Amr Sobhy

Amr Sobhy is a researcher working at the intersection of politics, media, and computational social science, with a particular focus on French news media, political communication, framing, and ideological measurement. His work combines natural language processing, large-scale corpus construction, annotation design, and transformer-based methods to study how news outlets frame political actors, represent public issues, and construct editorial positions across the French media ecosystem.

He is the founder of FrenchNewsLab, an interdisciplinary research hub dedicated to the systematic study of the French news media ecosystem. His work focuses on how political meaning is constructed, circulated, and differentiated across media systems, with particular attention to framing, ideology, representation, and the role of language in shaping public discourse.

He came to this work from civic technology rather than from the academy. As an Egyptian information activist and technology entrepreneur, he co-created Morsi Meter, the platform that tracked the campaign promises of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2012 and became the model for later promise trackers including Iran's Rouhani Meter and Canada's TrudeauMeter. He also founded Zabatak, an anti-corruption citizen reporting initiative, and PushBots, a notifications platform whose SaaS API products were later acquired. That period brought recognition from Forbes, the Anzisha Prize, the World Summit Awards and the Africa Youth Awards, and a Data Journalism Award nomination from the Global Editors Network. He is also a published author and poet, writing in Arabic.

A Chevening Scholar, he graduated from Birkbeck, University of London in 2015 with a Master's in Public Policy and Management, with a thesis on fact-checking trends and impact. That thesis is the hinge between the two halves of the work: the question of how public claims are verified at scale led directly from building accountability platforms to measuring how news media frame and construct political meaning. He read for his undergraduate degree at Tanta University in Egypt.

His work has received recognition through awards and nominations, including a Data Journalism Award nomination and two World Summit Youth Awards. His research and projects have also been highlighted by Forbes, Africa Youth Awards, and the Anzisha Prize program.

Sobhy co-founded Morsi Meter, a political accountability platform that tracked campaign promises during Egypt's 2012 presidential elections. The project helped establish a broader model for promise-tracking and public accountability tools, including similar initiatives in other countries.

His research has been cited in peer-reviewed publications, including Journalism Practice and related academic work on fact-checking, media analysis, and accountability. He has also conducted research on the evolution of global fact-checking networks and contributed to projects in healthcare technology. In addition to his research profile, he is a published author and poet.

His current work focuses on computational methods for analyzing French news media, including outlet ideology measurement and framing analysis. These projects aim to advance both the methodological foundations of media analysis and the empirical study of political discourse in French-language journalism.

1. • Akbar, S. Z., Panda, A., & Pal, J. (2022). 'Political hazard: Misinformation in the 2019 Indian General Election campaign.' South Asian History and Culture, Taylor & Francis.
2. • Park, S.S. (2024). 'Comparing Objectivity, Transparency, Context, and Trust Between Fact-Checking Sites and News Organizations.' Journalism Practice, Taylor & Francis.
3. • Funke, D. (2018). 'How to fact-check politics in countries where there's no press freedom.' Global Investigative Journalism Network.
4. • Kraft, D., Puri, B., Burgul, A., Nokola, N., Sobhy, A., Hussein, S.B., & Silva, R.S.A. (2019). 'Dentistry device for automatically cleaning an oral cavity.' U.S. Patent 10,478,273.
5. • 'Amr Sobhy.' Global Shakers, May 29, 2020.
6. • Anzisha Prize. 'Amr Sobhy.'