Portrait illustration of Amr Sobhy

Amr Sobhy

Media, Politics and Computation

I study how news media construct political meaning — framing, ideology, editorial position — using computational methods at Le French News Lab, the research lab I founded in Paris to study the French media ecosystem at scale. I am also a research fellow at SPAR, working on judge systems and scalable oversight.

I came to research by building. Thirteen years as a product leader and founder across AI, fintech (Linkurious, Finary) and B2B SaaS — making systems that move information (PushBots), make it findable (IPtrace and currencystack, both acquired by apiLayer), and turn it into public accountability (MorsiMeter, Mwazna, Zabatak).

Before that: youth policy at the Arab League, technology and policy advisory for Internews Europe, an MSc in Public Policy and Management from Birkbeck, University of London as a Chevening Scholar, and an EMBA from Quantic. In another life, I published poetry in classical Arabic.

Along the way: Forbes' 30 Most Promising Young Entrepreneurs in Africa, Top 100 Influential Young Africans, the Anzisha Prize, a Data Journalism Award nomination, two World Summit Youth Awards, and a US patent.

Work featured on

Selected Papers

  1. FrenchNews-7: Benchmarking Cross-Publisher French News Editorial Desk Classification The 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (AACL-IJCNLP), 2026.Topics: Natural Language ProcessingRobustness & EvaluationNews Ecosystem
  2. Who Published This Headline? Editorial Fingerprinting in French News Under Topic Control 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop (WaC-13) at EMNLP, 2026 (Poster).Topics: Natural Language ProcessingText ClassificationNews Ecosystem
  3. FrIdéo: French News Outlet Ideology Scoring via Multi-Source Evidence Fusion and Distancing-Aware Lexical Scoring International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP), 2026.Topics: Natural Language ProcessingMeasurement & ScalingPolitical Ideology
  4. Framing by Wording, Framing by Selection: A Large-Scale Two-Dimensional Audit of French News Headlines, 2022–2025 International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP), 2026.Topics: Computational Social ScienceText ClassificationMedia Bias & Framing
  5. Conflict or Strategy? Asymmetric Role Framing of La France insoumise and Rassemblement National in French News Headlines, 2022–2025 Preprint, Le French News Lab, 2026.Topics: Computational Social ScienceText ClassificationMedia Bias & Framing
  6. Understanding Fact-Checking as a Global Phenomenon: Trends, Institutions, and Impact Birkbeck, University of London, 2016.Topics: Political ScienceInstitutional AnalysisNews Ecosystem