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Democratic faith turns out to be as fragile as it is necessary, and Trump specializes in undermining it. When he repeatedly asserts massive fraud months before Election Day, announces that he won’t respect results that go against him, and refuses to promise a peaceful transfer of power—the litmus test of democracy—he is forcing Americans into […]
By George PackerMidway through a year rocked by a pandemic, protests and politics, we asked leading researchers and policy thinkers: What new questions relating to technology’s impact on democracy have emerged or are emerging during this period? In light of these new questions, what are your predictions for the rest of 2020? The responses we received over […]
By Knight FoundationFrom August 7 to 26 a group of researchers from Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University conducted their ninth wave of a large, 50-state survey. They surveyed 21,196 individuals across all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. This was the ninth in a series of surveys we have been conducting since […]
By Matthew A. Baum, Hanyu Chwe, Roy H. Perlis, James Druckman, Jennifer Lin & Matthew SimonsonThere’s been a raft of reporting this week on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s possible problem with Hispanic voters. “Trump is doing better with Hispanics than he did four years ago,” CNN’s Harry Enten reported. There are a number of reasons for this — as Derek Thompson noted in The Atlantic, those reasons include Florida’s […]
By Laura Hazard OwenA conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against an elite who engage in ritual child abuse is growing across UK social media, Guardian analysis has found. The QAnon conspiracy theory is propelled by an unlikely coalition of spirituality and wellness groups, vigilante “paedophile hunter” networks, pre-existing conspiracy forums, local news pages, […]
By Niamh McIntyreFor years, Myanmar’s military used Facebook to incite hatred and genocidal violence against the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority group, leading to mass death and displacement. It took until 2018 for Facebook to admit to and apologize for its failure to act. Two years later, the platform is, yet again, sowing the seeds for genocidal […]
By Jamelle BouieLast month, Seth Brown, the executive editor of the Biblical Recorder, a Southern Baptist newspaper in Cary, N.C., delivered a stark warning to Christians. He had become increasingly concerned about the posts some of his fellow Southern Baptists were sharing on Facebook. “If you start clicking through, it doesn’t take long to find out some […]
By Sarah PosnerAll elections feature claims and counterclaims by contending parties. The 2020 election seems to be an especially salient example, as conspiracy theories and a variety of misleading narratives, many of which can be debunked with professional fact-checking, are rampant. At Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe), our team is tracking widely circulated narratives throughout […]
By Observatory on Social Media: Indiana University-Bloomington Photojournalist Nathan Howard was on assignment for a picture agency south-east of the fire-menaced foothill town of Estacada, Oregon, on Thursday afternoon when a man angrily approached him on a rural roadside. The man insisted the photographer was a looter, Howard said, and despite his repeated attempts to identify himself as a journalist, the man […]
By Jason WilsonExtremists use opaque memes and coded language at a massive scale. They often communicate simultaneously across several web platforms as well as in the offline world. Our previous, big data approach in unveiling online emerging threats was rapid and proved effective. It helped to overcome the shortcomings of manual investigation1 and qualitative characterization which, by […]
By Joel Finkelstein, Pamela Paresky, John K. Donohue, John Farmer, Alex Goldenberg, Sean Stevens, and Lee Jussim The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (OHCHR), expressed concerns over the prevailing situation of violence against women journalists and human rights defenders in the country. The comment acknowledges the initial statement by the women journalists that alarmed the situation, and said, “Pakistani women journalists last month publicly warned of what they […]
By Hija Kamran