D. L. Linvill

• Clemson University

This paper presents four examples of different ways that coordinated influence operations exert pressure on the prominence of ideas on social networks. We argue that these examples illustrate the four archetypical paths to influence: promotion by strengthening, promotion by weakening, demotion by strengthening, and demotion by weakening. We formali...

The proliferation of political mis/disinformation on social media has led many scholars to embrace “inoculation” techniques, where individuals are trained to identify the signs of low veracity information prior to exposure. Coordinated information operations frequently spread mis/disinformation through inauthentic or “Troll” accounts that appear to...

In recent years, Russia has gained a reputation as a formidable player in the information domain, including in the Global South. But in the case of Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine information operations, its track record of success is not clear. This suggests it is necessary to revisit the widely held assumptions about how Russian entities operate on so...

This research explored how users interacted with inauthentic social media accounts with the goal of gaining insight into tactics employed by state-backed disinformation efforts. We combine hand coding with natural-language processing to measure the ways in which users talked with and about the accounts employed by the Russian-affiliated Internet Re...

The 2015–2017 Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA)’s coordinated information operation is one of the earliest and most studied of the social media age. A set of 38 city-specific inauthentic “newsfeeds” made up a large, underanalyzed part of its English-language output. We label 1,000 tweets from the IRA newsfeeds and a matched set of real news so...

This exploratory study examined Twitter content addressing the controversial social advocacy movement, American Descendants of Slavery. We collected 1.7 million tweets using the hashtag #ADOS. A sample of these were qualitatively placed into categories: galvanizing support for ADOS, divisive support for ADOS, attack ADOS, or unrelated. Tweets were...

We analyzed the Russian Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) 2015–2017 English-language information operation on Twitter to understand the special role that engagement with outsiders (i.e., non-IRA affiliated accounts) played in their campaign. By analyzing the timing and type of engagement of IRA accounts with non-IRA affiliated accounts, and the char...

We document methods employed by Russia’s Internet Research Agency to influence the political agenda of the United States from September 9, 2009 to June 21, 2018. We qualitatively and quantitatively analyze Twitter accounts with known IRA affiliation to better understand the form and function of Russian efforts. We identified five handle categories:...

This exploratory study examines the role virtual reality can play in student speech practice for oral communication courses. The study focuses on situational communication apprehension of the virtual reality practice session in relation to students who practice face-to-face and the final grade of the subsequent speech. Test and control groups pract...

This article reports findings of two studies exploring instructor feedback orientations. Study one examined relationships between Big Five personality traits and student feedback orientations. Study two examined relationships between academic traits and feedback orientations. Canonical correlations identified two significant functions for each stud...

This study analyzed tweets from handles associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency in an effort to better understand the tactics employed by that organization on the social media platform Twitter in their attempt to influence U.S. political discourse and the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. We sampled tweets from the month...

We assessed the effectiveness of an integrated engineering public-speaking class relative to a traditionally taught public-speaking class. The integrated class was designed to meet the growing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics communication needs and the fundamental Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and the National...

College and university campuses are regularly faced with various types of crises. One category of crisis that is becoming a more regular event of concern is the active shooter event. Trainings exist that can help individuals respond more confidently in the event of an active shooter incident on campus. However, the authors were concerned that stude...

In this content analysis, we explored how students address instructor ideology in the university classroom through the social media platform Twitter. We employed Boolean search operators through Salesforce Marketing Cloud Radian6 software to gather tweets and identified English language tweets by how students referenced their instructor's ideology....

On January 27, 2017, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order that attempted to bar citizens and refugees from seven countries from entering the U.S. for a certain time period. One of the contexts most directly affected by this order was higher education. This study examined college and university communicative responses to the order fro...

This study explored how teacher clarity may be construed differently by students with differing traits depending upon the content of the instruction. Specifically, it examined relationships between students’ need for cognition and cognitive style and their perceptions of teacher clarity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and non-S...

Course: Civil discourse, argumentation, debate, persuasion, political communication Objectives: This unit activity will help students build an understanding of civil discourse and its function in society. Students will: (1) increase their capacity to examine arguments critically, (2) enhance their own ability to self-reflect critically, and (3) imp...

Romantic jealousy is common within romantic relationships, yet there is a lack of research on media portrayals of romantic jealousy and subsequent communicative responses to jealousy. Motivated by script theory and social cognitive theory, this study is a content analysis of types of romantic jealousy and communicative responses to jealousy in the...

This study, employing an exploratory mixed-methods approach, explores college students’ use of Yik Yak, a pseudo-anonymous social media platform that allows users to post short messages and engage primarily with other nearby users. Study 1 qualitatively examined student uses and perceptions of the app through 12 in-depth interviews with Yik Yak use...

A common perception exists in the media that university instructors are a liberal elite who use their positions to instill a biased perspective in their students. Exploring student attitudes in the United States and Australia, the present study examined how students’ academic beliefs are related to their inferences of instructor ideological bias an...

This study examined the need for cognition as a mediator between aggressive communication traits and tolerance for disagreement. Previous research suggests that argumentativeness is a positive predictor of tolerance for disagreement, while verbal aggressiveness is a negative predictor of tolerance for disagreement. Our findings indicate that need f...

Colleges and universities have increasingly looked toward social media as a means of engaging with stakeholders. Using the relationship marketing framework as a lens, this study explores how institutions are employing the social media platform Pinterest. Content analysis of the types of college and university pins being used and their relationship...

Courses: Communication Theory and Introduction to Graduate Studies Objectives: To help students understand theoretical assumptions and ways in which those assumptions overlap and interact.

Student interest and student engagement have been found to be important communication-related traits linked to student classroom outcomes, including student learning and student retention. Employing student identity development as well as personality constructs, this interdisciplinary study takes a student trait approach to better understand how be...

Research indicates that Americans believe instructor political bias to be a serious problem in the college classroom, as many professors are considered a liberal elite. In light of scholarship suggesting that characteristics students bring with them to the classroom may influence their perception of instructor communication behaviors, the present s...

This study explored how colleges and universities are employing Twitter, a popular micro-blogging tool. Using Kent and Taylor's principles of dialogic communication, a content analysis was performed on individual tweets (n = 1130) from 113 colleges and universities. Tweets were coded for whether or not they met each principle of dialogical communic...

The role ideology plays in the university classroom has been debated since the publication of Buckley's God and Man at Yale (1951). The Chronicle of Higher Education's Special Report (2004) found that more than half of United States citizens polled felt that U.S. colleges and universities improperly introduce a liberal political bias into the class...

This study explored the relationship between identity development, as gauged by Marcia's identity development construct, and student perception of instructor political bias. Regression analysis was employed to compare participant responses on the Ego Identity Process Questionnaire, a measure of Marcia's construct, with the Political Bias in the Cla...

Five U.S. newspapers were searched for stories regarding childhood obesity. Of the 201 stories appearing in 1996, 2001, or 2006, 97 incorporated a public health frame (i.e., connects problem to the larger social and environmental context; exposes risk factors; includes information regarding preventatives and correctives). Significant risk factors w...