Dr. Martin Johannes Riedl is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His work investigates platform governance and content moderation, digital journalism, as well as the spread of false and misleading information on social media. Riedl’s recent work has focused on platform governance and violence, the politics of trust and safety, encrypted messaging and chat applications, and political influencers on social media.

He is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an affiliate fellow at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as an affiliate researcher at the Technology & Information Policy Institute (also at UT Austin), and has previously been affiliated with the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin, Germany. At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s College of Communication & Information, he is a CCI Founding Fellow at the Information Integrity Institute. In the winter of 2024/2025, he will be a visiting fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich’s Center for Advanced Studies.

Riedl’s work has been published in leading academic outlets such as New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Digital Journalism, and the Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. He also is the co-editor of a special issue on political influencers in Social Media + Society. His academic work has received numerous awards, including a research prize for professional relevance from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), as well as top paper awards from AEJMC’s Newspaper and Online News Division, and the International Communication Association’s (ICA) Journalism Studies and Communication Law and Policy Divisions.

Riedl’s writing has appeared through Teen Vogue, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Brookings Institution’s TechStream. His research has been covered by industry outlets such as Harvard’s Nieman Lab, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Poynter Institute, and news outlets like The New York Times, NPR, CBS News, Agence France Presse (AFP), Le Figaro, Hankook Ilbo, tagesschau.de, and NBC. He has been invited to present his work before the Congressional Hispanic Caucus of the 117th U.S. Congress, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Science and Technology study group, as well as think tanks and academic centers such as the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin, Germany, and the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C.

At the University of Tennessee, Riedl teaches courses on platform governance, communication law, and media entrepreneurship.

Riedl received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin where he also completed a postdoc at the Center for Media Engagement. He holds M.A.’s from Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media in Hanover, Germany, and from Humboldt University of Berlin, as well as a B.A. from FHWien der WKW in Vienna, Austria.

Name pronounciation: [ˈmaʁtiːn] [joˈhanəs] [ˈʁiːdl]

Pronouns: he/him/his