Hi, I’m Francesca. I am so happy to have you here!
I’m a sociologist and information scholar, interested in understanding how society interacts and engages with information systems and participatory platforms (e.g., Wikipedia, Facebook, YikYak, Search Engines, etc.). I combine ethnographic observations with scraped metadata to expose what scholars refer to as “sociotechnical vulnerabilities.” The goal of my research is to demonstrate how inequality and misinformation are often hiding in plain sight.
I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Information and Library Science and a Principal Investigator at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill.
I have had the opportunity to share my research in a variety of settings. If you are looking for someone to come and speak at departmental colloquiums, special events, or as a keynote speaker, please reach out via the contact button below.
FRANK 2023
Sociologist, professor, and expert in the field of misinformation, Francesca Triopodi, peels back the layers of media manipulation with insights from her book “The Propagandists’ Playbook.” Recorded Feb. 15 – 17, 2023 at the frank gathering ( frankgathering.org )
Ms. Categorized Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia
The Monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase is a public showcase of recent research by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Research Team and guest presenters from the academic community. This showcase was hosted at the Wikimedia Foundation in May 2022.
The Monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase is a public showcase of recent research by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Research Team and guest presenters from the academic community. This showcase was hosted at the Wikimedia Foundation in May 2022.
The Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution hearing entitled “Google and Censorship through Search Engines” took place on Tuesday, July 16, 2019 at 2:30 p.m., in Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.
UMass Amherst SBS, March 2023
Francesca Tripodi provides a detailed analysis of the information tactics pundits and politicians use in pursuit of partisan gains. Combining interviews and ethnographic observations with content analysis, media immersion, and web-scraped metadata, her research takes audiences on a deep dive into the conservative information landscape, revealing the networked strategies of far-right groups. The goal of identifying these tactics is to break the feedback loop to explain how an algorithmically polarized society poses a great risk to American democracy. This event is part of the Mapping the Far-Right Digital Infrastructure Series, and is sponsored by the UMass Amherst College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Communication, School of Public Policy, Journalism Department, and the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure on March 3, 2023.
Does Not Compute
We like to think of ourselves as savvy searchers, but the truth is that most of us have no idea how search engines work—especially given how much we rely on them. For example, do you know whether different people get personalized results for the same searches? What are data voids, and what do they mean for how we assess the information we find online?
“Disinformation is not a bug in the code, it is a feature wielded for political gain and a great risk to American democracy.”
In this book, I provide a detailed analysis of the tactics conservative elites use to spread disinformation in pursuit of partisan goals, demonstrate disinformation’s historical connections to white supremacist logic, and present a deeper understanding of how our society has become algorithmically polarized. To do so I combine interviews and ethnographic observations of two republican groups over the course of the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race- including firsthand experience of the Unite the Right rally – with content analysis, media immersion, and web-scraped metadata. Through the mechanics of information literacy, networked media, search engine optimization, curated keywords, and strategic signaling, the book explains how conservative pundits and politicians weave together economic, social, and religious groups into a common conversation and seed the internet with content around these filters. By encouraging audiences to “do their own research,” this method of spreading propaganda mainstreams extremist logic, changes narratives adopted by mainstream media, and blurs the lines between reality and fiction. The goal of identifying these tactics is to break the feedback loop instead of trying to reactively treat “information disorder.”
Nearly all my work is accessible via open-access agreements. Here are the direct links for you to download her research. If you are a researcher interested in accessing my work and you can’t access my research, please contact me before paying for the publication.
Articles on Information Integrity
- “Do your own research”: affordance activation and disinformation spread
- Abortion near me? The implications of semantic media on accessing health information
- ReOpen demands as public health threat: a sociotechnical framework for understanding the stickiness of misinformation
- You’ve got mail: how the Trump administration used legislative communication to frame his last year in office
- Libraries Combating Disinformation: From the Front Line to the Long Game
- Searching for Alternative Facts: Analyzing Scriptural Inference in Conservative News Practices
Articles on Inequality on Wikipedia