About

Christopher Wells is a Professor in Emerging Media Studies at Boston University College of Communication. He worked in environmental politics before attending graduate school at the University of Washington, where he earned a PhD in Communication with a Certificate in Political Communication, as well as an MA in Communication. His undergraduate degree is a BA in Linguistics from Cornell University. His research focuses on political communication and early social media, utilizing both conventional and computational methods to study how news media coverage takes shape, how citizens learn about politics, and how they choose to participate. His recent work explores how people can understand the many different media around us as making up an interactive media system.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Media studies
• Computer Science
• Public relations
• Business
• Internet privacy
• Advertising

Selected publications

• Black Trolls Matter: Racial and Ideological Asymmetries in Social Media Disinformation

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption of disinformation content. Such racial asymmetries may exist alongside, or even instead of, ideological ones. Our computational analysis of 5.2 million tweets by the Russian government-funded “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency sheds light on these possibilities. We find stark differences in the numbers of unique accounts and tweets originating from ostensibly liberal, conservative, and Black left-leaning individuals. But diverging from prior empirical accounts, we find racial presentation—specifically, presenting as a Black activist—to be the most effective predictor of disinformation engagement by far. Importantly, these results could only be detected once we disaggregated Black-presenting accounts from non-Black liberal accounts. In addition to its contributions to the study of ideological asymmetry in disinformation content and reception, this study also underscores the general relevance of race to disinformation studies.

  PublisherDOI

• The “Future of Energy”? Building resilience to ExxonMobil’s disinformation through disclosures and inoculation

  npj Climate Action · 2025-03-04 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Disinformation campaigns can significantly impact beliefs about climate change. This study involved an online experiment with 1045 U.S. participants, exposing them to a misleading ExxonMobil advertisement, some with disclosures and others preceded by inoculation messages. Participants were divided into five conditions: a control group, a group exposed to pre-bunking messages from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and groups shown social media posts featuring the ad—with or without disclosures—claiming ExxonMobil’s commitment to renewable energy. Results showed the ad effectively influenced beliefs, but disclosures helped participants recognize the content as advertising, and inoculation messages reduced susceptibility, though not entirely. These findings highlight the value of using disclosures and inoculation to counter climate disinformation, providing a foundation for communication strategies that support climate action.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Climate Action and Native Advertising: How Fossil Fuel Companies Present Environmental Commitment in American and British News Media

  The International Journal of Press/Politics · 2025-11-14

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Confronting severe economic challenges in the twenty-first century, many news media are forging new relationships with advertisers, including the focus of this study: native advertising. At the same time, as the climate crisis worsens, and political pressures and news coverage increase, we are seeing the fossil fuel industry expand and shift its communication about the topic. This study sits at the intersection of these trends: we ask to what extent, and how, native advertisements are being employed in fossil fuel communication campaigns. We analyze 252 native ads sponsored by fossil fuel companies between 2014 and 2022 in leading English-language news outlets. Led by human quantitative content analysis, with supplementary automated text analysis, we show that the style of climate science denial documented by, for example, Oreskes and Conway, is absent from native ad communications; in its place are frequent mentions of the environment, the reality of climate change, and the need to decarbonize. In fact, the primary position of fossil fuel companies in our data is the assertion that they are leading the decarbonization of energy systems. To do so, they strongly emphasize the relative virtues of natural gas and promote investments in unproven new technologies. A secondary tactic emphasizes the importance of energy to development and quality of life. Our discussion explores the challenges of analyzing claims that are often superficially true but misleading in context and the questions misleading native advertising raises for news media in a challenging digital media landscape.

  PublisherDOI

• Enabling Contextual Soft Moderation on Social Media through Contrastive Textual Deviation

  OpenBU (Boston University) · 2024-07-30

  preprintOpen access

  Automated soft moderation systems are unable to ascertain if a post supports or refutes a false claim, resulting in a large number of contextual false positives. This limits their effectiveness, for example undermining trust in health experts by adding warnings to their posts or resorting to vague warnings instead of granular fact-checks, which result in desensitizing users. In this paper, we propose to incorporate stance detection into existing automated soft-moderation pipelines, with the goal of ruling out contextual false positives and providing more precise recommendations for social media content that should receive warnings. We develop a textual deviation task called Contrastive Textual Deviation (CTD) and show that it outperforms existing stance detection approaches when applied to soft moderation.We then integrate CTD into the stateof-the-art system for automated soft moderation Lambretta, showing that our approach can reduce contextual false positives from 20% to 2.1%, providing another important building block towards deploying reliable automated soft moderation tools on social media.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gen Z's civic engagement: civic skills, political expression, and identity

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-11-21 · 4 citations

  book-chapter

  Gen Zers around the world have grown up and come of age in a period rife with the implications of climate change, heightened right-wing extremism, threats to democracy, and rising inflation. Gen Z has also been characterized by an enhanced awareness of mental health care and body positivity, LGBTQIA+ and the spectrum of gender identity, as well as racial justice, diversity, equity and inclusion. Our previous chapter (Chapter 11) on youth political engagement focused on digital media’s role in shaping engagement modes. In this chapter, we first explore shifts in the basis for civic identity for many young people beginning with the role of socio-economic status and affinity groups. Then we draw attention to skills, online practices, and the definition of political engagement. Lastly, we discuss what these changes imply for the study of political socialization and the practice of civic education.

  PublisherDOI

• Gen Z's civic engagement: news use, politics, and cultural engagement

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-11-21 · 5 citations

  book-chapter

  In the US and much of the developed world, Gen Z faces significant challenges such as climate change, racial inequality, and economic precarity. Though this emerging generation faces significant challenges, digital media is invaluable for engaging with public life. In this chapter, we will focus on changing civic identities of citizens in industrialized democracies and digital media’s role in shaping engagement modes. First, we touch on news consumption, followed by the practices and patterns emerging as formal political campaigns attempt to reach young people through digital media. Second, we will highlight how content creation and interaction in digital media enables, for some young citizens, a form of cultural engagement that pushes the boundaries of the political. This chapter provides a base for additional discussion on Gen Z and civic engagement, the role of socio-economic status and social identity, online practices, socialization, and civic education in Chapter 12.

  PublisherDOI

• Recognition Crisis: Coming to Terms with Identity, Attention and Political Communication in the Twenty-First Century

  Political Communication · 2023-06-08 · 25 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The theory of recognition has much to offer the field of political communication as it struggles to comprehend communicative dysfunctions, political polarization and governing crises across the industrialized democracies. Drawing on the work of Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser and Michele Lamont, as well as more recent contributions, we put recognition theory into conversation with some of our field’s contemporary concerns. In particular, we show how the theory offers depth, nuance and synthesis to progress communication scholars are making in the study of how attention economics and social identity shape perceptions and communications in a hybrid political media system. In the process, we argue that we are experiencing a historically novel phase of recognition, in which the granting and denial of recognition are transformed at the individual level by the affordances of many-to-many social networking platforms, and at the group level by the use of recognition for attracting attention to commodified media properties. At the intersection of the modern attention economy, heightened articulation of identity-based messaging, and recognition processes is what we term a recognition crisis, in which claims of misrecognition by multiple, conflictual groups are unresolvable and undermine the solidarity that grounds social and political life. We conclude with a roadmap of new opportunities to understand existing research findings and pose new research questions. Moreover, we show that the field of political communication has a great deal to offer discussions of recognition occurring in related fields of the social sciences.

  PublisherDOI

• Outside the bubble: Social media and political participation in Western democracies

  Communication Theory · 2022-04-28 · 24 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Outside the bubble: Social media and political participation in Western democracies. Vaccari, C. & Valeriani, A. (2021). New York: Oxford University Press, $27.95 paperback, 287 pages. Social media as moderating forces in political communication? You may be forgiven for finding the idea outlandish, following years of hate speech and harassment, the polarizing effects of engagement-seeking algorithms, and mis- and disinformation circulating on social media platforms. Yet in Outside the Bubble, Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani offer a powerful case—and present compelling multinational evidence—that when it comes to political participation, social media may do more to mitigate differences than reinforce them. The book’s motivating observation is that for most citizens, most of the time, social media are not media of political communication. Moreover, for the preponderance of citizens, it is the lifeworld-rooted Facebook, and not the more explicitly political Twitter, that forms the core of social media experience. This...

  PublisherDOI

• The Disinfectant Diversion: The Use of Narratives in Partisan News Media

  Mass Communication & Society · 2022-09-01 · 5 citations

  article

  The dysfunctions of American political media and their contributions to the erosion of modern democracy are actively being debated. In this light, there has been considerable empirical inquiry dedicated to understanding the role of narratives, storytelling, and the mythical “deep story” in the mobilization of the electorate. Here we seek to understand how narratives are employed by news outlets to make sense of media spectacles. We focus on coverage of the April 23, 2020 White House COVID-19 Task Force press briefing, during which President Donald Trump debated the effectiveness of sunlight and disinfectant injections in combating the virus. We conducted a qualitative analysis of all relevant articles, cable news coverage on this topic by CNN and Fox News, and Facebook posts on this topic issued by six media outlets from April 23, 2020, to April 26, 2020–a total of 115 articles, 87 television segments, and 41 Facebook posts. Our results reveal a reliance on several narratives in both the left- and right-wing media systems. These narratives all contribute to the overarching frames that are spun in ways that sow distrust and resentment throughout audiences across the partisan spectrum.

  PublisherDOI

• Political Events in a Partisan Media Ecology: Asymmetric Influence on Candidate Appraisals

  Mass Communication & Society · 2022-02-01 · 2 citations

  article

  Political campaigns often feature jarring revelations against candidates. This study examines how audiences come to understand major campaign events, the extent to which they shape evaluations of candidates, and how their impact is filtered through an increasingly partisan news media environment. Using national rolling cross-sectional survey data collected over the 2016 U.S. presidential election period, we show partisan asymmetries in the way major campaign events influenced candidate appraisals. Event effects during the 2016 campaign were dependent on various media use patterns and concentrated among Independents. In particular, the reopening of the investigation into Clinton’s email server by James Comey reduced her favorability, especially when paired with liberal and conservative partisan media use. By providing a nuanced picture of partisan selective exposure and campaign effects, our findings reinforce that the role of campaigns in candidate appraisals should be understood at the intersection of media use, partisanship, and specific events during a contentious race.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dhavan V. Shah

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  19 shared

• Kjerstin Thorson

  Michigan State University

  15 shared

• Stephanie Edgerly

  Northwestern University

  12 shared

• Leticia Bode

  12 shared

• Emily K. Vraga

  11 shared

• Lewis A. Friedland

  8 shared

• Josephine Lukito

  8 shared

• Justin Reedy

  University of Oklahoma

  7 shared

Education

• M.S., Political Science

  University of Washington

• B.A., Environmental Science

  University of California, Berkeley