Ayse Lokmanoglu

About

Ayse Lokmanoglu is an Assistant Professor in Emerging Media Studies at Boston University College of Communication. Her research is at the intersection of communication, computational social science, and digital humanities, focusing on how supremacist ideologies are propagated online by state and non-state actors, with particular attention to issues of race, gender, and religion. She utilizes advanced computational methods, including automated text and visual analysis and network analysis, to investigate the digital strategies of supremacist groups. Her scholarly work has been supported by significant grants such as the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). She has received numerous awards, including the National Communication Association's Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award and the IEEE VIS 2023 Best Paper Award. Lokmanoglu is a leadership member of the VOX-Pol Network and an affiliate of Northwestern University’s Center for Communication and Public Policy, the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, and Monash Global Peace and Security Center. She completed her Ph.D. in Communication at Georgia State University as a presidential fellow in the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative (TCV). Prior to her current role, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, an assistant professor of Disinformation Studies at Clemson University, and a core faculty member of the…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Medicine
• Media studies
• Gender studies
• Law
• Psychology
• Virology
• History

Selected publications

• Heaven Holds a Place for Those Who Pray: Instrumentalizing Religion and Disinformation the 2022 Brazilian and 2023 Turkish Presidential Campaigns

  The International Journal of Press/Politics · 2024-09-30 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  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 discourse analysis and applied to a corpus of 10,519 posts across seven social media platforms. The analysis informs two key findings. First, in both Bolso…

  PublisherDOI

• Some assembly required: Unpacking the content and spread of Wayfair conspiracy theory on Reddit and Twitter

  New Media & Society · 2025-05-29 · 3 citations

  articleCorresponding

  Wayfair, an American furniture and home goods retailer, garnered sudden attention across social media in 2020, particularly Twitter and Reddit, due to a conspiracy theory linking the company to child trafficking. The short-lived, well-delineated nature of this theory, coupled with its simultaneous emergence across multiple platforms, makes it a distinct case for studying the dynamics of online conspiracy development and spread. Using intermedia agenda-setting theory and computational approaches,…

  PublisherDOI

• Mediated Public Diplomacy and RT on Instagram: Role of International Institutions, Audience Engagement, and Online Account Bans

  Journalism Studies · 2024-08-27 · 2 citations

  article

  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' relation to UN statehood, examined audience engagement levels, and compared their frequency before and after major bans on RT content. The study foun…

  PublisherDOI

• Visual Framing in the AI Era: Lessons from Manual Approaches for Computational Methods

  Computational Communication Research · 2026-02-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Computational methods can minimize the time and resources needed to manually code thousands of images. Yet, they also come with challenges, including validation, algorithmic bias, and privacy concerns. Acknowledging that the pictorial turn has now entered a computational phase, this article reports on a manual and automated coding of 7000+ images to better understand online extremist content. Using Rodriguez and Dimitrova’s (2011) four-tiered model of visual framing, the study compares manual an…

  PublisherDOI

• Topic modeling of video and image data: a visual semantic unsupervised approach

  Communication Methods and Measures · 2025-08-21 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Understanding visual narratives is crucial for examining the evolving dynamics of media representation. This study introduces VisTopics, a computational framework designed to analyze large-scale visual datasets through an end-to-end pipeline encompassing frame extraction, deduplication, and semantic clustering. Applying VisTopics to a dataset of 452 NBC News videos resulted in reducing 11,070 frames to 6,928 deduplicated frames, which were then semantically analyzed to uncover 35 topics ranging…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Carol Winkler

  Georgia State University

  8 shared

• Erik C. Nisbet

  Northwestern University

  7 shared

• Meredith L. Pruden

  Kennesaw State University

  7 shared

• Yannick Veilleux-Lepage

  5 shared

• Yotam Ophir

  Boston University

  4 shared

• Nicholas Diakopoulos

  4 shared

• Matthew Kay

  Northwestern University

  4 shared

• Dror Walter

  Georgia State University

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Communication

  Georgia State University

  2021

• M.A., Middle Eastern Studies

  Harvard University

  2012

• Bachelor of Arts, Near Eastern Studies & Economics

  Cornell University

  2009

Awards & honors

• National Communication Association's Gerald R. Miller Outsta…
• IEEE VIS 2023 Best Paper Award
• top paper awards from the National Communication Association…
• Andrew Carnegie Fellowship

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