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News on Consequences of Exposure
After three successful editions, the Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM) returns for a 4th edition, this time hosted as a fully virtual conference by Boise State University on October 11-12, 2022. The symposium brings together researchers from multiple disciplines, including communication science, computer science, computational social science, political science, psychology, journalism, and media studies, […]
Pre-pandemic, Canadians’ love affair with social media shows no signs of slowing. But after living through two years of COVID-19 restrictions, more Canadians are reevaluating the role of social media in their lives. According to a new report, ‘The State of Social Media in Canada 2022’, released today by the Social Media Lab at Toronto […]
By Philip Mai and Anatoliy GruzdThis study examines the impact of fake news discourse on perceptions of news media credibility. If participants are told they have been exposed to fake news, does this lead them to trust information institutions less, including the news media? Study 1 (n = 188) found that news media credibility decreased when participants were told they […]
Threats of disinformation feature strongly in public discourse. Digital communication environments are characterized as being especially vulnerable to intentional disinformation or accidental misinformation. Although selected scientific findings feature strongly in this discourse, the overall tenor between public and scientific discourse differs. While public discourse is generally alarmist about the perceived dangers of disinformation in digital […]
My research studies how racial demographic changes alter political perceptions and democratic commitments, how elites use racial messages to garner support from their constituents, and how the American public considers representation. Within my projects, I use experiments, text-as-data, and surveys, among other methods to test these questions. Prior to GWU, I was a postdoctoral fellow […]
It had been a long pandemic for Twitter’s research team. Tasked with solving some of the platform’s toughest problems around harassment, extremism, and disinformation, staffers absconded to Napa Valley in November 2021 for a company retreat. Despite a tumultuous change in leadership — Jack Dorsey had recently stepped down, appointing former chief technology officer Parag […]
By Zoe Schiffer and Casey NewtonOver the last several years, there’s been a considerable increase in media coverage about misinformation and conspiracy theories in politics. The media has routinely reported on these falsehoods, making it seem like misinformation is rampant in politics. But are candidates for Congress actually sharing more misinformation in 2022 than 2020? […] Source: Republican candidates are […]
By Maggie Macdonald and Megan A. Brown The Polarization Lab at Duke University is inviting applications for a Postdoctoral Associate to begin immediately. We seek a recent PhD in political science, sociology, social psychology, statistics, computer or information science with an interest in computational social science or data science (broadly defined). This individual will help design, execute, and analyze a series of […]
By Duke UniversityLauren Feldman is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. Her current research emphasizes three primary areas of interest: climate change communication, partisan media and misinformation, and comedy and social change. Feldman’s research has been published in more than thirty peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as in several edited […]
In Germany, TikTok accounts impersonated prominent political figures during the country’s last national election. In Colombia, misleading TikTok posts falsely attributed a quotation from one candidate to a cartoon villain and allowed a woman to masquerade as another candidate’s daughter. In the Philippines, TikTok videos amplified sugarcoated myths about the country’s former dictator and helped […]
By Tiffany HsuThe Polarization Research Lab is very happy to announce that we have opened our first RFP for survey time. Similar in spirit to TESS, we are looking for innovative work on polarization, democratic/social norms, and political violence (all broadly defined). Proposals will be evaluated solely on scientific merit and will be awarded based on available […]
By Polarization Research Lab