By Michael Grass
During a special gathering and discussion this fall, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public honored University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assistant professor Francesca Bolla Tripodi, selected earlier this year as the winner of the 2023 CIP Award for Impact & Excellence, for her research, including ethnographic observations of two Republican groups over the course of the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race and her firsthand experience of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Tripodi’s book, The Propagandists’ Playbook (2022, Yale University Press) 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.
The 2023 CIP Award for Impact & Excellence event, hosted in the UW Allen Library on October 11, featured a conversation between Tripodi and CIP director Kate Starbird, an associate professor in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, about Tripodi’s book, scholarship, and research methods.
Sociology work informed by information science
“What I’m really interested in is how people use technology in ways that programmers might not anticipate or intend,” Tripodi said, opening her discussion with Starbird.
Describing herself as “a sociologist that found their way into information science,” Tripodi’s early work involved studying the social media platform YikYak, where content that was downvoted by enough users was automatically deleted while upvoted content remained. Tripodi said that while company decisionmakers at the time thought upvoting and downvoting would be an effective tool to mitigate harassment. Instead, she said, YikYak content that included veiled racism and misogyny would be upvoted or sometimes “trend,” allowing the content to stay up on the platform for longer, while historically marginalized voices were often downvoted, erasing them from the conversation.
By pursuing ethnographic work along with data-scraping, Tripodi said she recognized early on the cross-platform power of social media platforms in influencing and shaping what people see online and believe about the world and society around them.
Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Tripodi said she felt that there were many narratives discussed in political and media conversations about why people voted for Donald Trump. “I didn’t like any of them,” she said, noting that those narratives gave “very little agency” around the formation of information. “How do people find information that they could trust? That was the question that centered my study.”
When Tripodi went to the polls to ask voters about news and information sources they turned to inform their voting decisions, their No. 1 response was Google. When Tripodi asked those respondents what they meant, “they were worried I didn’t know what Google was.”
Tripodi said it was an important moment for her research. “That’s when I realized that all this emphasis on mis- and disinformation in social media spaces — which are definitely important and we need to think about — aren’t isolated to social media and the role that search plays in that process is just huge,” noting her concern that heading into the 2024 U.S. elections, platforms, including those that have struggled with content moderation issues may not effectively keep up with keywords around certain controversial topics that may lead to user manipulation.
While platforms can and have responded in some cases of problematic content being surfaced through search, Tripodi and Starbird both stressed the importance of studying the cross-platform spread of harmful, manipulative and false information. “Most of the interesting dynamics that we see are cross-platform dynamics right now, Starbird said, noting Tripodi’s deep experience in this area, including looking “at the features of platforms and how that shapes the behaviors that we see.”
Extending ethnography into media spaces
Starbird and Tripodi spent time discussing the research that laid the foundation for The Propagandists’ Playbook, where Tripodi spent time studying a College Republican group and a women’s Republican group, both which permitted her ethnographic study. By attending their meetings and interviewing members, Tripodi said she was fascinated by questions around the news and information sources they trusted and routinely turned to.
Tripodi, who voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and disclosed that to anyone who asked during her study, said she was mostly unfamiliar with the list of right-leaning and conservative news and information spaces that emerged through her ethnographic work. She then took that work a step further. “I went through a process that I refer to as media immersion,” she said, “extending ethnography into media spaces.”
For a four-month period in 2017, Tripodi abandoned her own news and media diet and replaced it exclusively with the podcasts, news sites and news sources of the people she was studying, including the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, The Federalist, Daily Signal and the “Fox and Friends” morning show on Fox News and PragerU.
The media immersion “was the most fascinating part of my study, realizing just how disconnected these information spheres are from each other and how little they were talking with each other,” Tripodi said.
Tripodi acknowledged the mental health considerations of navigating disorienting information spaces through such a media immersion, but stressed that there’s “a difference in some of the spaces I was listening to and embedding in and, say, 4Chan.”
But the disorienting news and information environments Tripodi was studying during her immersion ”definitely skewed the conversations” she had with her husband, family and friends. Tripodi shared a notable moment, as detailed in The Propagandists’ Playbook, when she was deep in her four-month media immersion in the fall of 2017.
It was at a time when mainstream news sources were reporting on an anticipated but yet-to-be-announced indictment of former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, in charges connected to a special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference from the 2016 election.
But from the conservative and right-leaning news sources, podcasts and other media recommended by members of the two Republican groups, Tripodi heard different narratives amid the speculation and uncertainty around the indictment : It was suggested that the person who might be indicted was actually the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. “I was thinking: ‘Who could it be? … What if it’s Hillary? … We don’t know who it is and it could be anyone!”
When Tripodi shared that possibility with her husband, he was puzzled.
Sociologists, Tripodi said “tend to be pretty skeptical” people. But “in four months, I had completely questioned my voting choice and thought that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted,” Tripodi said. “That was a powerful shift … and an interesting moment.”
Starbird and Tripodi observed that such disorienting moments are signs of methodological “saturation” and are times to pause and step back from the work to re-orient yourself.
“You have to have these moments” to keep yourself grounded doing this type of media immersion research, Tripodi said.
Participatory processes and structured efforts online
In her book, Tripodi looks at some of the nuts and bolts of how online content is organized, including keywords and tagging and where that fits in with some of the broader participatory processes and “structured efforts” online people she studied on the right utilize.
“If you’re activating groups of people to engage in participatory processes around doing your own research and you’re using technology to advance those claims, I don’t think there’s any one person that is more or less susceptible to falling for these kinds of strategies,” she said.
Although these strategies can be used by any ideological group, Tripodi said that influencers on the right, according to data she collected and analyzed, are better at search engine optimization.
Tripodi, working with data scientist Leon Yin, studied how leading YouTube accounts utilize tagging and keywords to make their content more searchable. “We found that the top YouTubers on the left don’t understand tagging, at least in terms of the data we were collecting,” she said.
Starbird made connections to areas her team at the CIP and other colleagues have studied. “Influence seems to look different across the political spectrum in the online environment,” she said. “They may be motivated in different ways to participate.”
About the CIP Award for Impact & Excellence
The CIP Award for Impact & Excellence 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. The Center for an Informed Public is grateful to the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for their foundational support for the CIP’s work and research, which has made the $5,000 award possible.
Michael Grass is the CIP’s assistant director for communications.
Photos above: University of Washington Center for an Informed Public director Kate Starbird (at left) listens to University of North Carolina assistant professor Francesca Tripodi, winner of the 2023 CIP Award for Impact & Excellence, during an October 11 conversation in the UW Allen Library. (Photos by Doug Parry / UW Information School)
