Dominika Betakova

We're looking for a colleague (postdoc) 📢 @politikuhh.bsky.social
3+3 years
Doing your own research while teaching 2.5 courses per semester
Research agenda with links to our team (democracy, digital politics, political competition/behaviour)
DL 🗓️ 05/01
stellen.uni-hamburg.de/jobposting/6...

Oxford University Has Failed Women Over Harassment Concerns, Staff Say The university has repeatedly been slow to act against male academics accused of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior, a Bloomberg investigation found.

"Multiple men have remained in senior roles at Oxford for months or years after allegations of sexual misconduct emerged against them, Bloomberg found in a nine-month investigation based on interviews with almost 50 people as well as documents and other records."

We're hiring! @univie.ac.at is seeking a TT Assistant Professor in the Psychology of Digitalization. If your work is about automation, AI, or immersive technology (e.g., VR) in the context of work and organizations (broadly defined), we’d love to hear from you. 👇

You don’t “engage”, you amplify, mainstream and normalize.

Don’t pretend you do this for anything else than 💰💰💰

🎉 New to PolComm? Join our Welcome Webinar!

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Meet the PolComm Division’s Executive Committee and get your last-minute questions answered!

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Invitation Kick-Off Vienna Doctoral College on Digital Humanism - dighumcollege Vienna Doctoral College on Digital Humanism 🗓 November 19, 2025 | 🕙 10:00–16:00 | 📍 Vienna You are kindly invited to join the official Kick-off of the  Vienna Doctoral College on Digital Humanism. We look forward to sharing with you the develop...

📣 Event tip: "Invitation Kick-Off Vienna Doctoral College on #DigitalHumanism" 👨‍🔬👩‍🔬
@wwtf.at @tuwien.at @wuvienna.bsky.social
🗓 November 19, 2025 | 🕙 10:00–16:00 | 📍 Vienna
‼️ The registration deadline is November 3.
More information about the program & registration here: ⤵️

Vacancy — Postdoctoral researcher Communication Science at AI, Media & Democracy Lab Do you want to be part of the AI, Media & Democracy Lab? We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher with a profile in communication science.

Work!! 🚨

We are looking for a #postdoc in our AI, media and Democracy Lab @aimediademlab.bsky.social

Dynamic position, great team, nice colleagues 💥

Profile: communication/ poli sci/ computational social sci

🗓️ DL November 1

Spread the word 📣

werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Last day to apply! 👇

2/2 And I am excited to announce that we are hiring a PostDoc and a PhD student to work with us on these topics.

Group description: www.weizenbaum-institut.de/en/research/...

PhD position: www.weizenbaum-institut.de/news/detail/...

PostDoc position: www.weizenbaum-institut.de/news/detail/...

One postdoctoral Research Position Deadline: November 15th, 2025

Join us as postdoc at the Inequality Discourse Observatory at the University of Konstanz: stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/7...
We will do epic research between Linguistics and Computational Social Science at the Cluster of Politics of Inequality. Feel free to DM if you have any questions.

FYI The hyperlink is not working🙂 but the preconference sounds interesting!

ONLINE FIRST! This article by Dominika Betakova et al. uses a comparative online experiment to test whether nudges could help with #news avoidance. Available with OPEN ACCESS.
➡️ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Additionally, big thanks goes to everyone who engaged with this paper at conferences, provided feedback, or just cheered me up on the way 🎉

And if you've made it this far, I want to share that I am super happy about this publication. Not only did I get a chance to include my (understudied!) country of origin, but it’s also the second publication from my recently defended dissertation😊

thank you Jakob 🤗

This highlights the role of technological affordances in news use, and their interaction with the automatic cognitive system of information processing that nudges typically leverage. 📄 The paper is published open access 🔑 in @digitaljournalism.bsky.social

🔎 TL;DR: Unlike news topics, country differences, or civic duty nudges, choice architecture emerged as the sole significant factor influencing news avoidance behavior.

This indicates that the civic duty to keep informed is a rather stable trait, likely formed early through education or socialization, making it hard to influence artificially on digital platforms.

This small change in choice architecture could increase incidental news exposure—and thus learning effects—even among news avoiders. However (!) such a nudge needs to be used transparently (more information in the paper).
2️⃣ In contrast, the civic duty nudge did not affect participants’ behavior.

👉 In practice, when setting up a personalized newsfeed, news outlets or social media platforms could pre-select categories like international or local news by default, prompting people to opt out of what they are not interested in rather than opt in.

1️⃣ Results in both countries are strikingly similar: Asking people to opt-out of news instead of opt-in was effective in reducing news avoidance during the initial phase of newsfeed setup.

2️⃣ A civic duty nudge, reminding people of their civic duty to keep informed, as previous research suggests that this duty is one of the strongest predictors of news avoidance.
📊 What did we find? 👇

Therefore, we conducted a pre-registered online comparative experiment (2×2) in Austria and Slovakia.

We tested two types of nudges:
1️⃣ A choice architecture nudge (default effects: opting-in and opting-out effects, where a default option is assigned to those not making a decision).

The Role of Choice Architecture in Mitigating News Avoidance News avoidance has become more common and is associated with negative democratic outcomes. However, only a handful of studies have explored solutions to reduce news avoidance, with nudges offering ...

🚫📰 Can we use nudges to mitigate news avoidance?
Yes and no — it depends on what nudges we use!
Together with @hajoboo.bsky.social & @solecheler.bsky.social I wanted to test whether nudges can reduce news avoidance as limited news consumption—and to do so beyond established Western democracies. 🧵👇

Hi both, the game sounds super cool 😎 I am not surprised Jakob is interested 🃏

we're hiring assistant professor in computational social science, applications close 26/10/2025

We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science ❗

📚 jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Apply before 26 October and join an internationally outstanding group of social science methodologists 🌎

🎓Introducing *DR.* Rasmus Schmøkel 🎓

Today, our incoming Postdoctoral Researcher / former PhD student @rasmusschmokel.bsky.social expertly defended his thesis...

The Impact of Algorithms on News Consumption:
The Power of Social Media as Democratic Infrastructure and its Potential for Public Value

🎓 DDC DISSERTATION UPDATE 🎓
Please welcome ✨Dr.✨ Emil Bakkensen Johansen, who today expertly defended his PhD Thesis on...

Complex Dynamics in Digital News Ecosystems: Collaboration and Imitation in the Age of Al

🎙️ New @ccspod.bsky.social episode!
I unpack how computational methods transform the study of opinionated communication + share insights from my work on studying climate change campaigns on social media with @cidape.bsky.social

Listen here 👉 aboutccs.net/opinion/

In case you are an ECR and you are already in Innsbruck 🏔️ for ECREA PolComm section conference, consider attending this preconference organized by the ECR representatives @amplanitzer.bsky.social & Andreea Stancea 🙂