Dr. Lisa Merten

Senior Researcher Media Use & Digital Communication

Lisa Merten has been working as a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) in Research Program 1 “Transformation of Public Communication – Journalistic and Intermediary Functions in the Process of Opinion Formation” since 2015. Her research interests include media use in digital media environments, especially with regard to the reception and effects of information-oriented media offerings, personalisation processes in publics shaped by algorithms and the development of digital methods.

As principal investigator and project coordinator, Lisa is currently leading the computational social science project “Political polarization and individualized online information environments: A longitudinal tracking study (POLTRACK)” investigating the interplay of individual information repertoires and the polarization of political opinions over time.  In this collaborative project between the HBI, GESIS, and the Universities of Bremen and Konstanz, they collect tracking and survey data from online panelists and conduct automated online analysis of the media content seen by the panelists.

In addition, in the DFG project “Public Connection” Lisa and her colleagues are investigating how users connect to different publics through the way they use media and other communicative practices.

Lisa was co-PI at the Research Institute Social Cohesion in the subproject “Media Use and Social Cohesion”. Together with Hannah Immler she ran a network and content analysis of Instagram accounts to examine whether and how political influencers in social media can reach populations without much information-oriented social media use.

In the summer semester of 2021, she substituted an assistant professor of Computational Social Science at the Center for Data and Methods at the University of Konstanz on a part-time basis. She has also taught at the Universität Hamburg, University of Augsburg, and Kiel University of Applied Sciences.

Career Path

Her cumulative dissertation project at Universität Hamburg focused on practices of news use on social networking platforms. Her dissertation article on practices of personal news curation on social media based on data from the Reuters Institute Digital News Survey named Article of the Year 2021 by Digital Journalism.

Lisa studied communication science at the University of Leipzig, at the TU Dresden as well as at the Universiteit van Amsterdam and Boston University with a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. After and during her studies, she worked in market and media research (e.g. Sinus Institute, ZDF Media Research, Gruner & Jahr, mindline, election campaign Elisabeth Warren for Massachusetts).

Contact information

Dr. Lisa Merten

Senior Researcher Media Use & Digital Communication

We are no longer located at Rothenbaumchaussee 36. You can reach us temporarely at the following address:

Leibniz Institute for Media Research, Hans-Bredow-Institut
c/o betahaus | Gänsemarkt
Gänsemarkt 43
20354 Hamburg

Last update: 28.07.2025

Works by Dr. Lisa Merten

Screenshot of the website diskursmonitor, entry “Social Bots” by Gregor Wiedemann
Publikation Online Portal for Strategic Communication

Glossary Entry on “Social Bots”

Dr. Gregor Wiedemann wrote a glossary entry on “social bots” for Diskursmonitor, a collaborative online platform that aims to educate and document strategic communication. This topic is marked by major controversy in academia, some of which has played out in public.

Cover of the M&K journal, issue 3/2025
Publikation M&K 3/2025 as Special Issue

Diversity, Intersectionality, and Gender in Journalism

The third issue of M&K in 2025 is a special edition on "Diversity, Intersectionality, and Gender in Journalism," edited by Margreth Lünenborg, Ana-Nzinga Weiß, Yener Bayramoğlu, and Bernadette Uth. The nine articles are available open access on the Nomos eLibrary.

Cover of an article by Judith Möller et al. in the journal
Publikation Article in Journal of Communication

Positioning and Presentation of Articles in News Aggregators

In the study “Nudges for News Recommenders,” Dr. Nicolas Mattis, Lucien Heitz, Dr. Philipp K. Masur, Prof. Dr. Judith Möller, and Prof. Dr. Wouter van Atteveldt examine how the placement and presentation of environmental news in news aggregators can influence user behavior.

Cover of the Oxford Handbook
Publikation Digital Orders of the Future

Digital Constitutionalism Rethought

In a chapter of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Constitutionalism, Matthias C. Kettemann and Anna Sophia Tiedeke explore digital constitutionalism from the perspective of various normativities. These are the diverse rules, values, and organizing principles that shape the digital space.

Eine hübsche junge Familie aus Vater, Mutter Kind blicken strahlend in die Kamera, im Vordergrund links ein Ringlicht
Projekt Project for State Media Authorities

Babies and Toddlers as Family Influencers

The HBI is conducting a qualitative and quantitative study to examine how babies and young children under the age of five are portrayed on commercial German-language 'family influencing' profiles on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. A team led by Dr. Claudia Lampert and Dr. Stephan Dreyer is discussing the findings in relation to the existing legal framework and media ethics considerations.

Cover des Buchs "Recht der Digitalisierung"
Publikation Available Open Access

Law of Digitalization

Can the right legal framework meet the central challenges of digitization? This volume, edited by Prof. Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann, explores important new areas of law, the regulation of AI, the role of digital services, and the characteristics of effective technology policy and sensible innovation law.

Screenshot der ersten "Seite" des Artikels auf dem Verfassungsblog
Publikation Article on Verfassungsblog

DSA Enforcement by the EU Commission

The problematic role of the European Commission in enforcing the Digital Services Act (DSA) and possible alternatives are the focus of a blog post published by Jan-Ole Harfst, Dr. Tobias Mast, and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz on 16 July 2025 on the Verfassungblog.

Cover der Zeitschrift
Publikation Recently Published

Community Data Trust for Sensitive Data

Jan Rau, Moritz Fürneisen, and Gregor Wiedemann co-developed the concept of community data stewardship to facilitate the collaborative creation and utilization of sensitive data in communication science. By using the example of research into right-wing extremist online communication, they demonstrate how community data stewardship can be structured.

Cover der Zeitschrift UFITA
Publikation Recently Published

On the Public Value of Public Service Media

"What Can Audience Research findings tell us about the public value of public service media?" This question explored by Prof. Dr. Uwe Hasebrink and PD Dr. Jan-Hinrik Schmidt, who published their insights in the issue 2/2024 of the journal UFITA.

Cover of the journal New Media & Society
Publikation Open Access Publication

Personal Preferences When Searching for Political Information

Lisa Merten and five co-authors researched how personality traits and attitudes affect the search for political information. Their article has now been published open access in the journal New Media & Society.

Cover der Broschüre zum 75. Geburtstag
Publikation Brochure Available for Download

Facets of 75 Years Hans-Bredow-Institut

With this brochure. we take a look at the institute's development since 1950. While we do not claim to provide a complete history, we aim to highlight some of the institute's unique characteristics, showcasing moments in the past when these features were particularly evident.

Altes Zeitungsfoto von Hans-Bredow,
Beitrag HBI 75: Founding History

How the Institute Got Its Name

On May 30, 1950, the Hans Bredow Institute was founded by the former Northwest German Broadcasting Corporation (the predecessor of NDR and WDR) and the University of Hamburg. This blog post describes the history of its founding and explains how the institute got its name.

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