Martin J Riedl
Biographic Data
| ID | 277103 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin J Riedl |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin J |
| FAMILY NAME | Riedl |
| SIGNATURE | RIEDL M J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2411-1998 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 52 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Antecedents of Disclosure: What Transparency Measures Social Media Users in the United States Want From Paid Political Influencers
At the heels of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, public attention turned to the role social media influencers played in Donald J. Trump’s decisive win. In the United States, unlike influencers promoting commercial brands, political influencers – that is, social media influencers who associate themselves with political causes – are not required to disclose whether they got paid in exchange for promoting a political organization, party, or camp…
Safety work repertoires and dating platforms: How users of Tinder and Bumble manage their safety
Making academia suck less: Supporting early career researchers studying harmful content online through a feminist ethics of care
Early career researchers (ECR) in communication and media research face increasing problems and stressors due to systemic challenges in academia, including the precarity of being an ECR and the politicization of research and targeting of researchers. For researchers studying harmful content online (HCO), research-related trauma (RRT) can compound these stressors. In this study, we present results from interviews with 18 ECRs from communication st…
Connective Democracy: A New Approach to Fighting Political Divisiveness
This special issue explores connective democracy, a new theoretical approach to fighting and understanding political polarization and divisiveness online. Connective democracy asks scholars to think about solutions that bridge societal and political divides, particularly on social media. Our collection of six articles theorizes connective democracy and applies the theoretical concept to global situations, such as nurturing freedom of speech in My…
Using Facebook Messenger versus Groups for News Engagement
For online news organizations trying to improve audience engagement strategies, Facebook Groups and Messenger chats constitute promising avenues. We explore whether these meso news-spaces, with different discourse architectures and group sizes, affect the substance of the discussion and people’s impressions. In this study, we experimentally tested how training and intimate forms of news engagement in small-group discussions on Facebook Messenger …
‘I get suppressed: ’ Pro- And Anti-Abortion Activists’ Folk Theories of Platform Governance and Shadowbanning
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a federal right to abortion access in the country. Ensuing disparate abortion legalization throughout the country made pertinent the question of whether and how digital platforms would promote or demote abortion-related content. In this study, we explore folk theories in the domain of abortion-related speech. We investigate conceptualizations and heuristics of how users think platform governance and shadowban…
Lodging complaints against platform power: How Lebanese journalists and activists experience reporting mechanisms, platform failures, and techno-alienation
Since Western technology platforms began colonizing online spaces, they have neglected Majority World populations, including those in MENA/SWANA countries like Lebanon. This neglect exacerbates harassment and violence against marginalized individuals, reinforcing systemic harms in Lebanon's cisheteropatriarchal and sectarian society. Our study draws on 14 in-depth interviews with women and queer journalists and activists in Lebanon who have faced…
Infrastructural platform violence: How women and queer journalists and activists in Lebanon experience abuse on WhatsApp
Technology-facilitated abuse and violence disproportionately affect marginalized people. While researchers have explored this issue in the context of public-facing social media platforms, less is known about how it plays out on more private messaging apps. This study draws on in-depth interviews with women and queer journalists and activists in Lebanon to illustrate their experiences of infrastructural platform violence on WhatsApp. Specifically,…
The role of geolocation data in U.S. political campaigning: How digital political strategists perceive it
The use of geolocation data by political campaigns is often the subject of media concern. Research has investigated the role of data in and use by political campaigns, but less attention has been paid to digital political strategists largely responsible for decisions behind the assemblage and mining of voter databases to deliver micro-targeted messages on behalf of political campaigns. In this study, we conducted interviews with 14 leading indust…
Promises and Perils of Automated Journalism: Algorithms, Experimentation, and “Teachers of Machines” in China and the United States
Automated tools for parsing and communicating information have increasingly become associated with the production of journalistic content. To study this phenomenon and to explore the development of automated journalism across two locales at the cutting edge of technology, we leverage insights from in-depth interviews with news technologists from pioneering news organizations and Internet companies specialized in the construction of "news bot" tec…
How pro- and anti-abortion activists use encrypted messaging apps in post-Roe America
In a post- Roe America, abortion-rights activists are scrambling to protect reproductive rights. Communication on open social media platforms like Facebook can now be used to prosecute those seeking an illegal abortion in a frightening entanglement of technology corporations and the state. Building on surveillance studies and feminist scholarship, we analyze 22 interviews with pro- and anti-abortion activists and pro-encryption activists to answe…
Political Influencers on Social Media: An Introduction
Influencers are omnipresent on social media platforms. They occupy important digital real estate across a range of topical domains including beauty, fashion, and gaming. While researchers have contributed important work on the respective role that authenticity plays for influencers' success and have described a burgeoning industry within the larger domain of social media entertainment, comparably little is known about what happens when influencer…
How Disinformation on WhatsApp Went From Campaign Weapon to Governmental Propaganda in Brazil
The popular encrypted messaging and chat app WhatsApp played a key role in the election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. The present study builds on this knowledge and showcases how the app continued to be used in a governmental operation spreading false and misleading information popularly known in Brazil as the Office of Hatred (OOH). By harnessing in-depth expert interviews with documentarians of the office's daily operations-res…
Effects of A High-Person-Centered Response to Commenters Who Disagree on Readers’ Positive Attitudes toward A News Outlet’s Facebook Page
This study examined what type of response to commenters who disagree led to more positive attitudes toward a news organization’s Facebook page. Results of two experiments, one in Germany (n = 764) and one in the United States (n = 763), found that a high-person-centered (HPC) response, which acknowledges people’s emotions, led to more positive attitudes toward the news organization’s Facebook page, compared with a low-person-centered (LPC) respon…
Using word vector models to trace conceptual change over time and space in historical newspapers, 1840–1914
Linking large digitized newspaper corpora in different languages that have become available in national and state libraries opens up new possibilities for the computational analysis of patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries. The significant contribution this article presents is to demonstrate how word vector models can be used to explore the way concepts have shifted in meaning over time, as they migrated across sp…
Signaling News Outlet Credibility in a Google Search
This study extends the literature on how transparency influences news credibility perceptions by examining trust signals at the news outlet level, rather than at the story level, as earlier research has done. Experiments in the United States ( n = 1,037) and Germany ( n = 1,000) found that exposure to trust signals in a Google search about a known news brand, rather than an unknown brand, and the German cultural context increased news credibility…
Reverse-engineering political protest: The Russian Internet Research Agency in the Heart of Texas
In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, the public slowly began to grapple with the extent of Russian disinformation campaigns by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), elements of which were carried out on Facebook. Campaigns targeted people in the United States in many ways, including by publishing event pages on Facebook that were at times piggybacking on existing events, stoking fear, anger and other emotions already on the rise i…
Antecedents of support for social media content moderation and platform regulation: The role of presumed effects on self and others
This study examines support for regulation of and by platforms and provides insights into public perceptions of platform governance. While much of the public discourse surrounding platforms evolves at a policy level between think tanks, journalists, academics and political actors, little attention is paid to how people think about regulation of and by platforms. Through a representative survey study of US internet users (N = 1,022), we explore an…
Signaling news outlet trust in a Google Knowledge Panel: A conjoint experiment in Brazil, Germany, and the United States
Using data from a conjoint experiment in three countries (Brazil, n = 2038; Germany, n = 2012, and the United States, n = 2005), this study demonstrates that journalistic transparency can cue trust at the level of the entire news outlet—or domain level—using a Google Knowledge Panel that comes up when people search for a news outlet. In Brazil and the United States, two pieces of information in a Knowledge Panel provided the strongest heuristics …
Platformed antisemitism on Twitter: Anti-Jewish rhetoric in political discourse surrounding the 2018 US midterm election
What does antisemitism look like in the context of political discussions on Twitter? In this article, we introduce the notion of platformed antisemitism. We first define it as a platform-agnostic concept, and then explore it through an exemplary case study of Twitter and its affordances by way of a mixed-methods analysis of discourse surrounding the 2018 US midterm election. Via qualitative textual analysis, we document how political discourse on…
Chat Apps and Cascade Logic: A Multi-Platform Perspective on India, Mexico, and the United States
Chat apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal are increasingly popular platforms for communication. Their sometimes-closed nature and encryption affordances present researchers, governments, and law enforcement with unique problems of access, traceability, and, ultimately, understanding. It also makes them useful vectors for sowing disinformation. This research assumes a multi-platform perspective, describing the particularities of how chat ap…
Affective Affordances: Exploring Facebook Reactions as Emotional Responses to Hyperpartisan Political News
Heloisa Sturm Wilkersona* , Martin J. Riedlbc & Kelsey N. Whippled a Department of Communication, Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, IN, USAb School of Journalism and Media, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USAc Digital Media Research Program, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USAd Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
Who is responsible for interventions against problematic comments? Comparing user attitudes in Germany and the United States
Online comment sections on news organizations' social media pages provide a unique forum for exploring attitudes toward platform governance and freedom of expression at the crossroads between people, platforms, and news providers. Amid ample political and policy interest, little empirical evidence exists on user perceptions of platform governance. Through survey studies in Germany ( n = 1155) and the United States ( n = 1164), we provide a compar…
Scoping new policy frameworks for local and community broadband networks
Journalism as a profession of conditional permeability: A case study of boundaries in a participatory online news setting
Journalistic professionalism serves as a semantic tool for journalists to draw boundaries and to demarcate their profession. This research builds on Andrew Abbott’s book The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, and his assessment of journalism as a ‘permeable occupation’. By way of a strategic case study of a German-language news organization, it puts forth the notion of journalism as a profession of conditional permea…
Political Influencers on Social Media: An Introduction
Influencers are omnipresent on social media platforms. They occupy important digital real estate across a range of topical domains including beauty, fashion, and gaming. While researchers have contributed important work on the respective role that authenticity plays for influencers' success and have described a burgeoning industry within the larger domain of social media entertainment, comparably little is known about what happens when influencer…
Reddit's Veil of Anonymity: Predictors of engagement and participation in media environments with hostile reputations
This research investigates how personality strength, news engagement, and news consumption influence engagement on Reddit, an environment that affords varying degrees of anonymity and is known to paradoxically host toxic and supportive communities. Using a survey of Redditors, findings suggest women are less likely to comment and post but are equally likely to vote and read posts as men, indicating there may be hesitation to engage in using more …
Journalism as a profession of conditional permeability: A case study of boundaries in a participatory online news setting
Journalistic professionalism serves as a semantic tool for journalists to draw boundaries and to demarcate their profession. This research builds on Andrew Abbott’s book The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, and his assessment of journalism as a ‘permeable occupation’. By way of a strategic case study of a German-language news organization, it puts forth the notion of journalism as a profession of conditional permea…
How Disinformation on WhatsApp Went From Campaign Weapon to Governmental Propaganda in Brazil
The popular encrypted messaging and chat app WhatsApp played a key role in the election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. The present study builds on this knowledge and showcases how the app continued to be used in a governmental operation spreading false and misleading information popularly known in Brazil as the Office of Hatred (OOH). By harnessing in-depth expert interviews with documentarians of the office's daily operations-res…
Chat Apps and Cascade Logic: A Multi-Platform Perspective on India, Mexico, and the United States
Chat apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal are increasingly popular platforms for communication. Their sometimes-closed nature and encryption affordances present researchers, governments, and law enforcement with unique problems of access, traceability, and, ultimately, understanding. It also makes them useful vectors for sowing disinformation. This research assumes a multi-platform perspective, describing the particularities of how chat ap…
What influences media effects on public perception? A cross-national study of comparative agenda setting
Using a big data approach, this study explores the media agenda setting effects in 16 countries on five continents. Agenda setting effects were found to vary across the nations. Our findings provide empirical evidence that individual factors such as Age, Education, Living area, and Political ideologyand national macro variables, including Economic developmentand Media freedom, are associated with the strength of such effects. Results suggest that…
Promises and Perils of Automated Journalism: Algorithms, Experimentation, and “Teachers of Machines” in China and the United States
Automated tools for parsing and communicating information have increasingly become associated with the production of journalistic content. To study this phenomenon and to explore the development of automated journalism across two locales at the cutting edge of technology, we leverage insights from in-depth interviews with news technologists from pioneering news organizations and Internet companies specialized in the construction of "news bot" tec…
Platformed antisemitism on Twitter: Anti-Jewish rhetoric in political discourse surrounding the 2018 US midterm election
What does antisemitism look like in the context of political discussions on Twitter? In this article, we introduce the notion of platformed antisemitism. We first define it as a platform-agnostic concept, and then explore it through an exemplary case study of Twitter and its affordances by way of a mixed-methods analysis of discourse surrounding the 2018 US midterm election. Via qualitative textual analysis, we document how political discourse on…
Engagement Moderation: What Journalists Should Say to Improve Online Discussions
The study put forth a new concept, which we call engagement moderation, that is defined as community managers or journalists interacting with commenters to improve the comment threads, rather than deleting comments. We then tested this concept using an experiment (N = 798) on a mock Facebook page of a news site. Results showed that if journalists employed engagement moderation and used what are called high-person-centered responses to incivility—…
Infrastructural platform violence: How women and queer journalists and activists in Lebanon experience abuse on WhatsApp
Technology-facilitated abuse and violence disproportionately affect marginalized people. While researchers have explored this issue in the context of public-facing social media platforms, less is known about how it plays out on more private messaging apps. This study draws on in-depth interviews with women and queer journalists and activists in Lebanon to illustrate their experiences of infrastructural platform violence on WhatsApp. Specifically,…
How pro- and anti-abortion activists use encrypted messaging apps in post-Roe America
In a post- Roe America, abortion-rights activists are scrambling to protect reproductive rights. Communication on open social media platforms like Facebook can now be used to prosecute those seeking an illegal abortion in a frightening entanglement of technology corporations and the state. Building on surveillance studies and feminist scholarship, we analyze 22 interviews with pro- and anti-abortion activists and pro-encryption activists to answe…
Making academia suck less: Supporting early career researchers studying harmful content online through a feminist ethics of care
Early career researchers (ECR) in communication and media research face increasing problems and stressors due to systemic challenges in academia, including the precarity of being an ECR and the politicization of research and targeting of researchers. For researchers studying harmful content online (HCO), research-related trauma (RRT) can compound these stressors. In this study, we present results from interviews with 18 ECRs from communication st…
Dialectics of Complexity: A Five-Country Examination of Lived Experiences on Social Media
This study examined people's lived experiences with social media through 10 focus groups with 82 total participants across five countries: Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, South Africa, and the United States. Findings demonstrate that social media make people's lives less complex, but this belies heightened complexity as they negotiate three paradoxes when using social media. We describe these as dialectics between: convenience versus privacy, trust ve…
Breakdown of Democratic Norms? Understanding the 2016 US Presidential Election Through Online Comments
This study examined how comments posted on news stories about the 2016 presidential election reflected the disruptive discourses of the campaign itself. A quantitative content analysis and a qualitative textual analysis of user-generated comments ( N = 1,881) showed that while incivility was less frequent than impoliteness, overall there was ample evidence of the violation of democratic norms of political talk in these comment streams. Findings a…
Exploring how online political quizzes boost interest in politics, political news, and political engagement
This study sought to understand whether people’s exposure to online quiz questions about politics could pique people’s interest in political news and politics. An online experiment (N = 585) showed support for a mediation model that demonstrated the psychological process by which taking an online political quiz could boost interest in political news and politics. Results showed that exposure to the quiz indirectly increased interest in politics a…
What influences media effects on public perception? A cross-national study of comparative agenda setting
Using a big data approach, this study explores the media agenda setting effects in 16 countries on five continents. Agenda setting effects were found to vary across the nations. Our findings provide empirical evidence that individual factors such as Age, Education, Living area, and Political ideologyand national macro variables, including Economic developmentand Media freedom, are associated with the strength of such effects. Results suggest that…
Using Semantics for Granularities of Tokenization
Depending on downstream applications, it is advisable to extend the notion of tokenization from low-level character-based token boundary detection to identification of meaningful and useful language units. This entails both identifying units composed of several single words that form a several single words that form a, as well as splitting single-word compounds into their meaningful parts. In this article, we introduce unsupervised and knowledge-…
Reddit's Veil of Anonymity: Predictors of engagement and participation in media environments with hostile reputations
This research investigates how personality strength, news engagement, and news consumption influence engagement on Reddit, an environment that affords varying degrees of anonymity and is known to paradoxically host toxic and supportive communities. Using a survey of Redditors, findings suggest women are less likely to comment and post but are equally likely to vote and read posts as men, indicating there may be hesitation to engage in using more …
Breakdown of Democratic Norms? Understanding the 2016 US Presidential Election Through Online Comments
This study examined how comments posted on news stories about the 2016 presidential election reflected the disruptive discourses of the campaign itself. A quantitative content analysis and a qualitative textual analysis of user-generated comments ( N = 1,881) showed that while incivility was less frequent than impoliteness, overall there was ample evidence of the violation of democratic norms of political talk in these comment streams. Findings a…
Exploring how online political quizzes boost interest in politics, political news, and political engagement
This study sought to understand whether people’s exposure to online quiz questions about politics could pique people’s interest in political news and politics. An online experiment (N = 585) showed support for a mediation model that demonstrated the psychological process by which taking an online political quiz could boost interest in political news and politics. Results showed that exposure to the quiz indirectly increased interest in politics a…
Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America by Jaime E. Settle
In her book Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America, Jaime E. Settle, an associate professor of government at the College of William & Mary, presents her well-executed scrutinization of one c
Who Put the ‘Social’ in Mobile and Social Payment Platforms? Re-Reading Simmel and Colleagues in Light of the Cambrian Explosion
This research considers the Cambrian explosion (Nelms, Maurer, Swartz, & Mainwaring, 2017) of mobile and social payment technologies from a perspective that integrates classical theorizing on money and payments (Mauss, 2002; Simmel, 2005) and more recent work (Bandelj, Wherry, & Zelizer, 2017; Dodd, 2014; Maurer, 2015; Zelizer, 2017), as well as research coming out of the $2 and $2 at the $2 at Amsterdam. The paper negotiates mobile and social pa…
The downsides of digital labor: Exploring the toll incivility takes on online comment moderators
Engagement Moderation: What Journalists Should Say to Improve Online Discussions
The study put forth a new concept, which we call engagement moderation, that is defined as community managers or journalists interacting with commenters to improve the comment threads, rather than deleting comments. We then tested this concept using an experiment (N = 798) on a mock Facebook page of a news site. Results showed that if journalists employed engagement moderation and used what are called high-person-centered responses to incivility—…
Dialectics of Complexity: A Five-Country Examination of Lived Experiences on Social Media
This study examined people's lived experiences with social media through 10 focus groups with 82 total participants across five countries: Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, South Africa, and the United States. Findings demonstrate that social media make people's lives less complex, but this belies heightened complexity as they negotiate three paradoxes when using social media. We describe these as dialectics between: convenience versus privacy, trust ve…
Affective Affordances: Exploring Facebook Reactions as Emotional Responses to Hyperpartisan Political News
Heloisa Sturm Wilkersona* , Martin J. Riedlbc & Kelsey N. Whippled a Department of Communication, Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, IN, USAb School of Journalism and Media, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USAc Digital Media Research Program, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USAd Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
Who is responsible for interventions against problematic comments? Comparing user attitudes in Germany and the United States
Online comment sections on news organizations' social media pages provide a unique forum for exploring attitudes toward platform governance and freedom of expression at the crossroads between people, platforms, and news providers. Amid ample political and policy interest, little empirical evidence exists on user perceptions of platform governance. Through survey studies in Germany ( n = 1155) and the United States ( n = 1164), we provide a compar…
Scoping new policy frameworks for local and community broadband networks
Journalism as a profession of conditional permeability: A case study of boundaries in a participatory online news setting
Journalistic professionalism serves as a semantic tool for journalists to draw boundaries and to demarcate their profession. This research builds on Andrew Abbott’s book The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, and his assessment of journalism as a ‘permeable occupation’. By way of a strategic case study of a German-language news organization, it puts forth the notion of journalism as a profession of conditional permea…
Effects of A High-Person-Centered Response to Commenters Who Disagree on Readers’ Positive Attitudes toward A News Outlet’s Facebook Page
This study examined what type of response to commenters who disagree led to more positive attitudes toward a news organization’s Facebook page. Results of two experiments, one in Germany (n = 764) and one in the United States (n = 763), found that a high-person-centered (HPC) response, which acknowledges people’s emotions, led to more positive attitudes toward the news organization’s Facebook page, compared with a low-person-centered (LPC) respon…
Using word vector models to trace conceptual change over time and space in historical newspapers, 1840–1914
Linking large digitized newspaper corpora in different languages that have become available in national and state libraries opens up new possibilities for the computational analysis of patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries. The significant contribution this article presents is to demonstrate how word vector models can be used to explore the way concepts have shifted in meaning over time, as they migrated across sp…
Signaling News Outlet Credibility in a Google Search
This study extends the literature on how transparency influences news credibility perceptions by examining trust signals at the news outlet level, rather than at the story level, as earlier research has done. Experiments in the United States ( n = 1,037) and Germany ( n = 1,000) found that exposure to trust signals in a Google search about a known news brand, rather than an unknown brand, and the German cultural context increased news credibility…
Reverse-engineering political protest: The Russian Internet Research Agency in the Heart of Texas
In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, the public slowly began to grapple with the extent of Russian disinformation campaigns by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), elements of which were carried out on Facebook. Campaigns targeted people in the United States in many ways, including by publishing event pages on Facebook that were at times piggybacking on existing events, stoking fear, anger and other emotions already on the rise i…
Antecedents of support for social media content moderation and platform regulation: The role of presumed effects on self and others
This study examines support for regulation of and by platforms and provides insights into public perceptions of platform governance. While much of the public discourse surrounding platforms evolves at a policy level between think tanks, journalists, academics and political actors, little attention is paid to how people think about regulation of and by platforms. Through a representative survey study of US internet users (N = 1,022), we explore an…
Signaling news outlet trust in a Google Knowledge Panel: A conjoint experiment in Brazil, Germany, and the United States
Using data from a conjoint experiment in three countries (Brazil, n = 2038; Germany, n = 2012, and the United States, n = 2005), this study demonstrates that journalistic transparency can cue trust at the level of the entire news outlet—or domain level—using a Google Knowledge Panel that comes up when people search for a news outlet. In Brazil and the United States, two pieces of information in a Knowledge Panel provided the strongest heuristics …
Platformed antisemitism on Twitter: Anti-Jewish rhetoric in political discourse surrounding the 2018 US midterm election
What does antisemitism look like in the context of political discussions on Twitter? In this article, we introduce the notion of platformed antisemitism. We first define it as a platform-agnostic concept, and then explore it through an exemplary case study of Twitter and its affordances by way of a mixed-methods analysis of discourse surrounding the 2018 US midterm election. Via qualitative textual analysis, we document how political discourse on…
Chat Apps and Cascade Logic: A Multi-Platform Perspective on India, Mexico, and the United States
Chat apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal are increasingly popular platforms for communication. Their sometimes-closed nature and encryption affordances present researchers, governments, and law enforcement with unique problems of access, traceability, and, ultimately, understanding. It also makes them useful vectors for sowing disinformation. This research assumes a multi-platform perspective, describing the particularities of how chat ap…
The role of geolocation data in U.S. political campaigning: How digital political strategists perceive it
The use of geolocation data by political campaigns is often the subject of media concern. Research has investigated the role of data in and use by political campaigns, but less attention has been paid to digital political strategists largely responsible for decisions behind the assemblage and mining of voter databases to deliver micro-targeted messages on behalf of political campaigns. In this study, we conducted interviews with 14 leading indust…
Promises and Perils of Automated Journalism: Algorithms, Experimentation, and “Teachers of Machines” in China and the United States
Automated tools for parsing and communicating information have increasingly become associated with the production of journalistic content. To study this phenomenon and to explore the development of automated journalism across two locales at the cutting edge of technology, we leverage insights from in-depth interviews with news technologists from pioneering news organizations and Internet companies specialized in the construction of "news bot" tec…
How pro- and anti-abortion activists use encrypted messaging apps in post-Roe America
In a post- Roe America, abortion-rights activists are scrambling to protect reproductive rights. Communication on open social media platforms like Facebook can now be used to prosecute those seeking an illegal abortion in a frightening entanglement of technology corporations and the state. Building on surveillance studies and feminist scholarship, we analyze 22 interviews with pro- and anti-abortion activists and pro-encryption activists to answe…
Political science (28 works) · Social Media and Politics (24 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Public relations (16 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Social media (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Media studies (11 works)