Josephine Lukito

• Master of Arts
• University of Wisconsin–Madison

Over the past decade, data provided by digital platforms has informed substantial research in HCI to understand online human interaction and communication. Following the closure of major social media APIs that previously provided free access to large-scale data (the "post-API age"), emerging data access programs required by the European Union's Dig...

Early career researchers (ECR) in communication and media research face increasing problems and stressors due to systemic challenges in academia, including the precarity of being an ECR and the politicization of research and targeting of researchers. For researchers studying harmful content online (HCO), research-related trauma (RRT) can compound t...

This introductory article discusses the current state of scholarship about global misinformation and disinformation, highlighting key actors that researchers study, common research questions, and differences between within-country and between-country mis/disinformation. It also provides an overview of the 8 submissions in the International Journal...

We applied a mixed-methods approach with the goal of understanding how Latinx and Asian diaspora communities perceive and experience the spread of misinformation through encrypted messaging apps in the United States. Our study consists of 12 in-depth interviews with leaders of relevant diaspora community organizations and a computer-assisted conten...

Despite its proven pervasiveness and effectiveness, the role of email in political campaigns has been understudied. In this article, we seek to understand the use of emails by Donald Trump's and Joe Biden's campaigns during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Employing newly collected email data (N = 4051), we compared how the two campaign teams d...

This project explores how affective polarization, hostility towards people’s political adversaries, manifests on social media. Whereas prior attempts have relied on sentiment analysis and bag-of-word approaches, we use supervised machine learning to capture the nuances of affective polarization in text on social media. Specifically, we fine-tune BE...

The rise of audio-as-data in social science research accentuates a fundamental challenge: establishing reproducible and reliable methodologies to guide this emerging area of study. In this study, we focus on the reproducibility of audio-as-data preparation methods in computational communication research and evaluate the accuracy of popular audio-as...

Bolsonaro’s supporters used social media to spread content during key events related to the Brasília attack. An unprecedented analysis of more than 15,000 public WhatsApp groups showed that these political actors tried to manufacture consensus in preparation for and after the attack. A cross-platform time series analysis showed that the spread of c...

Former President Donald Trump is well-known for dominating the attention-driven hybrid media system through his controversial tweets, which spurred social media user engagement and news media attention. The removal of Trump from Twitter/X raises questions about his continued ability to drive news attention through his alt-tech platform, Truth Socia...

Given that political groups are dispersed across platforms, resulting in different discourses, there is a need for more studies comparing communication across platforms. In this study, we compared posts about #StopTheSteal from three social media platforms after the 2020 US Presidential election and preceding the January 6 Capitol Riot. To do so, w...

Attacks on journalists have become a growing concern in democracies around the world. Past scholarship suggests that such attacks could lead to a chilling effect of journalists self-censoring their reporting. However, there is limited empirical work that substantiates the effects of attacks on journalists. To empirically test the existence of chill...

This study explores the visual content posted by far-right populist parliamentarians in Brazil, asking how “the people” are represented through imagery. Scholars have previously argued that populists have failed to foster the voice of “the people” in Latin America, but have they also failed to signify and cultivate an authentic visual representatio...

Influencers are omnipresent on social media platforms. They occupy important digital real estate across a range of topical domains including beauty, fashion, and gaming. While researchers have contributed important work on the respective role that authenticity plays for influencers’ success and have described a burgeoning industry within the larger...

In this theoretical piece, we discuss the limitations of using purely computational techniques to study big language data produced by people online. Instead, we advocate for mixed-method approaches that are able to more critically evaluate and consider the individual and social impact of this data. We propose one approach that combines qualitative,...

This study considers how governments use state-sponsored propaganda and state violence in tandem to repress social movements and, in so doing, exacerbate polarization. We specifically focus on cases in young and non-democracies in East and Southeast Asia: China and Hong Kong, the Free Papua Movement in Indonesia, and Myanmar’s more recent coup. Usi...

Social media amplification is both a mechanism to attract public attention and a process of information diffusion shaped by the online social network structure. This study focuses on amplification by elites on social media and examines the extent to which traditional media and emerging partisan influencers engage in “network amplification.” Defined...

The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has...

Social bots, or algorithmic agents that amplify certain viewpoints and interact with selected actors on social media, may influence online discussion, news attention, or even public opinion through coordinated action. Previous research has documented the presence of bot activities and developed detection algorithms. Yet, how social bots influence a...

This study explores how Presidential candidates compete for Twitter attention during a televised debate using two datasets of tweets posted during the first 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential debates. Using a time series analysis, we find that both debates exhibited zero-sum attention dynamics such that when one candidate gained attention, the other l...

Ongoing research into how states coordinate foreign disinformation campaign has raised concerns over social media’s influence on democracies. One example is the spread of Russian disinformation in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) Twitter accounts have been known to deliver messages with strategic attempts...

In this study, we explore online informational warfare by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) against Ukraine during the military conflict in Donbass. Introducing a digital dimension to the long-standing Russian disinformation strategy of reflexive control as a historic and theoretical framework, we investigate how the IRA combined online ne...

Live-tweeting has emerged as a popular hybrid media activity during broadcasted media events. Through second screens, users are able to engage with one another and react in real time to the broadcasted content. These reactions are dynamic: they ebb and flow throughout the media event as users respond to and converse about different memorable moment...

Mass shootings spur intense coverage across the ideological news media spectrum. A comparative analysis of news attention to verified features of events across partisan news outlets provides opportunities to understand the news values driving coverage in each of these venues. To examine these relationships, we conducted time-series analyses using a...

While music as an artistic form is well studied, the individuals behind the art receive relatively less attention. In this article, we provide evidence of celebrity advocacy with a systematic examination of musicians’ political engagement on Twitter. This study estimates the extent to which musicians use Twitter for political purposes, with particu...

While music as an artistic form has been well-studied, the individuals behind the art receive relatively less attention. In this paper, we provide evidence of celebrity advocacy with a systematic examination of musicians' political engagement on Twitter. This study estimates the extent to which musicians use Twitter for political purposes, with par...

This study investigates how successful Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) Twitter accounts constructed the followings that were central to their disinformation campaigns around the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Treating an account’s social media following as both an ego network and an audience critical for information diffusion and influence...

Populism, as many have observed, is a communication phenomenon as much as a coherent ideology whose mass appeal stems from the fiery articulation of core positions, notably hostility toward “others,” bias against elites in favor of “the people,” and the transgressive delivery of those messages. Yet much of what we know about populist communication...

How populists engage with media of various types, and are treated by those media, are questions of international interest. In the United States, Donald Trump stands out for both his populism-inflected campaign style and his success at attracting media attention. This article examines how interactions between candidate communications, social media,...

The Russian-sponsored Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) use of social media to influence U.S. political discourse is undoubtedly troubling. However, scholarly attention has focused on social media, overlooking the role that news media within the country played in amplifying false, foreign messages. In this article, we examine articles in the U.S. ne...

Previous research has shown the importance of Donald Trump’s Twitter activity, and that of his Twitter following, in spreading his message during the primary and general election campaigns of 2015-2016. However, we know little about how the publics who followed Trump and amplified his messages took shape. We take this case as an opportunity to theo...

Though nation-states have long utilized disinformation to influence foreign audiences, Russia’s 2015 to 2017 campaign against the U.S.—executed by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) —is unique in its complexity and distribution through the digital communication ecology. The following study explores IRA activity on three social media platforms, Face...

This study focuses on the outpouring of sympathy in response to mass shootings and the contesta-tion over gun policy on Twitter from 2012 to 2014 and relates these discourses to features of mass shooting events. We use two approaches to Twitter text analysis-hashtag grouping and supervised machine learning (ML)-to triangulate an understanding of in...

How disinformation campaigns operate and how they fit into the broader social communication environment – which has been described as a ‘disinformation order’ [Bennett & Livingston, (2018 Bennett, W. L., & Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Commun...

The use of Twitter by Donald Trump, and the amplification of his voice in the form of retweets, has been demonstrated to be one of the most consistent and powerful predictors of Trump’s news coverage, suggesting that he was able to leverage his interactions on social media into earned media attention worth billions of dollars. In the present study,...

The use of Twitter by Donald Trump, and the amplification of his voice in the form of retweets, has been demonstrated to be one of the most consistent and powerful predictors of Trump’s news coverage, suggesting that he was able to leverage his interactions on social media into earned media attention worth billions of dollars. In the present study...

The current study examines the framing of China in the opinion section of two elite newspapers, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Although there is an expectation that editorials and op-eds present multiple frames and opinions, the results of a content analysis show that China is not framed differently between these two newspapers. Both p...

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the process of extracting reserves of natural gas and oil from shale formations deep underground. This process, initially met with public support in the United Kingdom, has since become a highly contentious issue primarily debated between government, industry, and anti-fracking advocacy groups. Through the empl...

The current study analyzes the framing of China’s emergence as a global power in the opinion pages of two elite newspapers. The study expands upon previous studies examining newspaper opinion gatekeepers’ use of the editorial and opposite-editorial pages as salient platforms for the expression of diverse opinion regarding foreign affairs. Results s...

The New York Times and USA Today covered the 2008–09 recession differently. While The Times' information frame presents frames promptly, the USA Today's contextualizer frame addresses the same themes such as the housing crisis much later in a context of readers' everyday lives.