Professor Florian Toepfl holds the Chair of Political Communication with a Focus on Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet Region. Prior to joining the University of Passau in 2019, he was an Emmy Noether junior research group leader at the Freie Universitat Berlin (2014-2019) and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2012-2014).Toepfl is Principal Investigator of a five-year ERC consolidator project on "The Consequences of the Internet for Russia's Informational Influence Abroad" (RUSINFORM), funded by the European Research Council (ERC) with approximately 2 million Euro. This project investigates how, and with what consequences, new Internet-based technologies have contributed to the emergence of novel resources, techniques and processes by which political Russian elites can influence media audiences abroad.