Yotam Ophir
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 138863 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Yotam Ophir |
| NOMBRES | Yotam |
| APELLIDO | Ophir |
| FIRMA | OPHIR Y |
| AFILIACIONES | University at Buffalo, State University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5049-7906 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 98 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2018 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Can professional or AI fact-checking protect trust in journalism from political attacks? The complex roles of source, transparency, ideology, and the machine heuristic
Apocalyptic Climate Change Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation in White-Nationalist Communities Online
This study examines the ways in which white nationalists have been using climate change debates to further and extend racist, misogynistic, and antidemocratic narratives. Using a mixed-method approach, the Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN), we combine an unsupervised machine learning topic model, community detection, and theory-driven in-depth qualitative analysis to identify dynamic changes in climate-related discourse on the U.S.-based S…
A Naturally-Occurring Experiment on the Electoral Impact of President Biden’s Decision to Exit the 2024 Presidential Race
We assess the impact of former President Joe Biden’s unprecedented decision to exit the 2024 Presidential race 2 months before election day by analyzing a naturally-occurring experiment surrounding the incumbent President’s decision to exit the 2024 race, a period in which we fielded the second wave (N Wave 2 = 831) of a nationally-representative panel study (N Wave 1 = 1400), with random invitation assignment (from the original response pool) th…
Vaccine Hesitancy and Its Epistemic Antecedents
Although much attention has been given to vaccine hesitancy, there is still considerable ambiguity regarding its epistemological antecedents. The current meta-analysis addresses this theoretical and practical gap by focusing on the interplay between trust, belief in conspiracy theories, and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy (k = 32), as well as key moderators such as the availability of the vaccine and the state and progress of the pandemic. Overall, re…
Discourse and Misconceptions About Sexually Transmitted Infections in Lesbian Subreddits
Despite the increase in sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among lesbians, sex education and health services are often heterosexual-focused, leading them to be misinformed about their personal risks. Considering the lack of adequate discussions in offline settings, online spaces allow stigmatized groups to connect, support, and share health information. This study examines how lesbians discuss STIs on Reddit through an analysis guided by the …
Media matters
We use a large-scale mixed-method analysis to examine changes in misinformation research over three decades, with a particular attention to the role of media research. We examine a corpus of more than 7,000 academic studies, published between 1993 and 2022, analyzing changes in volume, topics, and methods used. Employing computational text and network analyses, we show how the meteoric rise in misinformation research in the 2010s was driven by a …
Some assembly required
Wayfair, an American furniture and home goods retailer, garnered sudden attention across social media in 2020, particularly Twitter and Reddit, due to a conspiracy theory linking the company to child trafficking. The short-lived, well-delineated nature of this theory, coupled with its simultaneous emergence across multiple platforms, makes it a distinct case for studying the dynamics of online conspiracy development and spread. Using intermedia a…
Negotiating extremism
This study examines thematic and engagement dynamics within r/PurplePillDebate, a Reddit community for deliberation between supporters and critics of anti-feminist “red pill” ideology. We utilize the Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN) and Content Engagement Capacity (CEC) frameworks to analyze 330,008 posts and comments, identifying 37 topics grouped into themes— Gender Dynamics and Socioeconomic Issues, Relationships and Gender Norms , and…
Value-Based Narratives Foster Trust in Scientists and Communication Behaviors
This study evaluated the impact of value-based narratives on American adult participants’ trust perception. In a first-person narrative, a medical scientist described their value-based motivations for developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology for medical diagnosis. Results indicated that only benevolence perception was positively related to transportation and identification. Furthermore, only identification was positively related to stor…
Shouts from the Void
Chronic illness affects millions worldwide, rendering the life of those affected complex to manage. Extant research points to the need for effective and supportive care for the successful treatment, yet health care encounters for this population are often filled with negative experiences, ranging from discontinuity of care to disenfranchisement from providers. One such group dedicated to sharing struggles is the NEISVoid (No End In Sight) communi…
The Effects of Corrective Strategies on Romantic Belief Endorsement
Romantic comedies have long been understood to create unrealistic views of relationships. In the current study, we tested theory-driven corrective strategies for counteracting potentially harmful beliefs about romantic relationships. In an online experiment ( N = 626), participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: to a no exposure control, to watch a romantic comedy scene without correction, to read a corrective article before vi…
The growing partisan politicization of non-political online spaces
Drawing on theories of identity politics and partisan polarization, we explored the politicization of Google Play’s news app reviews—an explicitly non-political domain. Using a mixed-methods approach, Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMNs), combining topic modeling, network analysis, community detection, and theory-driven qualitative reading, we analyzed 759,143 reviews from 2009 to 2022 across 46 news apps. Three themes emerged: Technical, Co…
Meta-theorizing framing in communication research (1992–2022)
Framing, a prominent communication theory, is often lamented as a fractured paradigm, leading some to offer radical changes to its conceptualization, operationalization, and application. Using a meta-theoretical and computational approach, we analyze three decades of framing research to examine academic silos, specializations, the canon’s formation, gender inequalities, authors’ origins, countries studied, and methods used in framing research. In…
Behind the black box
Facing historically low levels of public trust, journalists had been increasingly interested in the potential of artificial intelligence to produce news content. Some have suggested that Automated Journalism (AJ) may reduce Hostile Media Biases (HMB), where partisans perceive balanced articles as slanted against their side. However, empirical evidence for the hypothesis remains limited and inconclusive. In this study, we examine whether the effec…
The Long Shadow of the Big Lie
Has the “big lie”—the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump—shaped citizens’ views of the legitimacy of other US elections? We argue that it has. Those who believe Trump’s claim, whom we call election skeptics, lack confidence in elections for two interrelated reasons. First, because they think 2020 was inaccurately and unfairly conducted, they think that other elections will suffer a similar fate, and hence think these …
Democracy amid Crises
Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. Democracy amid Crises explains how these forces and the media messag…
Vaccine Hesitancy Under the Magnifying Glass
Resistance to vaccines has hindered attempts to contain and prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases for centuries. More recently, however, the term "vaccine hesitancy" has been used to describe not necessarily outright resistance but also a delay in acceptance or uncertainty regarding vaccines. Given concerns about hesitancy and its impact on vaccine uptake rates, researchers increasingly shifted the focus from resistance to vaccines toward vacc…
The evolution of advertising research through four decades
Over the past forty years, what we, as a discipline, define as advertising research has been negotiated through our primary scholastic contribution to the field: peer reviewed journal articles. The question ‘what is advertising research?’ may produce different answers by different scholars during various points of the history of our field. The goal of this study is to identify key developments in advertising research – themes, topics, and methods…
Weaponizing reproductive rights
According to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, nonwhites, globalists and elites are plotting to eliminate the white race and its dominance through anti-white policies and increased immigration. In that context, abortion among white women is perceived by white nationalists (WN) as a betrayal of their ‘biological’ and ‘traditional’ gender role – procreation of white babies. While WN condemn abortion among white women as a murderous sin, at t…
Trolls without borders
Despite the existence of multiple propaganda campaigns from around the globe, most scholarly attention has been primarily given to those operated by Russia. This focus on a single country has limited the scope of propaganda research. We offer a systematic comparison of six campaigns, examining the issues they engaged with, and their deployment strategies. Using a computational analysis of more than 9.5 million tweets released by the Twitter Moder…
Mapping the Media Genome
Despite their heightening popularity and potential individual and societal implications, little scientific attention has been given to the news coverage of direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT) kits (e.g. 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and MyHeritage). To accommodate, this study leverages the Analysis of Topic Model Networks to inductively develop a comprehensive overview of how major U.S. news media framed DTC-GT kits between 2009 and 2022, and the…
Not All Bots are Created Equal
As concerns about social bots online increase, studies have attempted to explore the discourse they produce, and its effects on individuals and the public at large. We argue that the common reliance on aggregated scores of binary classifiers for bot detection may have yielded biased or inaccurate results. To test this possibility, we systematically compare the differences between non-bots and bots using binary and non-binary classifiers (classifi…
Staying connected
Oppression by omission
Critical to managing a crisis such as COVID-19 is the propagation of information to all vulnerable populations. Despite guidelines regarding communicating with people with differing accessibility needs during crises, some often find their needs unmet. Following a lack of assisted communications for d/Deaf people during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Twitter hashtag campaign, #WhereIsTheInterpreter, was launched in the UK, protesting the lack of accessi…
Democracy amid Crises
News Frame Analysis
Framing is one of the most central, applicable, and contested theories in communication research. At the heart of the debate on framing is the question of operationalizing and measuring emphasis frames. We harness novel computational tools to propose a new method for inductive identification of frames. We argue and demonstrate that frame elements could be identified using topic modeling, and that frame elements can then be automatically grouped i…
News media framing of social protests around racial tensions during the Donald Trump presidency
Media framing of social protests can influence public opinion and governmental response. An extensive line of scholarly work had pointed to the existence of two alternative news frames; public order and debate. We argue that prior work may have been limited by the reliance on deductive strategies using predefined, theoretically-driven frames. Using a data-driven computational method, the Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN), we examine mainst…
Russian Twitter Accounts and the Partisan Polarization of Vaccine Discourse, 2015–2017
Objectives. To understand how Twitter accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) discussed vaccines to increase the credibility of their manufactured personas. Methods. We analyzed 2.82 million tweets published by 2689 IRA accounts between 2015 and 2017. Combining unsupervised machine learning and network analysis to identify “thematic personas” (i.e., accounts that consistently share the same topics), we analyzed the ways in…
Vaccine discourse in white nationalist online communication
Strategy Framing in News Coverage and Electoral Success
Past studies examined the prevalence of strategy framing in news coverage and its effects on cynicism, knowledge, and content evaluation. Missing from the literature is an examination of the relationship between strategy framing in news and electoral success, the actual goal of political campaigns. Similarly, factors that shape media use of strategy framing on the candidate and race levels were rarely examined. We argue that these gaps in knowled…
Meta-theorizing framing in communication research (1992–2022)
Framing, a prominent communication theory, is often lamented as a fractured paradigm, leading some to offer radical changes to its conceptualization, operationalization, and application. Using a meta-theoretical and computational approach, we analyze three decades of framing research to examine academic silos, specializations, the canon’s formation, gender inequalities, authors’ origins, countries studied, and methods used in framing research. In…
The Long Shadow of the Big Lie
Has the “big lie”—the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump—shaped citizens’ views of the legitimacy of other US elections? We argue that it has. Those who believe Trump’s claim, whom we call election skeptics, lack confidence in elections for two interrelated reasons. First, because they think 2020 was inaccurately and unfairly conducted, they think that other elections will suffer a similar fate, and hence think these …
Not All Bots are Created Equal
As concerns about social bots online increase, studies have attempted to explore the discourse they produce, and its effects on individuals and the public at large. We argue that the common reliance on aggregated scores of binary classifiers for bot detection may have yielded biased or inaccurate results. To test this possibility, we systematically compare the differences between non-bots and bots using binary and non-binary classifiers (classifi…
Watching the Whole World
For over five decades, researchers explored the volume of coverage countries receive in other countries’ media, the factors that shape countries’ newsworthy, and sentiment in their coverage. However, a quantitative systematic analysis of how countries are covered, specifically, the framing of coverage, has been lacking. We first utilize machine learning for the descriptive inductive identification of frames in large-scale content (N = 105,991 new…
The role of information avoidance in managing uncertainty from conflicting recommendations about electronic cigarettes
Insufficient scientific evidence about electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) has led to conflicting recommendations (CRs) by credible scientific organizations, creating a public health debate that could prove especially difficult to reconcile as current and former smokers make decisions about whether to use e-cigarettes. To investigate how CRs about e-cigarettes may affect intentions to engage in healthy behaviors, 717 former and current smokers w…
Some assembly required
Wayfair, an American furniture and home goods retailer, garnered sudden attention across social media in 2020, particularly Twitter and Reddit, due to a conspiracy theory linking the company to child trafficking. The short-lived, well-delineated nature of this theory, coupled with its simultaneous emergence across multiple platforms, makes it a distinct case for studying the dynamics of online conspiracy development and spread. Using intermedia a…
The growing partisan politicization of non-political online spaces
Drawing on theories of identity politics and partisan polarization, we explored the politicization of Google Play’s news app reviews—an explicitly non-political domain. Using a mixed-methods approach, Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMNs), combining topic modeling, network analysis, community detection, and theory-driven qualitative reading, we analyzed 759,143 reviews from 2009 to 2022 across 46 news apps. Three themes emerged: Technical, Co…
Behind the black box
Facing historically low levels of public trust, journalists had been increasingly interested in the potential of artificial intelligence to produce news content. Some have suggested that Automated Journalism (AJ) may reduce Hostile Media Biases (HMB), where partisans perceive balanced articles as slanted against their side. However, empirical evidence for the hypothesis remains limited and inconclusive. In this study, we examine whether the effec…
Mapping the Media Genome
Despite their heightening popularity and potential individual and societal implications, little scientific attention has been given to the news coverage of direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT) kits (e.g. 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and MyHeritage). To accommodate, this study leverages the Analysis of Topic Model Networks to inductively develop a comprehensive overview of how major U.S. news media framed DTC-GT kits between 2009 and 2022, and the…
Hashtag activism in a politicized pandemic
We examined hashtag activism promoting Taiwan’s participation in the global efforts to combat COVID-19. We employed the computational Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN) to examine the discourse around the #TaiwanCanHelp/#TWforWHO campaign in 2020 ( N = 163,876) on Twitter. Our model identified 35 topics clustered within three frames. The containment frame emphasized strategies used to stop COVID-19’s spread in Taiwan. The geopolitics frame …
Misinformation and Mass Audiences
Risk and Health Communication in an Evolving Media Environment
The Potential for Narrative Correctives to Combat Misinformation†
Misinformation can influence personal and societal decisions in detrimental ways. Not only is misinformation challenging to correct, but even when individuals accept corrective information, misinformation can continue to influence attitudes: a phenomenon known as belief echoes, affective perseverance, or the continued influence effect. Two controlled experiments tested the efficacy of narrative-based correctives to reduce this affective residual …
News Frame Analysis
Framing is one of the most central, applicable, and contested theories in communication research. At the heart of the debate on framing is the question of operationalizing and measuring emphasis frames. We harness novel computational tools to propose a new method for inductive identification of frames. We argue and demonstrate that frame elements could be identified using topic modeling, and that frame elements can then be automatically grouped i…
A Collaborative Way of Knowing
One of the great strengths of the field of communication is its interdisciplinarity. Yet this strength brings challenges, including rifts between diverse subfields. In this study, we illustrate the rich potential of collaborations across subfields. Specifically, we argue that due to often-overlooked epistemological similarities, unsupervised machine learning and grounded theory ethnography subfields are well-suited for an especially enriching col…
The role of information avoidance in managing uncertainty from conflicting recommendations about electronic cigarettes
Insufficient scientific evidence about electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) has led to conflicting recommendations (CRs) by credible scientific organizations, creating a public health debate that could prove especially difficult to reconcile as current and former smokers make decisions about whether to use e-cigarettes. To investigate how CRs about e-cigarettes may affect intentions to engage in healthy behaviors, 717 former and current smokers w…
Russian Twitter Accounts and the Partisan Polarization of Vaccine Discourse, 2015–2017
Objectives. To understand how Twitter accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) discussed vaccines to increase the credibility of their manufactured personas. Methods. We analyzed 2.82 million tweets published by 2689 IRA accounts between 2015 and 2017. Combining unsupervised machine learning and network analysis to identify “thematic personas” (i.e., accounts that consistently share the same topics), we analyzed the ways in…
The effects of media narratives about failures and discoveries in science on beliefs about and support for science
This study examines the effects of exposure to media narratives about science on perceptions pertaining to the reliability of science, including trust, beliefs, and support for science. In an experiment ( n = 4497), participants were randomly assigned to read stories representing ecologically valid media narratives: the honorable quest, counterfeit quest, crisis or broken, and problem explored. Exposure to stories highlighting problems reduced tr…
Strategy Framing in News Coverage and Electoral Success
Past studies examined the prevalence of strategy framing in news coverage and its effects on cynicism, knowledge, and content evaluation. Missing from the literature is an examination of the relationship between strategy framing in news and electoral success, the actual goal of political campaigns. Similarly, factors that shape media use of strategy framing on the candidate and race levels were rarely examined. We argue that these gaps in knowled…
News media framing of social protests around racial tensions during the Donald Trump presidency
Media framing of social protests can influence public opinion and governmental response. An extensive line of scholarly work had pointed to the existence of two alternative news frames; public order and debate. We argue that prior work may have been limited by the reliance on deductive strategies using predefined, theoretically-driven frames. Using a data-driven computational method, the Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN), we examine mainst…
Big data, actually
Hashtag activism in a politicized pandemic
We examined hashtag activism promoting Taiwan’s participation in the global efforts to combat COVID-19. We employed the computational Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN) to examine the discourse around the #TaiwanCanHelp/#TWforWHO campaign in 2020 ( N = 163,876) on Twitter. Our model identified 35 topics clustered within three frames. The containment frame emphasized strategies used to stop COVID-19’s spread in Taiwan. The geopolitics frame …
Watching the Whole World
For over five decades, researchers explored the volume of coverage countries receive in other countries’ media, the factors that shape countries’ newsworthy, and sentiment in their coverage. However, a quantitative systematic analysis of how countries are covered, specifically, the framing of coverage, has been lacking. We first utilize machine learning for the descriptive inductive identification of frames in large-scale content (N = 105,991 new…
Vaccine discourse in white nationalist online communication
Democracy amid Crises
Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. Democracy amid Crises explains how these forces and the media messag…
Vaccine Hesitancy Under the Magnifying Glass
Resistance to vaccines has hindered attempts to contain and prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases for centuries. More recently, however, the term "vaccine hesitancy" has been used to describe not necessarily outright resistance but also a delay in acceptance or uncertainty regarding vaccines. Given concerns about hesitancy and its impact on vaccine uptake rates, researchers increasingly shifted the focus from resistance to vaccines toward vacc…
The evolution of advertising research through four decades
Over the past forty years, what we, as a discipline, define as advertising research has been negotiated through our primary scholastic contribution to the field: peer reviewed journal articles. The question ‘what is advertising research?’ may produce different answers by different scholars during various points of the history of our field. The goal of this study is to identify key developments in advertising research – themes, topics, and methods…
Weaponizing reproductive rights
According to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, nonwhites, globalists and elites are plotting to eliminate the white race and its dominance through anti-white policies and increased immigration. In that context, abortion among white women is perceived by white nationalists (WN) as a betrayal of their ‘biological’ and ‘traditional’ gender role – procreation of white babies. While WN condemn abortion among white women as a murderous sin, at t…
Trolls without borders
Despite the existence of multiple propaganda campaigns from around the globe, most scholarly attention has been primarily given to those operated by Russia. This focus on a single country has limited the scope of propaganda research. We offer a systematic comparison of six campaigns, examining the issues they engaged with, and their deployment strategies. Using a computational analysis of more than 9.5 million tweets released by the Twitter Moder…
Mapping the Media Genome
Despite their heightening popularity and potential individual and societal implications, little scientific attention has been given to the news coverage of direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT) kits (e.g. 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and MyHeritage). To accommodate, this study leverages the Analysis of Topic Model Networks to inductively develop a comprehensive overview of how major U.S. news media framed DTC-GT kits between 2009 and 2022, and the…
Not All Bots are Created Equal
As concerns about social bots online increase, studies have attempted to explore the discourse they produce, and its effects on individuals and the public at large. We argue that the common reliance on aggregated scores of binary classifiers for bot detection may have yielded biased or inaccurate results. To test this possibility, we systematically compare the differences between non-bots and bots using binary and non-binary classifiers (classifi…
Staying connected
Oppression by omission
Critical to managing a crisis such as COVID-19 is the propagation of information to all vulnerable populations. Despite guidelines regarding communicating with people with differing accessibility needs during crises, some often find their needs unmet. Following a lack of assisted communications for d/Deaf people during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Twitter hashtag campaign, #WhereIsTheInterpreter, was launched in the UK, protesting the lack of accessi…
Democracy amid Crises
Shouts from the Void
Chronic illness affects millions worldwide, rendering the life of those affected complex to manage. Extant research points to the need for effective and supportive care for the successful treatment, yet health care encounters for this population are often filled with negative experiences, ranging from discontinuity of care to disenfranchisement from providers. One such group dedicated to sharing struggles is the NEISVoid (No End In Sight) communi…
Political science (22 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · Psychology (20 obras) · Computer Science (16 obras) · Politics (15 obras) · Media Studies and Communication (13 obras) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (13 obras) · Social Psychology (13 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Medicine (11 obras)