About
Me

Danielle Lee Tomson, PhD is a writer, scholar, and strategist. She thinks about political, cultural, and social representation in the digital age. Areas of expertise include social media influencers, populism, performative politics, nationalism, online speech, political polarization, social media platform policy, "misinformation," propaganda, narrative change, and civic tech.

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She recently defended a doctoral dissertation on conservative social media influencers at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, which she is working on publishing. She is a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and a graduate fellow at the Mellon Sawyer Seminar for Trust and Mistrust of Science and Experts.  She also consults for a variety of non-profit and corporate clients. 

 

Recently, she was the Director of Forums @ Civic Hall, a community center for civic tech, where she curated events, knowledge, and people solving problems at the intersection of technology and civil society. She was also the Director of Personal Democracy Forum, a 15+ year running summit focused on tech, politics, and media that was started by the co-founders of Civic Hall.

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Danielle or her writing have appeared in The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO, The Washington Post, CNBC, Civicist, Fox News, Brookings, Mother Jones, Coda, and Medium, in addition to a plethora of academic publications.

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In another life, Danielle was an innovation consultant, technical product prototyper, and product manager for clients including Fortune 500 companies, multinational organizations, and nonprofits.

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In her creative work, Danielle thinks about epistemology, American aesthetics, and "propaganda you can believe in" through the investment and production studio, IWR, which she co-founded.

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Danielle graduated from Yale University. She was raised on a horse farm in a family of scrap metal dealers in Western Pennsylvania. 

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C.V. available upon request.