Dror Walter

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Georgia State University

Has the “big lie”—the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump—shaped citizens’ views of the legitimacy of other US elections? We argue that it has. Those who believe Trump’s claim, whom we call election skeptics, lack confidence in elections for two interrelated reasons. First, because they think 2020 was inaccurately and un...

Background. A highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza (H5N1, or “bird flu”) began circulating across poultry farms worldwide in 2020. While the virus has been transmitted to mammals and humans in the past, media attention to the potential impact of H5N1 on human health following the documentation of unprecedented transmission between mammals in...

Conventional wisdom surrounding President Joe Biden’s unprecedented decision to exit the 2024 Presidential race suggests that he came to view his would-be nomination as detrimental for the Democratic Party; both with respect to turnout, as well as the success of “down-ballot” candidates for federal and state-wide office. Whether or not conventional...

We examined hashtag activism promoting Taiwan’s participation in the global efforts to combat COVID-19. We employed the computational Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN) to examine the discourse around the #TaiwanCanHelp/#TWforWHO campaign in 2020 (N = 163,876) on Twitter. Our model identified 35 topics clustered within three frames. The conta...

As concerns about social bots online increase, studies have attempted to explore the discourse they produce, and its effects on individuals and the public at large. We argue that the common reliance on aggregated scores of binary classifiers for bot detection may have yielded biased or inaccurate results. To test this possibility, we systematically...

Framing, a prominent communication theory, is often lamented as a fractured paradigm, leading some to offer radical changes to its conceptualization, operationalization, and application. Using a meta-theoretical and computational approach, we analyze three decades of framing research to examine academic silos, specializations, the canon’s formation...

This edited volume examines the ways in which rapidly changing technologies and patterns of media use influence, and are influenced by, our emotional experiences. Following introductory chapters outlining common conceptual frameworks used in the study of emotion and digital media effects, this book is then organized around four general areas highli...

A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of responses to 13 questions from a 2022 national probability sample of 1,154 US adults supported the existence of five factors that we argue assess perceptions of Factors Assessing Science’s Self-Presentation (FASS). These factors also predict support for increasing federal funding of science and, separately, s...

The 2016 U.S. elections, the Brexit vote, and other events in recent years have raised public and scholarly awareness around massive foreign propaganda efforts (Jamieson, 2018; Walter et al., 2020). While much academic attention has been given to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) and, particularly, their attempt to influence the American p...

This edited volume examines the ways in which rapidly changing technologies and patterns of media use influence, and are influenced by, our emotional experiences. Following introductory chapters outlining common conceptual frameworks used in the study of emotion and digital media effects, this book is then organized around four general areas highli...

Despite the existence of multiple propaganda campaigns from around the globe, most scholarly attention has been primarily given to those operated by Russia. This focus on a single country has limited the scope of propaganda research. We offer a systematic comparison of six campaigns, examining the issues they engaged with, and their deployment stra...

Recent studies documented alarming growth in antiscientific discourse among extremist groups online and especially the relatively high anti-vaccine attitudes among White Nationalists (WN). In light of accelerated politization of COVID-19 containment measures and the expansion of containment to lockdowns, masking, and more, we examine current sentim...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Over the past forty years, what we, as a discipline, define as advertising research has been negotiated through our primary scholastic contribution to the field: peer reviewed journal articles. The question ‘what is advertising research?’ may produce different answers by different scholars during various points of the history of our field. The goal...

For over five decades, researchers explored the volume of coverage countries receive in other countries’ media, the factors that shape countries’ newsworthy, and sentiment in their coverage. However, a quantitative systematic analysis of how countries are covered, specifically, the framing of coverage, has been lacking. We first utilize machine lea...

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...

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...

Media framing of social protests can influence public opinion and governmental response. An extensive line of scholarly work had pointed to the existence of two alternative news frames; public order and debate. We argue that prior work may have been limited by the reliance on deductive strategies using predefined, theoretically-driven frames. Using...

For more than five decades, researchers have explored the volume and sentiment of coverage foreign countries receive in other countries’ media including the factors that make countries more or less newsworthy, and the sentiment of coverage. However, partially due to methodological limitations, a quantitative comparative analysis of how countries ar...

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...

Past studies examined the prevalence of strategy framing in news coverage and its effects on cynicism, knowledge, and content evaluation. Missing from the literature is an examination of the relationship between strategy framing in news and electoral success, the actual goal of political campaigns. Similarly, factors that shape media use of strateg...

One of the great strengths of the field of communication is its interdisciplinarity. Yet this strength brings challenges, including rifts between diverse subfields. In this study, we illustrate the rich potential of collaborations across subfields. Specifically, we argue that due to often-overlooked epistemological similarities, unsupervised machin...

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing companies like 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and MyHeritage have become increasingly popular in the past few years. Despite the prevalence of these testing kits, there has not been much done to understand the ways in which DTC genetic testing is framed in mass media. This study analyzed 973 news articles from four...

Objectives. To understand how Twitter accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) discussed vaccines to increase the credibility of their manufactured personas. Methods. We analyzed 2.82 million tweets published by 2689 IRA accounts between 2015 and 2017. Combining unsupervised machine learning and network analysis to identify “...

Studies have demonstrated an increase in the use of strategy framing in coverage of political campaigns over the years, and during campaign cycles. Despite increases in politicians’ and voters’ use of social media, very little is known about the use of framing in e-campaigns. This study examines Republican presidential candidates’ Twitter activity...

Framing is one of the most central, applicable, and contested theories in communication research. At the heart of the debate on framing is the question of operationalizing and measuring emphasis frames. We harness novel computational tools to propose a new method for inductive identification of frames. We argue and demonstrate that frame elements c...

The relationship between media and politics has been at the core of communication research for over a century. Previous research has examined the impact of both volume and tone of news coverage of political candidates on their electoral success, and the relationship between the volume of candidates’ social media activity (though not its tone) and e...

Why do some countries appear more popular than others in mass media? Although researchers have long sought to explain foreign countries’ prevalence in the media, to date, they have exclusively focused on news, leaving other types of media content unexplored. Additionally, focusing on media effects and media content, the literature on entertainment...

The Israeli Democracy Index Survey 2011, like those of preceding years, seeks to provide a detailed and up-to-date picture of Israeli public opinion—of the population as a whole and its various subgroups—regarding preferred form of government, functioning of the political system, performance and behavior of elected officials and key democratic valu...