Gabrielle D. Beacken’s research focuses on political propaganda, identity-based political communication, and the role of political influencers and emerging technologies in shaping democratic discourse online, with particular attention to conspiracy, antisemitism, and democratic backsliding.

Gabrielle is a PhD candidate in Journalism and Media at the Moody College of Communication, University of Texas at Austin, where she is writing her dissertation, “Political Influencers and Identity Propaganda: Jewish Identity and Political Communication in the Post–October 7 U.S. Social Media Landscape.” She holds an MSc in Strategic Communications from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where her thesis examined automated Twitter accounts surrounding the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, and a BA in Journalism from The College of New Jersey. Before her doctoral studies, she worked as a trading analyst in advertising technology in New York. During her doctoral studies she has held research fellowships with Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict program and the University of Texas at Austin’s Technology and Information Policy Institute.

Gabrielle is a Research Fellow at Decoding Hate, where her contribution centers on platform-specific discourse studies, examining how antisemitic and identity-based propaganda and narratives circulate differently across social media platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

She is also a Graduate Research Affiliate at the University of Texas at Austin’s Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), and belongs to the Association of Internet Researchers, the International Communication Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Association for Jewish Studies. Across these projects, her work connects platform-specific studies of antisemitism to broader questions of influencer politics, propaganda, and democratic backsliding in international contexts.