Politics, Identities, and Communication Lab (PICL)
We study how people’s various intersecting social identities (including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, political ideology, religion, and national identity) influence how they communicate and how others communicate with them.
What We Do
Social identity is a core fact of life for everyone, yet the quantitative subdisciplines of communication research have rarely taken it seriously. Our mission is to help scholars and the general public alike understand the empirical realities of how who we are influences what we say, how we say it, who we talk to, and who talks to us. We are especially interested in social media and we make extensive use of computational methods, including AI, to collect and analyze data. However, we also use other methods when our projects call for them.
Areas of Focus
Social identity and communication
- How people’s social identities influence what, how, and with whom they communicate.
Social media and politics
- How politics manifests within and influences social media, and vice versa.
Computational social science
- The use of computer programming and AI to collect, analyze, and visualize large-scale digital data.
Political communication
- Communication about government, civic life, and politics
Recent Publications
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Freelon, D., Monzer, C., Jeon, G., Moy, C., & Williams, N. (2025). The Post-API Age of Social Media Data Access: Past, Present, and Future. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 715(1), 16-37. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162251372557
- van der Linden, S., Albarracín, D., Fazio, L., Freelon, D., Roozenbeek, J., Swire-Thompson, B., & Van Bavel, J. (2025). Using psychological science to understand and fight health misinformation: An APA consensus statement. American Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001598
- Freelon, D. (2024). The shared psychological roots of prejudice and conspiracy theory belief. Current Opinion in Psychology, 56, 101773. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101773
- Freelon, D., Pruden, M. L., Malmer, D., Wu, Q., Xia, Y., Johnson, D., ... & Crist, A. (2024). What's in your PIE? Understanding the contents of personalized information environments with PIEGraph. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 75(10), 1119-1133. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24869
- Ohme, J., Araujo, T., Boeschoten, L., Freelon, D., Ram, N., Reeves, B. B., & Robinson, T. N. (2024). Digital trace data collection for social media effects research: APIs, data donation, and (screen) tracking. Communication Methods and Measures, 18(2), 124-141. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2023.2181319
