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Expert Inquiry

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The Karl R. Wallace Award

Top Reviewer, International Communication Association

International Communication Association

National Communication Association

Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication

‘There will be screen caps’: the role of digital documentation and platform collapse in propagation and visibility of racial discourses

Can Social Media News Encourage Activism? The Impact of Discrimination News Frames on College Students’ Activism Intentions

Selective sharing on social media: Examining the effects of disparate racial impact frames on intentions to retransmit news stories among US college students

Dr. Marisa A. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations and the School of Journalism. Her research investigates news disseminated in digital environments and the sociopolitical influence of these messages. Her work highlights that a critical component for understanding the political implications of digital information environments is examining its implications for racial perceptions. Through investigating the effects of socially mediated messages on stereotype endorsement, public policy support, political polarization, civic engagement, and political opinion, her work assesses the implications of digital information environments on democracy. 

Dr. Smith addresses her research questions using a variety of quantitative research methods, including computational methods (e.g., text analysis, supervised machine learning), content analyses, surveys, and experiments. Her work has been published in New Media & Society and Social Media + Society. 

Dr. Smith received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Race

Social Media

Crime News

Politics

Activism

Computational Social Science

Michigan State University Profile

Google Scholar Citations

Facebook changes its corporate name to Meta: MSU professors react

Biased racial (mis)representations and news frames on social media

The perils of disinformation: Racial stereotyping, continued influence effect, and affective political polarization

Selective sharing on social media: examining the effects of race-related disparate impact frames on intentions to retrans- mit news stories among U.S. college students

Barrow Minority Doctoral Student Scholarship

The Ruth Anne Clark Student Scholar Award

President’s Research in Diversity Travel Award

Assistant Professor of Advertising and Public Relations

​Join this cross-disciplinary panel of legal scholars, media experts, and political scientists to consider the most pressing questions about disinformation in democratic politics today. Panelists will briefly discuss key findings from their own research before addressing questions about both the threat of disinformation and new forms of media, as well as potential opportunities that our contemporary media-scape may afford us.

Panelists:
Brendan Nyhan, Department of Government, Dartmouth College
https://sites.dartmouth.edu/nyhan/

Magdalena Wojcieszak, Department of Communication, UC Davis
https://communication.ucdavis.edu/people/mwojcie1

Kate Klonick, St. John's University School of Law
https://www.stjohns.edu/law/faculty/kate-klonick

Yunkang Yang, Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, George Washington University
https://iddp.gwu.edu/yunkang-yang

Shannon McGregor, Hussman School of Journalism and Media, UNC, Chapel Hill
http://hussman.unc.edu/directory/faculty/shannon-c-mcgregor

Host:
Robert Blair, Department of Political Science and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
https://watson.brown.edu/people/faculty/blair

Moderators:
Marisa Smith, School of Journalism, Michigan State University
https://comartsci.msu.edu/our-people/marisa-smith

Elizabeth Sperber, Department of Political Science, University of Denver
https://liberalarts.du.edu/about/people/elizabeth-sheridan-sperber

Virtual Events

This event is co-sponsored by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the Democratic Erosion Consortium and the University of Denver.

Disinformation, Media, and Democracy

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