Deen Freelon
Biographic Data
| ID | 245130 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deen Freelon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deen |
| FAMILY NAME | Freelon |
| SIGNATURE | FREELON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5055-0316 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 495 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 40 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Using psychological science to understand and fight health misinformation
There is widespread concern that misinformation poses dangerous risks to health, well-being, and civic life. Despite a growing body of research on the topic, significant questions remain about the psychological factors that render people susceptible to misinformation, the extent to which it affects real-world behavior, how it spreads online and offline, and intervention strategies that counter and correct misinformation effectively. This report r…
Communicating about sexual violence on TikTok
TikTok presents an opportunity for strategic and health communicators. There are more than 300 million views associated with the hashtags #sexualassaultawareness and #sexualassaultsurvivors on TikTok. Using quantitative content analysis, we analyzed 150 TikTok videos about “sexual assault” for trends in self-disclosures (RQ1), message framing (RQ2), types of sexual violence (RQ3), emotions (RQ4), creator characteristics (RQ5–7), and engagement (R…
The Diffusion and Reach of (Mis)Information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 Election
Social media creates the possibility for rapid, viral spread of content, but how many posts actually reach millions? And is misinformation special in how it propagates? We answer these questions by analyzing the virality of and exposure to information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 presidential election. We examine the diffusion trees of the approximately 1 B posts that were re-shared at least once by U.S.-based adults from July 1, 2020, to Feb…
Politicalcommunicationsowhite
Race has been a consequential factor in politics for centuries, yet our review of the political communication literature finds only sporadic interest in the topic. To examine systematically how and how much political communication research has addressed race, we analyze author-supplied keywords in nine journals within three broad categories (political communication, generalist communication, and critical communication) over 31 years. Combining co…
The Post-API Age of Social Media Data Access
Social media data have become a mainstay of social science research since the first application programming interfaces (APIs) debuted in the mid-2000s. Over time, platforms have radically altered their data offerings, substantially determining the kinds of research that can be conducted. This article presents historical and normative analyses of the current state of platform data precarity, defined by Freelon (2018) as the post-API age . We recou…
Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing
Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the challenges of conducting large-scale field experiments have made it difficult to assess the scope of the problem 1,2 . Here we present data from 2020 for the entire population of active adult Facebook users in the USA showing that content from ‘like-minded’ s…
Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook
Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that users could have seen in their feeds with the information that they saw (after algorithmic curation) and the information with which they engaged. We show that (i) ideological segregation is high and increase…
How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?
We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content the…
At the nexus of technology, identity, and norms
Journal Article At the nexus of technology, identity, and norms Get access Deen Freelon Deen Freelon Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA Corresponding author: Deen Freelon. Email: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5055-0316 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 73, Issue 6, December 2023, Pages 627–629, https://doi.org/10…
Inequities of race, place, and gender among the communication citation elite, 2000–2019
A recent wave of studies has focused on the identities of communication scholars, quantifying the degree to which Whites, men, and Americans dominate the discipline.This study analyzes the communication citation elite (CCE)—a group of 1,675 highly cited scholars in communication research—in terms of race, gender, and country of employment over 20 years. Applying computational methods and content analysis, we find that 91.5% of first-author CCE me…
Stitching Politics and Identity on Tiktok
Though a relative newcomer among social media platforms, social video-sharing platform TikTok is one of the largest social media platforms in the world, boasting over one billion monthly active users, which it garnered in just five years (Dellatto, 2021). While much of the early attention to the platform focused on more frivolous elements, such as its dances and challenges, the political weight of TikTok has become ever clearer. In the 2020 US el…
Digital Trace Data Collection for Social Media Effects Research
In social media effects research, the role of specific social media content is understudied, in part attributable to the fact that communication science previously lacked methods to access social media content directly. Digital trace data (DTD) can shed light on textual and audio-visual content of social media use and enable the analysis of content usage on a granular individual level that has been previously unavailable. However, because digital…
TikToks Lead to Higher Knowledge and Perceived Severity of Sexual Violence among Adolescent Men
Politicalcommunicationsowhite
Race has been a consequential factor in politics for centuries, yet our review of the political communication literature finds only sporadic interest in the topic. To examine systematically how and how much political communication research has addressed race, we analyze author-supplied keywords in nine journals within three broad categories (political communication, generalist communication, and critical communication) over 31 years. Combining co…
False equivalencies
Digital media are critical for contemporary activism—even low-effort “clicktivism” is politically consequential and contributes to offline participation. We argue that in the United States and throughout the industrialized West, left- and right-wing activists use digital and legacy media differently to achieve political goals. Although left-wing actors operate primarily through “hashtag activism” and offline protest, right-wing activists manipula…
Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017
There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican an…
The Evolving Journalistic Roles on Social Media
Scholarly and pragmatic definitions of the term “engagement” vary drastically. This article attempts to capture the nuances of the term by exploring journalists’ roles on social media where “engagement” is supposed to be particularly prevalent. Using in-depth interviews, we gauge the attitudes of traditional political journalists as well as those who think of themselves as “engagement specialists” about their responsibilities in interactive space…
Black Trolls Matter
The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption o…
Disinformation as Political Communication
This introduction to the special issue “Beyond Fake News: The Politics of Disinformation” contains four main sections. In the first, we discuss the major sociopolitical factors that have allowed disinformation to flourish in recent years. Second, we review the very short history of disinformation research, devoting particular attention to two of its more extensively studied conceptual relatives: propaganda and misinformation. Third, we preview th…
The Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
The Russian-sponsored Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) use of social media to influence U.S. political discourse is undoubtedly troubling. However, scholarly attention has focused on social media, overlooking the role that news media within the country played in amplifying false, foreign messages. In this article, we examine articles in the U.S. news media system that quoted IRA tweets through the lens of changing journalism practices in the hybr…
Computational Research in the Post-API Age
On April 4, 2018, the post-API age reached a milestone.On that day, Facebook closed access to its Pages API, which had allowed researchers to extract all posts, comments, and associated metadata from public Facebook pages (Schroepfer, 2018).This decision followed the company's April 2015 closure of its public search API, which provided searchable access to all public posts within a rolling two-week window (Facebook, n.d.).The closure of the Pages…
Campaigns in control
Most American political campaigns use social media as one component of a broader communication strategy. Campaign use of social media is typically governed by controlled interactivity, a philosophy that attempts to leverage citizens’ online behavior toward the goal of electing the candidate. One key outcome of controlled interactivity is high levels of message discipline, the degree of correspondence between a campaign’s and its audience’s politi…
Online clustering, fear and uncertainty in Egypt’s transition
Does the uncertainty associated with post-authoritarian transitions cause political and social polarization? Does ubiquitous social media exacerbate these problems and thus make successful democratic transitions less likely? This article examines these questions in the case of Egypt between the 11 February 2011 fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the 3 July 2013 military coup, which overthrew President Mohamed el-Morsi. The analysis is based on a…
Beyond the Hashtags
Quantifying the power and consequences of social media protest
The exercise of power has been an implicit theme in research on the use of social media for political protest, but few studies have attempted to measure social media power and its consequences directly. This study develops and measures three theoretically grounded metrics of social media power—unity, numbers, and commitment—as wielded on Twitter by a social movement (Black Lives Matter [BLM]), a counter-movement (political conservatives), and an …
Disinformation as Political Communication
This introduction to the special issue “Beyond Fake News: The Politics of Disinformation” contains four main sections. In the first, we discuss the major sociopolitical factors that have allowed disinformation to flourish in recent years. Second, we review the very short history of disinformation research, devoting particular attention to two of its more extensively studied conceptual relatives: propaganda and misinformation. Third, we preview th…
Quantifying the power and consequences of social media protest
The exercise of power has been an implicit theme in research on the use of social media for political protest, but few studies have attempted to measure social media power and its consequences directly. This study develops and measures three theoretically grounded metrics of social media power—unity, numbers, and commitment—as wielded on Twitter by a social movement (Black Lives Matter [BLM]), a counter-movement (political conservatives), and an …
Computational Research in the Post-API Age
On April 4, 2018, the post-API age reached a milestone.On that day, Facebook closed access to its Pages API, which had allowed researchers to extract all posts, comments, and associated metadata from public Facebook pages (Schroepfer, 2018).This decision followed the company's April 2015 closure of its public search API, which provided searchable access to all public posts within a rolling two-week window (Facebook, n.d.).The closure of the Pages…
Discourse architecture, ideology, and democratic norms in online political discussion
Studies of political discussions online have been dominated by approaches that focus exclusively on deliberation, ignoring other equally relevant communication norms. This study conducts a normative assessment of discussion spaces in two prominent web platforms—Twitter hashtags and newspaper comment sections devoted to particular political issues—applying the norms of communitarianism, liberal individualism, and deliberation. The platforms’ disti…
Black Trolls Matter
The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption o…
Analyzing online political discussion using three models of democratic communication
Research examining online political forums has until now been overwhelmingly guided by two broad perspectives: (1) a deliberative conception of democratic communication and (2) a diverse collection of incommensurable multi-sphere approaches. While these literatures have contributed many insightful observations, their disadvantages have left many interesting communicative dynamics largely unexplored. This article seeks to introduce a new framework…
Digital Trace Data Collection for Social Media Effects Research
In social media effects research, the role of specific social media content is understudied, in part attributable to the fact that communication science previously lacked methods to access social media content directly. Digital trace data (DTD) can shed light on textual and audio-visual content of social media use and enable the analysis of content usage on a granular individual level that has been previously unavailable. However, because digital…
The Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
The Russian-sponsored Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) use of social media to influence U.S. political discourse is undoubtedly troubling. However, scholarly attention has focused on social media, overlooking the role that news media within the country played in amplifying false, foreign messages. In this article, we examine articles in the U.S. news media system that quoted IRA tweets through the lens of changing journalism practices in the hybr…
Online clustering, fear and uncertainty in Egypt’s transition
Does the uncertainty associated with post-authoritarian transitions cause political and social polarization? Does ubiquitous social media exacerbate these problems and thus make successful democratic transitions less likely? This article examines these questions in the case of Egypt between the 11 February 2011 fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the 3 July 2013 military coup, which overthrew President Mohamed el-Morsi. The analysis is based on a…
Politicalcommunicationsowhite
Race has been a consequential factor in politics for centuries, yet our review of the political communication literature finds only sporadic interest in the topic. To examine systematically how and how much political communication research has addressed race, we analyze author-supplied keywords in nine journals within three broad categories (political communication, generalist communication, and critical communication) over 31 years. Combining co…
Campaigns in control
Most American political campaigns use social media as one component of a broader communication strategy. Campaign use of social media is typically governed by controlled interactivity, a philosophy that attempts to leverage citizens’ online behavior toward the goal of electing the candidate. One key outcome of controlled interactivity is high levels of message discipline, the degree of correspondence between a campaign’s and its audience’s politi…
Syria in the Arab Spring
How did Syria’s conflict interact with the broader wave of regional protest known as the Arab Spring? This article uses a unique, complete Twitter dataset of tweets including the word “Syria” in English or Arabic to empirically test how Syria’s conflict was discussed online. The analysis shows a high level of interaction between Syria and other Arab countries through 2011. Other Arab countries experiencing popular protests (“Arab Spring countries…
Handbook of digital politics
Watching From Afar
Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring-related content using a unique data se…
Introduction to the Special Issue on New Media and Social Unrest
Online Fragmentation in Wartime
Theorists have long predicted that like-minded individuals will tend to use social media to self-segregate into enclaves and that this tendency toward homophily will increase over time. Many studies have found moment-in-time evidence of network homophily, but very few have been able to directly measure longitudinal changes in the diversity of social media users' habits. This is due in part to a lack of appropriate tools and methods for such inves…
Facilitating Diverse Political Engagement with the Living Voters Guide
Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their pre-existing views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online engagement platform to engage with a wide variety of political opinions and arguments. In a system ai…
The Post-API Age of Social Media Data Access
Social media data have become a mainstay of social science research since the first application programming interfaces (APIs) debuted in the mid-2000s. Over time, platforms have radically altered their data offerings, substantially determining the kinds of research that can be conducted. This article presents historical and normative analyses of the current state of platform data precarity, defined by Freelon (2018) as the post-API age . We recou…
The Evolving Journalistic Roles on Social Media
Scholarly and pragmatic definitions of the term “engagement” vary drastically. This article attempts to capture the nuances of the term by exploring journalists’ roles on social media where “engagement” is supposed to be particularly prevalent. Using in-depth interviews, we gauge the attitudes of traditional political journalists as well as those who think of themselves as “engagement specialists” about their responsibilities in interactive space…
Participation in the Youth Civic Web
Concerns over youth disengagement from conventional politics mixed with perceptions of youth aptitude for digital media have led scholars and practitioners to investigate civic Web sites as locations of potential youth learning and participation. Over the past few years, the scholarly literature on youth civic Web sites has developed a number of conceptual vocabularies for, and catalogued the nature of, the civic engagement opportunities offered …
Analyzing online political discussion using three models of democratic communication
Research examining online political forums has until now been overwhelmingly guided by two broad perspectives: (1) a deliberative conception of democratic communication and (2) a diverse collection of incommensurable multi-sphere approaches. While these literatures have contributed many insightful observations, their disadvantages have left many interesting communicative dynamics largely unexplored. This article seeks to introduce a new framework…
Opening Closed Regimes
Talking Among Themselves
The character of youth civic engagement on the internet has emerged as a productive topic of study in communication research. Concurrently, a number of recent studies of online forums have found that technological design features can powerfully influence both the form and content of civic discussion. The present study integrates these previously unacquainted literatures, contributing to each by comparing the user content of two online youth engag…
Communicating Civic Engagement
Communication aimed at promoting civic engagement may become problematic when citizen roles undergo historic changes. In the current era, younger generations are embracing more expressive styles of actualizing citizenship defined around peer content sharing and social media, in contrast to earlier models of dutiful citizenship based on one-way communication managed by authorities. An analysis of 90 youth Web sites operated by diverse civic and po…
Facilitating Diverse Political Engagement with the Living Voters Guide
Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their pre-existing views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online engagement platform to engage with a wide variety of political opinions and arguments. In a system ai…
Participation in the Youth Civic Web
Concerns over youth disengagement from conventional politics mixed with perceptions of youth aptitude for digital media have led scholars and practitioners to investigate civic Web sites as locations of potential youth learning and participation. Over the past few years, the scholarly literature on youth civic Web sites has developed a number of conceptual vocabularies for, and catalogued the nature of, the civic engagement opportunities offered …
Discourse architecture, ideology, and democratic norms in online political discussion
Studies of political discussions online have been dominated by approaches that focus exclusively on deliberation, ignoring other equally relevant communication norms. This study conducts a normative assessment of discussion spaces in two prominent web platforms—Twitter hashtags and newspaper comment sections devoted to particular political issues—applying the norms of communitarianism, liberal individualism, and deliberation. The platforms’ disti…
Watching From Afar
Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring-related content using a unique data se…
Introduction to the Special Issue on New Media and Social Unrest
The effect of the Internet on civic engagement under authoritarianism
This study examines civic activities under an authoritarian state — Azerbaijan — focusing on how the Internet may influence them. The role of the Internet in political and civic engagement is a subject of debate in any society. But Azerbaijan offers a unique vantage point to study the Internet’s effect on engagement because it views the Internet as an extension of sovereign dominion and controls online discussions. The government maintains the sa…
Syria in the Arab Spring
How did Syria’s conflict interact with the broader wave of regional protest known as the Arab Spring? This article uses a unique, complete Twitter dataset of tweets including the word “Syria” in English or Arabic to empirically test how Syria’s conflict was discussed online. The analysis shows a high level of interaction between Syria and other Arab countries through 2011. Other Arab countries experiencing popular protests (“Arab Spring countries…
Tweeting to Power
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDeen FreelonDeen Freelon is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at American University
Of big birds and bayonets
The 2012 US Presidential debates were hybrid media events. Millions of viewers ‘dual-screened’ them, simultaneously watching their televisions and commenting on their social media feeds. In doing so, they helped transform verbal gaffes and zingers into debate-defining moments that may have influenced public opinion and media coverage. To examine this phenomenon, we apply network and qualitative textual analyses to a unique data set of over 1.9 mi…
Handbook of Digital Politics
Handbook of digital politics
Online Fragmentation in Wartime
Theorists have long predicted that like-minded individuals will tend to use social media to self-segregate into enclaves and that this tendency toward homophily will increase over time. Many studies have found moment-in-time evidence of network homophily, but very few have been able to directly measure longitudinal changes in the diversity of social media users' habits. This is due in part to a lack of appropriate tools and methods for such inves…
Beyond the Hashtags
Quantifying the power and consequences of social media protest
The exercise of power has been an implicit theme in research on the use of social media for political protest, but few studies have attempted to measure social media power and its consequences directly. This study develops and measures three theoretically grounded metrics of social media power—unity, numbers, and commitment—as wielded on Twitter by a social movement (Black Lives Matter [BLM]), a counter-movement (political conservatives), and an …
Campaigns in control
Most American political campaigns use social media as one component of a broader communication strategy. Campaign use of social media is typically governed by controlled interactivity, a philosophy that attempts to leverage citizens’ online behavior toward the goal of electing the candidate. One key outcome of controlled interactivity is high levels of message discipline, the degree of correspondence between a campaign’s and its audience’s politi…
Online clustering, fear and uncertainty in Egypt’s transition
Does the uncertainty associated with post-authoritarian transitions cause political and social polarization? Does ubiquitous social media exacerbate these problems and thus make successful democratic transitions less likely? This article examines these questions in the case of Egypt between the 11 February 2011 fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the 3 July 2013 military coup, which overthrew President Mohamed el-Morsi. The analysis is based on a…
Computational Research in the Post-API Age
On April 4, 2018, the post-API age reached a milestone.On that day, Facebook closed access to its Pages API, which had allowed researchers to extract all posts, comments, and associated metadata from public Facebook pages (Schroepfer, 2018).This decision followed the company's April 2015 closure of its public search API, which provided searchable access to all public posts within a rolling two-week window (Facebook, n.d.).The closure of the Pages…
The Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
The Russian-sponsored Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) use of social media to influence U.S. political discourse is undoubtedly troubling. However, scholarly attention has focused on social media, overlooking the role that news media within the country played in amplifying false, foreign messages. In this article, we examine articles in the U.S. news media system that quoted IRA tweets through the lens of changing journalism practices in the hybr…
False equivalencies
Digital media are critical for contemporary activism—even low-effort “clicktivism” is politically consequential and contributes to offline participation. We argue that in the United States and throughout the industrialized West, left- and right-wing activists use digital and legacy media differently to achieve political goals. Although left-wing actors operate primarily through “hashtag activism” and offline protest, right-wing activists manipula…
Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017
There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican an…
The Evolving Journalistic Roles on Social Media
Scholarly and pragmatic definitions of the term “engagement” vary drastically. This article attempts to capture the nuances of the term by exploring journalists’ roles on social media where “engagement” is supposed to be particularly prevalent. Using in-depth interviews, we gauge the attitudes of traditional political journalists as well as those who think of themselves as “engagement specialists” about their responsibilities in interactive space…
Political science (31 works) · Social Media and Politics (31 works) · Politics (29 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Law (27 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Social media (19 works) · Media studies (18 works) · Law (13 works) · Media Studies and Communication (12 works)