Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu

Clemson University | CU · Department of Communication Studies

This comparative study examines the interplay of religious messaging and disinformation in the election campaign material of Jair Bolsonaro and Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the 2022 Brazilian and 2023 Turkish presidential elections. We employ a mixed-methods approach, combining computational keyword filtering and content analysis with qualitative disco...

A year ago, we submitted an IEEE VIS paper entitled “Swaying the Public? Impacts of Election Forecast Visualizations on Emotion, Trust, and Intention in the 2022 U.S. Midterms” [50], which was later bestowed with the honor of a best paper award. Yet, studying such a complex phenomenon required us to explore many more design paths than we could coun...

Changes in the global media environment now challenge relationships between and within states. To expand understandings of mediated public diplomacy, this study examined 13,500 Instagram posts distributed on RT’s non-Russian accounts from September 2021–September 2022. It used LDA to identify RT topics across language accounts, explored the topics’...

In 2023, we submitted an IEEE VIS paper entitled “Swaying the Public? Impacts of Election Forecast Visualizations on Emotion, Trust, and Intention in the 2022 U.S. Midterms”, which was later bestowed with the honor of a best paper award. Yet, studying such a complex phenomenon required us to explore many more design paths than we could count, and c...

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 messag...

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' in...

We conducted a longitudinal study during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, investigating the real-world impacts of uncertainty visualizations. Using our forecast model of the governor elections in 33 states, we created a website and deployed four uncertainty visualizations for the election forecasts: single quantile dotplot (1-Dotplot), dual quantil...

The last four decades have been shaped by the rise of Islamist politics across significant swathes of the globe. Whether by gun or by ballot box, various Islamist movements--from as far and wide as the Malian desert and Indonesia’s archipelagos--have sought to obtain power and govern territories, in a bid to revive an Islamic ancient regime. With t...

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...

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 co...

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 f...

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...

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 herit...

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 vacc...

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 argumentat...

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...

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...

This bibliography contains books, edited volumes, journal articles, book chapters, theses, grey literature, and other resources on rebel governance, which refers to the informal takeover of state authority and political-administrative activities by insurgent non-state actors. The publications compiled herein represent the major thematic fields of r...

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. W...

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 analyses 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 W...

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...

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...

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 (former...

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...