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:

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

Previously, I was a senior researcher at the Information Futures Lab at Brown University. I investigated how often, and from what angles, the impacts of climate change on health were being communicated online. We trained a machine-learning classifier to efficiently contextualize millions of social media posts and news headlines over a span of 18 months,and found only 3.1 percent of English-language content about climate change did so:

The Untapped Potential of Climate Communication: Harnessing Health to Drive Action

Because many social listening tools were no longer accessible to journalists and researchers, I built this live dashboard before the election last year 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 research-reporter at First Draft, a leading nonprofit focuses on tracking and researching online misinformation globally. I wrote a daily newsletter alerting journalists 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: