Q & A: IDDP Fellow Josephine Lukito

At the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics, Dr. Lukito will study the relationship between state-sponsored disinformation on social media, news coverage and state violence.

June 25, 2021

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IDDP's research fellowships support projects by Ph.D. or other terminal degree holders at any stage of their career. The research should align with IDDP’s mission to help the public, journalists and policymakers understand digital media’s influence on public dialogue and opinion and to develop sound solutions to disinformation and other ills that arise in these spaces.

This is the first of three Q & A’s in which GW Today introduces the fellows to the university community.

Josephine Lukito is a first-year assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media. Her research focuses on multi-platform media systems, political disinformation and global communication. She uses computational and quantitative methods to analyze news and social media over time.

Dr. Lukito’s past research analyzed the linguistic intergroup bias in international news, differences in news language about 20th century and 21st century social movements and social media discourse about the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Her ongoing research focuses on state-sponsored disinformation and cross-platform flows of malicious political content. She has discussed her research in Columbia Journalism Review and on CNN, and her work was cited in Robert Mueller’s 2018 “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.”  

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