The New Momentum Foundation
For resilient digital democracies
The New Momentum Foundation is specialized in social and behavioral change interventions on social media. We develop tools and methods to study societal undercurrents on social media and make our tools and knowledge available via the open source and academic community.
Freedom and transparency
for resilient digital democracies
The New Momentum Foundation was established on May 29, 2020, to promote freedom and transparency in the digital age. We stand for a society where economy and technology serve its people and not the other way around.
To achieve this, the New Momentum Foundation aims to stimulate open dialogue and promote media literacy. After all: citizens who are aware of how the media landscape works, can defend themselves against deception; and citizens who are willing to step beyond the boundaries of their filter bubble can break societal deadlocks.
Research tools and systems to map
societal undercurrents in digital media networks
1. Research systems
We provide systems (IaC) to gather social media data from various social media APIs in full compliance with GDPR.
The infrastructure stores data in a graph database, preparing the data for powerful analytical techniques.
Coming soon (Q3 2023)
2. Analysis toolkit
We develop a toolkit to help analysts identify online communities and understand how they engage with societal topics.
Our toolkit comprises tools for text and emoji mining, semantic network analysis, and discourse analysis.
3. Publications
We publish in academic journals and popular media, and participate in events and summits.
We publish about behavioral change interventions on social media, social media discourses, and implications of plaformization and AI.
Who we are
Chair
Stijn van Leeuwen
Stijn van Leeuwen is a social entrepreneur and the founder of OopZ! – a business incubator in Rotterdam – and has created jobs for hundreds of young people.
stijn@newmomentum.org
Secretary
Špela Semion
Špela Semion is a culture marketing expert with vast international experience in leveraging performance arts for social good.
spela@newmomentum.org
Treasurer
Dr. Roel Lutkenhaus
Dr. Roel Lutkenhaus is an internet researcher specialized in researching and leveraging social media for social and behavioral change interventions.
roel@newmomentum.org
Note: The mandate of the board is non-remunerated.
Our objectives
The New Momentum Foundation aims to stimulate open dialogue and promote media literacy in two ways:
Pathway 1:
By developing research tools to map social and societal undercurrents on social media; by using these tools to conduct (academic) research; and by publishing our research in popular media and academic journals.
Pathway 2:
By making our research tools available under open-source license (CC BY-NC) for companies, institutions, and NGOs and thereby contributing to academic research, journalistic productions, and campaigns for social and behavioral change.
The New Momentum Foundation was founded along with New Momentum – a private company that focuses on research and consultancy, and that helps organizations to implement and leverage the foundation’s tooling.
New Momentum BV is fully controlled by the New Momentum Foundation, in that the latter controls 100% of the voting securities of the company.
Safeguarding data privacy
and responsible data science
→ We comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
→ Our tools and internal processes are regularly audited through external Data Privacy Impact Assessments (DPIA).
→ We protect the privacy of social media users by focusing on groups and patterns rather than individual users.
→ Our research pipeline runs in a secure cloud environment that only makes data available when we need it.
→ We never collect data that we do not need and fully anonymize data before analysis.
→ We are committed to making our tools and methods transparent through the open source community.