“Authenticity matters more than advertising.” An ICSJ researcher on athletes on social media, disinformation regulation, and AI ethics
Sport plays a significant role in the life and research of Dr Kateřina Turková from the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism FSV UK. She was actively involved in athletics herself, continues to work as a coach in her spare time, and previously served on the committee of a Prague athletics club. Even during her active sports career, however, she knew she did not want to remain only on the track. She was always drawn to a broader perspective—understanding how sport functions in the media, institutions, and society as a whole. This interest ultimately led her to pursue an academic career.
Her doctoral project focused on how elite Czech athletes communicate on social media and how audiences respond to their posts. The research, later developed into the monograph Sports Communication on Social Media and Audience Reactions (Karolinum, 2025), was based on data from 2018–2019. The analysis covered the social media profiles of sixteen Czech male and female athletes across various disciplines and tracked their communication over an entire annual cycle. “In the second phase of the research, I asked athletes and their managers how they manage their social media accounts and select content. Most relied on professional support, but they still placed strong emphasis on authenticity,” Dr Turková explains.
The research showed that alongside sporting performances, athletes’ profiles regularly featured leisure-time and lifestyle content, including commercial collaborations. These collaborations became one of the key points of analysis. “Somewhat surprisingly, it turned out that fans generally do not mind commercial posts. Negative reactions tended to appear rather in connection with current events—for example, controversies surrounding athletes’ public actions—or at moments when sporting performance was unsuccessful,” she notes. “For instance, Ester Ledecká was criticised for not refusing a state decoration, even though her post concerned a race. Or when tennis player Karolína Plíšková posted a photo from the beach and then struggled competitively, fans criticised her for ‘going on holiday with our money’,” she adds.
Recently, Dr Turková has continued working on sports communication together with Assoc. Prof. Alice Němcová Tejkalová and Dr Veronika Macková, also from the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, in a chapter focusing on the social media communication of Paralympic athletes. Together with colleagues from the ICSJ sports research group—Assoc. Prof. Alice Němcová Tejkalová, Dr Veronika Macková, Anna Hrbáčková, and Dr Ondřej Trunečka—she also analysed media coverage of the football match Sparta vs. Rangers in Scottish, Czech, and British media, as well as reactions on social media. In her larger research projects, however, she has since partially shifted away from this topic.
Application for Authorship Verification
At present, she devotes most of her research time to projects funded either by national agencies or by the European Commission. One of these is a project supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic entitled Authorship Verifier. Within this project, she collaborates with colleagues from technical disciplines on the development of a web-based application that can be used, among other things, in disciplinary proceedings and for verifying the authorship of submitted documents. Using the application, a suspected student would be asked—under supervision—to fill in omitted words in a fragment of text.
A partial aim of the project is also to determine the extent to which students use automated text generators and how they work with their outputs. “Our findings so far suggest that most respondents do not perceive artificial intelligence primarily as means of unethical writing, but rather as a supportive tool. At the same time, however, there is a clear need for clearer rules and better communication from universities,” she comments on the results of a pilot study conducted together with Dr Irena Prázová from ICSJ and researchers from Masaryk University and Mendel University in Brno.
The team is now evaluating the second wave of data collection, which also focused on academic staff. “We used questionnaires that were intentionally brief. They consisted of statement-based questions—for example, we asked whether respondents would be willing to have a test created with the help of artificial intelligence or whether they would delegate part of the assessment to AI,” she explains. The project is expected to culminate in the middle of next year with a pilot deployment of the application.
Disinformation and Fact-Checking
In recent years, disinformation and media resilience have become major themes in her research. Within the project Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age (ReMeD), led by Assoc. Prof. Alice Němcová Tejkalová, a book on the spread and regulation of disinformation in the European digital space is about to be published. Dr Turková edited the volume together with Dr Veronika Macková. Recently, as part of research coordinated by the University of Oxford, she and her colleagues Dr Victoria Nainová and Dr Suchibrata Roy conducted interviews with Czech and Slovak fact-checkers. The interviews focused on how their work is changing in the era of generative artificial intelligence, what new challenges content verification brings, and how fact-checkers cooperate at national and international levels.
“One of the most significant problems they identified was working with synthetic voice—for example, with older phone recordings it is increasingly difficult to determine whether they actually come from the person in question. At the same time, it became clear that even in the age of advanced technologies, so-called half-truths remain the most problematic: information that combines real facts with manipulative interpretation,” she explains. “An interesting finding was that international organisations provide fact-checkers with stronger support than local platforms. While barriers and distrust stemming from differing working practices persist at the national level, international networks have more clearly defined rules of cooperation, which facilitates the sharing of experience and mutual trust,” she adds.
Diverse Research Methods
What she enjoys most about academic work is the process itself: formulating research questions, searching for appropriate methods, and collaborative project work. She therefore likes to go beyond questionnaires and interviews. When examining media routines, for example, she and her colleagues from the ReMeD project employed ethnographic methods. “Ethnographic research is based on a combination of interviews and observation of people in their natural environment. Thanks to ethnography, one can understand much better how things work. It does not stop at what happens but also asks why,” she explains.
At the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, she appreciates the openness to collaboration, opportunities to participate in research projects, and support within doctoral studies—whether in the form of methodological consultations, conference participation, or international research stays.
“When I started studying here, it helped me greatly that people were open and willing to help. Getting involved in research projects here is truly possible,” she says.
Looking ahead, she would like to continue working on sport-related research, although she is aware that securing funding in this area is not easy. At the same time, she enjoys projects that connect different topics and methods—from sport and disinformation to artificial intelligence. “For about two years now, I have been the editor-in-chief of the academic journal Mediální studia, and I would like to gradually move it forward. I would mainly like to focus on improving its quality and visibility,” she concludes.
