Show off your University of Illinois and college pride with branded apparel items featuring the College of Media, Advertising, Journalism, Media & Cinema Studies, and the Institute of Communications Research.
From November 9 through December 4, a College of Media apparel shop will be open with items to purchase including branded sweatshirts, ball caps, T-shirts, beanies, polo shirts, and quarter-zip pullovers.
Orders will be ready to ship or pick up locally by Monday, Dec. 18. Customers can select shipping via USPS Priority Mail or via UPS Ground shipping, or pick up orders from Dixon Graphics at 312 S. Neil in Champaign (open Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.). USPS International Priority Mail is available as well.
My research centers on the psychology of persuasion in digital media, with a particular focus on social media platforms. I investigate how consumers interpret and react to persuasive messages such as advertisements and health-related messages by brands and social media influencers. I am also interested in the effects of misinformation and their mitigation, as well as the impact of LLM conversational agents like GPT models on cognitive processing.
Recent Publications/Presentations
Wise, K., Willis, E., Ji, A., Paltaratskaya, V. (2025, November). Reimagining the Presentation of Important Safety Information (ISI) in Social Media Pharmaceutical Advertising. NCA 111th Annual Convention, Colorado, US.
Liu, A. Y., Ji, A., Taneja, H., & Nelson, M. R. (2025). Stakeholder-desired audiences: Fans’ audience data imaginaries and how they shape industry data practices. Convergence, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565251366412
Paltaratskaya, V., Ji, A., Mazumdar, P., & Wise, K. (2025). Beyond Buzzwords: The Development of Large Language Models and Their Use in Advertising and Strategic Communication Research. Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/10641734.2025.2498996
Wise, K., Paltaratskaya, V., & Ji, A. (2025). Media choice. In De Gruyter Handbook of Media Psychology. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
Ji, A., Paltaratskaya, V., & Wise, K. (2025, June). The Effect of Message Fatigue on Visual Attention to, and Elaboration of Mental Health Infographics. Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA 2025), Colorado, US.
Ji, A., Khowaja, L., Gilloly, K., Luo, H., Oshodi, N., Randolph, Z., Sun, R., Wang, C.-Y., Nelson, M. R. (2025, March). TikTok Made Me Buy It: Breaking Expectations with Shoppable Ads. American Academy of Advertising 2025 Annual Conference, Pennsylvania, US.
Courses Taught
ADV 480: Social Media Analytics
ADV 305: Adtech and the Digital World
ADV 150: Introduction to Advertising
MACS 100: Intro to Popular TV & Movies
Awards and Honors
2025 Bart A. Cummings Gift Fund, University of Illinois
2025 Graduate Student Conference Scholarship, American Academy of Advertising
2024 Fall List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students
September 18, 2023 | Lois Yoksoulian, University of Illinois News Bureau
New research led by data science experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and United Nations Global Pulse found that there is no strong evidence that YouTube promoted anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, performed an algorithmic audit to examine if YouTube’s recommendation system acted as a “rabbit hole,” leading users searching for vaccine-related videos to anti-vaccine content.
For the study, the researchers asked World Health Organization-trained participants and workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk to intentionally find an anti-vaccine video with as few clicks as possible, starting from an initial informational COVID-19 video posted by the WHO. They compared the recommendations seen by these users to related videos that are obtained from the YouTube application programming interface and to YouTube’s Up-Next recommended videos that were seen by clean browsers without any user-identifying cookies.
The team then used machine learning methods to classify anti-vaccine content, analyzing more than 27,000 video recommendations made by YouTube.
Margaret Ng.
“We found no evidence that YouTube promotes anti-vaccine content to its users,” said Margaret Yee Man Ng, an Illinois assistant professor of journalism with an appointment in the Institute of Communications Research and lead author of the study. “The average share of anti-vaccine or vaccine hesitancy videos remained below 6% at all steps in users’ recommendation trajectories.”
The initial goal of the research was to better understand YouTube’s famously opaque techniques for content recommendations—going beyond querying the platform’s application programming interfaces to collect real-world data—and whether these techniques funnel users toward anti-vaccine sentiment and vaccine hesitancy.
“We wanted to learn about how different entities were using the platform to disseminate their content so that we could develop recommendations for how YouTube could do a better job of not pushing misinformation,” said UN Global Pulse researcher Katherine Hoffmann Pham, a co-author of the study. “Contrary to public belief, YouTube wasn’t promoting anti-vaccine content. The study reveals that YouTube’s algorithms instead recommended other health-related content that was not explicitly related to vaccination.”
“The videos that users were directed to were longer and contained more popular content, and attempted to push a blockbuster strategy to engage users by promoting other reliably successful content across the platform,” Ng said.
The study also allowed the researchers to examine how users’ real-world experiences differ from the personalized recommendations obtained by querying YouTube’s “RelatedToVideo” application programming interface. This API is designed to help programmers search for related content on the platform or using clean browsers, replicating the experience of a new user visiting YouTube with no search or view history, which is often used to study the platform’s recommendation system.
The study reports that the watch histories of users significantly affect video recommendations, suggesting that data from the API or a clean browser does not offer an accurate picture of the suggestions that real users are seeing. Real users saw slightly more pro-vaccine content as they advanced through their recommendation trajectories. In contrast, searches performed by the API or clean browsers during the study were drawn toward irrelevant recommendations as they advanced.
“I think one benefit of this study relative to others is that it proposes a relatively lightweight methodology to gather real data on how people navigate through YouTube’s video recommendations,” Pham said. “So unlike the APIs, which will just sort of randomly suggest new links, the users can critically review the links and pick one, which sort of mimics the behavior that many people would use on YouTube in reality.”
Understanding recommendation systems is important because it promotes transparency and holds them accountable,” added co-author Miguel Luengo-Oroz, a professor at the Telecommunications School of the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. ”This helps people understand the choices being made for them by platform designers.”
To contact Margaret Yee Man Ng, call 217-300-8186; email ymn@illinois.edu.
The paper “Exploring YouTube’s recommendation system in the context of COVID-19 vaccines: Computational and comparative analysis of video trajectories” is available online. DOI: 10.2196/49061
The Institute of Communications Research is excited to announce our newest cohort! Please learn more about the students’ research interests below and join us in welcoming them to the University of Illinois College of Media community this fall. For more information, see full student profiles.
Weiting Du earned his master’s degree in journalism from Michigan State University, specializing in science and environmental journalism, and holds a bachelor’s degree in ecological environmental engineering from Chongqing University. Weiting’s research interests encompass media effects and risk communication under the context of climate change, with a particular interest in climate inactions. In parallel, Weiting explores how contemporary visual imagery represents the complex interplay between human-environment relationships, collective memories, and broader societal issues. Weiting’s past research covers topics such as the social power of photography in China and persuasive health messages.
Yewon Hong received her master’s degree in cultural studies/critical theory and analysis from the University of Amsterdam and a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Yonsei University. Her research interests include cuteness, aesthetics, affect, game, critical theory, cultural studies, and cultural analysis.
Yanbo Li’s research interests lie at the intersection of computational communication and political communication. Specifically, Li is interested in using computational methods to learn about online misinformation and incivility contagion inside and between different countries and the possible factors that foster these processes.
Veranika Paltaratskaya completed her bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and art history at Emory University, and her master’s in advertising at UIUC. Veranika’s master’s thesis focused on the topic of time perception during media use. Her current research focuses on time perception, message fatigue, and computational approaches to communications research.
Se II (James) Park received his master’s in advertising and bachelor’s in communication, both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Se Il’s interdisciplinary research focuses on persuasive messages in the context of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Metaverse, and Web 3.0. He wants to examine the difference in consumer behavior in a more immersive and intelligent virtual. In addition, he worked for the Korean government agency, KOTRA, as a marketing consultant in Chicago and for a blockchain project, WEMIX, as a business development and PR manager in Korea.
Nisa Rahman received her MS in advertising from the College of Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and BA in communication from Purdue University – West Lafayette. Nisa’s research interest lies in emerging technologies and their effect on social behavior in the context of health communication. This exploration takes shape through studies utilizing anthropomorphic conversational agents, i.e., “chatbots” to debunk health misinformation and persuade behavior change, as well as the effect of modality in cognitive processing. Nisa is also interested in the intersections between gender presentations and its influence in Human-AI Communication.
Wei Xiao received her MA in communication, culture, and technology from Georgetown University and BA in communication and economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is broadly interested in exploring alternative approaches to the reasoning behind sharing dis/misinformation to debunk dis/misinformation or inoculate people against misinformation. Her research also involves technology policy topics, such as data privacy, free expression, and AI governance. While fighting traditional disinformation, Wei is equally dedicated to addressing the potential ramifications inherent in AI-amplified disinformation scenarios.
Junwei Zhan received his master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Oregon. Before joining ICR, he explored gardens and vehicles in Japan as media to better understand the condition and method of language/culture. Junwei’s research interests are centered around the relations between subjectivity, governmentality, global media network and the network’s interpretive power, which eradicate the boundary between public/private space, human/posthuman and self-governing/self-enslaving. Besides his academic research on communication and media, he is also a cross-disciplinary artist.
Zixuan (Melodie) Zhao earned her BA and MA degrees in journalism from the University of Missouri. She is primarily researching the social and psychological effects of media messages and digital media use. Her specific interests revolve around the interactions between interactive media technologies and individuals’ identity, perceptions of “otherness,” and social relationships, as well as their role in driving social mobilization or polarization.
Nini Zhou’s research interests include critical studies of communication, free labor of women online, and female digital communities.
Ronald E. Taylor (MS ’71, advertising; PhD ’83, communications, ICR), devoted scholar, teacher, and mentor, passed away at his home in Tennessee on September 11.
After receiving his PhD from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Taylor joined the University of Tennessee as the head of the Department of Advertising, where he built a nationally recognized advertising program at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
During his tenure, the Department of Advertising was rated by US News & World Report as one of the top eight advertising graduate programs in the country. After a reorganization of the college, Taylor served as the director of the School of Advertising and Public Relations until 2011.
Taylor was an active member of the American Academy of Advertising, where he served as secretary. In 2013, he was awarded AAA’s Charles H. Sandage Award for Teaching Excellence, which recognizes outstanding contributions to advertising education.
Academically, he was a champion of qualitative research and a recognized leader in advertising message strategy. He is best known for his “Six Segment Strategy Wheel” conceptualization, which he published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1999.
My research interests lie at the intersection of computational communication and political communication. Specifically, I am interested in using computational methods to learn about online misinformation and incivility contagion inside and between different countries and the possible factors that foster these processes.
Recent Publications/Presentations
Li, Y., & Su, C. (2022). “Toxidization” of social media discussion: Comparing online incivility expressed about the Russian-Ukraine war in China and the United States. Paper presented at the 73rd ICA annual conference, Toronto.
Chaikulngamdee Chawannuch, Janaki Riji Nair, Yanbo Li, Yanling Zhao, Cathleen Cusachs, Danilo Martinez, Yangyang Duan, Zige Chen, Xuanqi Ye, & Kelsey Prena. (2022). Learning through gaming: Examining the learning outcomes of EEK! game. Paper presented at 2022 International Conference on Meaningful Play, East Lansing, MI.
Se Il is a doctoral student at the Institute of Communications Research (ICR). Se Il’s interdisciplinary research focuses on persuasive messages in the context of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Metaverse, and Web 3.0. He wants to examine the difference in consumer behavior in a more immersive and intelligent virtual environment.
Prior to joining ICR, Se Il received his master’s in advertising and bachelor’s in communication, both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In addition, he worked for the Korean government agency, KOTRA, as a marketing consultant in Chicago and for a blockchain project, WEMIX, as a business development and PR manager in Korea.
Courses Taught
ADV 250/283: Advertising and Brand Strategy (Fall 22–present)
Awards and Honors
Teachers Ranked as Excellent By Their Students: FA22, *SP23 *Outstanding
Weiting Du is a first-year Ph.D. student at the Institute of Communications Research. Weiting’s research interests encompass media effects and risk communication under the context of climate change, with a particular interest in climate inactions. In parallel, Weiting explores how contemporary visual imagery represents the complex interplay between human-environment relationships, collective memories, and broader societal issues.
Weiting’s past research covers topics such as the social power of photography in China and persuasive health messages. Prior to joining ICR, Weiting earned his master’s degree in journalism from Michigan State University, specializing in science and environmental journalism, and holds a bachelor’s degree in ecological environmental engineering from Chongqing University.
Recent Publications/Presentations
Du, W., Sanders-Jackson, A., Neumann, D., & Tan, A. (2022, May 26-30). The effects of applying visual cues in culturally tailored anti-smoking messages for sexual minority women. Presented at the 72nd Annual ICA Conference, Paris, France (virtual session).
Du, W. (2021, June 19). The Desert Protector: How did an environmental photojournalist trigger a storm of environmental protection in China. Presented at the 35th Annual Visual Communication Conference, Cannon Beach, Oregon, United States.
Courses Taught
JOUR 205 History of American Journalism
What Most People Don’t Know about Me
I love Not to Be Reproduced (1937), On Fire (1989), and The Shadow Play (2018).
“I on the Media” is a series from the University of Illinois College of Media in which faculty, staff, and students at the college address current issues and research. It began in 2020 to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on media-related issues.
Hear from our experts
9/8/2023
In this Q&A, Professor Brant Houston, Knight Chair of Investigative and Enterprise Reporting in the Department of Journalism, discusses the implications of the August 11 police raid on the Marion County Record, run by retired associate professor of journalism Eric Meyer.
9/7/2022
Angela Aguayo, associate professor of media and cinema studies, discusses the Illinois Community Media Project, funded by Chancellor Jones’s Call to Action to Address Racism & Social Injustice Research Program. The project supports people making and circulating media that is most aligned with the interests of that community. (Video produced by Andrew Hall.)
1/18/2022
Nikki Usher, associate professor of journalism, discusses their new book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism. They argue that “the future of journalism conversation is actually a future of democracy conversation.” (Video produced by Andrew Hall.)
12/8/2021
Brian K. Johnson, professor of journalism, demonstrates how he applies a photojournalism methodology to his creative works and how to find the unseen in the seen.
11/5/2021
Kevin Wise, professor of advertising, discusses current studies at the MAD (Media and Advertising) Lab, where researchers have access to psychophysiology, eye-tracking, and virtual reality equipment. (Video produced by Andrew Hall.)
2/9/2021
Victor Font, lecturer in media and cinema studies, discusses how the pandemic affected film production in his class last spring, how he approached fall semester, and why he’s optimistic going forward. (Interview conducted by Connor Ciecko, Videography and Photography Intern.)
Derek Long, assistant professor of media and cinema studies, discusses trends in movie exhibition since the pandemic, distribution and production studio strategies to mitigate losses, and the shift to streaming. (Interview conducted by Connor Ciecko, Videography and Photography Intern.)
11/5/2020
Brant Houston, Knight Chair Professor in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting in the Department of Journalism, discusses student-driven investigative reporting of COVID-19 on the website he oversees, CU-CitizenAccess.org, which serves as a lab for digital innovation and data journalism. (Interview conducted by Connor Ciecko, Videography and Photography Intern.)
10/5/2020
Ewa Maslowska, assistant professor of advertising in the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising, discusses the changes in consumer behavior and brand advertising strategies that researchers observed in the first few months of the pandemic.
5/11/2020
Mike Yao, professor of digital media and head of the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising, explains the mental and social impacts of using computers and digital devices while working and learning from home.
4/22/2020
Alison Davis, a lecturer in journalism who teaches documentary production and has won seven regional Emmy Awards, recommends five documentaries to watch while we’re in quarantine and shares tips for documenting your own experience during this unprecedented time.
4/15/2020
Eric Meyer, associate professor of journalism, discusses how his weekly paper in Kansas, the Marion County Record, has temporarily removed its paywall and has begun distributing the paper free for 13 weeks to county residents to keep people better informed.
Congratulations to all of the College of Media faculty and teaching assistants who were ranked as excellent by their students!
This list is based on Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms completed by students during the Spring 2023 semester. Only those instructors who distributed ICES forms at least once during this time period and who released their data for publication are included in the list. View the complete list.
Note: * denotes that the instructor ratings were outstanding. + denotes Summer 2023 course.
