Mykola Makhortykh
Biographic Data
| ID | 328452 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mykola Makhortykh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mykola |
| FAMILY NAME | Makhortykh |
| SIGNATURE | MAKHORTYKH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bern |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7143-5317 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 186 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 65 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Algorithmically curated lies: How search engines handle misinformation about U.S. biolabs in Ukraine
The growing volume of online content prompts the need for adopting algorithmic systems for curating information. These systems range from web search engines to recommender systems and are integral for helping users stay informed about important societal developments. However, the algorithmic information curation systems (AICSs) are known to be subject to different forms of malperformance which make them vulnerable to possible manipulation, especi…
Search engines in polarized media environment: Auditing political information curation on Google and Bing prior to 2024 US elections
Search engines (SEs) influence how individuals are informed about election-related developments and perceive the environment in which elections take place. It has particular implications for (perceived) polarization, especially if SEs’ curation leads to a skewed treatment of information sources; however, until now, it is unclear how different SE factors may affect the emergence of such a partisan gap. To address this shortcoming, we audit the two…
How beliefs, knowledge and intuition affect the way we search? Examining how users formulate search queries about climate change
Search engines are one of the most common ways for users to discover news and political information. As a result, the content and sources prioritized by these platforms are of paramount importance. Previous research has shown that search engines can provide biased outputs by, for example, discriminating against certain social groups or favoring certain viewpoints. However, there has been a gap in understanding how users search for information usi…
Google, how should I vote? How users formulate search queries to find political information on search engines
Search engines play a crucial role in helping users navigate the digital environment. However, factors affecting how users interact with these platforms, in particular choose search queries, remain understudied. Using a representative survey of Swiss citizens conducted before a round of federal popular votes, this study examines how users formulate search queries related to the retirement policies that were voted on in 2024. Contrary to existing …
From prosthetic memory to prosthetic denial: Auditing whether large language models are prone to mass atrocity denialism
The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) can influence how historical narratives are disseminated and perceived. This study explores the implications of LLMs’ responses on the representation of mass atrocity memory, examining whether generative AI systems contribute to prosthetic memory, i.e., mediated experiences of historical events, or to what we term “prosthetic denial,” the AI-mediated erasure or distortion of atrocity memories. We …
Protean Memorialisation: International Holocaust Remembrance Day as a Digital Site of Memory on Twitter
Can social media spaces host sites of memory (or, as Pierre Nora called them, lieux de mémoire, and how do user congregations at such sites evolve? This article examines a decade-long collection of tweets about the International Holocaust Remembrance Day to investigate how digital sites of memory are produced and evolve on platforms like Twitter. By applying computational text analysis to operationalize the definitional features of a site of memo…
The Prevalence and Consequences of Women’s Algorithmic Underrepresentation in Cross-National Political Google Searches
Constructing the (in)security: Sociotechnical imaginaries of cybersecurity in Ukraine before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion
The election of Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 prompted a rapid digital transformation in Ukraine that affected different societal sectors, from the economy to politics and education. However, digitisation processes also enabled new cybersecurity risks amplified by the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, which was accompanied by a series of cyberattacks. To understand how these developments affect sociotechnical imaginaries of cybersecurity in Ukrai…
The silence of the LLMs: Cross-lingual analysis of guardrail-related political bias and false information prevalence in ChatGPT, Google Bard (Gemini), and Bing Chat
This article presents a comparative analysis of political bias in the outputs of three Large Language Model (LLM)-based chatbots – ChatGPT (GPT3.5, GPT4, GPT4o), Bing Chat, and Bard/Gemini – in response to political queries concerning the authoritarian regime in Russia. We investigate whether safeguards implemented in these chatbots contribute to the censorship of information that is viewed as harmful by the regime, in particular information abou…
Populist radical-right attitudes, media trust, and social media reliance: Combining survey and tracking data to investigate predictors of online exposure to disinformation
Is a single model enough? The systematic comparison of computational approaches for detecting populist radical right content
The rise of populist radical right (PRR) ideas stresses the importance of understanding how individuals engage with PRR content online. However, this task is complicated by the variety of channels through which such engagement can take place. In this article, we systematically compare computational approaches for detecting PRR content in textual data. Using 66 dictionary, classic supervised machine learning, and deep learning (DL) models, we comp…
Tracing Knowledge Gaps: Investigating the Influence of Education on News Exposure and Knowledge Using Digital Trace Data
The knowledge gap hypothesis—the assumption that an increasing flow of news on a topic fosters a gap in knowledge between the more and the less educated—has been demonstrated in numerous studies throughout the past 60 years. Knowledge gaps are attributed to individual differences in media selection and information processing capacities. However, it has been difficult to investigate the relative influence of selection and processing with conventio…
My war is your special operation: Engagement with pro- and anti-regime framing of the war in Ukraine on Russian social media
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which since then has been consistently referred to by the Russian authorities as a special operation and not war. The purpose of this specific framing of the Russian aggression can be attributed to multiple reasons, but among the main advantages it provides to the Kremlin is the emphasis on power inequality between Russia and Ukraine as well as minimizing the concerns of the …
Finding Frames With Bert: A Transformer-Based Approach to Generic News Frame Detection
Framing is among the most extensively used concepts in the field of communication science. The availability of digital data offers new possibilities for studying how specific aspects of social reality are made more salient in online communication, but also raises challenges related to the scaling of framing analysis and its adoption to new research areas (e.g. studying the impact of artificial intelligence-powered systems on the representation of…
Digital Dybbuks and virtual Golems: The ethics of digital duplicates in Holocaust testimony
Advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have driven a growing effort to create digital duplicates. These semi-autonomous recreations of living and dead people can be used for many purposes. Some of these purposes include tutoring, coping with grief, and attending business meetings. However, the normative implications of digital duplicates remain obscure, particularly considering the possibility of them being applied to genocide memory…
Handling the hype: Demystifying artificial intelligence for memory studies
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached memory studies in earnest. This partly reflects the hype around recent developments in generative AI (genAI), machine learning, and large language models (LLMs). But how can memory studies scholars handle this hype? Focusing on genAI applications, in particular so-called ‘chatbots’ (transformer-based instruction-tuned text generators), this commentary highlights five areas of critique that can help memory …
Where did you come from, where did you go? News trajectories in Germany and Switzerland
The article examines news trajectories used by individuals to access mainstream journalistic media in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland during the first peak of COVID-19 in Europe. It discusses the role of individual characteristics related to sociodemographics, political, and media attitudes in predisposition towards specific modes of news access. For this aim, it combines survey data with data on individuals’ engagement with news automati…
In generative AI we trust: Can Chatbots Effectively Verify Political Information
This article presents a comparative analysis of the potential of two large language model (LLM)-based chatbots—ChatGPT and Bing Chat (recently rebranded to Microsoft Copilot)—to detect veracity of political information. We use AI auditing methodology to investigate how chatbots evaluate true, false, and borderline statements on five topics: COVID-19, Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Holocaust, climate change, and LGBTQ + -related debates. …
Trolls, bots and everyone else: The analysis of multilingual social media manipulation campaigns on Twitter during 2019 elections in Ukraine
Imagining Human-AI Memory Symbiosis: How Re-Remembering the History of Artificial Intelligence Can Inform the Future of Collective Memory
In this article, we critically examine the history of artificial intelligence ( ai ) to explore how it can shape the future of collective memory. By situating our work within critical debates that challenge the dominant anthropomorphising discourse of ai , we scrutinise how ai specificities shape its interactions with information about the past. We highlight how the development of ai has been often misremembered in public discourse, and by extens…
Examining bias perpetuation in academic search engines: An algorithm audit of Google and Semantic Scholar
Researchers rely on academic Web search engines to find scientific sources, but search engine mechanisms may selectively present content that aligns with biases embedded in queries. This study examines whether confirmation biased queries prompted into Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar will yield results aligned with a query’s bias. Six queries (topics across health and technology domains such as ‘vaccines’, ‘Internet use’) were analyzed for dis…
Populist Radical-Right Attitudes, Political Involvement and Selective Information Consumption: Who Tunes Out and Who Prefers Attitude-Consonant Information
This study seeks to understand how populist radicalright (PRR) attitudes and political involvement relate to individuals' political information consumption and selective exposure to ideological content. The study approaches political information selection as a twostep phenomenon: first, individuals use different amounts of political information, and second, they rely on attitude-consonant information to different degrees. Results from a combinati…
Improving the Quality of Individual-Level Web Tracking: Challenges of Existing Approaches and Introduction of a New Content and Long-Tail Sensitive Academic Solution
This article evaluates the quality of data collection in individual-level desktop web tracking used in the social sciences and shows that the existing approaches face sampling issues, validity issues due to the lack of content-level data and their disregard for the variety of devices and long-tail consumption patterns as well as transparency and privacy issues. To overcome some of these problems, the article introduces a new academic web tracking…
How should platforms be archived? On sustainable use practices of a Telegram Archive to study Russia’s war against Ukraine
After Russia’s war against Ukraine destroyed people’s ability to move and communicate freely in Ukraine, many Ukrainians turned to social media and messenger apps, especially Telegram, to produce and share information. The vast amount of this digital data is privatized, ephemeral, and difficult to utilize for research, raising urgent questions about its sustainable accessibility and usability. In this article, we explore a specific aspect of digi…
Shall the robots remember? Conceptualising the role of non-human agents in digital memory communication
The rise of digital technology has led to fundamental changes in how individual and collective perspectives on the past are transmitted and engaged. An immediate implication of these changes relates to the shift away from human communication as a single form of communication about memory towards multiple models which involve non-human (or robotic) agents. These non-human agents are primarily constituted by artificial intelligence (AI)-driven syst…
Social media and visual framing of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine
This article investigates the use of social media for visual framing of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Using a large set of visual data from a popular social networking site, Vkontakte, the authors employ content analysis to examine how the conflict was represented and interpreted in pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian online communities during the peak of violence in summer 2014. The findings point to the existence of profound differences in framing…
Memory, politics and emotions: Internet memes and protests in Venezuela and Ukraine
The article discusses interactions between emotions, memory and user-generated digital content in the context of online protest campaigns. Using as a case study anti-government protest in Ukraine (2013–2014) and Venezuela (2019), it compares how pro- and anti-government communities use visuality and memoricity of internet memes to stir affect and promote their political agendas. It shows that despite differences in the use of visual content eleme…
Safeguarding the Journalistic DNA: Attitudes towards the Role of Professional Values in Algorithmic News Recommender Designs
In contrast to the extensive debate on the influence of algorithmic news recommenders (ANRs) on individual news diets, the interaction between such systems and journalistic norms and missions remain under-studied. The change in the relationship between journalists and the audience caused by the transition to personalized news delivery has profound consequences for the understanding of what journalism should be. To investigate how media practition…
Hyperpartisan, Alternative, and Conspiracy Media Users: An Anti-Establishment Portrait
While there is growing academic attention to readers of hyperpartisan, alternative, and conspiracy (HAC) media, our understanding of these sites has developed in separate bodies of work. We make a case for studying HAC media in unison, recognizing them as different information sources that share the same underlying anti-establishment sentiment. We do so by painting a detailed portrait of HAC media users, detailing 1) who consumes HAC media; 2) ho…
The Matter of Chance: Auditing Web Search Results Related to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Primary Elections Across Six Search Engines
We examine how six search engines filter and rank information in relation to the queries on the U.S. 2020 presidential primary elections under the default—that is nonpersonalized—conditions. For that, we utilize an algorithmic auditing methodology that uses virtual agents to conduct large-scale analysis of algorithmic information curation in a controlled environment. Specifically, we look at the text search results for “us elections,” “donald tru…
Personalizing the war: Perspectives for the adoption of news recommendation algorithms in the media coverage of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine
The use of algorithmically tailored individual news feeds is increasingly viewed as an important strategy for accommodating consumers’ information needs by legacy media. However, growing personalization of news distribution also raises normative concerns about the societal function of legacy media, in particular when dealing with personalization of traumatic and polarizing content. To extend the discussion of these concerns beyond the current foc…
Do (Not!) Track Me: Relationship Between Willingness to Participate and Sample Composition in Online Information Behavior Tracking Research
This paper offers a critical look at the promises and drawbacks of a popular, novel data collection technique—online tracking—from the point of view of sample composition. Using data from two large-scale studies about political attitudes and information consumption behavior carried out in Germany and Switzerland, we find that the likelihood of participation in a tracking study at several critical dropout points is systematically related to the ge…
Remediating the past: YouTube and Second World War memory in Ukraine and Russia
This article examines how Second World War memory is circulated, reproduced, and challenged in the transnational space of digital media by Ukrainian and Russian Internet users. Using as a case study one episode of the war on the Eastern Front—the capture of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, by the Red Army in 1943—it investigates how this event is commemorated through YouTube, which is a popular online platform for uploading, viewing, and commenting o…
Sociotechnical imaginaries of algorithmic governance in EU policy on online disinformation and FinTech
Datafication and the use of algorithmic systems increasingly blur distinctions between policy fields. In the financial sector, for example, algorithms are used in credit scoring, money has become transactional data sought after by large data-driven companies, while financial technologies (FinTech) are emerging as a locus of information warfare. To grasp the context specificity of algorithmic governance and the assumptions on which its evaluation …
To track or not to track: Examining perceptions of online tracking for information behavior research
Purpose This study investigates perceptions of the use of online tracking, a passive data collection method relying on the automated recording of participant actions on desktop and mobile devices, for studying information behavior. It scrutinizes folk theories of tracking, the concerns tracking raises among the potential participants and design mechanisms that can be used to alleviate these concerns. Design/methodology/approach This study uses fo…
We are what we click: Understanding time and content-based habits of online news readers
The article contributes both conceptually and methodologically to the study of online news consumption by introducing new approaches to measuring user information behaviour and proposing a typology of users based on their click behaviour. Using as a case study two online outlets of large national newspapers, it employs computational approaches to detect patterns in time- and content-based user interactions with news content based on clickstream d…
Explanations of news personalisation across countries and media types
News outlets worldwide increasingly adopt user-and system-driven personalisation to individualise their news delivery. Yet, the technical implementation of news personalisation systems, in particular the one relying on algorithmic news recommenders (ANRs) and tailoring individual news suggestions with the help of user data, often remains opaque. In our article, we examine how news personalisation is used by quality and popular media in three coun…
Shall the robots remember? Conceptualising the role of non-human agents in digital memory communication
The rise of digital technology has led to fundamental changes in how individual and collective perspectives on the past are transmitted and engaged. An immediate implication of these changes relates to the shift away from human communication as a single form of communication about memory towards multiple models which involve non-human (or robotic) agents. These non-human agents are primarily constituted by artificial intelligence (AI)-driven syst…
Azovsteel: Comparing qualitative and quantitative approaches for studying framing of the siege of Mariupol on Twitter
Social media platforms play a major role in shaping how the public around the world perceives contemporary wars, including the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, there are multiple challenges in studying how exactly these platforms represent violence and what aspects of it are made more salient by their users. One of these challenges concerns the broad range of qualitative and quantitative approaches used to study platform-based war fr…
Laughing to forget or to remember? Anne Frank memes and mediatization of Holocaust memory
The rise of user-generated content (UGC), such as internet memes and amateur videos, enables new possibilities for mediatization of the past. However, these possibilities can facilitate not only more diverse and less top-down engagements with memory, but also lead to its trivialization and distortion of historical facts. The latter concerns are particularly pronounced in the case of memories about mass atrocities (e.g. the Holocaust), where onlin…
Improving the Quality of Individual-Level Web Tracking: Challenges of Existing Approaches and Introduction of a New Content and Long-Tail Sensitive Academic Solution
This article evaluates the quality of data collection in individual-level desktop web tracking used in the social sciences and shows that the existing approaches face sampling issues, validity issues due to the lack of content-level data and their disregard for the variety of devices and long-tail consumption patterns as well as transparency and privacy issues. To overcome some of these problems, the article introduces a new academic web tracking…
Nurturing the pain: Audiovisual tributes to the Holocaust on YouTube
This article examines how digital technology interacts with Holocaust remembrance in post-socialist countries. Using the Lviv pogrom of 1941 as a case study, it explores how Russophone and Ukrainophone web users engage with audiovisual tributes to this event on YouTube. The article scrutinizes user engagement with Holocaust memory on two levels: the level of representation (how the pogrom is represented on YouTube) and the level of interaction (h…
News, Threats, and Trust: How Covid-19 News Shaped Political Trust, and How Threat Perceptions Conditioned This Relationship
This study explores shifts in political trust during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland, examining the role that media consumption and threat perceptions played in individuals’ trust in politics. We combine panel surveys taken before and during the first nation-wide lockdown with webtracking data of participants' online behaviour to paint a nuanced picture of media effects during the crisis. Our work has several findings. First,…
Memory, counter-memory and denialism: How search engines circulate information about the Holodomor-related memory wars
Search engines, such as Google or Yandex, shape social reality by informing their users about current and historical phenomena. However, there is little research on how search engines deal with contested memories, which are subjected to ontological conflicts known as memory wars. In this article, we investigate how search engines circulate information about memory wars related to the Holodomor, a mass famine caused by Soviet repressive politics i…
Representativeness and face-ism: Gender bias in image search
Implicit and explicit gender biases in media representations of individuals have long existed. Women are less likely to be represented in gender-neutral media content (representation bias), and their face-to-body ratio in images is often lower (face-ism bias). In this article, we look at representativeness and face-ism in search engine image results. We systematically queried four search engines (Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex) from three locations,…
Foreign beauties want to meet you”: The sexualization of women in Google’s organic and sponsored text search results
Search engines serve as information gatekeepers on a multitude of topics dealing with different aspects of society. However, the ways search engines filter and rank information are prone to biases related to gender, ethnicity, and race. In this article, we conduct a systematic algorithm audit to examine how one specific form of bias, namely, sexualization, is manifested in Google’s text search results about different national and gender groups. W…
There can be only one truth: Ideological segregation and online news communities in Ukraine
The paper examines ideological segregation among Ukrainian users in online environments, using as a case study partisan news communities on Vkontakte, the largest online platform in post-communist states. Its findings suggest that despite their insignificant numbers, partisan news communities attract substantial attention from Ukrainian users and can encourage the formation of isolated ideological cliques – or ‘echo chambers’ – that increase soci…
Animating the subjugated past: Digital greeting cards as a form of counter-memory
This article discusses how popular culture products – digital greeting cards – interact with hegemonic historical narratives in the context of war remembrance. It employs the Foucauldian concept of counter-memory to analyse how user-generated mnemonic content interacts with historical power relations. Using content analysis to examine a sample of amateur greeting cards, the authors investigate how these cultural products engage with official and …
In generative AI we trust: Can Chatbots Effectively Verify Political Information
This article presents a comparative analysis of the potential of two large language model (LLM)-based chatbots—ChatGPT and Bing Chat (recently rebranded to Microsoft Copilot)—to detect veracity of political information. We use AI auditing methodology to investigate how chatbots evaluate true, false, and borderline statements on five topics: COVID-19, Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Holocaust, climate change, and LGBTQ + -related debates. …
Digitally witnessable war from pereklychka to propaganda: Unfolding Telegram communication during Russia’s war in Ukraine
The witnessing of wars is being transformed by digital platforms. In this article, the authors empirically investigate and develop the novel approach to the study of witnessing, in particular the non-institutionalized form of inconspicuous digital witnessing which thrives in platform communities in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine. By empirically examining communication practices on Telegram, a highly popular platform in Ukraine, the articl…
Remediating the past: YouTube and Second World War memory in Ukraine and Russia
This article examines how Second World War memory is circulated, reproduced, and challenged in the transnational space of digital media by Ukrainian and Russian Internet users. Using as a case study one episode of the war on the Eastern Front—the capture of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, by the Red Army in 1943—it investigates how this event is commemorated through YouTube, which is a popular online platform for uploading, viewing, and commenting o…
Social media and visual framing of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine
This article investigates the use of social media for visual framing of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Using a large set of visual data from a popular social networking site, Vkontakte, the authors employ content analysis to examine how the conflict was represented and interpreted in pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian online communities during the peak of violence in summer 2014. The findings point to the existence of profound differences in framing…
Nurturing the pain: Audiovisual tributes to the Holocaust on YouTube
This article examines how digital technology interacts with Holocaust remembrance in post-socialist countries. Using the Lviv pogrom of 1941 as a case study, it explores how Russophone and Ukrainophone web users engage with audiovisual tributes to this event on YouTube. The article scrutinizes user engagement with Holocaust memory on two levels: the level of representation (how the pogrom is represented on YouTube) and the level of interaction (h…
Animating the subjugated past: Digital greeting cards as a form of counter-memory
This article discusses how popular culture products – digital greeting cards – interact with hegemonic historical narratives in the context of war remembrance. It employs the Foucauldian concept of counter-memory to analyse how user-generated mnemonic content interacts with historical power relations. Using content analysis to examine a sample of amateur greeting cards, the authors investigate how these cultural products engage with official and …
Four tales of sci-fi and information law
let us challenge your ideas of where reality ends, and sci-fi begins
The Great Randomizer: Using Virtual Agents for Auditing the Effects of Youtube Recommendation Algorithm on Ideologically-Charged News Content Distribution
In this paper, we examine the effects of the YouTube recommendation algorithm on the distribution of ideologically-charged news content. For that purpose, we develop a research infrastructure and conduct a series of experiments using virtual agents (n=200) in a fully controlled environment. We specifically look at YouTube recommendations for videos related to the far-right terrorist attack in the German city of Halle in 2019 and examine how these…
Personalizing the war: Perspectives for the adoption of news recommendation algorithms in the media coverage of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine
The use of algorithmically tailored individual news feeds is increasingly viewed as an important strategy for accommodating consumers’ information needs by legacy media. However, growing personalization of news distribution also raises normative concerns about the societal function of legacy media, in particular when dealing with personalization of traumatic and polarizing content. To extend the discussion of these concerns beyond the current foc…
We are what we click: Understanding time and content-based habits of online news readers
The article contributes both conceptually and methodologically to the study of online news consumption by introducing new approaches to measuring user information behaviour and proposing a typology of users based on their click behaviour. Using as a case study two online outlets of large national newspapers, it employs computational approaches to detect patterns in time- and content-based user interactions with news content based on clickstream d…
Historical memory and securitisation of the Russian intervention in Syria
Memory, politics and emotions: Internet memes and protests in Venezuela and Ukraine
The article discusses interactions between emotions, memory and user-generated digital content in the context of online protest campaigns. Using as a case study anti-government protest in Ukraine (2013–2014) and Venezuela (2019), it compares how pro- and anti-government communities use visuality and memoricity of internet memes to stir affect and promote their political agendas. It shows that despite differences in the use of visual content eleme…
Explanations of news personalisation across countries and media types
News outlets worldwide increasingly adopt user-and system-driven personalisation to individualise their news delivery. Yet, the technical implementation of news personalisation systems, in particular the one relying on algorithmic news recommenders (ANRs) and tailoring individual news suggestions with the help of user data, often remains opaque. In our article, we examine how news personalisation is used by quality and popular media in three coun…
Hey, Google, is it what the Holocaust looked like: Auditing algorithmic curation of visual historical content on Web search engines
By filtering and ranking information, search engines shape how individuals perceive both the present and past events. However, these information curation mechanisms are prone to malperformance that can misinform their users. In this article, we examine how search malperformance can influence representation of traumatic past by investigating image search outputs of six search engines in relation to the Holocaust in English and Russian. Our finding…
There can be only one truth: Ideological segregation and online news communities in Ukraine
The paper examines ideological segregation among Ukrainian users in online environments, using as a case study partisan news communities on Vkontakte, the largest online platform in post-communist states. Its findings suggest that despite their insignificant numbers, partisan news communities attract substantial attention from Ukrainian users and can encourage the formation of isolated ideological cliques – or ‘echo chambers’ – that increase soci…
To track or not to track: Examining perceptions of online tracking for information behavior research
Purpose This study investigates perceptions of the use of online tracking, a passive data collection method relying on the automated recording of participant actions on desktop and mobile devices, for studying information behavior. It scrutinizes folk theories of tracking, the concerns tracking raises among the potential participants and design mechanisms that can be used to alleviate these concerns. Design/methodology/approach This study uses fo…
The Matter of Chance: Auditing Web Search Results Related to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Primary Elections Across Six Search Engines
We examine how six search engines filter and rank information in relation to the queries on the U.S. 2020 presidential primary elections under the default—that is nonpersonalized—conditions. For that, we utilize an algorithmic auditing methodology that uses virtual agents to conduct large-scale analysis of algorithmic information curation in a controlled environment. Specifically, we look at the text search results for “us elections,” “donald tru…
Overcoming polarization with chatbot news? Investigating the impact of news content containing opposing views on agreement and credibility
Chatbots are a burgeoning opportunity for news media outlets to disseminate their content in a conversational way, and create an engaging experience around it. Since chatbots are social and interactive technologies, they might be effective tools to lower the threshold of engaging with news content containing opposing views. In an experiment, we test this idea by investigating whether people are more likely to accept a news article containing conf…
Past Is Another Resource: Remembering the 70th Anniversary of the Victory Day on LiveJournal
In our article we examine changes experienced by media and memory systems in Russia since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis. Using as an example a popular Russian blogging platform, LiveJournal, we scrutinize how the digital practices related to commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany are influenced by the growing instrumentalization of Second World War memory for media propaganda and manipulation. Using to…
Safeguarding the Journalistic DNA: Attitudes towards the Role of Professional Values in Algorithmic News Recommender Designs
In contrast to the extensive debate on the influence of algorithmic news recommenders (ANRs) on individual news diets, the interaction between such systems and journalistic norms and missions remain under-studied. The change in the relationship between journalists and the audience caused by the transition to personalized news delivery has profound consequences for the understanding of what journalism should be. To investigate how media practition…
Auditing the representation of migrants in image web search results
Search engines serve as information gatekeepers on a multitude of topics that are prone to gender, ethnicity, and race misrepresentations. In this paper, we specifically look at the image search representation of migrant population groups that are often subjected to discrimination and biased representation in mainstream media, increasingly so with the rise of right-wing populist actors in the Western countries. Using multiple ( n = 200) virtual a…
Where the earth is flat and 9/11 is an inside job: A comparative algorithm audit of conspiratorial information in web search results
Web search engines are important online information intermediaries that are frequently used and highly trusted by the public despite multiple evidence of their outputs being subjected to inaccuracies and biases. One form of such inaccuracy, which so far received little scholarly attention, is the presence of conspiratorial information, namely pages promoting conspiracy theories. We address this gap by conducting a comparative algorithm audit to e…
News, Threats, and Trust: How Covid-19 News Shaped Political Trust, and How Threat Perceptions Conditioned This Relationship
This study explores shifts in political trust during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland, examining the role that media consumption and threat perceptions played in individuals’ trust in politics. We combine panel surveys taken before and during the first nation-wide lockdown with webtracking data of participants' online behaviour to paint a nuanced picture of media effects during the crisis. Our work has several findings. First,…
Memory, counter-memory and denialism: How search engines circulate information about the Holodomor-related memory wars
Search engines, such as Google or Yandex, shape social reality by informing their users about current and historical phenomena. However, there is little research on how search engines deal with contested memories, which are subjected to ontological conflicts known as memory wars. In this article, we investigate how search engines circulate information about memory wars related to the Holodomor, a mass famine caused by Soviet repressive politics i…
Representativeness and face-ism: Gender bias in image search
Implicit and explicit gender biases in media representations of individuals have long existed. Women are less likely to be represented in gender-neutral media content (representation bias), and their face-to-body ratio in images is often lower (face-ism bias). In this article, we look at representativeness and face-ism in search engine image results. We systematically queried four search engines (Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex) from three locations,…
Foreign beauties want to meet you”: The sexualization of women in Google’s organic and sponsored text search results
Search engines serve as information gatekeepers on a multitude of topics dealing with different aspects of society. However, the ways search engines filter and rank information are prone to biases related to gender, ethnicity, and race. In this article, we conduct a systematic algorithm audit to examine how one specific form of bias, namely, sexualization, is manifested in Google’s text search results about different national and gender groups. W…
Not all who are bots are evil: A cross-platform analysis of automated agent governance
The growth of online platforms is accompanied by the increasing use of automated agents. Despite being discussed primarily in the context of opinion manipulation, agents play diverse roles within platform ecosystems that raises the need for governance approaches that go beyond policing agents’ unwanted behaviour. To provide a more nuanced assessment of agent governance, we introduce an analytical framework that distinguishes between different asp…
Political science (44 works) · Computer Science (43 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Law (32 works) · Social Media and Politics (32 works) · Politics (28 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Business (21 works) · Psychology (20 works)