Jose Marichal is a professor of political science at California Lutheran University. He specializes in studying the role that social media plays in restructuring political behavior and institutions.
In 2012, he published "Facebook Democracy" (Routledge Press), which looks at the role that the popular social network played on the formation of political identity across different countries. His most recent work (with Richard Neve and Brian Collins) looks at they ways in which social media platforms encourage antagonistic political discourse and how they could be regulated.
In addition, Marichal (with collaborators) is using computational social science methods on a number of projects including an examination of fracking debates on Twitter, a study of candidate branding in 2016, and a study on political talk on Facebook. In 2018, Dr. Marichal organized a mini-conference on Algorithmic Politics for the Western Political Science Association. Currently, he is working on a book that looks at the damaging effects of algorithms on democracy by creating an "algorithmic mentality" among citizens.
