Current Projects

Formation, Projection, and Audience Reception Across Diverse Information Environments (funded by the German Research Foundation, duration 2027-2030) 

Kostiantyn Yanchenko, Edda Humprecht

Foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) by authoritarian states represents an acute and persistent threat to democratic societies. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian state actors have intensified their efforts to influence European and other Western democracies through coordinated information operations. Among other factors, rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) facilitate the deployment of relatively cheap, highly automated, easily adaptable, and multimodal infrastructures capable of targeting public opinion across countries, languages, and societal issues. 

Yet, while the means of information influence continue to evolve and diversify, foreign actors still largely rely on the purposeful and systematic dissemination of strategic narratives – whether through state-controlled propaganda outlets, synthetic social media accounts, or AI-generated visuals. How these narratives function across changing information environments and under what conditions they effectively influence public opinion remains insufficiently understood. The project addresses this gap through a large-scale, comparative, theory-driven, and multi-method investigation. 

The project consists of three work packages (WPs). WP1 focuses on the role of strategic adaptation in foreign information influence, examining how foreign actors adjust their messaging to the characteristics of target information environments, including regulatory frameworks, patterns of audience information consumption, and existing socio-political cleavages. WP2 focuses on the role of domestic actors in the indirect projection of strategic narratives. It traces the entry points of foreign information influence across different media systems and political configurations, thereby identifying the conditions that make its amplification by domestic actors more likely. Finally, WP3 examines the reception of strategic narratives through survey experiments. It investigates how audiences interpret the strategic intent behind such messaging and tests whether and how these interpretations relate to agreement with strategic narratives.

The project aims to generate findings of both empirical and theoretical relevance that will inform future scholarly debates on disinformation, propaganda, and FIMI, while also contributing to policy and civil society initiatives aimed at strengthening democratic resilience to information influence.

Visual politics in contemporary digital environments

Xin Zhou

My PhD project focuses on visual politics in contemporary digital environments. I study how state and organizational actors use short-video platforms, particularly TikTok, to disseminate political narratives and influence transnational audiences. Using computational and multimodal methods, my research analyzes large-scale visual and audiovisual data to understand how platform structures, algorithms, and content features shape the production, circulation, and visibility of political communication. The project aims to advance empirical knowledge on digital propaganda and the role of visual media in global information flows.

Twitch as a Platform for Political Opinion Formation

Maria F. Grub, Antonia Wurm, Julian Kauk

This project investigates live-streaming as an emerging mode of political opinion formation and a key site of incidental exposure to political content. Focusing on the live-streaming platform Twitch, the study combines computational approaches (topic modeling, sentiment and emotion analysis) with qualitative methods (interviews). Through this mixed-methods approach, the project analyzes the thematic structures, affective dynamics, and interaction patterns that shape political communication in German Twitch streams. By examining where and how especially young audiences encounter and engage with political information in real time, the project advances research on politainment, participatory political communication, and the role of live interaction in facilitating incidental political exposure. This project is funded by the LIBERTY Connect Fund.