Our guest for this episode (29 min. long) is Deen Freelon, an associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.  His research ranges from political expression through digital media to data science to computational methods. He has also served as principal investigator on grants from the Knight Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the US Institute of Peace. Not only does Deen make intellectual contributions to the fields of web science, communication studies, and more, but he also focuses on engaging and helping the general public with his insights.

In this conversation, Deen tells us why it is so important to incorporate identity into web science research, and how that has influenced his own work. That includes his recent article on Black-presenting trolls, and why disaggregating ideology from race was crucial to his insights. Deen also discusses the difference between disinformation and misinformation, as well as why there needs to be more research into left-leaning disinformation. And he describes what tools he’s created to help other researchers as well as the general public — coming up are developments to his “filter map” project. To hear about about all this and more, listen to the episode!

Click here for this episode’s transcript, and click here for this episode’s show notes.