Shannon C. McGregor

About

Shannon C. McGregor is an associate professor and director of the Ph.D. program at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is also a principal investigator at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life and holds appointments with UNC’s department of political science and the School of Information and Library Science. Her research focuses on the role of media and social media in political processes, emphasizing the interplay of politicians, journalists, and the public, which are essential to a functioning democracy. McGregor’s interdisciplinary and mixed-method research has been published across fields including communication, political science, and sociology, and she is a co-editor of the book 'Media and January 6th,' published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. She frequently writes for the public press, with work appearing in outlets such as The Washington Post, Wired, and The Guardian.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Law
• Art history
• Public relations
• Social psychology
• Media studies
• Psychology
• Art

Selected publications

• A review and provocation: On polarization and platforms

  New Media & Society · 2023-04-11 · 123 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior author

  Scholars increasingly point to polarization as a central threat to democracy—and identify technology platforms as key contributors to polarization. In contrast, we argue that polarization can only be seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored. The central theoretical claim of this piece is that political identities map more or less onto social groups, and groups are, in turn, located in social structures. As such, scholars must analyze groups as they are embedded in relations…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Taking the Temperature of the Room”

  Public Opinion Quarterly · 2020 · 87 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract For most of the twentieth century, public opinion was nearly analogous with polling. Enter social media, which has upended the social, technical, and communication contingencies upon which public opinion is constructed. This study documents how political professionals turn to social media to understand the public, charting important implications for the practice of campaigning as well as the study of public opinion itself. An analysis of in-depth interviews with 13 professionals from 20…

  DOI

• Tackling misinformation: What researchers could do with social media data

  2020 · 87 citations

  Written by Michelle A. Amazeen, Fabrício Benevenuto, Nadia M. Brashier, Robert M. Bond, Lia C. Bozarth, Ceren Budak, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Lisa K. Fazio, Emilio Ferrara, Andrew J. Flanagin, Ales-sandro Flammini, Deen Freelon, Nir Grinberg, Ralph Hertwig, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Kenneth Jo-seph, Jason J. Jones, R. Kelly Garrett, Daniel Kreiss, Shannon McGregor, Jasmine McNealy, Drew Margolin, Alice Marwick, FiIippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Seungahn Nah, Stephan Lewan-dowsky, Philipp Lorenz-Spre…

  PublisherDOI

• Academic Caregivers on Organizational and Community Resilience in Academia (Fuck Individual Resilience)

  Communication Culture and Critique · 2021-03-31 · 36 citations

  article

  Crises, whether society-wide or personal, are endemic to the human condition. Yet academia and its associated institutions persist in having insufficient scaffolding to support its members during periods of crisis. No one knows this more acutely than academic caregivers of children, elders, disabled adults, and other loved ones with special needs. Academic caregivers are disproportionately women, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light our precarious position and the lack of structural and in…

  PublisherDOI

• Social media policy in two dimensions: understanding the role of anti-establishment beliefs and political ideology in Americans’ attribution of responsibility regarding online content

  Information Communication & Society · 2023-08-03 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  While government regulators, the press, and academics struggle to determine who should be responsible for content on social media platforms, we know little about what the public believes about these issues. In this study, we investigate what drives Americans’ opinions on whether the government, platforms, or individual users should be responsible for social media content. Using data from a nationally representative survey of over 10,000 Americans, we investigate how anti-establishment attitudes…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel Kreiss

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  14 shared

• Regina G. Lawrence

  9 shared

• Magdalena Saldaña

  8 shared

• Rachel R. Mourão

  Michigan State University

  7 shared

• Gordon Pennycook

  University of Regina

  7 shared

• Andrew M. Guess

  Princeton University

  6 shared

• Carolyn Schmitt

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  5 shared

• Bridget Barrett

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  5 shared

Education

• PhD, School of Journalism

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2017

• MA, College of Journalism and Communications

  University of Florida

  2008

• BA, Communication

  Flagler College

  2005

Similar researchers at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Seth M. Noarh-64
• Kristen Harrisonh-36
• Suman Leeh-34