Martin Johannes Riedl

Martin Johannes Riedl

mriedl1 (at) utk (dot) edu

School of Journalism and Media, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Dr. Martin Johannes Riedl is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His work investigates platform governance and content moderation, digital journalism, as well as the spread of false and misleading information on social media.

He is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an affiliate fellow at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a research associate at the Technology & Information Policy Institute (also at UT Austin), and has previously been affiliated with the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin, Germany. At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s College of Communication & Information, he is a CCI Founding Fellow at the Information Integrity Institute.

Riedl’s work has been published in leading academic outlets such as New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Digital Journalism, and the Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. He also is the co-editor of a special issue on political influencers in Social Media + Society. His academic work has received numerous awards, including a research prize for professional relevance from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), as well as top paper awards from AEJMC’s Newspaper and Online News Division, and the International Communication Association’s (ICA) Journalism Studies and Communication Law and Policy Divisions.

Riedl’s writing has appeared through Teen Vogue, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Brookings Institution’s TechStream. His research has been covered by industry outlets such as Harvard’s Nieman Lab, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Poynter Institute, and news outlets like CBS News, Agence France Presse (AFP), Hankook Ilbo, tagesschau.de, and Voice of America. He has been invited to present his work before the Congressional Hispanic Caucus of the 117th U.S. Congress, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Science and Technology study group, as well as think tanks and academic centers such as the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin, Germany, and the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C.

Riedl received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin where he also completed a postdoc at the Center for Media Engagement. He holds M.A.’s from Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media in Hanover, Germany, and from Humboldt University of Berlin, as well as a B.A. from FHWien der WKW in Vienna, Austria.

Name pronounciation: [ˈmaʁtiːn] [joˈhanəs] [ˈʁiːdl]

Pronouns: he/him/his

Interests
  • Social media
  • Digital journalism
  • Platform governance
  • Content moderation
  • False and misleading information
Education
  • Ph.D. in Journalism and Media, 2021

    University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA

  • M.A. in Social Sciences, 2016

    Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  • M.A. in Media Management, 2015

    Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media, Hanover, Germany

  • B.A. in Journalism and Media Management, 2013

    FHWien der WKW, Vienna, Austria

Academic positions

Publications

(2023). The role of geolocation data in U.S. political campaigning: How digital political strategists perceive it. Convergence.

(2023). Using Facebook Messenger versus Groups for news engagement. Digital Journalism.

(2023). How disinformation on WhatsApp went from campaign weapon to governmental propaganda in Brazil. Social Media + Society.

(2023). Political relational influencers: The mobilization of social media influencers in the political arena. International Journal of Communication.

(2021). How to signal trust in a Google search. Center for Media Engagement White Paper.

Contact

  • mriedl1 (at) utk (dot) edu
  • Knoxville, Tennessee