Recent Work
- Read Kim’s full research, “The Stealth Media? Groups and Targets Behind Divisive Issue Campaigns on Facebook,” click here.
- Read a media brief about Kim’s recent research, “The Stealth Media? Groups and Targets Behind Divisive Issue Campaigns on Facebook.”
- Read a memo on Russian voter suppression ads on Facebook.
- Read original research articles in Science (Meta-Academics Collaboration on the 2020 U.S. Elections)
- Read original research article in Nature (Meta-Academics Collaboration on the 2020 U.S. Elections)
Faculty Affiliate
- Department of Political Science
- Science and Technology Studies
- Elections Research Center, Department of Political Science
- Center for Community and Nonprofits, School of Human Ecology
Young Mie Kim is a Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a Faculty Affiliate of the Department of Political Science. Kim is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.
Kim’s research concerns media and politics in the age of data-driven digital media, specifically the role digital media play in political communication among political leaders, non-party groups (issue advocacy groups), and citizens.
Kim’s recent research project, Project DATA (Digital Ad Tracking & Analysis), empirically investigates the sponsors/sources, content, and targets of digital political campaigns across multiple platforms with a user-based, real-time, ad tracking tool that reverse engineers the algorithms of political campaigns. The project uncovers the “behind-the-scenes” operations of digital political campaigns, i.e., microtargeting practices (individual-level voter identification, targeting, and message placement and customization strategies).
Kim’s research, “The Stealth Media? Groups and Targets behind Divisive Issue Campaigns on Facebook,” identified “suspicious groups,” including Russian groups on Facebook ahead of the 2016 elections. It received the Kaid-Sanders Award for the Best Political Communication Article of the Year by the International Communication Association. Her work appeared on more than 400 national and international media (The New York Times;WIRED; BBC) outlets. Kim also actively engages in public scholarship to work toward policy solutions for malicious actors’ disinformation campaigns and microtargeting on digital platforms. Kim testified at the Federal Election Commission‘s hearings on the rulemaking of internet communication disclaimers. She presented her research and provided expert opinions at the Congressional briefings on foreign interference in elections, the Honest Ads Act, and other technology policy matters. Kim was also invited by the European Data Protection Supervisor, the European Union’s data protection authority, to speak at the European Parliament on her research on data-driven political advertising and inequality in political involvement.
During her faculty career, Kim’s research has developed a program of research on how the digital media environment contributes to the changing foundation of political communication. Her research theoretically explains and empirically demonstrates that the digital media environment has set a condition to facilitate the development of passionate publics who care about a particular issue almost exclusively based on their values, identities, and self-interests. Kim’s research also demonstrates that in the data-driven digital age, political actors—including malicious foreign groups—identify, target, and mobilize passionate publics. Kim’s research illuminates the contemporary outlook of passionate issue publics, issue advocacy groups, and political leaders in the age of data-driven digital media.
Kim’s research has appeared in the flagship journals in the fields of Communication and Political Science including Communication Research, the Journal of Communication, and the Journal of Politics, among others. Her work has also received prestigious awards and research grants in social science, including the Best Article of the Year Award (awarded for the best published article on political communication across the fields of Communication, Political Science, and Sociology) and the Nafzinger-White Dissertation Award (awarded for the best dissertation in Mass Communication).
Kim has been teaching 15 different courses on a wide range of subjects including digital media, political communication, mass communication, and strategic communication. Integrating her research expertise and her passion for public service, Kim has developed a service learning course, Communication and Community Service: Technology for Social Change, where her students partner with a community organization and experiment with the democratic potential of digital communication technologies. The class project, Savor South Madison, garnered a number of accolades including the Best Service Learning Practice and the Innovator in Community-Campus Partnership.
Kim received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a Visiting Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. As the Microsoft Visiting Professor of the Center for Information Technology Policy, Kim also taught a course, Politics in the Age of Digital Media, in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.