Rebekah Tromble
Biographic Data
| ID | 336715 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebekah Tromble |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebekah |
| FAMILY NAME | Tromble |
| SIGNATURE | TROMBLE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Washington University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3875-2729 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 107 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 21 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Understanding the efficacy of online bystander intervention when journalists are the targets
Journalists have distinct needs when it comes to online harassment intervention • Bystander intervention efficacy requires consideration of profession and context • Journalists experiencing online harassment prefer consensual-driven interventions • Journalists experiencing online harassment prefer bystander interventions that account for the context of abuse
Moving Targets, Moving Politics
Understanding Perceptions and Effects of Online Intolerance
Research on online political discourse has long been concerned with the pervasiveness of incivility across various digital arenas. However, most of this work has focused on discourse that is rude in tone, but not necessarily harmful in substance. Consequently, there remains a significant gap in understanding the true impact of harmful online speech on both its targets and bystanders. Addressing this gap, this four-country experimental study exami…
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…
Keep Your Heads Held High Boys
This study examines the relationship between online communication by the Proud Boys and their offline activities. We use a supervised machine learning model to analyze a novel dataset of Proud Boys Telegram messages, merged with US Crisis Monitor data of violent and nonviolent events in which group members participated over a 31-month period. Our analysis finds that intensifying expressions of grievances online predict participation in offline vi…
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…
Combating Hateful Attitudes and Online Browsing Behavior
This study adds to the analogic perspective-taking literature by examining whether an online perspective-taking intervention affects both antisemitic attitudes and behaviors – in particular, engagement with antisemitic websites. Subjects who were randomly assigned to the treatment viewed a 90-s video of a college student describing an experience with antisemitism and reflected on its similarity to their own experiences. In a survey, treated subje…
The Data Abyss
This article articulates why the lack of social media platform data access for researchers is a huge problem, for research and society. We then review a number of ongoing initiatives and opportunities towards ensuring sustainable data accees
Advocating for Platform Data Access
Independent researchers’ access to digital platform data is critical for our understanding of the online world; yet recent reflections have shown that data are not always readily available (Asbjørn Møller & Bechmann, 2019; Bruns, 2018; Tromble, 2021). In the face of platform power to determine data accessibility, academics can often feel powerless, but opportunities and openings can emerge for scholars to shape practice. In this article, we exami…
Where Have All the Data Gone? A Critical Reflection on Academic Digital Research in the Post-API Age
In the wake of the 2018 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, social media companies began restricting academic researchers' access to the easiest, most reliable means of systematic data collection via their application programming interfaces (APIs). Although these restrictions have been decried widely by digital researchers, in this essay, I argue that relatively little has changed. The underlying relationship between researchers, the platforms,…
In Search of Meaning
In the early years, researchers greeted the internet and digital data with almost wide-eyed wonder and excitement. The opportunities provided by digital media such as websites, bulletin boards, and blogs—and later by social media platforms and mobile apps—seemed nearly endless, and researchers were suddenly awash in data. The bounty was so great that it required new methods for processing, organizing, and analysis. Yet in all the excitement, it s…
You Break It, You Buy It
Facebook’s mission statement promises to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Zuckerberg, 2017a), and in his commencement speech to the Harvard class of 2
The Great Leveler? Comparing Citizen–Politician Twitter Engagement Across Three Western Democracies
Social media are the great social leveler – or so some commentators would have us believe. Social media put the power of communication directly into the average person’s hands. They also present opportunities for politicians to improve their contacts with the common person – to directly share their messages with and better understand the concerns of constituents. This study explores whether and to what extent the potential for such citizen–politi…
Thanks for (actually) responding! How citizen demand shapes politicians’ interactive practices on Twitter
Social media are frequently touted for their potential to strengthen democratic processes by bringing politicians and citizens into dialogue with one another. Social media may enrich the public sphere and improve democratic decision-making by allowing politicians and constituents to discuss matters of political import directly, free from intermediaries. But what factors impact whether this potential is realized? Previous research has focused on p…
From Nomadic Traditionalists to Sedentary Scripturalists
Religion and ethnicity are inextricably linked in discourse within and about Central Asia. One common narrative suggests that as a result of differences between historically sedentary and nomadic populations, ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks are naturally more religious and more likely to radicalize than their Kazakh and Kyrgyz neighbors. Using extensive data available from the Pew Research Center’s 2012 The World’s Muslims survey, this study examines wh…
A discussion of Paul M. Sniderman, Michael Bang Petersen, Rune Slothuus, and Rune Stubager's Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy
The 2005 Danish cartoon crisis has been the topic of much discussion among political science scholars. In September 2011 we ran a symposium on Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons That Shook the World that centered on the tensions between multiculturalism, civility, and freedom of expression disclosed by the controversy. Paul M. Sniderman, Michael Bang Petersen, Rune Slothuus, and Rune Stubager’s Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy: Islam, Western Europe, and…
Are We Talking With or Past One Another? Examining Transnational Political Discourse across Western-Muslim “Divides”
In a time of rapid, globalized communication, what are the possibilities for truly meaningful cross-cultural political dialogue? Optimists contend that we may now speak of transnational public spheres-of spaces in which people reach across national boundaries to engage one another on issues of common concern. Skeptics, on the other hand, maintain that political, cultural, and linguistic barriers continue to preclude truly meaningful transnational…
Securitising Islam, securitising ethnicity
Since independence, Kyrgyzstani leaders have used Islamic identity as a tool for nation-building. While embracing Islam as a marker of Kyrgyz nationhood, however, they have simultaneously sought to limit its role in political life. The resulting discourse draws a sharp dichotomy between “good”, “local” forms of Islam and “bad”, “foreign” manifestations. Unfortunately, the latter, “bad” forms are frequently linked to Kyrgyzstan's largest minority …
Political Islam in Central Asia
Political Islam in Central Asia: the challenge of Hizb ut-Tahrir, by Emmanuel Karagiannis, London and New York, Routledge, 2011, 176 pp., £95.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-415-55399-5 Picking up a book with
Thanks for (actually) responding! How citizen demand shapes politicians’ interactive practices on Twitter
Social media are frequently touted for their potential to strengthen democratic processes by bringing politicians and citizens into dialogue with one another. Social media may enrich the public sphere and improve democratic decision-making by allowing politicians and constituents to discuss matters of political import directly, free from intermediaries. But what factors impact whether this potential is realized? Previous research has focused on p…
The Data Abyss
This article articulates why the lack of social media platform data access for researchers is a huge problem, for research and society. We then review a number of ongoing initiatives and opportunities towards ensuring sustainable data accees
Where Have All the Data Gone? A Critical Reflection on Academic Digital Research in the Post-API Age
In the wake of the 2018 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, social media companies began restricting academic researchers' access to the easiest, most reliable means of systematic data collection via their application programming interfaces (APIs). Although these restrictions have been decried widely by digital researchers, in this essay, I argue that relatively little has changed. The underlying relationship between researchers, the platforms,…
The Great Leveler? Comparing Citizen–Politician Twitter Engagement Across Three Western Democracies
Social media are the great social leveler – or so some commentators would have us believe. Social media put the power of communication directly into the average person’s hands. They also present opportunities for politicians to improve their contacts with the common person – to directly share their messages with and better understand the concerns of constituents. This study explores whether and to what extent the potential for such citizen–politi…
Securitising Islam, securitising ethnicity
Since independence, Kyrgyzstani leaders have used Islamic identity as a tool for nation-building. While embracing Islam as a marker of Kyrgyz nationhood, however, they have simultaneously sought to limit its role in political life. The resulting discourse draws a sharp dichotomy between “good”, “local” forms of Islam and “bad”, “foreign” manifestations. Unfortunately, the latter, “bad” forms are frequently linked to Kyrgyzstan's largest minority …
You Break It, You Buy It
Facebook’s mission statement promises to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Zuckerberg, 2017a), and in his commencement speech to the Harvard class of 2
Keep Your Heads Held High Boys
This study examines the relationship between online communication by the Proud Boys and their offline activities. We use a supervised machine learning model to analyze a novel dataset of Proud Boys Telegram messages, merged with US Crisis Monitor data of violent and nonviolent events in which group members participated over a 31-month period. Our analysis finds that intensifying expressions of grievances online predict participation in offline vi…
Political Islam in Central Asia
Political Islam in Central Asia: the challenge of Hizb ut-Tahrir, by Emmanuel Karagiannis, London and New York, Routledge, 2011, 176 pp., £95.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-415-55399-5 Picking up a book with
Are We Talking With or Past One Another? Examining Transnational Political Discourse across Western-Muslim “Divides”
In a time of rapid, globalized communication, what are the possibilities for truly meaningful cross-cultural political dialogue? Optimists contend that we may now speak of transnational public spheres-of spaces in which people reach across national boundaries to engage one another on issues of common concern. Skeptics, on the other hand, maintain that political, cultural, and linguistic barriers continue to preclude truly meaningful transnational…
Securitising Islam, securitising ethnicity
Since independence, Kyrgyzstani leaders have used Islamic identity as a tool for nation-building. While embracing Islam as a marker of Kyrgyz nationhood, however, they have simultaneously sought to limit its role in political life. The resulting discourse draws a sharp dichotomy between “good”, “local” forms of Islam and “bad”, “foreign” manifestations. Unfortunately, the latter, “bad” forms are frequently linked to Kyrgyzstan's largest minority …
A discussion of Paul M. Sniderman, Michael Bang Petersen, Rune Slothuus, and Rune Stubager's Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy
The 2005 Danish cartoon crisis has been the topic of much discussion among political science scholars. In September 2011 we ran a symposium on Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons That Shook the World that centered on the tensions between multiculturalism, civility, and freedom of expression disclosed by the controversy. Paul M. Sniderman, Michael Bang Petersen, Rune Slothuus, and Rune Stubager’s Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy: Islam, Western Europe, and…
The Great Leveler? Comparing Citizen–Politician Twitter Engagement Across Three Western Democracies
Social media are the great social leveler – or so some commentators would have us believe. Social media put the power of communication directly into the average person’s hands. They also present opportunities for politicians to improve their contacts with the common person – to directly share their messages with and better understand the concerns of constituents. This study explores whether and to what extent the potential for such citizen–politi…
Thanks for (actually) responding! How citizen demand shapes politicians’ interactive practices on Twitter
Social media are frequently touted for their potential to strengthen democratic processes by bringing politicians and citizens into dialogue with one another. Social media may enrich the public sphere and improve democratic decision-making by allowing politicians and constituents to discuss matters of political import directly, free from intermediaries. But what factors impact whether this potential is realized? Previous research has focused on p…
From Nomadic Traditionalists to Sedentary Scripturalists
Religion and ethnicity are inextricably linked in discourse within and about Central Asia. One common narrative suggests that as a result of differences between historically sedentary and nomadic populations, ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks are naturally more religious and more likely to radicalize than their Kazakh and Kyrgyz neighbors. Using extensive data available from the Pew Research Center’s 2012 The World’s Muslims survey, this study examines wh…
In Search of Meaning
In the early years, researchers greeted the internet and digital data with almost wide-eyed wonder and excitement. The opportunities provided by digital media such as websites, bulletin boards, and blogs—and later by social media platforms and mobile apps—seemed nearly endless, and researchers were suddenly awash in data. The bounty was so great that it required new methods for processing, organizing, and analysis. Yet in all the excitement, it s…
You Break It, You Buy It
Facebook’s mission statement promises to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Zuckerberg, 2017a), and in his commencement speech to the Harvard class of 2
Where Have All the Data Gone? A Critical Reflection on Academic Digital Research in the Post-API Age
In the wake of the 2018 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, social media companies began restricting academic researchers' access to the easiest, most reliable means of systematic data collection via their application programming interfaces (APIs). Although these restrictions have been decried widely by digital researchers, in this essay, I argue that relatively little has changed. The underlying relationship between researchers, the platforms,…
Advocating for Platform Data Access
Independent researchers’ access to digital platform data is critical for our understanding of the online world; yet recent reflections have shown that data are not always readily available (Asbjørn Møller & Bechmann, 2019; Bruns, 2018; Tromble, 2021). In the face of platform power to determine data accessibility, academics can often feel powerless, but opportunities and openings can emerge for scholars to shape practice. In this article, we exami…
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…
Combating Hateful Attitudes and Online Browsing Behavior
This study adds to the analogic perspective-taking literature by examining whether an online perspective-taking intervention affects both antisemitic attitudes and behaviors – in particular, engagement with antisemitic websites. Subjects who were randomly assigned to the treatment viewed a 90-s video of a college student describing an experience with antisemitism and reflected on its similarity to their own experiences. In a survey, treated subje…
The Data Abyss
This article articulates why the lack of social media platform data access for researchers is a huge problem, for research and society. We then review a number of ongoing initiatives and opportunities towards ensuring sustainable data accees
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…
Keep Your Heads Held High Boys
This study examines the relationship between online communication by the Proud Boys and their offline activities. We use a supervised machine learning model to analyze a novel dataset of Proud Boys Telegram messages, merged with US Crisis Monitor data of violent and nonviolent events in which group members participated over a 31-month period. Our analysis finds that intensifying expressions of grievances online predict participation in offline vi…
Understanding Perceptions and Effects of Online Intolerance
Research on online political discourse has long been concerned with the pervasiveness of incivility across various digital arenas. However, most of this work has focused on discourse that is rude in tone, but not necessarily harmful in substance. Consequently, there remains a significant gap in understanding the true impact of harmful online speech on both its targets and bystanders. Addressing this gap, this four-country experimental study exami…
Understanding the efficacy of online bystander intervention when journalists are the targets
Journalists have distinct needs when it comes to online harassment intervention • Bystander intervention efficacy requires consideration of profession and context • Journalists experiencing online harassment prefer consensual-driven interventions • Journalists experiencing online harassment prefer bystander interventions that account for the context of abuse
Moving Targets, Moving Politics
Political science (16 works) · Social Media and Politics (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Internet privacy (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Social media (8 works)