Bence Kollanyi

• Centre for Social Sciences

Transformer-based machine learning models have become an essential tool for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks since the introduction of the method. A common objective of these projects is to classify text data. Classification models are often extended to a different topic and/or time period. In these situations, deciding how long a class...

Transformer-based machine learning models have become an essential tool for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks since the introduction of the method. A common objective of these projects is to classify text data. Classification models are often extended to a different topic and/or time period. In these situations, deciding how long a class...

Political communication increasingly takes on visual forms. Yet, despite their ubiquity in everyday communication and digital campaigning, the use of these visuals remains critically understudied. In this article, we investigate the formats and modes of visual content deployed by Twitter users over a two-week period leading up to the 2019 EU Parlia...

Today, an estimated 75% of the British public access information about politics and public life online, and 40% do so via social media. With this context in mind, we investigate information sharing patterns over social media in the lead-up to the 2019 UK General Elections, and ask: (1) What type of political news and information were social media u...

Social media is an important source of news and information in the United States. But during the 2016 US presidential election, social media platforms emerged as a breeding ground for influence campaigns, conspiracy, and alternative media. Anecdotally, the nature of political news and information evolved over time, but political communication resea...

In our project, we explored the involvement of bots in the black market of the social media attention economy. Based on our investigation of various intensities and qualities of automated engagement on Instagram and Tumblr, we developed a situated understanding of this market as an ensemble of software affordances, human interests and techniques of...

Voters increasingly rely on social media for news and information about politics. But increasingly, social media has emerged as a fertile soil for deliberately produced misinformation campaigns, conspiracy, and extremist alternative media. How does the sourcing of political news and information define contemporary political communication in differe...

There are rising concerns over the spread of misinformation in WhatsApp groups and the potential impact on political polarization, hindrance of public debate and fostering acts of political violence. As social media use becomes increasingly widespread, it becomes imperative to study how these platforms can be used to as a tool to spread propaganda...

In recent years, the phenomenon of online misinformation and junk news circulating on social media has come to constitute an important and widespread problem affecting public life online across the globe, particularly around important political events such as elections. At the same time, there have been calls for more transparency around misinforma...

What kinds of social media users read junk news? We examine the distribution of the most significant sources of junk news in the three months before President Donald Trump first State of the Union Address. Drawing on a list of sources that consistently publish political news and information that is extremist, sensationalist, conspiratorial, masked...

US voters shared large volumes of polarizing political news and information in the form of links to content from Russian, WikiLeaks and junk news sources. Was this low quality political information distributed evenly around the country, or concentrated in swing states and particular parts of the country? In this data memo we apply a tested dictiona...

Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact with people. Political bots are automated accounts that are particularly active on public policy issues, elect...

Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact with people. Political bots are automated accounts that are particularly active on public policy issues, elect...

In this paper, we explore the different ways in which people collaborate and share knowledge in public Internet venues, or cybercafés, in Ghana, West Africa. Based on 150 survey interviews conducted in two different cybercafés, one urban and business-oriented and the other peri-urban and family-oriented, we find that most cybercafé customers, large...

This paper evaluates the accomplishments of the eInclusion policy of the European Union in 2007. In this field ambitious aims were defined by the Riga Ministerial Summit of 2006. The policy is implemented by the EU applying the so-called "open method of co-ordination". However, monitoring of the process faces difficulties on supra-national and nati...