Ayse Lokmanoglu

Ayse Lokmanoglu is an assistant professor of emerging media studies in the College of Communication and an affiliate faculty member in computing and data science at Boston University. She studies information integrity, the politicization of science, and visual communication in the digital public sphere. Integrating computational social science and digital humanities, her research examines how misinformation, conspiracies, and scientific claims circulate across online platforms using large-scale text, image, and network analysis. She also develops tools that enable humanities and social science researchers to work with big data at scale, advancing understanding of public trust, polarization, and civic discourse.  

She is an affiliate of Northwestern University’s Center for Communication & Public Policy and the Media and Democracy Data Cooperative. She completed her PhD in communication at Georgia State University as a presidential fellow in the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, an assistant professor of disinformation studies at Clemson University, and a core faculty member of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation–funded Media Forensics Hub. 

Lokmanoglu’s project, “Seeing Polarization: Visual Media, AI Images, and Democratic Resilience,” examines how authentic, altered, and AI-generated images circulate during politically sensitive moments and whether exposure to these visuals intensifies polarization and distrust. Using computational methods and controlled experiments, she will map how visual narratives evolve across online networks during periods of heightened tension, test whether synthetic imagery erodes public trust and credibility judgments, and evaluate whether targeted media literacy interventions can moderate polarization and strengthen democratic resilience.

May 2026