Political manipulation thesis database

Political manipulation is the use of covert, deceptive or structurally unfair techniques to influence what people believe, how they feel, and how they behave in the political sphere. It goes beyond ordinary persuasion: instead of offering arguments in an open debate, it exploits information asymmetries, emotional triggers, profiling and opaque algorithms so that citizens make choices they would likely not make under conditions of transparency and genuine autonomy. Proprietary social media platforms have become central infrastructures for this kind of manipulation, because they control what billions of people see and how messages are targeted, ranked and amplified.

Political manipulation includes micro-targeted advertising based on detailed personal profiles, coordinated disinformation campaigns, artificial amplification of some actors and systematic down-ranking of others, as well as “dark patterns” in interface design that steer users toward certain political content or away from political participation altogether. These mechanisms often operate invisibly: neither citizens, nor journalists, nor regulators can easily see how decisions are made inside proprietary recommendation and advertising systems. This opacity makes it difficult to assess democratic harms or to enforce existing legal frameworks (data protection, consumer protection, electoral law, the EU Digital Services Act and political advertising regulation).

This list contains the most relevant PhD/Master theses about political persuasion contained in the OpenAIRE publication database (see methodology at the end of the document). The goal is not only to document what has been done in the literature, but to build a knowledge base that can support very concrete projects such as independent measurement tools for evidence-based political or legal actions.

List of PhD/Master theses

1. Mochla, Vagia, Segmenting voters in political marketing: a survey on voters' motives and behavior on social media (Τμηματοποίηση των ψηφοφόρων στο πλαίσιο του πολιτικού μάρκετινγκ: ανάλυση των κινήτρων και της συμπεριφοράς τους στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης), National Documentation Centre (EKT) (2022).
2. Dobber, Tom, Data & Democracy: Political microtargeting: A threat to electoral integrity?, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (2020).
3. Boutzeti Maria, Personalized political communication on social media networks (Εξατομικευμένη πολιτική επικοινωνία στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης), National Documentation Centre (EKT), Greece (2021).
4. Maasbommel, Sam, Room for regulation of political microtargeting (Ruimte voor regulering van politieke microtargeting), University of Groningen, Netherlands (2024).
5. Votta, Fabio A., A Dance with Data: Unraveling the supply and demand side dynamics of political microtargeting, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (2024).
6. Carlos Eduardo Ferreira de Souza, DESINFORMAÇÃO E REGULAÇÃO DA PUBLICIDADE PERSONALIZADA, Faculdades Catolicas, Brasil (2023).
7. Decker, Hannah, Watch your attitude! Investigating the role of personalisation in social media campaigns from political actors to the electorate, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany (2024).
8. Ghazala Abbass Ajami, Facebook politics. (c2012), Lebanese American University, Lebanon (2017).
9. Hove, Mads Fuglsang, The nature and consequences of online political microtargeting, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (2025).
10. Bezzi, Luca Matteo, Divide et impera 2.0: data-driven opinion and mind manipulation via digital media, Universität Innsbruck, Austria (2021).
11. Heeren, Silke, Microtargeting via Facebook and its impacts on federal state elections in Hamburg, University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal (2021).
12. Henriksen, Ellen Emilie, Big data, microtargeting, and governmentality in cyber-times. The case of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal., University of Oslo, Norway (2019).
13. Nevešćanin, Nina, Analiza velikih podataka u politici: studija slučaja na primjeru Cambridge analytice, Universitas Studiorum Jadertina, Croatia (2025).
14. Benčič, Nina, Informacijska zasebnost po škandalu Cambridge Analytica, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (2021).
15. Kirkedam, Ingvild Heglum, Piksler og politikk: En studie av norske partiers bruk av målrettet reklame på Facebook under stortingsvalgkampen i 2021, University of Oslo, Norway (2022).
16. Arslan, Ertuğrul, Siyasal iletişim sürecinde siyasal reklamların sosyal medyada kullanımı 1 Kasım 2015 genel seçimlerinde TBMM'de temsil edilen partilerin siyasal reklamlarının facebook ve youtube mecralarında incelenmesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Turkey (2018).
17. Brandela, Hélène, Online microtargeting and voter autonomy: electoral campaigns and online microtargeting: data protection rules as a safeguard for voter autonomy, Tilburg University, Netherlands (2021).
18. Melkild, Anna Pettersdatter, Rettslige skranker for politisk mikromålretting – Om den frie meningsdannelsen i en digital tid, University of Oslo, Norway (2023).
19. Rein, Daphne, Does the European Union's data protection law sufficiently protect social media users against manipulation through targeted political advertising?, Tilburg University, Netherlands (2024).
20. Farinha Oliveira, Raquel, A critical evaluation of fake news: an experimental study on protective measures against the spread of disinformation on Facebook in a political context, Tilburg University, Netherlands (2021).
21. Vilas Curto, R.M., Political micro-targeting: a European information war story: the principle of transparency and algorithmic decision-making in politics, Tilburg University, Netherlands (2018).
22. Janssen, J., Political micro-targeting, a threat to the democratic system?: can the General Data Protection Regulation adequately mitigate the risks that political micro-targeting enables?, Tilburg University, Netherlands (2021).
23. de Oliveira, João António França, Rússia, Cambridge Analytica e as eleições presidenciais Norte-Americanas de 2016: o ciberespaço como o mais recente domínio da conflitualidade política, Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, Portugal (2021).
24. Ringstad, Herman Hatløy, Grønn valgkamp på Facebook, grå valgkamp på Twitter, University of Oslo, Norway (2018).
25. Arikan, Lara Ayver Ilse, Social Media und der Grundsatz der freien Wahl, University of Graz, Austria (2023).
26. Hirschi, Silvia, politics digital manipulation report 2020, The Open University, UK (2020).
27. Chang, Yu-Hsi, Personalized political Facebook advertisements, Universität Wien, Austria (2020).
28. Hotham, Tristan, How do political parties use Facebook and what does it offer to their campaigns?, University of Bath, UK (2021).
29. Abrahamsson, Jonas Axel, DEMOCRACY DISRUPTED-FOR WHOM? A Study on Political Micro-Targeting and its Potential for Revitalizing Political Articulation, University of Gothenburg, Sweden (2019).
30. Frischknecht, Max, Predicting Voters: The Significant Role of Personal Data for Political Communication in Switzerland's Social Networks, University of Arts, Bern, Switzerland (2019).
31. Papakyriakopoulos, Orestis, Political Machines: Machine learning for understanding the politics of social machines, Technical University of Munich, Germany (2020).
32. Daniel Cockcroft, UP NEXT: YouTube's Recommendation System and the 2019 Canadian Federal Election, University of Alberta, Canada (2020).
33. Freitag, Markus, Personalisierte Wahlkampagnen in Schweden – Eine theoretische und empirische Untersuchung, Universitätsbibliothek der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany (2018).

Authors who are now professors/researchers

• Prof. Dr. Markus Freitag, https://www.ipw.unibe.ch/about_us/people/prof_dr_freitag_markus/index_eng.html
• Prof. Dr. Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, https://www.professoren.tum.de/en/papakyriakopoulos-orestis
• Dr T. (Tom) Dobber, Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam, https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/d/o/t.dobber/t.dobber.html
• Dr. Mads Fuglsang Hove, Assistant Professor, Aarhus University, https://www.au.dk/en/madshove@ps.au.dk/
• Dr. Vagia Mochla, Postdoc, University of Athens, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vagia-Mochla
• Dr. Fabio Votta, Postdoc, University of Amsterdam, https://www.techpolicy.press/author/fabio-votta/
• Mr. Dr. S. (Sam) Maasbommel, Lecturer/researcher, University of Groningen, https://www.rug.nl/staff/s.maasbommel/?lang=en

Authors who contributed to WhoTargetsMe

This list is probably incomplete.

• Dr. Tristan Hotham, https://tristanahotham.wordpress.com/

Note: In 2019, ProPublica, Mozilla and WhoTargetsMe all reported that their ad-transparency extensions stopped working after Facebook inserted code to block them: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools

Today, the extensions of both ProPublica (https://github.com/propublica/facebook-political-ads) and Mozilla (https://github.com/mozilla/ad-analysis-for-facebook/) are effectively dead. WhoTargetsMe is functioning but is limited. For example it does not run on mobile devices and hence cannot track native mobile apps. It is also limited to what appears on the PC of the volunteers.

Methodology: How the list was created

The list of theses was created by processing the full OpenAIRE database which contains 203 million publications. The core filtering technique is based on a neural reranker (Qwen3-Reranker-4B) which run for 29 hours on an RTX PRO 6000 GPU. The full description of the filtering technique and the source code are available at https://codeberg.org/fsi/thesis-filtering-pipeline. The list contains all theses with a score larger than 0.5.