. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions curated by the organising team. Presenters will be connected via email ahead of time to coordinate their contributions. The first day is about presentations and discussions. The next three days are dedicated to exploring and developing methods - hands-on! We invite you to join a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers in probing new methodological combinations. Each of our project teams will present a research question alongside a specific method to be collaboratively explored. The event is free of charge, though attendees are responsible for arranging and covering their travel and accommodation in Siegen. Questions? Feel free to get in touch: elena.pilipets@uni-siegen.de We look forward to your contributions! Elena