About

Daniel Kreiss is a professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is involved in research and teaching within these roles. Alongside Nikki Usher, he serves as the editor of the Oxford University Press book series titled Journalism and Political Communication Unbound. Additionally, he holds the position of associate editor for the journal Political Communication.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Political economy
• Art
• Media studies
• Art history

Selected publications

• Platforms and Global Democracies

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication · 2025-06-16

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Since approximately 2003−2004, social media and technology platforms have become central infrastructures for political processes around the world. In many countries, technology and social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok play a central role in public debate, social movements, governmental communication, public diplomacy, terrorism, war, campaigns, elections, governance, and policymaking, in addition to many other domains. As such, how these companies are governed, monetize content and users, set policies, and design technologies has outsized implications for global and national public spheres and political processes, including electoral institutions. These platforms are embedded in political, social, and economic systems that influence how they are governed and used—and which they in turn shape. Platforms have a complicated past when it comes to regulating political content. The role of mis/disinformation on social media platforms in the wake of the international Cambridge Analytica scandals and the rise of populist, authoritarian, or anti-democratic leaders and parties led to new global calls for increased regulation of these technologies once thought to be tools of liberation and democracy. Between 2016 and 2020, platforms responded by instituting a number of different content-moderation policies, strategies, and partnerships to address issues surrounding their role in democratic politics. Platforms took more seriously the propagation of conspiratorial content, the correction of misleading information, and the policing of content that undermined electoral processes. Since that time, platforms have generally rolled back trust and safety efforts, with stated justifications of freedom of expression. This article provides an overview of what is known about social media platforms and democratic processes, including their social and psychological effects. It analyzes platform policies belonging to Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), X, YouTube, and TikTok regarding political and election-related content in six countries (Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States) as well as the European Union—all places holding elections in 2024 or 2025. The article focuses on the civic integrity, artificial intelligence, fact-checking, and political advertising policies of these platforms, given their importance to global politics and elections.

  PublisherDOI

• The Democratic Decay Within

  2025-06-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter documents and analyzes the uptake of QAnon symbols and narratives by Republican Party candidates during their 2020 electoral bids. Empirical analysis revealed that candidates used 45 discrete QAnon symbols during the 2020 cycle organized around six central themes: Christianity, opposition to elites, opposition to marginalized groups, nationalism, revolution, and a form of corrosive skepticism. Analytically, the chapter shows how QAnon offers a set of symbolic resources to Republican candidates that center on fundamental(ist) ideas of religion, morality, and white, Christian, masculine, and heteronormative identity that accord with the party’s main coalitions. In doing so, it reveals how QAnon is a digital surrogate organization for the Republican Party, creating a discursive order that is advantageous for it, and offers an interrelated yet flexible set of themes that people can identify with and take up on a personal basis in multiple ways. The Republican Party, in turn, potentially offers QAnon validation, symbolic and stylistic outcomes (as opposed to policy outcomes), and access to broader audiences and institutional levers of power.

  PublisherDOI

• Toward a group theory of political communication

  Journal of Communication · 2025-10-31 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Recent political communication scholarship finds that groups and identities play a central role in the crises faced by political and media systems globally, particularly in democracies. Yet an individualist orientation in the literature has resulted in key theoretical and conceptual limitations, preventing a broader group-centric theoretical framework from emerging. We synthesize disparate bodies of theory on groups, politics, and communication to offer three basic propositions underlying a group theory of political communication. First, it is the group—not the individual—that is the fundamental organizing unit of social and political life. Second, groups are constituted through communication, which is central to how they define their politics. Third, groups and politics are reciprocally influencing forces through political communication, oriented around power. We offer a framework for studying the role of groups in political communication at the micro, meso, and macro levels, providing a concrete agenda for the study of groups in political communication.

  PublisherDOI

• Communication Theory at a Time of Racial Reckoning

  UNC Libraries · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Review of "Distributed Blackness: African American cybercultures" by Andre Brock Jr., "# HashtagActivism: Networks of race and gender justice" by Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles and "Bearing witness while Black: African Americans, smartphones, and the new protest #journalism" by Allissa V. Richardson.

  PublisherDOI

• Trump Goes to Tulsa on Juneteenth: Placing the Study of Identity, Social Groups, and Power at the Center of Political Communication Research

  UNC Libraries · 2025-10-28

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The increase in elites’ use of racial appeals has compelled some scholars of political communication to tell a more comprehensive story about political identity in the United States and elsewhere around the world . This occurred alongside the field of communication’s , and subfield of political communication’s , longstanding failures to develop a racial analytic – a clear reflection of the field’s overwhelming whiteness. In this forum essay, we contextualize and review some strains of new literature on identity in political communication, with a focus especially on the U.S. context and the intersection of race and political power. Our aim is to call attention to what we see as an emerging approach to centering power, identity, and social groups in the field. These works are diverse theoretically and methodologically, and their authors may or may not recognize themselves as doing work in political communication at all. But we see tremendous value in what they share analytically, substantively, and normatively, and aim to mark the emergence and – we hope – flourishing of this work.

  PublisherDOI

• Network Histories: Methods and Measures for Studying Interdependence and Interconnectedness Within Digital Journalism

  Digital Journalism · 2025-05-15

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Safeguarding the Peaceful Transfer of Power: Pro-Democracy Electoral Frames and Journalist Coverage of Election Deniers During the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections

  UNC Libraries · 2025-04-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study develops a new normative and analytical framework of “democracy-framed electoral coverage” grounded in literatures that stress the role of governmental and communicative institutions in protecting democracies from threats. We define “democracy-framed electoral coverage” as journalism that embraces fairly contested elections as an established norm and political ideal, and clearly alerts the public to threats to the peaceful transfer of power. Using the U.S. as a case study of a consolidated democracy facing autocratization threats, the study applies the framework to analyze a comprehensive dataset of 708 articles encompassing twenty one races during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections when candidates who denied the results of the 2020 presidential election were on the ballot. Additionally, we conducted interviews with twelve journalists to evaluate their perspectives and practices regarding election denying candidates. We find that journalists routinely failed to alert the public to the threat posed by candidates unwilling to embrace the legitimacy of U.S. elections. This paper demonstrates the necessity of a normative framework for pro-democracy election coverage, and the findings underscore the electoral fragility of the U.S.—a case of a democracy undergoing autocratization processes and facing threats to the legitimacy of its elections and the peaceful transfer of power.

  PublisherDOI

• Identity propaganda: Racial narratives and disinformation

  UNC Libraries · 2025-06-26

  articleOpen access

  This article develops the concept of “identity propaganda,” or narratives that strategically target and exploit identity-based differences in accord with pre-existing power structures to maintain hegemonic social orders. In proposing and developing the concept of identity propaganda, we especially aim to help researchers find new insights into their data on misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda by outlining a framework for unpacking layers of historical power relations embedded in the content they analyze. We focus on three forms of identity propaganda: othering narratives that alienate and marginalize non-white or non-dominant groups; essentializing narratives that create generalizing tropes of marginalized groups; and authenticating narratives that call upon people to prove or undermine their claims to be part of certain groups. We demonstrate the utility of this framework through our analysis of identity propaganda around Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2020 US presidential election.

  PublisherDOI

• Strategically Hijacking Victimhood: A Political Communication Strategy in the Discourse of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump

  Perspectives on Politics · 2024-03-25 · 32 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article introduces the concept of “hijacked victimhood” as a form of strategically leveraging victimhood narratives. It is a subset of strategic victimhood, which is a relatively common communicative strategy whereby groups claim victimhood status in contests over power and legitimacy. Political leaders who use the strategy of hijacked victimhood present dominant groups as in danger, as current or future victims, and in need of protection (especially by the crafter of the narrative) from oppressive forces consisting of—or indirectly representing—marginalized and subaltern groups. In the process, leaders hijacking victimhood blunt the rights-based claims of such groups. Analyzing Viktor Orbán’s and Donald Trump’s elite rhetoric in Hungary and the United States, respectively, we inductively document varieties of hijacked victimhood in their political communication, showing how Orbán leverages historical suffering and resistance while Trump constructs economic and value-based harms for dominant groups. Making both conceptual and empirical contributions, we argue that at the heart of hijacked victimhood is a reversal of the victimizer–victim dichotomy, a new portrayal of moral orders, a teleological ordering of past and future harms, and a mobilization of security threats—all used to preserve or expand a dominant group’s power.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Political Communication Research is Unprepared for the Far Right

  Political Communication · 2024-10-26 · 15 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In this introductory piece to a special issue of the Forum, we explore the inadequacies of the field of political communication in addressing the rising threats posed by illiberalism and the far right. We argue that the discipline’s frameworks, developed within the context of Western liberal democracies, are ill-equipped to tackle the complexities and self-reflexive strategies of contemporary far-right movements and actor types. These formations exploit liberal norms and practices to ultimately undermine and dismantle democratic values. We call for more “democratic clarity,” urging political communication scholars to adopt a clear stance in defense of democratic principles and to develop more robust conceptual tools to accurately classify and understand far-right actors. We introduce the other discussion pieces featured in this special section and ultimately point to actionable items meant to move the field forward.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kirsten Adams

  Center for Information Technology

  14 shared

• Shannon C. McGregor

  Life University

  14 shared

• Brinley Lowe

  9 shared

• Jenni Ciesielski

  9 shared

• Gabrielle Micchia

  9 shared

• Haley Fernandez

  9 shared

• Kate Frauenfelder

  9 shared

• Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

  University of Oxford

  7 shared

Awards & honors

• Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Professor, UNC Hussman Schoo…