Journal Articles

2024

1. Signalling media professionalism: comparative social constructions of RT and CGTN

   Kareem El Damanhoury, Carol Kay Winkler, Virginia Massignan, and 3 more authors

   The Journal of International Communication, 2024

   Publisher: Routledge _eprint: https://doi.org/10.1080/13216597.2024.2359715

   Abs

   The messaging content of Russia Today (RT) and China Global Television Network (CGTN) provides alternatives to those offered in mainstream western media. Comparative studies point to RT’s aggressive, ideological rhetoric and CGTN’s more tacit, celebratory, and culture-focused approach. This study adds to these understandings by examining how messaging strategies construct media professionalism – one of the four historic pillars of media systems analysis – to delegitimize media systems of rival states and build credibility of their own platforms and by assessing the dialectical role of key oppositional voices to Western media hegemony in the digital sphere. Using a mixed methods approach, we analyzed thousands of RT and CGTN’s Facebook posts across language accounts between 2017 and 2022. The study documents that RT and CGTN utilise arguments by comparison to assess competing news outlets and redefine scholarly modes of assessing media professionalism. The study identified four metrics used by RT and CGTN to evaluate media professionalism: source attribution, adherence to positive news values, distinctions from negative news standards of competing outlets, and relative commitment levels to free expression. It further reveals differences in RT and CGTN’s language-based, message targeting in relation to media professionalism.

2023

1. Social Media Sentiment about COVID-19 Vaccination Predicts Vaccine Acceptance among Peruvian Social Media Users the Next Day

   Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, Erik C. Nisbet, Matthew T. Osborne, and 5 more authors

   Vaccines, Apr 2023

   Abs

   Drawing upon theories of risk and decision making, we present a theoretical framework for how the emotional attributes of social media content influence risk behaviors. We apply our framework to understanding how COVID-19 vaccination Twitter posts influence acceptance of the vaccine in Peru, the country with the highest relative number of COVID-19 excess deaths. By employing computational methods, topic modeling, and vector autoregressive time series analysis, we show that the prominence of expressed emotions about COVID-19 vaccination in social media content is associated with the daily percentage of Peruvian social media survey respondents who are vaccine-accepting over 231 days. Our findings show that net (positive) sentiment and trust emotions expressed in tweets about COVID-19 are positively associated with vaccine acceptance among survey respondents one day after the post occurs. This study demonstrates that the emotional attributes of social media content, besides veracity or informational attributes, may influence vaccine acceptance for better or worse based on its valence.

2. Special issue: The (international) politics of content takedowns: Theory, practice, ethics

   James Fitzgerald, and Ayse D. Lokmanoglu

   Policy & Internet, Apr 2023
3. Montevideo Convention and CGTN: Defining Statehood for Global Outreach

   Keyu Alexander Chen, Virginia Massignan, Mor Yachin, and 2 more authors

   International Journal of Communication, Apr 2023

   Abs

   State-based global media efforts are rapidly expanding and have attracted a wide audience reach. Instagram, a rapidly growing photo- and video-sharing platform, however, remains understudied. To fill the gap, this study examines the audience-targeting strategies of CGTN (China Global Television Network) Instagram account about the United Nations’ institutional definition of statehood: territorial control, population control, governance, and capacity for alliances. Using topic modeling, this study reveals that CGTN Instagram, by intention or happenstance, promotes China’s relative institutional strength in relation to other countries through its targeted use of statehood-based posts across different languages. The study discusses a comparison of the divergent strategies of CGTN and RT statehood posts. Whereas RT adopts more aggressive rhetoric to showcase its military might and undermine the institutional legitimacy of rival states, CGTN adopts more celebratory means to expand its influence and promote its institutional successes. This study expands understanding of China’s global media operations, China-Russia comparative information strategy, and audience interaction on social media.

2022

1. Weaponizing reproductive rights: a mixed-method analysis of White nationalists’ discussion of abortions online

   Yotam Ophir, Meredith L. Pruden, Dror Walter, and 3 more authors

   Information, Communication & Society, Jun 2022

   Abs

   According to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, nonwhites, globalists and elites are plotting to eliminate the white race and its dominance through anti-white policies and increased immigration. In that context, abortion among white women is perceived by white nationalists (WN) as a betrayal of their ‘biological’ and ‘traditional’ gender role – procreation of white babies. While WN condemn abortion among white women as a murderous sin, at times they encourage the practice among nonwhites to solve demographic threats to white dominance. In this study, we use mixed methods, combining unsupervised machine learning with close textual analysis of 30,725 posts including the term ‘abortion’ published on the WN website Stormfront between 2001 and 2017. We identify three broad themes: White genocide, focused on the conspiracy theory and detailing the active actors in its alleged execution; political, focused on political agendas and laws; and WN reproductive reasoning, articulating and justifying the contradiction between supporting abortion for nonwhites but not for whites via politics of difference that emphasize nonwhites’ supposed inferior morality. We discuss WN’s unique and explicitly racist discourse around a medical topic like abortion, a staple of the conservative and religious right for decades, and how it is used to alleviate their cognitive dissonance resulting from their dual-stance on abortion. Such discourse could be harnessed to recruit members into the movement and normalize extreme, racist ideologies.

2. Vaccine Hesitancy Under the Magnifying Glass: A Systematic Review of the Uses and Misuses of an Increasingly Popular Construct

   Yotam Ophir, Nathan Walter, Dror Walter, and 4 more authors

   Health Communication, Mar 2022

   Abs

   Resistance to vaccines has hindered attempts to contain and prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases for centuries. More recently, however, the term “vaccine hesitancy” has been used to describe not necessarily outright resistance but also a delay in acceptance or uncertainty regarding vaccines. Given concerns about hesitancy and its impact on vaccine uptake rates, researchers increasingly shifted the focus from resistance to vaccines toward vaccine hesitancy. Acknowledging the urgency to accurately assess the phenomenon, it is critical to understand the state of the literature, focusing on issues of conceptualization and operationalization. To carry out this systematic review, we collected and analyzed all published empirical articles from 2000 to 2021 that explicitly included quantitative self-report measures of vaccine hesitancy (k = 86). Using a mixed-method approach, the review demonstrates and quantifies crucial inconsistencies in the measurement of the construct, lack of clarity in regard to the determination of who should or should not be defined as hesitant, and overreliance on unrepresentative samples. Crucially, our analysis points to a potential systematic bias toward exaggerating the level of hesitancy in the population. Modeling a vaccine hesitancy co-citation network, the analysis also points to the existence of insular academic silos that make it harder to achieve a unified measurement tool. Theoretical and practical implications for academics, practitioners, and policymakers are discussed.

3. Vaccine discourse in white nationalist online communication: A mixed-methods computational approach

   Dror Walter, Yotam Ophir, Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, and 1 more author

   Social Science & Medicine, Apr 2022

   Abs

   Introduction Research has indicated a growing resistance to vaccines among U.S. conservatives and Republicans. Following past successes of the far-right in mainstreaming health misinformation, this study tracks almost two decades of vaccine discourse on the extremist, white nationalist (WN) online message-board Stormfront. We examine the argumentative repertoire around vaccines on the forum, and whether it assimilated to or challenged common arguments for and against vaccines, or extended it in ways unique to the racist WN agenda. Methods We use a mixed-methods approach, combining unsupervised machine learning of 8892 posts including the term “vaccin*“, published on Stormfront between 2001 and 2017. We supplemented the computational analysis with a manual coding of randomly sampled 500 posts, evaluating the prevalence of pro- and anti-vaccine sentiment, previously identified pro- and anti-vaccine arguments, and WN-specific arguments. Results Discourse was dynamic, increasing around specific events, such as outbreaks and following legal debates about vaccine mandates. We identified four themes: conspiracies, science, race and white innovation. The prominence of themes over time was relatively stable. Our manual coding identified levels of anti-vaccine sentiment that were much higher than found in the past on mainstream social media. Most anti-vaccine posts relied on common anti-vaccine tropes and not on WN conspiracy theories. Pro-vaccination posts, however, were supported by unique race-based arguments. Conclusion We find a high volume of anti-vaccine sentiment among WN on Stormfront, but also identify unique pro-vaccine arguments that echo the group’s racist ideology. Public health implication As with past health-related conspiracy theories, high levels of anti-vaccine sentiment in online far-right sociotechnical information systems could threaten public health, especially if it ‘spills-over’ to mainstream media. Many pro-vaccine arguments on the forum relied on racist, WN reasoning, thus preventing the authors from recommending the use of these unethical arguments in future public health communications.

4. Gendered radicalisation and ‘everyday practices’: An analysis of extreme right and Islamic State women-only forums

   Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, Alexandra Phelan, and Ayse D. Lokmanoglu

   European Journal of International Security, Dec 2022

   Abs

   A growing amount of literature is being devoted to interrogating gendered dynamics in both violent extremism and terrorism, contributing to the integration of international and feminist security. This includes how such dynamics can shape differences in the motivations and participation of women and men. By critically analysing ideological gender constructs in two women-only extremist forums – the Women’s Forum on Stormfront.org and Women Dawah, a Turkish-language pro-Islamic State group chat on Telegram – and employing feminist methodology, this article demonstrates how gendered online spaces influence women’s ‘everyday practices’ within extremist movements. We argue that women-only online spaces not only facilitate gendered practices by allowing women to share everyday experiences, hold ideological discussions, and engage in debate, but also provide an important means to navigate these issues within the movement itself. In fact, women-only forums are actively used by women within extremist movements to exert greater agency in the face of otherwise constraining gendered ideological constructs. In turn, gendered everyday practices are reinforced by virtual communities that strengthen a sense of meaning – and purpose – in the movement, albeit being ideologically confined to the private sphere in many ways. This study sheds light not only on the differences in participation between women and men, but also on how such virtual communities can serve as spaces to frame and reinforce gendered practices in extremist movements. This has key implications for deradicalisation and disengagement strategies, which are at present overwhelmingly gender neutral. We provide evidence of how women navigate agency in these spaces, while challenging the stereotype that women in extremist movements are typically passive actors confined to traditional roles.

5. ISIS Media and Troop Withdrawal Announcements: Visualizing Community and Resilience

   Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, Carol K. Winkler, Kayla McMinimy, and 1 more author

   International Journal of Communication, Jan 2022

   Number: 0

   Abs

   When a president announces troop withdrawal, some factors change. Financial and human costs fall, and relations among international actors change. To expand contemporary understandings of how the influence of troop withdrawal announcements may extend beyond state-based media portrayals, and to explore additional factors that help explain changes in nonstate actor’s media campaigns, this study asks whether troop withdrawal announcements in regions of military conflict correspond to changes in the visual media output of militant groups. Focusing on issues leading up to and following President Trump’s Twitter announcement of U.S. troop withdrawals from Syria on December 19, 2018, we conducted a content analysis of 887 images in 102 issues of ISIS’s official weekly newsletter al-Naba that examined variables related to presentational, individual, and institutional components. A chi-squared analysis and post-facto qualitative analysis revealed that militant, nonstate groups emphasize community building, resilience, and nonprovocative postures in their media campaigns after troop withdrawal announcements. The findings have implications for the intersections of platforms and gatekeeping, and of military, media, nonstate actors, and the public.

6. Textual Messaging of ISIS’s al-Naba and the Context Drivers That Correspond to Strategic Changes

   Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, Carol K. Winkler, Monerah Al Mahmoud, and 2 more authors

   Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Aug 2022

   Abs

   Recognizing the importance of the Arabic publication for reaching a key target audience for ISIS, this expansive study of al-Naba’s text-based content will add to the scholarship of non-state actor communication using a mixed methodology of unsupervised machine learning and rhetorical analysis. First, it uses the ANTMN methodology to identify the frequency of the top Arabic thematic word clusters. Second, through time series and regression analysis, it adds to contemporary attention theories related to extremist group propaganda by uncovering what environmental factors correspond to changes in thematic emphasis. Third, it reveals the methodological steps necessary to improve evaluations of non-English large data discourse corpora.

2021

1. The Framing of COVID-19 in Italian Media and Its Relationship with Community Mobility: A Mixed-Method Approach

   Yotam Ophir, Dror Walter, Daniel Arnon, and 5 more authors

   Journal of Health Communication, Mar 2021

   Abs

   Media framing of epidemics was found to influence public perceptions and behaviors in experiments, yet no research has been conducted on real-world behaviors during public health crises. We examined the relationship between Italian news media coverage of COVID-19 and compliance with stay-at-home orders, which could impact the spread of epidemics. We used a computational method for framing analysis (ANTMN) and combined it with Google’s Community Mobility data. A time-series analysis using vector autoregressive models showed that the Italian media used media frames that were largely congruent with ones used by journalists in other countries: A scientific frame focusing on symptoms and health effects, a containment frame focusing on attempts to ameliorate risks, and a social frame, focusing on political and social impact. The prominence of different media frames over time was associated with changes in Italians’ mobility patterns. Specifically, we found that the social frame was associated with increased mobility, whereas the containment frame was associated with decreased mobility. The results demonstrate that the ways the news media discuss epidemics can influence changes in community mobility, above and beyond the effect of the number of deaths per day.

2. Censoring Extremism: Influence of Online Restriction on Official Media Products of ISIS

   Kayla McMinimy, Carol K. Winkler, Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, and 1 more author

   Terrorism and Political Violence, Nov 2021

   Publisher: Routledge _eprint: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09546553.2021.1988938

   Abs

   Recognizing that militant, non-state groups utilize social media and online platforms to reach members, sympathizers, and potential recruits, state agencies and social media corporations now increasingly regulate access to accounts affiliated with such groups. Scholars examining deplatforming efforts have, to date, focused on the extent of audience loss after account restrictions and the identification of strategies for regrouping online followers on the same or different platforms over time. Left unexplored is if and how militant non-state groups adapt their official messaging strategies in response to platform restrictions despite continuing online access to them. To begin to fill that gap, this study compares ISIS’s 550 images displayed in the group’s official newsletter al-Naba 6 months before and after Europol’s November 2019 take-down of terrorist affiliated accounts, groups, channels, and bots on Telegram. It conducts a content analysis of images related to militaries and their outcomes, non-military activities and their outcomes, and presentational forms. The findings demonstrate that ISIS visually emphasizes its standard priming approach but shifts its agenda-setting strategy. While retaining some of its standard visual framing practices, the group also alters frames, particularly those related to images showing opposing militaries and military outcome.

2020

1. From Pawn to Knights: The Changing Role of Women’s Agency in Terrorism?

   Mia Bloom, and Ayse D. Lokmanoglu

   Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Apr 2020

   Abs

   As terrorist groups became more technologically advanced with their media campaigns, the global audience began to see pictures of women in black burkas pledging allegiance to the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and posing with guns. Although there is a backlash against such change that we see reflected in the ideologies of violent extremism; the shifts in gender relations within these groups are significant to examine. Further, we face questions about the repatriation of ISIS women and children to their countries of origin – notably questions of agency and culpability within the mainstream media. This paper asks: to what extent have women’s roles changed within and across terrorist groups? Is there a move toward women’s empowerment, or is it a facade? Analyzing the three cases of Al-Qaeda (AQ), Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) does their advent represent a significant shift? The emergence of ISIS and Boko Haram’s explicitly gendered strategies of violence and recruitment within the highly patriarchal and misogynistic Salafi-jihadist culture, and PKK’s postconflict genderequal political advances demonstrates that addressing women’s agency through a gendered analysis outside of the masculine domain is imperative. Scholars should challenge the idea that women have limited roles.

2. Coin as Imagined Sovereignty: A Rhetorical Analysis of Coins as a Transhistorical Artifact and an Ideograph in Islamic State’s Communication

   Ayse D. Lokmanoglu

   Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Jul 2020

   Abs

   This research argues that an imagined artifact, the IS coins, serves as a transhistorical artifact, condensing the larger ideology of the violent extremist organization of legitimacy and sovereignty. This paper conducts a qualitative content analysis on all references to IS Coin within Dabiq, al-Naba, Rumiyah and all the official videos publicized in the above magazines from April 2014 to September 2018. The power of one artifact, in this case, coin, embodies the whole ideology of ISIS and transports the ideology from the past to the present to the future and the artifact belongs to daily life, amplifies its power.

2019

1. Definitions matter: a comparison of the global terrorism database and the U.S. governmental reports of terrorist incidents in Western Europe, 2002-2016

   Wojciech Kaczkowski, Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, and Carol Winkler

   Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Dec 2019

   Abs

   Definitional assumptions within and across terrorism databases cause variations in terrorist incidents that can have impactful implications for time-series analyses. This study compares 2002–2016 Western Europe attacks recorded by the open source media Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and US governmental reports, Country Reports on Terrorism (formerly Patterns of Global Terrorism). The findings indicate significant differences exist between the GTD and US governmental reports related to location, type, perpetrators, and target of attacks.

Edited Volumes

2025

1. Banal Fascism Online: Weaponizing the “Everyday” for Extreme Ends

   2025

2024

1. Networks Approach: Trolls and Bots in Malaysia

   Munira Mustaffa, and Ayse D. Lokmanoglu

   In Routledge Handbook of Conflict and Peacebuilding , 2024

2023

1. Monetary Economics, Illicit Economies, and Legitimation: The Case of Islamic State

   Ayse Lokmanoglu, and Alexandra Phelan

   In The Rule is for None but Allah: Islamist Approaches to Governance , Jul 2023

   Abs

   In Chapter 7, Ayse Lokmanoglu and Alexandra Phelan consider the case of ISIS utilizing the concept of eudaemonic legitimation, which involves appeals to economic performance and effectiveness as a legitimation strategy. They investigate how ISIS consolidated stable economic practices by way of illicit activities, while simultaneously justifying traditional monetary economics in an attempt to appeal to the organization’s performance and effectiveness as means of legitimation. These economic appeals of legitimation were not solely attempts to mobilize popular support, but also to assert the portrayal of sovereignty to an international audience.

2022

1. Birds of a feather: A comparative analysis of white supremacist and violent male supremacist discourses

   Meredith L. Pruden, Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, Anne Peterscheck, and 1 more author

   In Far-right Extremism in North America , Jul 2022

   Abs

   This chapter explores the intersection of white and male supremacy, both of which misrepresent women as genetically and intellectually inferior and reduce them to reproductive and/or sexual functions. The white power movement historically has been characterized by sexism and misogyny, as evidenced by the movement’s attempts to retain European heritage and maintain whiteness by policing the behavior and controlling the bodies of white women. However, the influence of white supremacist discourses on physically violent manifestations of the male supremacist movement remains largely understudied. Using supervised machine learning, we compare a corpus of violent male supremacist manifestos and other multimodal content with highly influential white nationalist texts and the manifestos of violent white supremacists to identify the shared beliefs, tropes and justifications for violence deployed within.

2020

1. Conducting Field Work in a Virtual Space, Exploring ISIS’ Encrypted Messaging on Telegram

   Mia Bloom, and Ayse D. Lokmanoglu

   In Stories from the Field A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science , Jul 2020
2. Hatred She Wrote: A Comparative Topic Analysis of Extreme Right and Islamic State Women-Only Forums

   Ayse Lokmanoglu, and Yannick Veilleux-Lepage

   In Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization , Jan 2020

   Abs

   Purpose – In order to explore how gender and sexual politics are played out in everyday practice within both the extreme right and jihadi-Salafist movements online, this chapter analyzes the content of two women’s only forums: The Women’s Forum on Stormfront.org and Women Dawah, a Turkish language pro-IS group chat on Telegram.Methodology – The Women’s Forum and the Women Dawah data sets were analyzed using structural topic modeling to uncover the differences and similarities in salient topics between White Nationalist and Islamic State women-only forums.Findings – The cross-ideological and multi-linguistic thematic analysis suggests that the safety of online spaces enables women to be more active, and serves digital support network for like-minding individuals. It also highlights that religion and ideology, whilst interwoven throughout posts on both platforms, they were more explicitly discussed within Women Dawah data.Originality/Value – This research uses a unique data set which was collected over one year to conduct a cross-ideological and multi-linguistic thematic analysis, a relatively uncommon approach.

2019

1. Communicating Terrorism and Counterterrorism

   Carol K. Winkler, and Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu

   In The Handbook of Communication and Security , Jan 2019

   Num Pages: 18

   Abs

   This essay reviews previous strategic communication research related to online messaging of terrorist groups and rhetorical responses of U.S. presidents to terrorism. It identifies future areas of needed communication research related to both terrorism and counterterrorism efforts. To illustrate terrorism-related communication studies, it concludes with a content analysis examining how ISIS changed the quantity and nature of online visual messaging campaign in response to intensified battlefield operations for recapturing East Mosul in 2016–2017. The findings indicate that initially ISIS significantly increased its photographic output and relied more heavily on the about to die trope in response to heightened on-the-ground military actions.

Preprints

2024

1. Transnational Network Dynamics of Problematic Information Diffusion

   Esteban Villa-Turek, Rod Abhari, Erik C. Nisbet, and 2 more authors

   Apr 2024

   arXiv:2404.01467 [physics, stat]

   Abs

   This study maps the spread of two cases of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and misinformation in Spanish and French in Latin American and French-speaking communities on Facebook, and thus contributes to understanding the dynamics, reach and consequences of emerging transnational misinformation networks. The findings show that co-sharing behavior of public Facebook groups created transnational networks by sharing videos of Medicos por la Verdad (MPV) conspiracy theories in Spanish and hydroxychloroquine-related misinformation sparked by microbiologist Didier Raoult (DR) in French, usually igniting the surge of locally led interest groups across the Global South. Using inferential methods, the study shows how these networks are enabled primarily by shared cultural and thematic attributes among Facebook groups, effectively creating very large, networked audiences. The study contributes to the understanding of how potentially harmful conspiracy theories and misinformation transcend national borders through non-English speaking online communities, further highlighting the overlooked role of transnationalism in global misinformation diffusion and the potentially disproportionate harm that it causes in vulnerable communities across the globe.

2. The Economy and Public Diplomacy: An Analysis of RT’s Economic Content and Context on Facebook

   Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, Carol K. Winkler, Kareem El Damanhoury, and 3 more authors

   May 2024

   arXiv:2405.01798 [cs, econ, math, q-fin]

   Abs

   With globalization’s rise, economic interdependence’s impacts have become a prominent factor affecting personal lives, as well as national and international dynamics. This study examines RT’s public diplomacy efforts on its non-Russian Facebook accounts over the past five years to identify the prominence of economic topics across language accounts. Computational analysis, including word embeddings and statistical methods, investigates how offline economic indicators, like currency values and oil prices, correspond to RT’s online economic content changes. The results demonstrate that RT uses message reinforcement associated economic topics as an audience targeting strategy and differentiates their use with changing currency and oil values.

Reports

2023

1. A Picture is Worth a Thousand (S)words: Classification and Diffusion of Memes on a Partisan Media Platform

   Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, Mowafak Allaham, Rod Abhari, and 2 more authors

   2023