Mykola Makhortykh
Author directory2026
SWARM: A Multilingual Human-Annotated Dataset for Russian Propaganda Detection in Search Engine Results
Manuel Tonneau | Abhinav Dubey | Farhan Shaikh | Ilaria Vitulano | Martha Stolze | Hale Dedeoglu | Clara Riechert | Ella Kuka | Maryna Sydorova | Mykola Makhortykh | Elizaveta Kuznetsova
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Manuel Tonneau | Abhinav Dubey | Farhan Shaikh | Ilaria Vitulano | Martha Stolze | Hale Dedeoglu | Clara Riechert | Ella Kuka | Maryna Sydorova | Mykola Makhortykh | Elizaveta Kuznetsova
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Russian state propaganda spreads across many languages and online spaces. Yet, most computational work examines only one such space, usually social media, in one or two languages, and analyses sources rather than content. We introduce SWARM (Search-Web documents Annotated for Russian propaganda, Multilingual), a dataset of 2,183 search engine results across nine languages and diverse web domains (e.g., news, blogs, government sites), each annotated by trained coders for whether it supports a recurring Russian propaganda narrative. We benchmark a source-based blocklist, supervised classifiers, and zero-shot LLMs against these labels. The blocklist misses most propaganda-supporting documents, because such content is not confined to flagged "propaganda" outlets but also appears on mainstream ones. Content-level analysis helps, though how much depends on the model: the strongest LLM reaches a positive-class F1 of 0.73, whereas the supervised classifiers reach only about 0.5, with the smaller LLMs over-predicting support, mistaking topical relevance for endorsement. Detecting search-borne propaganda thus requires per-language, content-level evaluation, which we hope SWARM and our evaluation code enable.
2019
Uphill from here: Sentiment patterns in videos from left- and right-wing YouTube news channels
Felix Soldner | Justin Chun-ting Ho | Mykola Makhortykh | Isabelle W.J. van der Vegt | Maximilian Mozes | Bennett Kleinberg
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science
Felix Soldner | Justin Chun-ting Ho | Mykola Makhortykh | Isabelle W.J. van der Vegt | Maximilian Mozes | Bennett Kleinberg
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science
News consumption exhibits an increasing shift towards online sources, which bring platforms such as YouTube more into focus. Thus, the distribution of politically loaded news is easier, receives more attention, but also raises the concern of forming isolated ideological communities. Understanding how such news is communicated and received is becoming increasingly important. To expand our understanding in this domain, we apply a linguistic temporal trajectory analysis to analyze sentiment patterns in English-language videos from news channels on YouTube. We examine transcripts from videos distributed through eight channels with pro-left and pro-right political leanings. Using unsupervised clustering, we identify seven different sentiment patterns in the transcripts. We found that the use of two sentiment patterns differed significantly depending on political leaning. Furthermore, we used predictive models to examine how different sentiment patterns relate to video popularity and if they differ depending on the channel’s political leaning. No clear relations between sentiment patterns and popularity were found. However, results indicate, that videos from pro-right news channels are more popular and that a negative sentiment further increases that popularity, when sentiments are averaged for each video.