The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public is pleased to announce the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Francesca Bolla Tripodi as the winner of the 2023 CIP Award for Impact & Excellence, which recognizes an individual or organization that has made outstanding contributions, achievements, or bodies of work that significantly resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse.
She is an assistant professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science and a senior faculty researcher at UNC’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, and is the author of The Propagandists’ Playbook (2022, Yale University Press), a book that’s based on interviews and ethnographic observations of two Republican groups over the course of the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race — including Tripodi’s firsthand experience of the 2017 Unite the Right rally. The book combines this ethnographic data with content analysis and scraped metadata to reveal how Google algorithms, YouTube playlists, pundits, and politicians can manipulate audiences, reaffirm beliefs, and expose audiences to more extremist ideas, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.
According to an award nomination letter, Tripodi’s research and book make “two significant academic contributions that make future work aiming to strengthen democracy against disinformation more robust.”
The first is methodical: “The book’s empirics are rooted in ethnographic observations — Dr. Tripodi’s research extends this rich method to fully study how media is a part of everyday life. She refers to this methodological contribution as media immersion whereby researchers replace their usual sources of news and cultural information with content identified with by respondents as trustworthy sources. During the four-month period she did so for her book, Dr. Tripodi also refrained from her traditional news diet. This method allows researchers to embed themselves more fully into the communities they are observing, allowing them to sink deeply into the information ecosystem on which their respondents relied.”
The second is theoretical: “Many researchers and journalists have studied how algorithms fuel polarization, but Dr. Tripodi’s research considers how one’s worldview (i.e., society) impacts starting points, and how search queries connect with “deep stories” (e.g., Hochschild). In doing so, she explains how the social construction of reality maps on to information systems.”
Tripodi has presented research from the book to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, as part of a 2019 hearing, “Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse.” She keynoted a January 2022 event, “The Capitol Coup One Year Later: How Research Can Assess and Counter Threats to Democracy,” co-hosted by UNC’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life and GWU’s Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics. She has also given talks based on her book to both Wikimedia and Google.
Tripodi holds a PhD and MA in sociology from the University of Virginia, as well as an MA in communication, culture, and technology from Georgetown University.
With the award, Tripodi will receive $5,000 and an invitation to speak this fall at the University of Washington in Seattle and engage with the CIP community.
The CIP’s award selection committee consisted of Camille François, Columbia University School of Internet & Public Affairs lecturer; Charley Johnson, Program Director, Public Tech Leadership Collaborative at Data & Society; Steven Livingston, George Washington University professor of media and public affairs and Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics founding director; Shannon McGregor, UNC Hussman School of Journalism & Media assistant professor and UNC Center for Information, Technology & Public Life senior researcher; Jonathan Corpus Ong, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2022-2024); Jevin D. West, UW Information School associate professor and Center for an Informed Public co-founder; and Brandy Zadrozny, NBC News investigative reporter.
“The Propagandists’ Playbook is a pathbreaking title inspiring a whole generation of researchers across communication, sociology, and information science make sense of how conservatives’ social anxieties and cultural resentments find new expression and affirmation in online communities,” Ong said. “The book’s retelling of conservative voters’ ‘deep stories’ are at times difficult to read, but essential to grapple with as we work towards a shared political future.”
The CIP is grateful to the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for their foundational support for the Center for an Informed Public’s work and research, which has made this award possible.
