by Media Manipulation Research Lead Joan Donovan and Research Analyst Brian Friedberg Unite the Right 2.0 organizer Jason Kessler’s August 12 anniversary rally was an abject failure due to internal conflict in the white nationalist movement, and the unrelenting pressure of anti-racist organizing and coalitions of civil society groups determined…

by Data & Society Affiliate Amelia Acker Last week, Twitter announced that it would begin deleting millions of fake accounts that were suspended earlier this summer for abusing the platform’s terms of service. The company has framed the problem as an accuracy issue related to confidence in “follower counts” and…

White Identity Politics at the Borders — By Data & Society Media Manipulation Research Lead Joan Donovan, Researcher Becca Lewis, and Research Analyst Brian Friedberg This week in the Media Manipulation research initiative, we look at how Breitbart News is simultaneously celebrating far-right political victories and helping mainstream fascist youth factions in Europe, providing a hub of…

Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines is an 82-page report based on one year of interviews and observation of the high-level strategists and digital support workers behind fake news and “digital black ops.” This report results from a British…

Mainstreaming the Extreme Through Conservative Media Networks — By Data & Society Postdoctoral Scholar Francesca Tripodi Once a relatively obscure YouTube personality, Candice Owens is now someone about whom the President of the United States tweets. While many heard about Owens for the first time on April 21, 2018 when Kanye West asserted that he loves the way…

By Postdoctoral Scholar Caroline Jack, Researcher Becca Lewis, and Research Assistant Kinjal Dave Workplace diversity has long been a key concept for advocates of racial and gender equity. Yet, recent events in US politics and culture have foregrounded a different conceptualization of diversity: “viewpoint diversity.” The most radical version of…

by Jonas Kaiser and Adrian Rauchfleisch With over 1.5 billion users a month, YouTube is the world’s biggest social media platform. It is also the communication and information backbone for the far-right in the United States. In this blogpost, we share some preliminary results of our analysis of 13,529 channels…

Researcher Becca Lewis and Research Analyst Kinjal Dave Following the release of the superhero movie Black Panther, white nationalists and other far-right online communities reacted to its success and the important moment for black representation in Hollywood. Below, we analyze these reactions and what they reveal about the panic and…