Keenan Chen

As a data journalist, I love uncovering hidden patterns and diving deep into complex stories. Some of my most recent freelance articles include:

Rage-baiting YouTube videos falsely claim to expose police for arresting FBI agents

Merch sellers cash in on Kirk’s killing with flood of social media ads

New York City's broker fee ban, explained in three charts

City Council’s 'Crackdown' on Bogus Parking Placards Is Itself Bogus, Data Reveals

He Used to Make Videos About NYC Real Estate. Then He Became Radicalized by the Right (And for a more interactive experience, visit this page)

Previously, I was a senior researcher at the Information Futures Lab at Brown University. I helped train a machine learning classifier to analyze millions of social media posts and investigate how often the health impacts of climate change were being communicated online. Our research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Health Communication.

The Climate-Health Communication Gap: Connecting the Dots to Drive Climate Health Action

Because many social listening tools were no longer accessible to journalists and researchers, I built this live dashboard before the 2024 election to flag claims of election fraud and other potentially misleading narratives shared on The Donald, a popular far-right messaging board:

What's up with The Donald? An analytic tool capturing the latest misinformation trend

From 2020 through 2022, I was an senior research-reporter at First Draft, a leading research group in online misinformation globally. I wrote a daily newsletter alerting journalists to the latest misinformation narratives and online trends throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election. I also led an exclusive investigation into how Radio Free Asia, a US government-funded news outlet, repeatedly promoted anti-vaccine narratives abroad during the early rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines:

Chinese-made vaccines are being subject to misleading narratives

My other articles and research on online misinformation trends and disinformation tactics have been cited in various publications. Here are a few examples: