This study analyzes over 4000 tweets related to six misinformation topics about the COVID-19 pandemic: the use of hydroxychloroquine as treatment, the use of bleach as a preventative measure, Bill Gates intentionally causing the virus, the Chinese Communist Party intentionally causing the virus, and the Deep State causing the virus to ruin the economy and threaten President Trump’s reelection chances. Across 5 of 6 topics (excluding bleach), conservatives dominate the discourse on Twitter. Conservatives are also more likely than their liberal peers to believe in and push conspiracy theories that the Chinese Communist Party, Bill Gates, and the Deep State are working in conjunction to infect the population and enact a surveillance state. Pandemic related misinformation has previously been associated with decreased adherence to public health recommendations and adverse health effects and evidence from the current pandemic indicates that adherence to public health recommendations is starkly partisan. This study suggests that the political and informational polarization further facilitated by social media platforms such as Twitter may have dire consequences for public health.

This paper explores how whiteness is rhetorically employed in the recruitment and organizational strategies of conservative student campus groups. It considers group activity prior to, during, and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle and during the 2020 presidential election cycle. Drawing on both critical whiteness studies and social movements, this study examines how conservative students engage in framing processes designed to convert nonadherents to adherents of a group ideology. It also interrogates how whiteness influences this framing. Through a multi-site case study analysis incorporating observation, interviews, and a critical document analysis of over 100 unique articles and student group artifacts (e.g., flyers, social media posts, student newspaper editorials, etc.), and over 2,000 tweets over two distinct time points, I find that conservative student groups are employing whiteness to recruit new students over shared experiences. Specific effort is focused on "coming out" as conservative, identifying as the more academically and intellectually rigorous side of the campus political debate, and disidentifying with contemporary campus liberalism.

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Over the past decade, increasingly more colleges and universities have had to address student-initiated demands following racist incidents that occur both locally and nationally. However, the demands to address unfair conditions on campus do not necessarily result in meaningful change. To better understand how student activism facilitates administrative actions that lead to change and the extent to which social media accentuates activism, we examined student-initiated efforts to increase “diversity” at Yale University. Our study combined more than 100 documents with 5 years of social media data to identify key patterns that significantly contributed toward facilitating institutional change. The findings show that to facilitate administrative actions, student activists grew their reach, reiterated their demands over time, and activated the individuals and groups peripheral to the original demands. Their combined efforts were accentuated by the use of social media, which served to make their activism even more consequential for mediating tangible and demonstrable change at the institutional level.