About

Diana Zulli is an Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University, specializing in communication. Her primary research interests include political communication, communication theory, digital technology, and crisis communication. Her work focuses on the interaction between communication theory, political rhetoric, and digital technology, particularly examining how social media and digital technology influence social and political processes, how political elites communicate strategically online and offline to influence public opinion, and how news media portray political elites and events. Dr. Zulli's research has been published in numerous communication journals such as Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media and Society, Social Media + Society, Information, Communication, & Society, and the International Journal of Communication. Her scholarly work has earned several top paper awards at the NCA, WSCA, and CSCA annual conferences. Her teaching areas include American political communication, public relations, and crisis communication. Before completing her doctoral degree, she worked part-time as a public relations specialist for The Government Technology Research Alliance and served as an academic advisor for Texas Tech University. She typically works with graduate students interested in political communication, public relations, and social media, adopting a guided autonomy approach to advising, helping students navigate graduate school and cultivate their own research interests.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Public relations
• World Wide Web
• Media studies
• Law and economics
• Philosophy
• Cognitive science
• Geography
• Ecology
• Economics
• Management
• Biology
• Public administration

Selected publications

• Can emojis replace the embrace? Evidence from an experiment

  Communication Research Reports · 2025-08-08

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  PublisherDOI

• Political pets: The pawsitive effect of dogs in politicians’ social media posts

  Journal of Information Technology & Politics · 2025-03-02 · 1 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• Political humor on TikTok: trends, challenges, and opportunities

  Comedy Studies · 2025-08-21 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• A UNITING ISSUE?

  Purdue University Press eBooks · 2024-11-23

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Is it funny or a trend?: Examining US news humor on TikTok

  The Communication Review · 2024-06-03 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Humor is foundational to American politics and online culture. However, the content and effects of political humor vary greatly depending on the type of humor and context in which it is deployed. TikTok is particularly known for its humorous content, and US news organizations have capitalized on TikTok's popularity by creating accounts. Using digital affordances and relief theory as theoretical lenses, we qualitatively content analyze US news organizations' TikTok videos (WaPo, NYT, WSJ, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NPR), asking how US news humor manifests on TikTok and how TikTok affordances impact US news humor on the platform. We find that US news organizations' TikTok content ranges from no humor (ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN) to explicit humor (WaPo). News organizations also incorporated small attempts at lighthearted content using TikTok features and norms.

  PublisherDOI

• PATHWAYS TO RADICALISM: EXAMINING ONLINE COMMUNITY AND POLITICAL PATHWAYS TO MORE RADICAL BELIEFS ON REDDIT

  AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Social psychology

  Recent research shows that “algorithmic radicalization” and “echo chambers”—the idea that recommendation algorithms on social media have a strong independent effect on radicalization and silo people into ideologically homogeneous communities—are not as prevalent nor influential as once feared. Yet, online political discourse is as toxic as ever while political misinformation continues to plague social media platforms. This begs the question: If algorithms aren’t encouraging radicalization, then what is producing it? Drawing from church-sect theory, this study interviews politically active Reddit users to better understand _how_ they arrived at their current media use, online engagement, and political beliefs. Results show that participants have a deep mistrust of mainstream media, leading them to seek alternative sources of political content. Reddit participation is also driven by a desire for “earnest” political discussions with like-minded individuals and cross-partisans, in part to “reject” partisan polarization. Despite engaging on more extreme subreddits, participants said their beliefs were unchanged, but that other Redditors had moved to more extreme beliefs over time. And, participants perceived their Reddit participation as necessary to _prevent_ radicalization and partisan polarization. Collectively, these results provide preliminary insight into the media and social/psychological pathways that could lead to online radicalization, providing an alternative explanation to algorithmic radicalization. This study also underscores the importance of interrogating the ecological pathways to radicalization for researchers and policy-makers; future interventions should account for attribution bias and the individual-level factors related to radicalization.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Unsorted Significance: Examining Potential Pathways to Extreme Political Beliefs and Communities on Reddit

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2023 · 9 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Violent political extremists often point to online communities as motivating their behavior. However, researchers studying online exposure to extremism through structural mechanisms such as algorithms have not found strong evidence of their influence. At the same time, models of offline radicalization processes emphasize the importance of personal motivations, such as desire for significance and community, but do not fully account for online contexts. The authors integrate these approaches, which are both interested in worsening political extremism, asking, (1) What are the pathways to extreme content and communities online? and (2) What are the perceptions of extremism in online communities? Through interviews with politically active Redditors, the authors identify three motivations for initial engagement with fringe political communities: political unsorting of the self, political exceptionalism, and virtuous participation. The authors argue these motivations are potentially important seeds of political extremism and discuss the implications for supporting healthy political discourse online.

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• STITCHING POLITICS AND IDENTITY ON TIKTOK

  AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research · 2023-12-31 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Though a relative newcomer among social media platforms, social video-sharing platform TikTok is one of the largest social media platforms in the world, boasting over one billion monthly active users, which it garnered in just five years (Dellatto, 2021). While much of the early attention to the platform focused on more frivolous elements, such as its dances and challenges, the political weight of TikTok has become ever clearer. In the 2020 US election, Donald Trump’s plan to fill the 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa was stymied by young activists who reserved tickets with no intention of attending, organized largely on TikTok (Bandy & Diakopoulos, 2020). In the years since, political discourse on TikTok has continued to emerge from everyday users and political campaigns alike (see Newman, 2022), even as TikTok itself has become an object of political contention: calls for banning the app in the United States–citing security concerns influenced by xenophobia, given the app’s Chinese ownership–began in the Trump presidency (Allyn, 2020) and have recently culminated in state- and federal-level bans on the app for government-owned devices in the U.S. (Berman, 2023). While some studies have navigated limited data access and the platform’s relative infancy to offer an examination of political TikTok (see Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2019; Medina Serrano et al., 2020; Vijay & Gekker, 2021; Guinaudeau et al., 2022), there remains a significant need for more analysis and theorization of how TikTok can become both a site for political discourse and a feature caught up within political mobilization. This panel seeks to bring together emerging work that deals with political participation on TikTok, in order to share current wisdom and forge future research directions. The presented works specifically focus on the relationship between political participation on TikTok and political identity for three primary reasons. First, as a video-based and thus embodied platform (Raun, 2012), creator identity is more prominent and easily perceptible in the visual and auditory elements of TikTok videos than in the primarily text-based posts on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Second, TikTok relies more heavily on its recommendation algorithm for content distribution than its competitors traditionally have (Kaye et al., 2022; Cotter et al., 2022; Zeng & Kaye, 2022; Zhang & Liu, 2021), leading to the creation of “refracted publics” (Abidin, 2021) or Gemeinschaft-style communities (Kaye et al., 2022) around users’ common interests, which may include and/or be heavily informed by identity. Third, TikTok has long prioritized and found success with Generation Z and younger users more broadly (Zeng et al., 2021; Vogels et al., 2022; Stahl & Literat, 2022), which has made generational identity extremely salient on the app, while also implicating political identity, as young people tend to hold political beliefs more cognizant and accepting of diverse identities than older generations (Parker et al., 2019). The papers in this panel consider a wide range of identity characteristics of TikTok users and how these identities shape and are shaped by political discourse on TikTok. Paper 1 builds on TikTok’s targeting of Gen Z, considering the identities of age and generation through a content analysis of political remix on TikTok to uncover how younger users use TikTok for political activism as compared to their older counterparts, and finding evidence that TikTok is a powerful site of collective action. Also building from TikTok’s appeal to GenZ, Paper 2 presents a digital ethnographic analysis of the Trad-Wife phenomena on TikTok, offering that TikTok quietly (and thus insidiously) offers space for the cultivation of Christian Nationalist, ‘gentle fascisms’ within GenZ women, often without mention of ‘politics’ at all. Paper 3 offers a computational content analysis of political posts on TikTok with a focus on the interactions between identity and partisanship, and particularly the ways in which creators of marginalized identities on the right act as identity entrepreneurs, offering conservative critiques of their identity groups in ways which find popularity among conservative audiences of hegemonic identities. Finally, Paper 4 looks at differences in how TikTok users respond to male and female politicians’ TikTok videos using a combination of computational and qualitative methods, with exploratory analysis suggesting that male politicians receive more neutral and positive comments than female politicians. By focusing on identity and political discourse on TikTok, we recognize the wide range of political activity occurring on a platform often denigrated as frivolous, and foreground the importance of identity characteristics to the technological and social shaping of these dialogues.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The digital covenant: non-centralized platform governance on the mastodon social network

  Information Communication & Society · 2022 · 46 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  The majority of scholarship on platform governance focuses on for-profit, corporate social media with highly centralized network structures. Instead, we show how non-centralized platform governance functions in the Mastodon social network. Through an analysis of survey data, Github and Discourse developer discussions, Mastodon Codes of Conduct, and participant observations, we argue Mastodon’s platform governance is an exemplar of the covenant, a key concept from federalist political theory. We contrast Mastodon’s covenantal federalism platform governance with the contractual form used by corporate social media. We also use covenantal federalist theory to explain how Mastodon’s users, administrators, and developers justify revoking or denying membership in the federation. In doing so, this study sheds new light on the innovations in platform governance that go beyond the corporate/alt-right platform dichotomy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• News Framing in the Aftermath of the January 6 Attacks on the U.S. Capitol: An Analysis of Labels, Definitional Uncertainty, and Contextualization

  American Behavioral Scientist · 2022-05-11 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the aftermath of a violent attack, questions of definition arise. News framing research has shown that the words chosen to define a given event can affect attitudes and decision-making, even when only a single word is varied. This study analyzes public discourse in the aftermath of the January 6 U.S. Capitol attacks to better understand which labels predominated and how different labels were explained/justified. We pair computer-assisted content analysis with qualitative textual analysis to identify patterns in public commentary during the week following the attacks. Results indicate that initial news coverage favored “protest(s)” as a descriptor, but “riot,” “attack(s),” and “insurrection” gained traction as the week unfolded. Many labels were also definitively applied and deployed to contextualize the attacks, providing a degree of contrast to framing norms. The results are considered in relation to ongoing debates over definitions of domestic terrorism and related crises, as well as normative considerations central to the maintenance of U.S. democracy.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Meaghan McKasy

  Utah Valley University

  3 shared

• Robert W. Gehl

  3 shared

• Diana Deyoe

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  3 shared

• Zachary Isaacs

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  2 shared

• Kevin Coe

  2 shared

• Emily Ku

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  2 shared

• Christina Walker

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  2 shared

• Marcus Mann

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• top paper awards at the NCA, WSCA, and CSCA annual conferenc…