Nathalie Van Raemdonck

Nathalie Van Raemdonck is a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She is currently funded through the VUB's research Centre for Digitalisation, Democracy and Innovation (CD2I) at the Brussels School of Governance, and remains affiliated with the imec-SMIT research group, as well as the Hannah Arendt Institute where she does research and knowledge diffusion. Nathalie holds an MsC in Political Science from the VUB and an LLM in the Law and Politics of international Security from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). She previously worked for the EU Institute for Security Studies, providing research support for European cyberdiplomacy endeavours, and the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium, focusing on improving national cybersecurity capacity.

Nathalie positions herself in the field of STS and media & communication science, focusing on platform governance, the organic spread of misinformation, polarisation and online radicalisation. She investigates these online dynamics through the mutual shaping of platform affordances and social norms. She employs digital methods and qualitative research methods to uncover normative processes on social media platforms such as Instagram, X (former Twitter), Telegram, Reddit and Mastodon.

Nathalie was previously working with the NUSE unit on two Flemish Relance projects, EHBT, which investigated how to assist media consumers that doubt the news, and RE:PLUS, which aimed to improve the civility and quality of comment sections on news sites.