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Attila Bátorfy | Eötvös Loránd University
Attila Bátorfy is a data journalist, media scholar, and professor of journalism and information design at the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest. Before his academic career, he worked as a journalist for nearly fifteen years. He was previously the head of data at Átlátszó, Hungary’s first investigative journalism outlet. In 2018 he founded with Átlátszó the visual journalism project Átló. He has received numerous awards for his journalistic work. He has published several articles on the authoritarian tendencies and transformation of the Hungarian media system and journalism over the past decade.
Talk Title: Data journalism in an illiberal regime
Abstract: Two decades ago, most evangelists of data journalism proclaimed that an age of facts and reason was coming. We have many reasons to believe that the opposite has happened. While data journalism methods have become increasingly sophisticated and more data has become available, the impact of this type of content has been limited. This is especially true in a country, Hungary, that has had an authoritarian government for a decade and a half. What has worked so far, what has not worked, and what will never work in data journalism in an illiberal country? |
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Yevheniia Drozdova
Texty.org.ua (Kyiv, Ukraine)
Yevhenii Drozdova holds a Master’s degree in Media and Communications and began her career in a local newspaper. In 2017, she joined the independent Ukrainian media outlet Texty.org.ua, where she now leads the Data Journalism Section. She is passionate about anthropological stories and often works with satellite imagery to explore social and geopolitical issues.
Since 2023, Yevheniia has served as a jury member for The Sigma Awards, an international data journalism competition. She also enjoys creating interactive data stories that make complex issues accessible to wider audiences.
Talk Title: Guiding Through the Fog: Media’s Role in Narrative Wars
Abstract: In today’s complex information landscape, simply debunking individual fakes is no longer sufficient. Readers need a compass — an approach that helps them navigate competing narratives and understand the intentions behind them.
Texty.org.ua embodies this approach as an independent Ukrainian data journalism outlet. Since 2014, the team has focused on studying disinformation and manipulation in the information space, combining traditional journalism with machine learning and natural language processing. Even before AI became mainstream, Texty was already using these technologies to create large-scale interactive projects that make complex topics accessible to broad audiences.
What challenges arise when preparing such investigations, and is the audience ready to engage and understand them? These are some of the questions we will address.
Texty’s work has earned international recognition, including The Sigma Awards along with multiple European and Ukrainian journalism honors. In 2025, Texty won a Sigma Award for a project that examined manipulations in Telegram channels popular in Ukraine. |
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Homa Hosseinmardi, PhD
University of California, Los Angeles
Homa Hosseinmardi is an Assistant Professor of Data Science (DataX) and Computational Communication at UCLA, where she directs the OASIS Lab (Online and AI Systems’ Integrity & Safety). Her research takes a holistic, large-scale approach to understanding sociotechnical systems and information ecosystems, with a focus on safety and trustworthiness.
She serves as an editor for the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, received the “Outstanding Research Award” during her Ph.D., and co-founded the CyberSafety workshop series. Her work has been featured in major media outlets and published in over 30 peer-reviewed papers, including top venues such as PNAS, Science Advances, TKDE, and IMWUT.
Talk Title: Overexamined Algorithms and Overlooked Agency: Rethinking Online Harm
Abstract: In recent years, critics of online platforms have raised concerns about the ability of recommendation algorithms to amplify problematic content with potentially radicalizing consequences. Yet most attempts to evaluate these claims suffer from a core methodological gap: the absence of appropriate counterfactuals—what users would have encountered without algorithmic recommendations—making it difficult to disentangle the influence of the algorithm from users’ own intentions.
To address this challenge, we first examined the scale of the problem and possible explanations. While we identified several distinct communities of news consumers within YouTube, from moderate to more extreme, we found little evidence that the YouTube recommendation algorithm is actively driving attention to problematic content. Overall, our findings indicate that trends in video-based political news consumption are determined by a complicated combination of user preferences, platform features such as recommendation systems, as well as the supply-and-demand dynamics of the broader web.
We propose a novel method called “counterfactual bots,” which enables us to disentangle the role of the user from platform features on the consumption of highly partisan content. By comparing bots that replicate real users’ consumption patterns with counterfactual bots that follow rule-based trajectories, we show that, on average, relying exclusively on the recommender results in less partisan consumption, with the effect being most pronounced for heavy partisan consumers. |
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Kae Petrin
Data & Graphics Reporter, Civic News Company
Kae Petrin is a data journalist and media educator whose work crosses the intersections of government accountability reporting and LGBTQ+ communities coverage. They are a current John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.
In 2020, they cofounded the Trans Journalists Association with several dozen fellow journalists. Through four years of volunteer work as a board member and Interim Executive Director, they oversaw the organization’s formalization into a 501(c)(3). Kae now serves on the board as President.
As a Data & Graphics Reporter on Civic News Company’s visuals team, they collaborate with local reporters to tell policy and accountability stories about education, voting rights, and public health. Throughout their career in local news they have contributed analysis and visualizations to reporting recognized by regional and national awards. They also served on the board of directors for the St. Louis Pro chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists from 2017 to 2023.
Kae presents on queer and trans coverage best practices, data reporting and visualization tools, and the collision of these topics for universities, industry conferences, and newsrooms around the U.S.
Talk Title: Malice & government data: What anti-LGBTQ+ policies mean for journalism
Abstract: The Trump administration has gone out of its way to obstruct and remove data collections related to LGBTQ+ Americans. In his first term, this looked like interference with the 2020 Census. Now, it involves mass-censoring the word “gender” to “sex” in scientific datasets and removing some of the few repositories of federal data that we have on LGBTQ+ people. The latter sets back years of research and changes to data collection practices that could have informed policy change. Yet, LGBTQ+ data collection has a dark side: Texas, for instance, has attempted to use data as a tool of state power, to separate families from transgender children and to identify Texans seeking out-of-state medical care. How can journalists work with datasets that might seek to actively misrepresent their content? And how can we responsibly illuminate data that may fill in the absences the government is creating? |
