Joshua Braun

About

Joshua Braun is a faculty member at the Department of Journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, affiliated with the Computational Social Science Institute. His research focuses on understanding how infrastructures for media distribution are constructed and maintained from a sociological perspective. Braun employs conceptual tools from the history and sociology of socio-technical systems, as well as lenses from media studies, media sociology, journalism studies, and communication theory, to analyze how companies and individuals develop and deploy new systems for distributing content online. From a methods standpoint, Braun typically uses scripting to support qualitative research, enabling him to acquire and analyze data sets in pursuit of interesting cases. He also conducts interviews with software developers and system administrators to gain insights into the infrastructures that support media organizations. His work aims to shed light on the sociotechnical processes underlying media distribution systems.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Physical medicine and rehabilitation
• Cardiology
• Endocrinology

Selected publications

• Fake News, Real Money: Ad Tech Platforms, Profit-Driven Hoaxes, and the Business of Journalism

  Digital Journalism · 2019-01-02 · 212 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Following the viral spread of hoax political news in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, it's been reported that at least some of the individuals publishing these stories made substantial sums of money—tens of thousands of US dollars—from their efforts. Whether or not such hoax stories are ultimately revealed to have had a persuasive impact on the electorate, they raise important normative questions about the underlying media infrastructures and industries—ad tech firms, programmat…

  PublisherDOI

• Activism, Advertising, and Far-Right Media: The Case of Sleeping Giants

  Media and Communication · 2019-12-17 · 38 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study examines the international activist movement known as Sleeping Giants, a social-media “campaign to make bigotry and sexism less profitable” (Sleeping Giants, n.d.). The campaign originated in the US with an anonymous Twitter account that enlisted followers in encouraging brands to pull their online advertising from <em>Breitbart News</em>. The campaign achieved dramatic success and rapidly spread to regions outside the US, with other anonymously run and loosely allied chap…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet

  Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media · 2020-01-27 · 22 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Researchers who study how digital media technologies are developed and deployed constantly struggle to produce scholarship that is simultaneously enduring and relevant in the moment. In the time it...

  PublisherDOI

• Technology and Journalism

  The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies · 2019-04-29 · 21 citations

  otherSenior author

  Technology has long impacted journalism but the linkage between the two is deeper and more complex than ever before. Technology must be situated within a larger system, however, and cannot be divorced from social, economic, and cultural contexts. It has played a key role in the development of new logics and forms, which has impacted arrangements within news production. It has also been a key component of new dependencies on platforms and introduced new transparent intermediaries to news distribu…

  PublisherDOI

• Journalism, Media Research, and Mastodon: Notes on the Future

  Digital Journalism · 2023-05-10 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

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  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alexander V. Ng

  Marquette University

  93 shared

• Julie Doyle

  Northern California Institute for Research and Education

  68 shared

• Ian R. Lanza

  Mayo Clinic in Arizona

  51 shared

• Michael W. Weiner

  University of California, San Francisco

  48 shared

• Robert G. Miller

  Loughborough University

  43 shared

• Giorgos K. Sakkas

  University of Thessaly

  43 shared

• Kirsten L. Johansen

  University of Minnesota

  42 shared

• H. T. Dao

  40 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Communication

  Cornell University

  2011

• M.S., Communication

  Cornell University

  2009

• Master of Bioethics, Bioethics

  University of Pennsylvania

  2005

• B.S., Individual Studies Program

  University of California Santa Barbara

  2003

Similar researchers at University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Arindrajit Dubeh-36
• Erin Bakerh-34
• Mark C. Pachuckih-25