I’m proud of the research I’ve done on online communities taking cues from dark corners of the internet, and I’m glad that some reporters find it interesting. It’s still uncomfortable to read certain excerpts from my data out loud to people over the phone.

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed by Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Tamarra Kemsley about work that Amy Chapman and I have been doing on the reactionary DezNat movement within Mormon Twitter. Our conversation largely focused on the article that Amy and I published last year on far-right and anti-feminist influences within DezNat, but I got to pull in some observations from an article on DezNat perceptions of religious authority that is currently under review and some work on broad patterns in DezNat activity between early 2019 and late 2022 that we’ll be presenting at October’s meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (more specifically, within a session organized by the Mormon Social Science Association).

I enjoy reading Natalie Brown’s columns for the Salt Lake Tribune, so it was a real honor that she referenced research that Amy Chapman and I did on the “DezNat” Twitter movement in last Saturday’s installment. In particular, Brown referenced a comment I made to the Tribune last summer that our findings highlighted anti-feminist influences on the DezNat movement (which has typically been criticized for its far right influences) and that while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

I love hearing from former students about the great and interesting things that they’re up to—and especially when something they learned in one of my classes helped them along the way. In my experience, former students who are up to great and interesting things would often be doing those things whether or not they had taken one of my classes, but I still appreciate feeling like my teaching contributed in some small way.

This past weekend, Peggy Fletcher Stack at the Salt Lake Tribune published an article about the #DezNat movement on Mormon Twitter, which takes cues from far-right and anti-feminist online communities. In her article, Peggy was kind enough to reference (and quote from) my new publication with Amy Chapman in the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association, which presents the (partial) results of a qualitative analysis of over 1,400 DezNat tweets from 2019.

One of my most recent articles—a piece on technology, naming, and legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint tradition—was published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Publishing in Dialogue has been a wonderful opportunity. It’s a niche journal, so it may never reach the breadth of audience that I usually aim for in publishing. However, that niche focus has also come with a number of benefits. I want to write more about this soon, but the purpose of this post is just to draw attention to one of these benefits: the in-house podcast(s) produced by the Dialogue team.

As I wrote earlier, I recently appeared on the Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Land podcast to discuss a recent publication in which I discuss the history of official Latter-day Saint domain names. Near the end of the interview, David Noyce (managing editor of the Tribune and one of the podcast hosts) asked me the “so what” question—sure, this history is interesting, but what’s the takeaway? Here’s (part of) how I answered:

I recently wrote about a new article of mine in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought where I trace the history of the official domain names of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This past week, I was lucky enough for the fine folks at the Salt Lake Tribune to take interest in the article. Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote a summary of my findings in this (unfortunately paywalled) article, which appeared on Sunday. Later in the week, I got to sit down with Peggy and Dave Noyce for their excellent Mormon Land podcast. That episode is freely available (i.e., no paywall), and can be listened to here.

This week, Discord announced that it has acquired the Gas social media app popular among secondary students. Presumably in response, Alyson Klein ran an explainer today at EducationWeek on the subject of the app. In doing this, she re-ran a quote that I provided to her for a December article that she also wrote:

“It feels a little exploitative to me,” said Spencer Greenhalgh, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky’s school of information sciences. “They know teenagers are insecure and they want to know what their friends think about them.”

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of talking with Arianna Prothero at EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools’ suing Snap, Alphabet, Meta, and ByteDance, and she ended up quoting me—and colleagues like Jeff Carpenter and Josh Rosenberg—in her article.

I appreciate that all three of us were quoted in the article, because Jeff and Josh both made points that I didn’t articulate as well in my conversation with Arianna. For example, Jeff’s comments summed up a lot of the complexities that have gone through my head:

A few weeks ago, thanks to a recommendation from my colleague and friend Josh Rosenberg, I was contacted by Alyson Klein at EducationWeek to talk about the “Gas” social media app that’s become popular among high schoolers lately. Klein’s article was published last night, and I was happy to see that I’d been quoted in the article.

To be honest, I wasn’t familiar with the app before Klein reached out, but it only took a few minutes of research for me to figure out that I didn’t like it very much. According to the website, Gas is:

Last week, I was interviewed by a reporter at WEKU about social media and content moderation in the context of the horrific recent shooting in Buffalo, and I was pleased to see the interview appear on the WEKU website this morning.

I wish that the headline didn’t frame this as a question of “free speech”—and that I’d perhaps been more forceful in emphasizing that these really aren’t questions of free speech so much as content moderation. I’m also a bit disappointed that our conversation about 4chan in the early part of the interview got cut; I get why (probably not as interesting to the average viewer than some of my more generally-reaching comments), but I also think it’s important to understand that there are these dark places out there on the internet and that they are leading to tragedies like Buffalo.

Last week, I got the chance to chat with Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack about Latter-day Saint missionaries use of social media videos, and I was pleased to see the article published on Sunday. I hadn’t been paying attention to online missionary videos, but the subject fit nicely with the reading I’ve been doing on platform and platform values recently:

Both kinds of accounts “are drawing from the internet/influencer cultures of these platforms,” [Greenhalgh] says. “On one hand, that’s a smart move, and it makes a lot of sense, but online platforms have their own embedded values, and they may not always be compatible. The church has long been nervous about assimilating too much into the cultures it goes into, and I wonder how much concern there is here.”