Mykola Makhortykh is an Alfred Landecker lecturer at the Institute of Communication and Media Science, where he studies the impact of algorithmic systems and AI on Holocaust memory transmission. Before it, Mykola worked as postdoctoral researcher on the project “Populist radical-right attitudes and political information behaviour. A longitudinal study of attitude development in high-choice information environments” (University of Bern & University Koblenz-Landau). In his research, Mykola focuses on politics- and history-centred information behaviour in online environments and how it is affected by the information retrieval systems, such as search engines and recommender systems. To achieve this goal, he combines traditional social science methods (e.g., content analysis and focus groups) with novel computational approaches (e.g., deep learning and agent-based testing). His other research interests include trauma and memory studies, armed conflict reporting, disinformation and computational propaganda research, cybersecurity and critical security studies, and bias in information retrieval systems.
Mykola has an interdisciplinary background, which combines communication science, humanities, data science, and computer science. He received BA in History and MA in Archaeology at the Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University, a joint MA degree in Euroculture at the University of Goettingen and Jagiellonian University, and BA in Computer Science at the University of the People. Before moving to Bern, he finished his PhD at the University of Amsterdam on the relationship between Second World War remembrance and online platforms in Eastern Europe, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Data Science at the Amsterdam School of Communication Science for the FairNews project, where Mykola studied algorithmic (un)fairness in news personalization systems.
