Brendan Mahoney Wants To Know How the Internet Affects Us

Brendan Mahoney (Ph.D. '24) grew up online.

On his family computer in a small New England town, he explored the still-new internet, fascinated by the way people communicated online.

By the time Mahoney left New England to study economics and English at the State University of New York (SUNY) Geneseo, the internet was more accessible than ever.

He found himself captivated by research on the way people use social media to communicate and realized that he could be doing this research too.

He was inspired to apply to Annenberg by fellow Geneseo alum Sean Fischer (Ph.D. '23), who was already enrolled at the school. “He was doing work and asking questions that I found so fascinating — about the intersection of culture and technology,” Mahoney said.

At Annenberg, Mahoney came to study the digital spaces where people organize activist movements and the corporations that keep those spaces online (or take them down).

In writing his dissertation, “The platformization of ideology: How left- and right-wing social movements perform intellectual work on Reddit,” Mahoney focused on around 60 different subreddits, forums devoted to discussing specific topics on the website Reddit, dedicated to left- and right-wing political and social causes in the U.S.

He used quantitative methods to analyze posts in subreddits that were activated after the 2020 murder of George Floyd — and the protests that followed — and coded them for different ideologies.

“My research is broadly trying to get at the question, ‘What kind of political and social movement actors does social media work for?'” he said. “And specifically, what kinds of social movement actors are better able to produce and reproduce their ideologies online?”

This fall, Mahoney joined the faculty of the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information as an assistant teaching professor of library and information science.