News

Visit to the DGPuK 2025 From March 19-21, our team attended the 70th annual conference of the German Society for Journalism and Communication Studies (DGPuK) in Berlin.
To kick things off, we attended the pre-conference “Erosion of democratic values? Anti-democratic actors in the public sphere”, led by our colleague Ines Engelmann, among others.
This was followed on Thursday by a presentation by our team member Maria Grub with a study on the acceptance of chatbots in mental healthcare.
On Friday, our team, represented by Kostiantyn Yanchenko and Maria Grub, presented a poster presentation on the agreement with pro-Kremlin narratives in the context of the state elections in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg.
We would like to thank the organizers in Berlin and are already looking forward to the next annual conference in Dortmund.
You can find more information about our current research projects here, on LinkedIn or by contacting us directly!

New publication alert Algorithms shape our online experiences daily, but how well do we understand them? A new study by Emilija Gagrčin, Teresa Naab, and our team member Maria Grub dives into the concept of Algorithm Literacy – our ability to navigate, critique, and leverage algorithmic systems effectively.

The research underscores the importance of Algorithm Literacy: High levels of literacy can empower users to engage critically with algorithms, shape their digital experiences, and advocate for ethical platform practices. Conversely, low levels contributes to polarization, misinformation, and digital inequality.

Learn more in New Media & Society: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448241291137

Guest Lecture Prof. Dr. Florian Töpfe We had the privilege of hosting Prof. Florian Toepfl, Chair of Political Communication with a focus on Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet region at the University of Passau, as part of our speaker series at the Institute of Communication Science (IfKW Jena).

Prof. Töpfl shared key insights from the five-year ERC-funded project RUSINFORM, shedding light on the Kremlin's propaganda and informational influence both domestically and internationally.

We are grateful for this insightful talk and look forward to the future collaborations and exchange with the University of Passau.

Conference Visit: DGPuK Health Communication 2024 in Lucerne PhD candidate Maria F. Grub visited this year's DGPuK Conference Health Communication held at the University of Lucerne. The theme of the conference was "Insight to Impact: Translating Health Communication Research into Policy and Action". Maria presented her work on Online Health Communities (OHCs) on Reddit where she analyzed subreddits on anxiety, depression and general mental health via a blended approach of LDA topic modeling and Grounded Theory Methodology.

The discussion afterwards led to many ideas to expand this research. Stay tuned for more upcoming research!

New OA Publication Alert We are proud to announce that Kostiantyn Yanchenko, postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Digitalization and Public Sphere, together with Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw, has published a new study in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly!

Kostiantyn Yanchenko and Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw present timely research examining political values embedded in applauded statements from the major Ukrainian political talk shows.

The authors identified two salient value types in the data: identity-oriented values (e.g., anti-elitism, patriotism), which emphasize in-group and out-group dynamics, and governance-oriented values, which pertain to the principles that shape the organization and functioning of society (e.g., democracy, rule of law). It is the interplay between these two value types that influenced the portrayals of public debate projected to the talk show viewers through the applauded content.

Read more in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10776990241284581?icid=int.sj-full-text.citing-articles.5

Visit to the ECREA 2024 Our team members Edda Humprecht and Xin Zhou visited beautiful Ljubliana for this year's ECREA conference.

In his presentation “Leveraging OpenAI's multimodal APIs for analyzing digital propaganda in political communication”, Xin Zhou explained a new method for analyzing digital propaganda in social media using OpenAI's ChatGPT and Whisper APIs.

By converting video content into text and images, one can dive deep into political communication and identify themes, persuasion techniques and audience targeting. The pilot study with 30 political TikTok videos showed promising results, with the AI identifying the most important political topics with an accuracy of up to 85%!

ECREA was a fantastic opportunity to engage with experts and discuss how AI is revolutionizing the analysis of political communication. Thank you to everyone who attended!

Our team visits MISDOOM 2024 From September 2-4, 2024, Kostiantyn Yanchenko, Xin Zhou and Maria Grub attended MISDOOM in Münster.

The 6th Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media attracted researchers from all over the world to discuss disinformation, propaganda, media literacy and much more, combining the disciplines of communication science and information systems.

Xin Zhou and Maria Grub took part in the PhD workshop before the conference. In small discussion groups, they presented their PhD projects on computational detection and analysis of multimodal propaganda content (X. Zhou) and the role of artificial intelligence in spreading, detecting and countering online disinformation (M. Grub) and received insightful feedback from top experts in the field. A big thank you to the organizers at the University of Münster and the mentors Thorsten Quandt, Kyoko Kuwahara, Jean-Christophe Boucher and Ofer Fridman for helping to move both projects forward.

Congratulations to Xin Zhou on his very first conference presentation, in which he presented the first study of his PhD thesis on analyzing implicit propaganda content on TikTok using a multimodal deep learning approach.