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Anna Beers

 

By

Anna Beers

Post-doctorate

Headshot of Anna Beers

Pronouns

She/Her

Email

albeers@unc.edu

Office

Remote

Headshot of Anna Beers

Expertise

Online Communities, Network Science, Political Communication

Education

PhD, Human Centered Design and Engineering, University of Washington

Biography

Anna Beers studies the activities of political online communities and particularly the social media influencers that act within them. While she focuses on quantitative methods and particularly network science, her work is informed by ethnographic work on online communities and influencers derived from media and cultural studies. She concerns herself primarily with pressing problems in political communication in the United States, particularly related to public concern around disinformation, radicalization, and far-right mobilization. Her prior and ongoing work has focused on United States elections, pseudo-scientific content relating to COVID-19, international information operations, and anti-transgender organizing.

Publications

Beers, Andrew, Sarah Nguyễn, Kate Starbird, Jevin D. West, and Emma S. Spiro. 2023. “Selective and Deceptive Citation in the Construction of Dueling Consensuses.” Science Advances 9(38)

Beers, Andrew, Joseph S. Schafer, Ian Kennedy, Morgan Wack, Emma S. Spiro, and Kate Starbird. 2023. “Followback Clusters, Satellite Audiences, and Bridge Nodes: Coengagement Networks for the 2020 US Election.” Pp. 59–71 in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 17.

Beers, Andrew, Tom Wilson, and Kate Starbird. 2022. “The Demographics of an International Influence Operation Affecting Facebook Users in the United States.” Journal of Online Trust and Safety 1(4)