Marie is a postdoc researcher at the Department of Media Studies at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University and an editorial assistant at Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace. Her research interests include cyberhate and online discrimination with a focus on children and adolescents.

Currently, she works on her research project Cyberhate that targets people who are plus-size in the news: The role of bystanders in mitigating social pathologies (CYBERPLUS) within our research group.

About: CYBERPLUS focuses on cyberhate, hateful and biased expressions, proliferated in news media and on social media discussions and targeting people who are plus-size. Such cyberhate provides opportunities for the exposed bystanders to react; they might adopt the harmful attitudes and reinforce the hate, but they might also dispute the biased expressions and engage in counter-speech. The main objective of CYBERPLUS is to examine the interplay of the individual- and media-related factors that affect youth bystanders' reactions and provide an empirically based comprehensive and complex model of their appraisal processes and the subsequent behavioural reactions to cyberhate in media. A multi-method investigation will be conducted, including an online experiment, survey, and qualitative probes. The findings will inform policy and legislation makers who address intolerance, journalists, platform designers, and educators who deal with cyberhate and contribute to youth civic engagement.

This project is financed from Operational Programme Johannes Amos Comenius – Project "MSCAfellow6_MUNI" No. CZ.02.01.01/00/22_010/0007541.