Francesca Tripodi

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 University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, a senior faculty researcher with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from the University of Virginia, as well as an M.A. 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 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.