Márton Bene

📢 New publication in American Behavioral Scientistwith Vanessza Juhász about the role of Megafon, the astroturf influencer agency which played a key role in Fidesz's digital campaign strategy in the last Hungarian election campaign.

Blog summary about the findings below 👇

Are you attending #ICA25?
Are you curious to learn more about our algorithm audit study that we conducted in collaboration with 30 political parties during the 2024 European election?

@martonbene.bsky.social will be presenting it today!

🗓️ June 16
🕛 12:00–1:15 PM
📍 Aspen Ballroom (Grand 2)

Yesterday I kicked off #ica25 with a hike at the Flatirons. From today, the professional part of the conference starts!

It was a great honor to contribute to the edited volume reflecting on Jay Blumler’s legacy in today’s changing communication environment.

His work has had a profound impact on me since the beginning of my academic journey.

My theoretical chapter in the volume is summarized in the blog post below.

Celebrating the end of the academic year — just before conference season kicks off: #CEECOM starts tomorrow, and #ICA25 is coming up next week!

That means that negative campaigning is not just louder—it’s also safer. Not only are attack messages more likely to get media coverage (as previous research has shown), they are also less likely to be reinterpreted critically by journalists. 8/8

Negative attacks on opponents are framed neutrally—whether they come from populists or mainstream parties, incumbents or challengers. Journalists may be skeptical of some actors, but their response depends more on message type than sender. 7/8

In contrast, negative campaign messages are not more likely to trigger journalistic criticism. When politicians act as critics, journalists step aside—but when politicians praise themselves, the media steps in. The press plays devil’s advocate only when no one else does. 6/8

According to the results, all types of self-promotional messages are more likely to be negatively framed by journalists—especially those focusing on the politician’s character, and less so those centered on policy issues. 5/8

We answered this question using data from the Comparative Campaign Dynamics dataset, based on manual content analysis of 16 election campaigns across 10 countries. 4/8

To explore this question, we used Benoit’s typology to distinguish six types of campaign messages and analyzed how journalists frame each of them. 3/8

🗞️ Journalists’ negative framing can reshape how voters perceive campaign messages—so it’s crucial for political actors to know which messages are more media-proof, and which are more exposed to criticism. 2/8

🆕 New pub co-authored w/ Xénia Farkas in Journalism on which campaign messages are more likely to be negatively framed by journalists.
💡 Findings: Negative messages are reported neutrally, while self-promotion is more often challenged.
📖 Blog summary here: tinyurl.com/574eppu5
📌Key takeaways in 👇1/8

False sense of security and a flurry of misplaced trust: the construction of trust in and by Facebook In this research, we highlight the fundamental forces that shape the dynamics of trust in the digital society by examining how platform-specific and platform-mediated trust is constructed on Facebo...

These findings suggest that Facebook users may be operating under a false sense of security. They trust a platform with a questionable track record and overestimate their own ability to stay safe—creating a potentially fragile foundation for digital trust. 9/9

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

These sources of trust don’t replace each other. Rather than one pillar compensating for another, they reinforce each other. Trust is strongest when users believe in both Facebook’s safeguards and their own ability to manage risks. 8/9

Belief in government regulation doesn’t significantly affect trust. Users don’t seem to associate platform safety with external oversight. 7/9

A secondary factor is users’ self-confidence. Those who believe they can manage risks—by recognizing and avoiding manipulation—report higher trust. Interestingly, merely identifying risks doesn’t boost trust; it’s action and perceived ability that matter more than vigilance. 6/9

The strongest factor influencing trust is the perceived effectiveness of Facebook’s self-regulation. When users believe the platform actively protects them—through moderation or algorithmic controls—their trust increases significantly. 5/9

Users who perceive high risk are less likely to trust Facebook as a platform—but this distrust doesn't extend to other users or to the content. People tend to blame the company, yet still trust what they see and who they interact with. 4/9

To answer this, we conducted a large-scale survey in 2022 across seven European countries: Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, and the Netherlands. 3/9

In this paper, we investigated how trust on Facebook is influenced by users' perceptions of risk and three potential "pillars" of trust: (1) confidence in their own ability to recognize and avoid harm, (2) belief in Facebook’s self-regulation, and (3) belief in state regulation. 2/9

New publication in Information, Communication & Society with Balázs Bodó and Zsolt Boda on how trust is constructed on social media!

🔗 Blog summary: prisma-rg.hu/new-publicat...

🧵 Key takeaways below

1/9

Check out this great poster from @favstats.eu on our study of bias in how political ads are delivered!

My research group is excited to host international postdocs through this fellowship opportunity!

Argumentative fallacies outsourced to astroturf influencers?

New PRiSMa publication by Vanessza Juhász on the rhetorical strategies of pro-government influencers and political actors. The article is in Hungarian, but a brief overview is available here:
🔗 prisma-rg.hu/new-prisma-p...

What a wonderful feeling to finally close a book manuscript. It’s been a long journey—but it’s officially submitted! #NetworkedLocality #polcomm

We’ve just launched the Bluesky profile of our new research group—come follow us!

bsky.app/profile/pris...

You can also check out our website to learn more about who we are and what we do!

prisma-rg.hu

Based on the theory of monitorial citizens, political distrust does not necessarily lead to heightened news consumption but makes people less likely to turn away from the news entirely. As Schudson argues monitorial citizens "are not gathering information; they are keeping an eye on the scene.” 7/7

In contrast, this sense of civic duty is not activated for those who trust political elites: civic supervision is not necessary when political actors are believed to be good-willing. It is not the sense of civic duty to keep informed but the civic duty to monitor the processes that matter here. 6/7

We also demonstrate that political distrust decreases intentional news avoidance since it turns on a monitoring attitude, a sort of sense of civic duty to keep at least “approximately” informed as a tool of civic control over untrustworthy political elites to prevent serious abuse of power. 5/7