Nader Hotait, Dr.

Dr. Nader Hotait is a sociologist with a particular interest in digitalization, extremism, and migration. He completed his studies of social sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Potsdam and his PhD in sociology in 2025 at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim. Furthermore he did a research stay at the Data Science Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Currently he is a fellow at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and a visiting researcher at the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM) at Humboldt University of Berlin.

His research focuses on attitude change through social media, extremist and radical content in algorithmically curated feeds, digital religion, and racism and discrimination online. Methodologically, he works with experimental and computational methods, natural language processing, as well as qualitative and mixed-methods approaches. Before his time at DeZIM, he worked on the D:Islam project and led the project “Radicalization Potentials on TikTok” (RaPoTik). He currently leads the Princeton-Humboldt Joint Project “MEDIVA (Media Diets and Democratic Values).”