Rinat Meerson

Rinat Meerson is a visiting PhD researcher from the Advertising and Media Psychology (AdMe) Research Group at the University of Vienna, Austria. Within the ERC-funded project „Digital Hate: Perpetrators, Audiences, and (Dis)Empowered Targets“, supervised by Prof. Jörg Matthes, her doctoral research explores why and how users decide to engage against digital hate or choose not to engage at all. Alongside her doctoral work, she contributes to the project „Extremism and Conflicts: Mobilization Potential and Online Opinion Formation in Austria (ECHO)“, where she investigates how social media environments shape opinion formation, polarization, and radicalization, as well as the emergence of outgroup hostility. Bringing her psychological background (M.Sc.) to the study of online behavior, her broader research interests include media literacy interventions, (de-)sensitization processes, trust formation in AI, and the role of emotions in online decision-making.