In this work, we explore the remix strategies deployed by members of Gen Z to circulate activist content on TikTok. Especially compared with older users, we find an instinct for more collective — rather than more personalized — forms of remix, which challenges prevailing theories of youth civic styles and online action.

Using the Lazer Lab's Twitter Panel dataset, we look at the following patterns and dynamics of over a million U.S. Twitter users who are also registered U.S. voters. We find that these users' following choices cluster into hyper specific niches and that a politically salient inciting event drove users to follow nontraditional elites. Those following choices have persisted until present day.

Conventional wisdom suggests that when an influential Twitter user retweets another account, some of the influential account's followers might follow the retweeted account. Using a novel technique that exploits features of the Twitter API, we find empirical evidence for this phenomenon. Furthermore, we look at the heterogeneity of this effect by account type, focusing on the causes of two influential Twitter accounts (Jorts The Cat and J.K. Rowling) endorse.

From racialized police violence to transgender activism to sexual assault in the workplace, many current high-profile public conversations started with fringe movements by online activists. Their expansion from niche conversations on channels like Twitter into mainstream news media has had important consequences for broader US political discourse, workplace and other institutional cultures, and innumerable associated policy changes at the local, state, and national levels. This project aims to identify how a message spreads from isolated conversations into the mainstream, specifically focusing on the role of companies and organizations in amplifying relevant discourse in the case of the #MeToo movement.

In this work, we study how youth activists exploit the possibility of (de)centralized communication online in order to reconfigure power and reimagine leadership in movement building. Are 'leaderful' movements true in practice, and do they in fact expand voice and ownership among their participants?

Using a multi-platform dataset, we compare the coverage of Britney Spears' highly publicized legal battle against her conservatorship. We look at Wikipedia, TMZ, and Twitter to understand how different narratives, whether subversive or in service of hegemonic norms, come into existence, survive, and proliferate.

Open-source projects are integral to the scientific communities (and industry) however they are often abandoned and often lack diversity. Our team aims to investigate how the leadership structures and invisible work of open-source community managers contributes to their longevity and inclusivity.

Open source software projects rely on groups of volunteer contributors who collaborate to produce code and documentation. Their work is often coordinated and supported by online communities, which are essential to sustain open source projects. In this paper we analyze the emergent structure of five online communities associated with highly successful open source projects in order to identify structural correlates of successful projects, as well as moments of vulnerability in community structure that could be monitored and addressed to improve project sustainability.

Hate speech is an ever-present threat online. For people who are marginalized that threat does not just exist for them, but also their communities. This work aims to examine how marginalized people react when their communities are attacked online as well as how they protect each other.

Alyssa's research agenda in the Attention Brokers/Jorts The Cat project had unexpected fallout in the form of online bullying. Alyssa is writing an autoethnography of the ensuing events, focusing on the ruling relations of university bureaucracy in the face of novel context collapse.

This work aims at understanding how people make decisions to adopt public health interventions such as getting vaccinated or wearing a mask. One important factor in making these decisions is getting accurate and trustworthy information about different interventions and how they work. Unfortunately, the modern information ecosystem allows all sorts of information to circulate, including harmful misinformation that might discourage people from taking effective precautions to slow the spread of diseases. Some people use the term "infodemic" to describe the role played by social media and mass media communications in the dissemination of health-related misinformation and the decisions made by the public as a result of this misinformation. Our team is focusing on understanding the infodemic as a communication phenomenon by evaluating the efficacy of existing information diffusion modeling techniques and developing novel frameworks that can help researchers estimate the effect of an infodemic on pandemic prevention.

The ways in which mass media frames messages surrounding a health issue is an indicator (if not a driving factor) of public attitudes towards the issue. This work aims to identify politicized frames in the U.S. national news media discourse surrounding the Mpox epidemic of 2022. As an epidemic that primarily affected Sexual and Gender Minorities (SGMs) of color, the news coverage highlights interesting intersections of issues concerning queerness, race, health, global relations and partisan politics. We ask: To what extent did Mpox get politicized? How do we detect and measure politicized frames? What were the characteristic frames and dynamics of this process? And why did the discourse get politicized?