The external advisory board comprises international scholars who have in-depth expertise in the different aspects of this project. The project team will build upon this expertise through regular consultations in order to publish high-quality scholarly works and to have a wider impact beyond academia.

Márton Bene, PhD

Márton Bene is a senior research fellow at Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence, and a lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University. His research activity primarily focuses on political communication and the political role of social media. He is the principal investigator of the “Networked locality: A multimethod approach to investigate the role of social media in local politics” research project funded by National Research, Development and Innovation Office, and a member of several international research collaboration such as CamforS, DigiWorld, Digital Parties Research Network and the H-2020 Funded Demos research project.

Bente Kalsnes, PhD

Bente Kalsnes is an Associate Professor, Department of Communication, Kristiania University College. Her research interests include political communication, social media, fake news & disinformation. She is the author of a book about fake news and disinformation in a Norwegian context (Falske nyheter: Løgn, desinformasjon og propaganda i den digitale offentligheten, Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2019), and is part of the research project Source Criticism in an Age of Mediated Disinformation (SCAM) financed by the Norwegian Research Council. Kalsnes is a member of the Freedom of Speech Commission, appointed by the Norwegian Government. She worked as a journalist and communication advisor before she started working in academia. Her dissertation (2016) is titled “Power in networked publics: Social media logic and political communication”.

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, PhD

Dr. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her research focuses on political expression in the context of the changing media environment, and the role of varied digital environments in shaping communication around news and politics. She has published widely in communication journals in the areas of youth political expression on social media, citizens’ modes of everyday political communication, and engagement with news in varied digital platforms, in venues such as Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society and Political Communication. She is also co-author on the book By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, published by NYU Press. Dr. Kligler-Vilenchik has been listed in Israeli Globes Magazine’s 40 under 40 list. In 2021-2, she is an Annenberg Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.

Antonio López, PhD

Antonio López is a leading international expert bridging ecojustice with media literacy. He is a founding theorist and architect of ecomedia literacy. As an authority in media literacy, he is regularly interviewed in the media about fake news, including on NPR and BBC. As a producer of dozens of youth media projects, Antonio has collaborated with the MacArthur Foundation, National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, National Rural Health Organization, and numerous First Nations across North America. As a consultant, López has advised PBS’ In the Mix series, Intel and The Praxis Project on media and cultural diversity. He received professional training at the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, earned his BA in Peace and Conflict Studies at UC Berkeley and MA in Media Studies at the New School for Social Research. He earned a Ph.D. is Sustainability Education from Prescott College. He has written numerous academic articles, essays and four books: Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the 21st Century (2008)The Media Ecosystem: What Ecology Can Teach Us About Responsible Media Practice (2012)Greening Media Education: Bridging Media Literacy with Green Cultural Citizenship (2014); and  Ecomedia Literacy: Integrating Ecology into Media Education (2021). He is currently Chair and Associate Professor of Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.

Jakub Macek, PhD

Jakub Macek is a media scholar and sociologist and he works as an associate professor at the Department of Media Studies and Journalism, Masaryk University. In his research and teaching he focuses on current media audiences and their transformations linked with online media. Recently he led the projects Trust in media in a fragmented media environment (2019-2020) and New and old media in everyday life (2013-2015), and took part in CATCH-EyoU (Horizon 2020, 2015-2018) and other projects.

Paul Mihailidis, PhD

Paul Mihailidis is an associate professor of civic media and journalism and assistant dean in the school of communication at Emerson College in Boston, MA, where he teaches media literacy, civic media, and community activism. He is founding program director of the MA in Media Design, Senior Fellow of the Emerson Engagement Lab, and faculty chair and director of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change.