Umass Amherst’s Jonathan Corpus Ong Featured as Spotlight Scholar

Jonathan Corpus Ong, associate professor of global digital media in the UMass Amherst Department of Communication, has been honored as a Spotlight Scholar for September 2023.

Ong is one of the country’s leading scholars on issues of online disinformation, global media ethics, digital politics and the anthropology of humanitarianism. He brings a global perspective and a unique field-based ethnographic approach to his work, which seeks to understand the different personal, political, and entrepreneurial motivations of paid trolls and disinformers. An engaged researcher, Ong’s research has informed the work of human rights organizations, national governments and social media platforms like Meta. Ong co-hosts a popular podcast, “Catch Me If You Can,” which shares the voices of paid trolls while exposing the corrupt systems that enable their work, and his scholarship is frequently cited by major media outlets, including The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Reuters, and the Los Angeles Times.

Ong is the author of three books, including “Trolls for Sale” (2022), and more than 25 journal articles based on his research. His scholarship has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Luminate Group and the Gates Foundation, and in 2022 he was awarded a prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, among other honors. In a survey of fact-checkers conducted by Poynter in spring 2023, Ong was named among the top 15 most noted researchers in the disinformation field, while his study was cited as one of the top five most useful.