The Capitol Coup One Year Later: How Research Can Assess and Counter Threats to Democracy

The University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) and George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics (IDDP) host The Capital Coup One Year Later: How Research Can Assess and Counter Threats to Democracy, a two-day conference exploring key questions surrounding January 6, 2021.

This session, recorded on January 7, 2022, features two keynote talks:
- Becoming the News: Tea parties, insurrections, and the fourth estate, from Khadijah Costley White
- The Propagandists’ Playbook: The Long and Racist History of #StopTheSteal, from Francesca Tripodi

Dr. Khadijah Costley White is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Her book, The Branding of Right-Wing Activism: The News Media and the Tea Party (Oxford, 2018) examines the rise of the Tea Party in online, print, broadcast, and cable news. She has been a White House intern on the Obama broadcast media team, a National Association of Black Journalists and United Nations fellow, and an assistant producer for Now on PBS (formerly Now with Bill Moyers. Most recently, she was a 2020-2021 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow completing a community media project on lockdown culture in schools. She has contributed to books and published in journals such as Communication, Culture, and Critique, International Journal of Communication, and more.

White's writing and commentary on topics such as race, social movements, news, and politics has appeared in National Public Radio, The Atlantic, The New York Times and more. She is also an activist and community organizer, deeply invested in the transformative power of grassroots politics. Through this work, she has founded a community non-profit, SOMA Justice, which organizes for racial, social, and economic justice in South Orange and Maplewood, NJ.

Dr. Francesca Tripodi is a sociologist and media scholar whose research examines the relationship between social media, political partisanship, and democratic participation, revealing how Google and Wikipedia are manipulated for political gains. She is an Assistant Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and an affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. She 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.

In 2019, Tripodi testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on her research, explaining how search processes are gamed to maximize exposure and drive ideologically based queries. This research is the basis of her upcoming book, which is under contract with Yale University Press. She also studies patterns of gender inequality on Wikipedia, shedding light on how knowledge is contested in the 21st century. Her research has been covered by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Columbia Journalism Review, Wired, The Guardian and The Neiman Journalism Lab.