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During this talk, Dr. Francesca Tripodi will provide a detailed analysis of the information tactics pundits and politicians use in pursuit of partisan gains.  Combining interviews and ethnographic observations with content analysis, media immersion, and web-scraped metadata, this talk takes audiences on a deep dive into the conservative information landscape. Through the mechanics of information literacy, networked media, search-engine optimization, curated keywords, and strategic signaling, Dr. Tripodi explains how dominant narratives weave together economic, social, and religious groups into a common conversation and filters the news around their concerns. By encouraging audiences to “do their own research,” but seeding the internet beforehand, conspiracy theorists and propagandists effectively redirect attention away from negative media attention, blur the line between reality and fiction, and draw on a historical legacy of white supremacist logics. The goal of identifying these tactics is to break the feedback-loop to explain how an algorithmically polarized society poses a great risk to American democracy.