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Study 2 of the larger project "Selbst-effects of public vs. private opinion expression": The experimental study manipulates the public vs. private context of opinion expression (new manipulation compared to study 1). It tests the effects on elaboration, expression composition, issue interest, perceived expertise, and behavioral intention.

Media scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias (2019) define digital colonialism as the “term for the extension of a global process of extraction that started under colonialism and continues through industrial capitalism, culminating in today's new form: instead of natural resources in labor, what is now being appropriated is human life through its conversion into data” (p. 22). This research will critically analyze the Canadian government’s ill-received Bill C-11: the Amended Consumer Privacy Protection Act by using digital colonialism as a conceptual framework to reveal the Bill’s essential limitations. It will consist of two sections: 1) an in-depth exploration of the definition of digital colonialism and Indigenous Subjectivity, which will inform the objective, and 2) an examination of amendment recommendations (7, 8, 11 and 15), put forth by the previous Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien to improve Bill C-11. By using digital colonial theory and applying it to a critical legislative case study, this research addresses the following questions: What is digital colonialism and how, from a digital colonial standpoint, can we critically unpack the recommended amendments proposed by Therrien?

The work in progress draws on an experiment, incorporating accumulated knowledge in the field of news avoidance. The proposed multifactorial online comparative experiment (2 x 2) is set up to simulate a contemporary online news information environment prompting people to make choices. Participants in Austria and Slovakia are asked to browse a news website and either select or avoid news headlines they are interested in having included in their personalized newsfeed. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the respective institution.

Radical violent extremist terrorism is a global issue that has existed for centuries and has been the cause of millions of deaths. Extremist organizations have learned to adapt and survive attempts at legal and military interdictions. One possible major element that allows for the survival of these radicalized organizations is the use of conspiracy theories within their online messages that are used to radicalize and recruit members to their cause. These conspiracy theories tend to elicit two types of messages: a quest for significance or a loss of significance. This study aims to observe how extremist organizations utilize conspiracy theories in their online messages and whether these messages adapt to the standing of the organization (their growth, height, and decline). This study will utilize a 2x3 non-experimental, correlational content analysis of historical documents using text-based algorithms via latent dirichlet allocation to examine the frequency of conspiracy theory usage (presence or absence) from a radical Islamic and a right-wing extremist group, as well as the frequency of the type of conspiracy theory used over time.

Based on research on framing effects and biased cognitive processing, this study investigates the role of biased cognitive processing and group cues in frames-in-thought following exposure to identity-related frames. Research on selective exposure and cognitive dissonance suggests that individuals prefer attitude-consistent messages. Exposing oneself only to confirmatory information leads to higher attitude strength and polarisation. However, as people increasingly rely on social media platforms to access their news, they are more likely to be exposed to counter-attitudinal messages. Still, attitude polarisation on topics such as immigration and asylum and climate change grows ever stronger, suggesting that selective exposure only partly explains attitude polarisation for some of these topics. This study proposes that, in addition to selective exposure and filter bubbles, confirmatory bias plays a significant role in reinforcing existing attitudes – leading to higher polarisation. More specifically, cognitive bias is a systematic thought process caused by the tendency of the human brain to simplify information processing through a filter of personal experience and preferences. Thus, biased processing implies using schema, prior attitudes and other internal and peripheral cues to maintain and defend prior attitudes and belief systems. For highly polarised issues – such as immigration, asylum or climate change, on which people have strong prior attitudes – it can be expected that individuals will prioritise this type of information processing. Based on research on framing effects and biased cognitive processing, this study posits that, when exposed to frames-in-communication that emphasise some aspects of an issue, individuals may assign more or less salience to those considerations depending on whether they confirm or clash (respectively) with their prior attitudes and social identities. We test this assumption in a between-subject experiment using a German sample (N=200). Specifically, this study will test how outgroup (peripheral) cues influence identity-related frames-in-thought following exposure to a real-life article framing refugees and integration policies. We manipulate the nationality of the outgroup of reference: Syrian (Condition 1) and Ukrainian (Condition 2). We expect that – despite the only treatment variation being the outgroup of reference – there will be significant differences in frames-in-thought across these conditions. More specifically, participants in the Syrian condition will report higher assimilation frames-in-thought than those in the Ukrainian condition. Conversely, we expect those in the Ukrainian versus Syrian condition to report higher multicultural frames-in-thought. Finally, since refugees are often represented as more culturally diverse (i.e., Muslims from outside of Europe) in the media and public discourse, we expect that frames-in-thought in the non-nationality condition will be similar to those in the Syrian condition. Additionally, Islamophobia and secular critique of Islam will moderate the relationship between frame exposure and frames-in-thought in that, in the Syrian condition, these variables will be positively related to assimilation frames-in-thought and negatively to multicultural frames-in-thought. In turn, European identification will be negatively related to assimilation frames-in-thought in the Ukrainian condition but positively related in the Syrian condition.

A plan of energy sobriety is planned by the French government for this winter of the year 2022. We seek to test whether a communication (autonomous-normative or controlling) that targets one eco-gesture (reduction of heating consumption) can spillover to other non-targeted eco-gestures. Self-determination theory (Decy & Ryan, 2017) is used. In addition, the government is recommending health gestures against Covid-19 during this winter. We want to see if communication in one domain (energy sobriety) can influence the intention to adopt behaviors in another domain (health).

We run a cross-sectional survey using a convenience sample (Prolific.co) to understand predictors of pluralistic ignorance surrounding climate change attitudes and policy support. We will regress the perceived support among Americans for different policies on various individual difference measurements. We will test tentative psychological mechanisms that are presumed to drive misperception of public opinions, which may involve (lack of) information availability, motivated reasoning, and non-motivated biases and heuristics. We will further examine participants’ (mis)perception of Americans’ opinions about gun control and immigration policies in exploratory analyses.

How do social networks affect the spread of protest information in social media? The existing body of literature on media effects and information diffusion identifies various components which can influence media consumers’ perception of new information and their decision to diffuse information or contents, including network-related components. In this article, I suggest the political characteristics of accounts that share protest information affect how the information gets interpreted and diffused by other Twitter users focusing on the Twitter protest hashtag network. I argue whether Twitter accounts that share protest information gets perceived as strongly political or not can affect how other users perceive the signals regarding political protests. I expect to observe more political influence on Twitter accounts that are not perceived as political by others compared with accounts that are viewed as political accounts. To test my theory, I will conduct an online experiment with vignettes that simulate the informational environment that participants would face during their actual Twitter activities. All participants would be provided with simulated Twitter pages with various Tweets, the same as they observe when they are using Twitter in real. The simulated pages will be filled with various types of Tweets, including Tweets with protest information. I will ask participants whether they will retweet the Tweets they observe. Participants would be provided with profile information of Twitter accounts that have published Tweets in the vignettes. The variation will be implemented in the political characteristics of profiles: some publishers would have various political traits in their profiles while others’ profiles would not contain political information.

Public Service Media (henceforth: PSM) play an important role in democratic societies, reflected in both academic work and policy-making (Cushion, 2012; Habermas, 1987; Schweizer & Puppis, 2018). On the one hand, they provide citizens with necessary information to participate well in democracies, and other hand presenting a balanced representation of (political) realities (Cushion, 2012; Van Aelst et al., 2017). However, delegitimizing attributions through bias accusations towards PSM threaten to undermine their democratic function (Egelhofer et al., 2021; Holtz-Bacha, 2021; Sehl et al., 2022). Given the neutral function of PSM, accusations of bias potentially undermine their legitimacy and hence contribute to an erosion of trust in media generally (Brosius et al., 2022; Egelhofer et al., 2021). This is for example the case in the Netherlands, with contentious debates about the alleged bias at public service broadcaster NOS. While extant literature has aimed to capture biases in news content (Brandenburg, 2005; D’Alessio & Allen, 2000; Hopmann et al., 2012), and there is an increasing scholarly attention for media criticism, fake news accusations, mis- and disinformation, and other delegitimizing narratives towards media generally (Cheruiyot, 2019; Egelhofer & Lecheler, 2019; Egelhofer et al., 2021; Tong et al., 2018), we know little about the nature of bias accusations, specifically directed towards PSM. This study aims to contribute to these strands of literature by 1) positioning bias accusations among other forms of media criticism, and 2) by understanding what PSM are actually accused of, and to what extent biases in academic literature correspond with the actual accusations of bias.

What is the best response strategy to use an uncivil negative campaigning attack in your political advantage and does this chosen strategy differ between male and female responders?

Divides between the Democrats and the Republicans in America are greater than ever before. Partisans report negative feelings toward outparty supporters, attribute negative character traits to their opponents, and are displeased at the prospect of interacting with outparty supporters in various settings (Iyengar et al., 2019). Interparty hostility surpasses other traditionally salient divides, spills over to non-political judgments (Iyengar and Westwood, 2015), and may thwart consensual governance. Given its detrimental consequences, scholars from different fields have developed various antidotes. One of the most effective and successful interventions is priming the common American identity (Levendusky, 2018a; Voekel et al., 2022).

An undergraduate dissertation in psychology, qualitatively exploring how people with a history of disordered eating think about environmentally sustainable eating, and what barriers they might face in changing their eating habits to be more sustainable.

In this research endeavor, we delve into the prevailing public sentiment concerning a recent Russian law project that has raised substantial concern due to its severe restrictions on transgender people’s rights. This legislation was introduced towards the end of May 2023. Our primary objective is to investigate the various factors that influence the level of support for this law among Russian citizens. Specifically, we aim to understand the drivers behind the success of Russian propaganda in endorsing and promoting this law, consequently fostering transphobia at a state level. We postulate that two critical aspects of attitudes, namely their strength, and ambivalence, play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion regarding the legislation. To test our hypothesis, we plan to conduct a comprehensive survey experiment during the period between the law’s acceptance by the lower chamber of the Russian parliament and its pending consideration in the upper chamber, as well as awaiting the president’s signature.

This project explores the effects of visual disinformation differing in production. Participants in this experiment are exposed to manipulated visual media in form of a decontextualized video, a cheapfake, deepfake or a control group consisting of an authentic video.

In this study, we test whether exposure to derogatory information about an opposing political candidate on social media results in more affective polarisation when it is presented in a fake news format compared to a real news format. The study also tests whether the potential effect is mediated by perceived intergroup threat. Moreover, we also examine whether social media literacy skills moderate this mediated effect. The participants of this study are social media users in Indonesia, as it was observed that affective polarization increased rapidly in Indonesia in the past years, particularly before the general elections.

The aim of this study is to investigate how often Swiss media users are exposed to hate speech. Previous research has investigated this from a subjective perspective; survey participants indicated how often they encounter "hate speech" on a scale from "never" to "very often". This leaves two open questions: First, what is the actual frequency of exposure (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly)? Second, what kind of content do media users see when they encounter hate speech and does their subjective categorization correspond to academic or legal definitions of hate speech? To answer these questions, we conduct a twofold study: First, we conduct a representative survey among citizens in Switzerland (DE-CH and FR-CH, N = 2'000), in which we assess the self-reported frequency of exposure to hate speech on a scale from "several times a day" to "never". Moreover, we show the participants concrete examples of different types of hate speech (insults, defamation, call for violence) and mere incivility (which is rude language, but not hate speech) and assess how often these types of messages are encountered. From those participants who report to encounter hate speech at least several times a week, we will invite a group of N = 150 to participate in a mobile longitudinal linkage analysis: participants will collect all instances of hate speech they see in their daily media use during two weeks by uploading a picture/screenshot. Each time they upload content, they answer a short survey. We will then code the uploaded content to determine if it is hate speech (insult, defamation, call for violence), mere incivility, or none of these.

The agreement with conspiracy theories is affected by individual as well as situational factors, including psychological stress, according to cross-sectional studies. Its effect was, however, never confirmed experimentally. Theoretical literature also expects the effect of acute stress reaction, which was never tested. An experimental blinded randomized study will explore the effect of stress reaction on the belief in conspiracy theories in a sample of 90 students of general medicine. The experimental group will undergo a standardized stress induction procedure Maastricht Acute Stress Test (MAST) (Smeets et al., 2012), the control group will undergo control procedure mimicking the experimental one but not stressing. The agreement with conspiracy theories will be compared between the two groups and correlated with changes in salivary cortisol level and blood pressure.

This experiment tests how specific elements of news coverage influence attitudes toward Supreme Court nominees, specifically the first Black woman to be nominated, Ketanji Brown Jackson. In particular, we will test how the intersectional identities of quoted sources in new articles contribute to perceptions of the candidate and her qualifications, as well as perceptions of the news coverage. We also examine how emphasizing Black representation and empowerment in American politics influences perceptions of the nomination. Does emphasizing the nomination’s historic nature improve or undermine support? And, are these effects of news coverage contingent on participant identity, ideology, partisanship, and beliefs about race?

If voters generally follow elite cues to form foreign policy opinions, how do they form their opinions when elites in their own party disagree? Prominent theories of public opinion formation, which give pride of place to partisanship in explaining the effects of elite cues, offer less guidance when elite disagreement happens within parties rather than between them. Two heuristic models of public opinion formation put emphasis on either partisan loyalty or surprising opinions, and produce distinct expectations for opinion formation in a complex multiple-cue environment. Drawing on these models, in contrast to recent work, I predict that intraparty dissent will weaken a president's persuasive power when it comes to moving partisan-identified voters' opinions on policy issues. In this paper, I propose a survey experiment to test these and other predictions.

This registration is about the research that will be done on the connection between interpersonal and institutional trust. It will be a master's thesis for the VU University in Amsterdam

This is a pre-registration for an experiment testing the hypothesis that exposure to social media content undermines support for free expression.

The purpose of this study is to better understand people’s belief in misinformation in the context of science denial. There is an increasing amount of literature on what characteristics determine if misinformation is regarded as believable or not (Carnahan et al. 2022). However, an under-researched element is whether these misinformation claims are made openly “nitrogen is not harmful to the climate” or in a way that casts doubt on the scientific evidence without making an outright claim “I think it is strange that these scientists have changed their story about the outcomes of this study. What are their motives?” (van der Goot 2022). It is essential to gain more knowledge about this since these messages are probably less likely to be picked up by fact-checkers. They technically do not make any false claims and could potentially roam around in the public debate relatively unchecked. It is yet unclear whether these more suggestive forms of spreading misinformation have similar effects to outright claims of misinformation. We want to examine whether belief in misinformation and trust in science is influenced by the level of conviction contained in the message. Our theoretical expectations are that exposure to misinformation will negatively affect people’s trust in science as well as well as their perceived credibility of source of the accurate information. Moreover, we expect that people exposed to misinformation claims are more likely to view the false claim as accurate than people who are not exposed to any misinformation claims. We expect that these effects are stronger in individuals’ who express stronger rightist or populist attitudes and weaker in more highly educates individuals. To our knowledge there is no existing literature studying the differential effect of suggestive versus blatant misinformation claims so for this we take an explorative approach. Our proposal concerns a survey experiment with a 1*3 experimental design. Participants are assigned randomly to a news article about the impact of nitrogen. The neutral condition will contain accurate information and no misinformation claims. The two treatment conditions will contain misinformation claims with different levels of conviction. We will refer to fictional politicians and experts in this news article. The source of the news article will appear to be NU.nl, a news website that is generally regarded as neutral and trustworthy.

With regard to many of the vexing problems facing the United States (and global community), it is fair to say that collective action is the primary barrier. For example, with regard to climate change, the warnings have been issued for decades and technological advances provide a path to avoid calamity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing, masking, and rapid development of vaccines created opportunities to limit the death-toll, but resistance to each solution extended the scale and impact of the disease. There are many such instances in which collective action lags the existence of solutions. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that, when faced with large-scale problems, it is social scientists who have the most ground to make up. It is with these limitations in mind that Druckman (2021) synthesized the vast literature on social influence into a Generalizing Persuasion (GP) Framework. This framework illustrates the impressive amount of literature that exists on the social and psychological barriers to collection action. The field of communication is certainly not absent in important contributions. For example, the framing of messages (Chong & Druckman, 2007; Gamson, 1992), the use of a narrative (Dahlstrom, 2012; Fisher, 1985), and avoidance of directive or controlling language (Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Raines, 2013). There is one crucial area of communication scholarship, however, where our understanding of message composition strategies is entirely lacking - we do not know what constitutes a good argument. In his GP Framework, Druckman (2012) characterizes the scholarship on this question as providing “scant theoretical insight” (p. 73) because the ultimate definition of argument quality is wrapped up in “an inadequate tautology” (p. 73). He is not the first to level this complaint (cf. Carpenter, 20215; Dijk et al., 2003; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Hoeken et al., 2020; O’Keefe, 2003). We seek to contribute to the ongoing conversation about argument quality by proposing a practical definition of good arguments. A practical definition focuses on the question of utility to those who wish to communicate information to a public and seek guidance about effective message construction. This is in contrast to the two dominant approaches, empirical definitions (e.g., Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), in which a good argument is defined as an argument that evokes more positive and fewer negative reactions, and normative definitions (e.g., Johnson et al., 2004; Hoeken et al., 2020; Park et al., 2007) in which a good argument is defined as an argument that offers more desirable consequences and/or a higher probability of being true. We begin our search for a practical definition of argument with a maxim informed by the psychological reactance literature (Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018): namely that people wish to possess the necessary information to draw their own conclusions. This is hardly a new premise, in fact it echoes Aristotle’s view that audiences prefer to come to their own conclusions and will reward speakers who use enthymeme to engage the listener’s faculty of reasoning (Bitzer, 1959). Ours is not an explicit test of the enthymeme or psychological reactance theory - though we are indebted to both frameworks. Our opening position is that people do not merely want to know what experts think, they want to know why experts think what they do. In other words, we define a weak argument as a claim supported by an appeal to expertise whereas we define a strong argument as a claim supported by an explanation of the evidence experts evaluated to render a judgment. Our fundamental premise is that these evidence explanations will outperform appeals to expertise when the claim is controversial. Furthermore, we expect evidence explanations to be even more important when audiences are disinclined to accept expert judgment either due to a directional motivation (Kunda, 1990) or a general lack of trust in elite opinion (Capella, 2002; Mede & Schäfer, 2020). We also see no reason that one of the most promising areas of scholarship on reducing message resistance - namely narrative persuasion - should not be incorporated into any practical definition of argument strength. However, we seek to contribute to scholarship on narrative persuasion by adding the concept of narrative illustration. Specifically, we argue that narratives can aid in explaining the nature of scientific evidence by providing a case-in-point or illustration of the scientific data - which aggregates many individual cases to provide an overall picture. Thus, a good argument would present the aggregated data and then provide an illustration in narrative form. There are numerous politicized information environments that are suitable tests of our expectations including but not limited to climate change, the efficacy of COVID-19 remediation measures, the legal evidence against prominent politicians involved in the January 6th attack, the evidence of voter fraud in general and the legitimacy of the 2020 election in particular, and the historical record regarding issues surrounding slavery, reconstruction, and civil rights. Though all of these would make excellent contexts to test our theoretical expectations, we focus on the issue of race-informed education in elementary schools. We select this topic for three reasons. First, it intersects three salient attitudes linked to cognitive biases in information processing: partisanship, racial attitudes, and issues of low social trust. Second, it lends itself to a straightforward experimental manipulation because the race-informed curriculum in question can easily be explained in a simple two-group treatment/control randomized experiment, facilitating the operationalization of evidence demonstration. Third, compared to other issues (especially climate change and COVID-19), race informed curriculum is an important but less studied topic that directly affects the academic audience of this study.

The goal of this study is to examine whether exposure to anti-feminist comments reduces online public expression about gender issues from those who hold relatively positive attitudes toward feminism/feminists, and explore possible mechanisms of such effects. We expand our previous experiment by testing the effect with a nationally-representative sample based on age, region, and gender. We also aim to explore possible mechanisms of the effects, such as perceived public opinion toward feminism/feminists.

In recent years, Journalism in many Western democracies – such as Germany - is facing a decrease of trust in the traditional news media (Newman et al., 2022). The profession is challenged through social platforms impairing journalistic gatekeeping processes, allowing false alternative narratives to flourish among a large audience. Additionally, these platforms give voice to influential politicians increasingly questioning the news media’s legitimacy (Egelhofer et al., 2021). This phenomenon has been increasingly observed with (mainly right-wing populist) politicians, such as Donald Trump’s Fake News narrative. At the same time, rational media criticism from elites is crucial for democracies to ensure that journalists attain to their democratic functions. This may be the case with misinformation attributions, referring to pointing out false information in the media as honest mistakes. Negativity towards the established media from politicians becomes problematic, however, when the boundaries of democratic civil communication are crossed and the criticism does not strive to improve the quality of journalistic output, but to strategically fuel distrust or to share opposing (disinformation) narratives. In these instances, disinformation is used as a delegitimizing label, which can have negative consequences for citizens’ media trust. With this study, we will qualitatively explore and typologize these different types of media criticism. That way, we aim to gain a better understanding of how media criticism, including mis- and disinformation accusations from politicians, can look like and be distinguished, as well as how they may (strategically) serve to share opposing truth claims.

Social identity is a key driver of online behavior, where people usually form connections and communities based on their shared social identities. However, the salience of social identity in fostering normative behavior could vary based on the contextual and technological differences between different online platforms. On social media, network and privacy cues are important technological factors that determine adherence to normative behavior. This study will test whether social media users are more likely to cross-collaborate with out-group members within ultimatum game bargaining interactions when the others are less socially distant, and when their actions are not made public. Participants will consider the same monetary split from out-group proposers under varying conditions of privacy and social distancing. Accepting an offer yields the proposed payout; rejecting it causes each player to earn nothing. This study will be conducted through an online survey on a panel of Twitter users in the Indian context and replicated for a panel in the United States. The main dependent variable is: participants' acceptance or refusal of offers to collaborate with out-group members. The experiment would manipulate the social distance cues on their Twitter profile ranging from around 50 mutual friends (socially close) to no mutual friends (socially distant. The experiment will also manipulate the level of privacy afforded to the announcement of their decision broadcast to the general public (no privacy), close friends (limited privacy), or to no one at all (full privacy).

This pre-registration adds a new independent variable in building an understanding of how privacy and norms influence collaborations online. Social identity is a key driver of online behavior, where people usually form connections and communities based on their shared social identities. However, the salience of social identity in fostering normative behavior could vary based on the contextual and technological differences between different online platforms. On social media, network and privacy cues are important technological factors that determine adherence to normative behavior. This study will test whether social media users are more likely to cross-collaborate with out-group members within ultimatum game bargaining interactions when the others are less socially distant, and when their actions are not made public. Participants will consider the same monetary split from out-group proposers under varying conditions of privacy and social distancing. Accepting an offer yields the proposed payout; rejecting it causes each player to earn nothing. This study will be conducted through an online survey on a panel of Twitter users in the Indian context and replicated for a panel in the United States. The main dependent variable is: participants' acceptance or refusal of offers to collaborate with out-group members. The experiment would manipulate the social distance cues on their Twitter profile ranging from around 50 mutual friends (socially close) to no mutual friends (socially distant. The experiment will also manipulate the level of privacy afforded to the announcement of their decision broadcast to the general public (no privacy) or to no one at all (full privacy). It thus deleted one of the privacy conditions as compared to the original pre-registration.

All over Europe, we see rising politicization of mainstream media as well as increasing attacks questioning their legitimacy, particularly under populist radical right-wing politicians. Especially in our ‘post-factual' era, opinions are often equated with facts, leaving the evidence-based mainstream media in a vulnerable position. Accusations of media bias and disinformation can have detrimental consequences for public media trust and democratic stability, especially in times of crisis. Yet, we still have little systematic knowledge about whether individuals themselves actually perceive bias in different news outlets. Relatedly, we need to better understand to what extent citizens observe such accusations voiced by politicians at all, and how this impacts their evaluations of these politicians. Extending previous research on (delegitimizing) media criticism (e.g. Egelhofer et al., 2021), we thus intend to understand the role of bias perceptions in the relationship between media, politicians, and citizens through looking at the intersection of bias as a perceptual phenomenon and its pervasiveness and effectiveness as an accusatory label. Combining these perspectives, we aim to grasp the relationship between the pervasiveness of bias perceptions among citizens, their self-reported exposure to elite accusations, and their evaluations of politicians spreading these accusations. Hence, we propose three measures shedding light on the role of politicians and citizens’ perceptions in a discursive crisis threatening the legitimacy of mainstream media in democratic societies.

This article examines Russian public diplomacy mechanisms in Africa. These include the intentional use of historical ties, various aid programmes in education and health, the targeted use of international broadcasting and digital media, and the exploitation of anti-Western sentiments on the continent. Russia employs these to win the hearts and minds of African publics for its national interest. The article first explores Moscow’s public diplomacy in general and analyses the challenges Russia faces in Africa, which has become a ‘dumping ground’ for public diplomacy campaigns by the US, the EU and its members, the UK, and China. The article argues that Russia’s public diplomacy in Africa is state-centric with little or no civil society involvement. This makes its message appear incredible. The article concludes that Russian public diplomacy efforts in Africa have intensified anti-Western sentiments in African countries where Moscow’s presence is strong.

A study on disinformation using experimental methods. Our interest lays in the contextual presentation of intentionally deceptive beliefs.

New digital technologies have caused a substantial shift in how people obtain information as the fourth estate increasingly becomes only a portion of peoples’ information diets. As the incorporation of digital technologies has fundamentally changed how people interact with their information landscape, so too has their incorporation into the purposeful creation and dissemination of deceitful information (Chesney and Citron, 2019). The development of open-source technologies and artificial intelligence-driven machine learning techniques create new tools that can be consistently co-opted by nefarious political entrepreneurs to overcome efforts by those who wish to identify and correct misleading or factually incorrect information (DiCicco and Agarwal, 2020; Ciampaglia et al, 2018; Anderson and Raine, 2017). Such technologies have included the use of deep learning and open-source technologies to create fake news stories via AI-generated text (Kreps et al., 2020) and audio (Whittaker et al., 2020) as well as synthetically-manipulated video, colloquially known as Deepfakes (Barari et al., 2021; Dobber et al., 2020). While new possibilities for understanding disinformation are growing, there remains a need to learn how concepts and theories in political communication and political psychology can help explain this phenomenon and its effects. One area that has been devoid of much study is how manipulators can use a combination of new technology, deceptive information, and a more open information environment to create disruptive media frames that can alter political messaging or narratives. The predominant focus of this dissertation will be to borrow from the technocognition (Lewandowsky et al. 2017) and current framing/counter-framing (Chong, 2013) theoretical approaches to better understand how developments in new synthetic media formats, predominantly Deepfake technology, affect the processing of disinformation using a concept I define as “distortion framing”. Distortion framing can be thought of as both visually-augmenting and deceptively inserting sound bites into a political story to help change the frame or focus of the message and potentially create uncertainty within typically resolute attitudes or opinions.

Research on selective exposure and cognitive dissonance suggests that individuals prefer attitude-consistent messages (Festinger, 1962; Lazarsfeld et al., 1944). Exposing oneself only to confirmatory information leads to higher attitude strength and polarisation (Knobloch-Westerwick & Jingbo Meng, 2009; Knobloch-Westerwick & Johnson, 2014; Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2011). However, as people increasingly rely on social media platforms to access their news, they are more likely to be exposed to counter-attitudinal messages (Jang, 2013). Still, attitude polarisation on topics such as immigration and asylum (e.g. Alba & Foner, 2017; Baker & Edmonds, 2021) and climate change (E. K. Smith & Mayer, 2019; Zhou, 2016) grows ever stronger, suggesting that selective exposure only partly explains attitude polarisation for some of these topics. This study proposes that, in addition to selective exposure and filter bubbles (Pariser, 2011), confirmatory bias plays a significant role in reinforcing existing attitudes – leading to higher polarisation. More specifically, cognitive bias is a systematic thought process caused by the tendency of the human brain to simplify information processing through a filter of personal experience and preferences (Igartua et al., 2011). Thus, biased processing implies using schema, prior attitudes and other internal and peripheral cues to maintain and defend prior attitudes and belief systems (Igartua, 2013). For highly polarised issues – such as immigration, asylum or climate change, on which people have strong prior attitudes – it can be expected that individuals will prioritise this type of information processing. Identity-related frames are those that emphasise social identities and their shares beliefs and values. Some identity-related frames focus on ethnocultural (multicultural, assimilation) or national (nationalist, cosmopolitan) identities. The use of cosmopolitan or global-identity framing in climate change has been well documented. These frames emphasise that climate change affects humankind as a whole and, as such, climate change and environmental protection is a shared responsibility among all human beings. However, more recently, we have observed a rise in the use of generational-identity-related framing among climate change activists to advocate for radical climate change action. These frames emphasise that younger and future generations will be disproportionately more affected by climate change than older and past generations, while the latter carry the most responsibility for climate change adverse consequences. Because identity-related frames focus on social groups, their norms values and beliefs, we can expect social identities to affect their cognitive processing. Specifically, we can expect people will tend to use group cues to interpret the information presented in the frame and, consequently, assign more salience to those considerations aligned with their social identities while overlooking other considerations. Based on research on framing effects and biased cognitive processing, This study posits that, when exposed to frames-in-communication that emphasise some aspects of an issue, individuals may assign more or less salience to those considerations depending on whether they confirm or clash (respectively) with their prior attitudes and social identities. In particular, this study will explore the role of social identities in frames-in-thought (FIT) and frame interpretation. In particular, this study investigates the role of age and age group identification strength in FIT. Overall, it is expected that younger participants will assign more salience to generational FIT than older participants, who can be expected to assign more salience to global FIT. In turn, higher generational FIT (compared to global FIT) will be related to higher support for climate change policies. Additionally, this study explores the role of generational identification strength in the predicted effects.

News recommender systems (NRS) based on algorithms are used in social media platforms and online news portals to recommend content to users based on their previous user behaviour, explicit preferences, or the behaviour and preferences of similar users. In this project, we investigate to what extent users rely on algorithmically curated outlets specifically for news, to what extent users are aware of NRS, how they perceive such systems, and how this relates to trust in news and media organisations. In addition, we are interested in how important users consider normative aspects such as transparency, data protection, and control options. For this purpose, we conduct a representative survey in different media systems (CH, NL, UK, USA, PL), in which the media organisations are at different stages of development in this respect. Since this is a larger project, in the following the research questions and hypotheses are divided into different topical blocks that are planned to be published separately due to the large scope of the project. This preregistration was registered during the time of data collection but before accessing the data (i.e., before receiving any data from the market research company that recruited participants and collected the data for this study).

Demand for domestic redistribution has been the subject of hundreds of studies, but few have focused on international redistribution. As inequality between countries remains the main component of global inequality, this is a surprising omission. This study is the first to explore demand for international redistribution in the Global South. Using an original survey experiment, it elicits perceptions of between-country inequality and tests effects of factual information on attitudes. Its findings shed light on the pressures governments in the Global South experience, thus contributing to our understanding of the politics of global inequality and international redistribution.

The aim of this research project is to identify and assess the factors that affect the decision-making process occurring when individuals evaluate information on Social Networking Platforms. In particular, the goal is to understand whether heuristic thinking increases individual vulnerability toward propaganda messages disseminated on these online platforms, thus increasing their circulation.

In this experiment, we want to investigate the effect of different levels of agency in Immersive Journalism (IJ) on the audience. We want to firstly, test to which extent higher agency in IJ translates to a higher level of participation in and through media. Additionally, we want to investigate the agency paradox: whether different agency possibilities lead to different memories and understandings while being considered more accurate (see Aitamuorto, 2019).

Research on selective exposure and cognitive dissonance suggests that individuals prefer attitude-consistent messages (Festinger, 1962; Lazarsfeld et al., 1944). Exposing oneself only to confirmatory information leads to higher attitude strength and polarisation (Knobloch-Westerwick & Jingbo Meng, 2009; Knobloch-Westerwick & Johnson, 2014; Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2011). However, as people increasingly rely on social media platforms to access their news, they are more likely to be exposed to counter-attitudinal messages (Jang, 2013). Still, attitude polarisation on topics such as immigration and asylum (e.g. Alba & Foner, 2017; Baker & Edmonds, 2021) and climate change (E. K. Smith & Mayer, 2019; Zhou, 2016) grows ever stronger, suggesting that selective exposure only partly explains attitude polarisation for some of these topics. This study proposes that, in addition to selective exposure and filter bubbles (Pariser, 2011), confirmatory bias plays a significant role in reinforcing existing attitudes – leading to higher polarisation. More specifically, cognitive bias is a systematic thought process caused by the tendency of the human brain to simplify information processing through a filter of personal experience and preferences (Igartua et al., 2011). Thus, biased processing implies using schema, prior attitudes and other internal and peripheral cues to maintain and defend prior attitudes and belief systems (Igartua, 2013). For highly polarised issues – such as immigration, asylum or climate change, on which people have strong prior attitudes – it can be expected that individuals will prioritise this type of information processing. Based on research on framing effects and biased cognitive processing, This study posits that, when exposed to frames-in-communication that emphasise some aspects of an issue, individuals may assign more or less salience to those considerations depending on whether they confirm or clash (respectively) with their prior attitudes and social identities. In particular, this study will explore the interaction effect of political identity and exposure to nationalist climate change frames – increasingly common among right-wing (Hultman et al., 2020) as well as left-wing media and politicians (Conversi & Friis Hau, 2021; Ridanpää, 2021) – on nationalist frames-in-thought. This study will consist of a between-subject online experiment using a US sample of N = 850 recruited using Bilendi in a 2 (frame exposure: nationalist; control) x 2 (political identity: Republican, Democrat) design.

Scholars over the years have delved into the discourse of states’ foreign publics engagementin their foreign policy objectives. This analysis is done generally with the western perspective of public diplomacy with recent Asian scholarship evolving. As a result, this study aims to reflect on public diplomacy from an African perspective. It analyses how African governments have engaged their foreign publics (foreign governments and their citizens) to attract foreign aid, tourism, and investments in their nation-building and development trajectory. The article explores African public diplomacy mechanisms such as diasporas, nation branding, cultural diplomacy, and many others. It also digests into some challenges confronting African governments in their public diplomacy campaigns, like lack of research, human and financial resources, and coherent foreign policy documents. The article’s findings demonstrate that although Africa generally has rich public diplomacy resources, these are not adequately harnessed in most African states’ foreign policy. This situation has led to poor foreign policy implementation by most African governments. Itcontributes to public diplomacy scholarship in general and African public diplomacy in particular, which scholars have underexplored. It concludes that scholars should delve into the exegesis of the rich African public diplomacy currencies.

This major research paper explores the historical shifts in labour and childhood, highlighting children’s ongoing implication in the capitalist market. My focus is influencer marketing, the newest form of digital work. The onset of social media and the introduction of the “influencer” is a cultural and political-economic shift that has expanded the definition of labour, whether this form of labour is widely recognized or not. The Instamom has emerged from this redefinition of labour; these individuals have curated influencer status by advertising their life as a mom on social media, particularly Instagram. This becomes problematic as children are inherently involved in the income- generating labour process, and there are no laws protecting children from possible exploitation. In addition to labour, children are also unable to consent to having a permanent digital footprint which poses an ethical threat. There exists a substantial body of research and literature on the topic of child labour. Yet, there remains a fixation on child labour in the form of physical exploitation of children while corporations profit. Many international organizations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) outline the risks and hazards associated with child labour to fight for children’s rights and lobby for rigorous labour laws. While childhood and child labour within research and advocacy groups is understood as static and physical, this project presents alternate theorizations. I identify four subthemes that will be critically analyzed: Sponsored posts, candid photos, baby bump pictures, and relatable posts. Combined, all four themes showcase how children perform a necessary form of labour in this new social media economy I conclude the inclusion of children in Instamom content constitutes a form of labour and requires recognition as such for a legislative response.

Existing theories agree that China's rise will be one of the most fundamental events for world politics but debate the scale of China's impact. I demonstrate how China attempts to attract support for new forms of order through rhetoric and frames that mobilize rather than coerce support for change. To determine the conditions when China's social strategies succeed, I elaborate the most important hypotheses of institutional coalition-building. Theories that focus on messaging anticipate that China's frames widely mobilize elites by interpreting the need for change through the lens of sovereignty --- a foundational value of statehood. On the other hand, theories focused on institutional context expect balkanization. Factors such as identity and prior socialization from the United States could lower the efficacy of China's sovereignty frames. In a case study, I first outline China's approach to building order in the process of developing a Cybercrime Convention through an analysis of statements, votes, and submissions. Through an original survey experiment with diplomatic elites at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I test the microprocesses of attraction with those holding the levers of power within international organizations.