About
Philipp is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Co-Director of the Digital Literacy Hub, Managing Director of the Digital Media and Behavior Lab, and co-founder of the Comparative Privacy Research Network. He previously worked as a research associate at the Department of Communication of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) and the Department of Media Psychology at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart (Germany). From 2018 to 2019, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Communication at Cornell University (Ithaca, USA).
He studied communication science, economics, and philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) and Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia). In 2018, he earned his PhD in the social sciences at the University of Hohenheim.
Philipp’s research explores digital communication and the impact of social media on daily life, using interdisciplinary methods such as surveys, experiments, and computational approaches. His work covers social influence, privacy, media literacy, and the effects of social media on well-being. He is also interested in open science, transparency, and replication. He follows open science practices and, whenever possible, makes materials, data, and analyses publicly available on the Open Science Framework.
His research has been presented at many international conferences and published in leading international journals (e.g., Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Digital Journalism, Human Communication Research, and Computers & Education) and in several edited volumes (→ publications). In 2018, he published the book Situational Privacy and Self-Disclosure, in which he advanced a comprehensive theory of person–situation interactions in online privacy processes (→ book). Together with Sabine Trepte, he edited The Routledge Handbook of Privacy and Social Media, published in June 2023 (→ edited volume). He was awarded a VENI innovation grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), in which he studies how behavioral contagion propagates problematic behaviors on social media (→ blog post).
He often develops original software and tools for his research (→ GitHub). Among other things, he developed the R package specr, a versatile framework for conducting multiverse and specification curve analyses. He also contributed to The Truman Platform, a complete, open-source social media simulation tool (→ software & tools).
Philipp is a member of the editorial boards of Media Psychology, Mobile Media & Communication, and the European Journal of Social Psychology. He is a co-founder of the Comparative Privacy Research Network (→ comparativeprivacy.org) and a member of the Computational Communication Science Amsterdam group (→ ccs-amsterdam.github.io).
As an academic teacher, Philipp has taught courses on online communication, persuasion and marketing, media psychology, statistics, and computational methods. He also frequently teaches statistics workshops for researchers at various universities (→ teaching). He sometimes blogs about statistics and R as well (→ blog posts on R & statistics).