Personal Updates and Moving During COVID-19

Wow! I did not realize how long it had been since I have written in this blog (not since December of 2019). A lot has happened to the world (and to me) since that time, so it’s worth beginning with a few updates:

  • Earlier this year, I accepted an Assistant Professorship (tenure-track) at the University of Texas, Austin’s Journalism & Media School. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to continue doing research on global mis-/dis-information and political language in an esteemed and inviting department.

  • I’m very close to defending! I will be defending in early August (a little over a week from now). My dissertation focuses on perceptions of U.S.-China trade from 2008 to 2018, and the role of news media and economic context in explaining people’s understanding of their local economy and national politics.

  • A co-authored paper with fellow Ph.D student Jordan Sallis (the lead author, and a rising second-year) was accepted to AEJMC 2020 (which is virtual this as, like ICA 2020, and all other conferences).

  • My long-time partner and I got engaged a few days ago!

My transition from Ph.D candidate to Assistant Professor this summer is consumed by the COVID-19 pandemic. From the largely virtual goodbyes (though I did see some folks in my last week) to the stressful packing and traveling process, moving during COVID-19 has been a uniquely stressful and anxiety-inducing experience.

Given the unique historical time point of my move (from Madison, WI to Austin, TX), I thought it would be worth recording my experiences here.

My COVID-19 Move Journal #1: Packing and Leaving Wisconsin

Packing and leaving Wisconsin was one of the saddest and most frustrating experiences I have had in graduate school.

Though we scheduled to have movers arrive on July 30th at 3:00 p.m., they did not arrive for another 28 hours, on July 31 at 7:00 p.m. Throughout this time (and now still), my partner and I had very little knowledge about why the movers took so long, but the broker we were working with emphasized how COVID-19 slowed down all the moves being scheduled (though it does not explain why we were lied to—there were several times where the broker or driver told us they would arrive “in 20 minutes” or “in two hours,” only for us to be told it would be “six hours from now” less than an hour later).

In any case, the movers did eventually arrive. It took about three hours to fully load the truck. During that time, my partner and I wore masks. About an hour into our packing, two neighbors who we did not know walked out of their apartment and saw us. Noticing that we were wearing masks, the two men began harassing and heckling us for wearing masks while we were moving. Leaning against their car (about 15 feet away from us), they repeatedly made sheep sounds (“Baaa”) and described us as “sheeple” and “idiots.” When we didn’t respond, they proceeded to loudly say that I probably couldn’t understand them. On several occasions throughout the move, for two full hours, these two individuals took immense pleasure in staring at us, calling us “libtards,” and continually bleating at us.

To say it was frustrating would be an understatement. It made an already incredibly bad moving experience so much worse. I was perpetually anxious to leave the house because every time I was within their field of vision, they would make comments (they were less vocal when they saw my partner, a white man who was also wearing a mask).

But it also made me think a lot about the state of my local civil society. In New York, and when I lived downtown in Madison, I had good relationships with my neighbors. However, at the time of the move, we had been living in our apartment for only a month (due to a leasing issue that is a whole story of its own). We didn’t know our neighbors well this time. But, I didn’t anticipate such disdain from a neighbor I didn’t know. These two individuals decided it was worth their time to make our moving experience worse, without knowing us, without ever having interacted with us, and without any consideration, seemingly, of social decency. If they disagreed with the mask policy, they could have just as easily minded their own business instead of bothering us.

It is interesting to think of masks as a political statement rather than a function of a health epidemic. And it is frustrating that strangers can resent you so much for wearing a mask that they would go out of their way to make your life worse.

What it is not, however, is surprising. Since March of this year, conservative politicians and opinion leaders (and President Trump in particular) have frequently framed people taking COVID-19 seriously as “harmful” to American society.

An example tweet describing Democrats as

An example tweet describing Democrats as un-American

It’s worth noting that liberals also call conservative un-American, but (anecdotally speaking) liberals doesn’t seem to evoke “un-Americanness” as a critique as frequently as verified conservative accounts decry un-Americanness.

These tweets, and my experience moving, reminded me a lot of sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s social binaries. In The Civil Sphere, Alexander (2006) describes how people use binaries to identify which roles, relationships, and social structures are beneficial to civil society (logical, rational, independent, strong) and which are detrimental (illogical, irrational, dependent, weak). By applying these binaries, people make sense of which values or actions deserve to be celebrated (i.e., protected in the civil society) and which values or actions deserve to be ridiculed (i.e., rejected in the civil society). For these two men, me wearing a mask fell into the latter category, which warranted their harassment.

We expect these binaries in many aspects of politics. Certainly, political Twitter lives for this binary, as negative and controversial tweets tend to receive more attention on the social media platform, particularly among U.S. conservatives (Himelboim et al., 2014). However, I didn’t know how to make sense of when this binarization bleeds into our lifeworld; when two men are more interested in harassing you for a choice that has nothing to do with them than even minding their own business.

And sure, it’s easy to chalk it up to the two men being “stupid” or “idiotic,” but it doesn’t explain why and how they got to the point where they had no qualms harassing people they didn’t know.

In the days of COVID-19, we have reached a point where citizens (a more patriotic person might say, “fellow Americans”) treat mask-wearing (or not) as a visual symbol of “un-Americanness.” In the days of COVID-19, it is easier to harass someone you see as detrimental to society than engage in any constructive behavior. In the days of COVID-19, we rarely acknowledge that people live complicated and stressful lives (made all the more stressful with the pandemic), and are quick to cast the first stone.

My partner and I left our apartment quickly after the movers left. We didn’t want to be outside with people harassing us anymore. But the moment stayed with me, as a reminder of how quick we are to designate people we don’t truly know as “bad”—illogical, weak, and ignorant.

Frankly, I have no interest in continuing that cycle. People are too complicated to categorize them purely into “good” and “bad” binaries. If we are to survive this pandemic as a society (and it’s hard to say at this point whether that will happen), extending kindness during this stressful moment in history is essential.

To the two men, whoever you are: I hope you are safe and COVID-free. I know you can’t understand this, but I wore the mask for your protection, too, even if you hated me for it. And your harassment said a lot more about you than it did about me.

After the move, my partner and I went to a hotel to rest and recover before the start of our three-day drive down to Texas. In Dane County (and Hilton hotels) there is a mandatory mask requirement. At one point, we were in the elevator with an older couple who saw us and had an “oh s***, I need to put on my mask” moment. She apologies profusely while rummaging through her bag for her mask. I told her it was alright—mask-wearing is a new practice in our society, and we are all doing our best during these stressful times. The woman gave me a grateful look as she put her mask on. In that elevator, six feet away, she and I shared a moment of comfort and a mutual acknowledgment that, in the era of COVID, we are all simply trying to do our best.

Daily Tracking

Habit Tracking. It’s a really popular trend in bullet journaling, despite not being part of the original rapid logging system. And it’s that way for a reason: people like to see the progress they’ve made, or habits they’ve kept up with. Sometimes they’re functional or necessary, like taking medication or tracking the number of hours you sleep. Sometimes, they’re aspirational, like workout trackers or recording the number of pages you write every day. There are tons of activities you can track and many ways to track them, both physical and digital.

I use a few trackers to look at what I do every day. One of my favorite things to do is look at past habit tracker pages to see what I was doing at any given week (and with a discbound planner system, I can actually pull all the habit tracker pages out and look at them together)!

In the beginning of 2019, I tried maintaining monthly and weekly trackers. By March, however, I had completely switched over to weekly trackers—I just don’t have the patience to keep flipping back to update a monthly tracker!

Here’s a template of the weekly tracker page I use now. On the top of the sheet is my time log, on the bottom is a group of other trackers. (Disclaimer: this picture, and all the pictures in this blog post, are not real. While I do use this habit tracking template, I am not using real information to fill out the time log or habit trackers below).

 
An example of a weekly habit tracker page.

An example of a weekly habit tracker page.

 

The Time Log

On the top half are time trackers (sometimes known as a time log, since 1 page has 7 time trackers). Each row has 24 boxes: one for each hour of the day. My days begin at 6 a.m. and end at 5:59 a.m. the next day, so the first box of the day is 6 a.m. to 7 a.m.

 
An example time log. In this example, I am midway through my Tuesday.

An example time log. In this example, I am midway through my Tuesday.

 

I use a combination of seven or eight colors to identify out what I’m doing at any given point. Sleeping (which is grey), “down time” (orange), and meetings (purple) are common things to track. I also track reading (pink), writing (red), programming (blue), hand coding (light blue), and “misc work” (green). These more detailed codes allow me to really see where my work time is spent on any given day.

Writing, in particular, involves a lot of different tasks. The three that are the most common for me are: outlining, new writing, and proofing. If I want to provide more detail about what I’m doing when I’m “writing”, I’ll mark a box with “O” for outline, “W” for new writing, and “P” for proofing.

Underneath each time tracker, I will write notes and details about that day, things that add context to the day’s data. This includes (but is not limited to): social functions I attend, exam days, major grading days, conference deadlines, travel days, and sick days.

Other Trackers

Below my time log are templates of a few other trackers. I don’t actually use all of these; I just wanted to present different ideas of trackers you may be interested in.

Some example trackers. In my day-to-day, I do use the work tracker and the skincare tracker.

Some example trackers. In my day-to-day, I do use the work tracker and the skincare tracker.

Work Tracker

I do use a work tracker: it’s a 7x3 matrix, with each row representing a day, and each column representing a task (c = coding, r = reading, w = writing). While I already track these tasks in my time log, they’re important enough that I also want to record when I do all three daily; I like day when I code a little, read a little, and write a little.

tracker_3.png

To the right of this 7x3 matrix is a set of purple bars. Those are the number of pages I hope to write daily (my estimate). I draw a rectangle to represent the number of pages I write in a given writing session (my observed)—1 box for 1 page, 3 boxes for 3 pages. This allows me to see the days I’ve hit my writing goals… and the days I haven’t.

The combination of my time log and my writing page tracker allows me to see how much I’ve written per hour. Sometimes, the words flow out easily and I can write 1 or 2 pages in an hour. Sometimes, it’s really hard to produce good writing.

Other Trackers

I do track a variety of other, non-work tasks. These range from the mundane habits, like brushing my teeth or showering, to hobbies, like baking and doing calligraphy.

For most of these tasks, each box represents one task per day (similar to my work tracker, the columns are the tasks and the rows are the days). It’s easy to vary up these tasks based on my needs that week, or things that I want to improve on. For that reason, the list of habits that I track change week-by-week.

Sometimes, I want to keep track of a more complex habit (e.g., taking multiple types of medication or my skincare routine). For this, I’ll often use a frankenlog system.

The Frankenlog

The goal of the frankenlog system frankenlog system, generally, is to jam as much information into a single page of your bullet journal. This is a great, minimalist strategy that gives you a “bird’s eye view” without sacrificing the detail.

One of the awesome features of the frankenlog is the “four mark” daily habit box. Each habit is tracked with a single pen stroke, allowing for four habits to be tracked with one box.

I use this system to track my skincare routine. In the morning, I have four tasks: face washing, toner, vitamin c extract,  and sunblock. In the evening, I have seven or eight tasks: face washing, micellar water, toner, face mask (sometimes), eye cream, hyaluronic acid serum, retinol, and night cream.

 
An example of a frankenlog habit tracker. Each “box” can track up to four different tasks or habits. In this skincare example, I have 4 morning steps and 8 nighttime steps.

An example of a frankenlog habit tracker. Each “box” can track up to four different tasks or habits. In this skincare example, I have 4 morning steps and 8 nighttime steps.

 

Weekly trackers give me a good sense of what I’ve been doing that week. This helps me make sure I’m living a (relatively) balanced life—time for work, for friends, and for myself. Plus, I love to see the bars fill up over the course of the week.

Example time lapse of a week’s worth of habit tracking information.

Example time lapse of a week’s worth of habit tracking information.

Daily Scheduling

If my weekly (master) to-do list is looking at the forest, my daily to-do and schedule are the individual trees.

My Daily To-Do List

My daily to-do list is a selection of tasks from my weekly to-do and minor to-do’s that come up over the course of the day (things like taking out the garbage or responding to that email… or posting on Twitter). This step is not super necessary, but it is the middleman between my weekly to-do list and my scheduler.

Here are 3 days of to-do lists.

Here are 3 days of to-do lists.

Sometime in the summer of 2019, I started color-coding my tasks by priority. I have three red boxes for “high priority” tasks, three or four yellow boxes for “middle priority tasks” and about six or seven boxes for “low priority tasks.”

I often repeat long tasks that take me several days. I check off a task when I’ve worked on it that day (not necessarily when I complete it—that’s what my master to-do list is for). In the above example, I just wrote “Dissertation writing” or “diss writing”, but I tend to be more specific (e.g., what chapter of my dissertation am I working on?)

My Schedule

Once I’ve written my to-do list, it’s time to work on my schedule for that day. Right now, I’m using my Happy Planner to schedule my days. I really like writing out what I’m going to do the next day. I know many people prefer to be high-tech, though (most people have an iCal, gCal, planner, scheduler, or something digital). I’ve had both a Google calendar and a planner for the majority of my time in higher education (there were one or two years where I gave up on the physical scheduler).

For a while, my primary schedule was digital (Google Calendar). This was great when I took classes or was a Teaching Assistant because I had to work around major blocks of time (i.e., classes). But since I’ve started dissertating, I’ve switched almost completely over to my planner. I like being able to see my to-do list and my schedule side by side, and I couldn’t really replicate that effect with Any.do + gcal.

Though I may go back to a hybrid system in the future (where I maintain both a planner and an online calendar), it’s unlikely that I will ever go “full digital” again. There are just too many benefits to maintaining a physical planner. You don’t have to worry about having an internet connection, for one. I find that I remember my schedule better when I write it down, as well. There has been a resurgence of planning on paper in the past few years (see all the news articles discussing this in WSJ, NYT, Vox, and CNBC)!

Planners also don’t have to be too expensive. Sure, some people dish out upwards of $60.00 for their planner. But you can easily maintain a physical planner with a one-dollar notebook and a pen using the bullet journal strategy.

To make my schedule, I use a strategy called time blocking.

Time Blocking

Time blocking refers to planning out “blocks” of time to do various things. Time blocking is a great strategy for young academics because it (theoretically) forces you to devote long periods of time to a task, whether it is reading, writing, programming, analyzing, or something else.

You can time-block regardless of whether you use a digital or analog system. Below is an example of a digital time blocked schedule in April 2017 (When I was a teaching assistant and taking classes). I’ve color-coded many of my tasks: light green is for my own classes, dark green is for my research groups, blue is for the class I was a teaching assistant, light red for reading, dark red for writing, purple for programming, and seafoam green (“peacock”) for hand coding (for a traditional content analysis). Color coding online (or offline) can be really useful—it’s a way to quickly see what you need to do.

My time blocked schedule from a week in April 2017 (when I was still working as a teaching assistant and taking classes). I do have some gaps in time, so not all of my time is completely organized. But it does what I need it to do, and that’s the most important part!

In my physical planner now, I block time by assessing what I need to do for that day, estimating how long it takes to do that task, and trying to find a block of time to fit into my schedule. For example, if I know I want to dedicate 3-4 hours to working on a paper, I’ll look for a time in my schedule to fit that in.

Here’s what my planner looks like now. Happy Planners with a vertical layout (like mine is) are blocked into thirds. I used the first box to write my to-do list and a second box to write my time blocked schedule. My third box is a wild card: I’ll put quotes in it, grocery lists, or agendas for meetings.
Vertical planning layouts mean that you plan vertically (in columns). Each day is a column. Some vertical planners are already time-stamped. Horizontal planning layouts, on the other hand, have wider and shorter spaces for their days. Days are stacked on top of each other.

Time blocking may seem overboard (“you mean I have to schedule all my time?”*) but there is a big payoff: I get more work done and have dedicated time to major projects, and I force myself to have breaks by blocking them in. This is very important: taking time off is important, and scheduling in a break is better than not taking a break at all.

My time blocked schedule is also an estimation—the only person forcing you to your time blocked schedule is yourself. It is rare that my time blocked schedule aligns perfectly with reality. Like most people, I tend to overestimate what I can do (we all do; it’s called planning fallacy). Or, there are days where I just crash. When this happens, it’s important to not be hard on yourself. A time blocked schedule is supposed to help you, not make you feel like shit.

Sometimes, advocates of time blocking say that it prioritizes your work. This is true to some extent—but it’s not the point of time blocking; at least, it’s not to me. Time blocking prioritizes your time: you only have so many hours in the day to live (to work, to relax, to create, to think, to thrive, to cry, to eat, to poop, to sleep). Time blocking, at least the way that I use it, helps me maintain a balance between work and life. I put in break times because I know I can’t work 24/7 (or at least, I know I shouldn’t or I will burn out). Time blocking allows you to prioritize what is important. That might be work, or that might be your creative endeavors after work, or time for you to hang out with friends.

* Obviously, you don’t have to schedule all your time away. In my digital calendar from 2017, I obviously had gaps of time.

When do I do all of this?

At the end of the day, I write my to-do list and my schedule for the next day. It’s usually one of the last things I do. I’ve tried to write my schedule on the morning of that day, but I’ve had less success with that (some people do prefer to plan in the morning, though). Here are my steps:

  1. Review my Master to-do list. Is there anything urgent I need to consider or include?

  2. Write my Daily to-do list. I rarely fill out all the boxes at this point (if there are 10 boxes total, I usually fill about 5 or 6).

  3. Write my schedule by the hour (or half-hour). The first thing I think about is when I need to wake up for that day.

  4. I then fill it in with meetings and major deadlines.

  5. I finally time-block my remaining time. Conventional wisdom suggests that the first few hours of your day are your most productive. I like to get a lot of writing or coding out of the way in the morning. I always make time for breaks.

New Semester, New Writing Approach

Hello!

Long time no chat, readers!

The summer has been a whirlwind for me (writing, programming, reading, and moving has fully consumed my last few months, not including traveling for AEJMC and appearing on CNN).

For whatever reason, this summer has been “The Summer of Unfinished Drafts.” I’ve had more unfinished ideas and drafts than I’ve ever had before. The ideas keep popping up and landing on top of one another (an experience that is simultaneously exciting and anxiety-inducing). I’ve had a couple drafts on the docket, but for various reason, I haven’t been able to post them to my blog. Sometimes I start an outline, but never complete it. In other instances, I tell myself I need to proof it again (and again and again and again), resulting it me never publishing it.

At the same time, I think my publication aspirations (I recently had my first single-authored piece accepted to Political Communication) and academic writing trajectory has paralyzed some aspects of my writing. In an attempt to be so polished all. the. time., I have lost a bit of my "natural voice”—my signature informality.

This became all the more evident while reading Gretchen McCulloch’s* Because Internet (a book I highly recommend). In it, she talks about how spellcheck and grammarcheck operates as a “linguistic authority” (p. 45), reinforcing archaic rules. She (admirably so) is upfront about her stylistic choices: when to adopt accepted 21st century norms (e.g., “lol” vs “LOL”) and when to bend to the norms of standard American English writing.

This matters a lot for me and this blog, because I realize the desire to write “really clean blog posts” is hindering my willingness to share new ideas and thoughts on this blog. I want this to be a place for me to be more free-flowing, and not be hindered by where my ggplot2 title should be 10 pixels to the right (or whether I have one typo in my post).

For this reason, my subsequent posts this semester will have fairly minimal editing (if any at all). This choice reflects the kind of work I am posting here—fresh, fairly raw, but also liberated from the rigidity of many other writing genres/registers that I use (e.g., AP style news writing, academic writing). Should you want to read my more formal writing, I encourage you to check out my CJR piece, and upcoming publications.

I hope you’re excited to take this writing journey with me! For those starting semesters on campuses across the world: Happy Fall 2019! (And happy continuing quarters for those on the quarter-system.)

———

* In her book, Mulloch points out that her name is often marked as erroneous for the more common “McCullough.” Funnily enough, this happened while I was written her name for this blog post (see screenshot below).

book_ss.png

The Hidden Conference Cost of doing Interdisciplinary Work

Hello blog!

Long time no chat. May was entirely lost in the black hole that is the end of the semester and the start of “academic conferencing.” In the past month, I attended the International Communication Association’s conference (ICA 2019; what I would consider the “main” conference of my primary field, Mass Communication) and a workshop at the the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics conference (NAACL NLP+CSS 2019). I have a nice break through the remainder of June and July, and then in August I have one more conference (Association in Education for Journalism and Mass Communication, AEJMC 2019).

Which brings me to my topic of the day: the cost of attending conferences to stay up to date on interdisciplinary scholarship.

Realistically, I work in three intersecting fields (four, if you include my computational stuff separately): Mass Communication, Political Science, and Linguistics. Removing a component of the trifecta is not possible; it would mean fundamentally misunderstanding my research agenda.

There are a lot of benefits and problems to doing interdisciplinary research, which many other scholars have spoken on. I love interdisciplinary work, personally, because that’s where all the enjoyable little questions are. And, as valuable as specialization can be, most research questions can be studied in many ways, depending on the department/discipline you end up in. A question about political language may produce different results if studied in Sociology, Psychology, and Political Science. So, to me, the rigorous thing would be to do interdisciplinary research—to be specific in your question, broad in where you look for theory, and concrete in your study’s operationalization and methodology.

But there are substantial professional costs to doing interdisciplinary work. A Google Scholar search of “interdisciplinary research difficulties” will yield more than enough articles to give you a sense of how much the academy has struggled to deal with interdisciplinary scholars (I choose the word “deal” carefully… rarely do I feel as if the academy “supports” interdisciplinary work).

One of those weirdly silent struggles is the cost of attending oh-so-many conferences. In an ideal world, I’d like to submit to conferences for all the fields I participate in (ICA/AEJMC for Mass Comm, LSA for Linguistics, APSA/MPSA for Political Science, NAACL/CoLing for Computational Linguistics). There conferences are important for many reasons. They help you connect with others to find jobs (a super important thing for any graduate student), they expose you to the latest studies and results in the field, and they help you connect with other people who are doing similar work to you.

But each conference can cost a substantial amount of money to attend. Below are the registration cost of the seven conferences I noted above, and a few others:

Conference 2019 Location Regular Reg Student Reg
AEJMC Toronto $ 215 $ 125
APSA Washington D.C. $ 160 $ 125
CoLing Santa Fe $ 715 $ 500
ICA Washington D.C. $ 300* $ 165
IC2S2 Amsterdam 345 € 195 €
ICCSS Amsterdam 450 € 350 €
LSA NYC $ 86 $ 90
NAACL Minneapolis $ 595 $ 295

(* ICA has tiered prices depending on where your institution is located. These are U.S. prices, Tier A.)

For each conference, you also need to account for hotel and airfare, at minimum. The best conferences are the ones that are proximity close (the location of NAACL, in Minneapolis, was a huge reason why I submitted a paper to begin with), but you are typically looking at between 300 and 500 dollars for a round-trip flight to somewhere-in-the-U.S. (aka: Chicago or DC). Conference hotels usually charge between 175 and 250 per night (graduate students bring down the cost substantially by staying with other graduate students). If you are a lucky young scholar like I am, you will have tt professors who will assist with food and drink for a good portion of the trip, but this is obviously not always the case.

All in all, you can be spending somewhere between 500 and 1000 dollars for each conference you attend. This cost increases considerably for non-(U.S. and European) scholars, who have to not only fly in from another country ($$$ international flights anyone?!) but also apply for visas, an increasingly daunting task (most of my conferences are in the U.S., which makes me double-privileged as a scholar in the States).

If you’re a scholar working in two disciplines, that’s twice the conferences you may need to pay for. Or, you’ll have to sacrifice attending certain conferences in one year to attend another. For a young scholar, particularly one doing interdisciplinary research, not attending a conference means missed opportunities to meet people, connect about research, and find future avenues of collaboration.

Given this, we need to start thinking about the conference model, and how that limits young scholars who cannot normally afford to attend so many conferences. Alternative ways to participate, cheaper locations (and cheaper hotels), and having more included in a registration can go a long way.

Yesterday, I was a footnote in history!

Yesterday, I received exciting news! A piece that I had written with Chris Wells for Columbia Journalism Review was cited in the Mueller Report, which was released a day ago.

The piece that we wrote for CJR focused on news organizations that embedded tweets by Internet Research Agency (IRA) handles into their news stories. We’ve increased the number of outlets analyzed since the CJR piece (it was about 40 when we started, but over 100 now), and our finding still holds: a majority of news organizations cited an IRA account in at least one story.

Contrary to popular opinion, these IRA accounts were not sharing “fake news” (as in: false information). Instead, IRA tweets were often quoted for their salient, often hyper-partisan opinions. For example, one tweet advocated for a Heterosexual Pride Day as a way of inciting LGBTQ activists. Another called refugees, “rapefugees”. These accounts would often portray themselves as American people (e.g., @JennAbrams portrayed herself as a “typical” American girl, as shown by research done by my colleague Yiping Xia), or as groups (like @ten_gop, an IRA account pretending to be Tennessee GOP members, and @blacktivist, an IRA account pretending to be BlackLivesMatter organizers).

This has important implications, and speaks to Muller’s earlier indictment of the IRA, which noted that Russia’s campaign goal was “spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general” (p. 6). Ironically, the discovery of the IRA campaign in the summer/fall of 2017 probably fed into this distrust (especially since news organization were as likely to be “duped” as American citizens).

The (underacted) part where we are referenced focuses on this specific issue—journalists embedded these tweets thinking they reflected the opinions of U.S. citizens. This is incredibly problematic, and something that both academics and journalists want to find solutions for. Following our publication in early of 2018, several news organizations reached out to us regarding the specific articles i which they had unintentionally quoted IRA tweets. The research team was particularly excited by these exchanges because it shows that journalists care, and want to avoid doing this in the future.