Stanford News: Search results not biased along party lines, Stanford scholars find . “According to newly published research by Stanford scholars, there appears to be no political favoritism for or against either major political party in the algorithm of a popular search engine.”
political polarization
NiemanLab: Political hashtags like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter make some people doubt the stories they’re attached to
NiemanLab: Political hashtags like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter make some people doubt the stories they’re attached to. “People who identified as politically moderate perceived news posts to be significantly more partisan when the posts included hashtags. In fact, in their comments, politically moderate respondents who saw news posts with hashtags were more suspicious of the story’s credibility and focused more on the politics of the hashtag.”
Nieman Lab: News portals like Yahoo still bring Democrats and Republicans together for political news, but they’re fading fast
Nieman Lab: News portals like Yahoo still bring Democrats and Republicans together for political news, but they’re fading fast. “‘We observe segregation in political news consumption.’ In this working paper, ‘Partisan Enclaves and Information Bazaars: Mapping Selective Exposure to Online News,’ Stanford researchers examined a ‘data set of web browsing behavior collected during the 2016 U.S. presidential election’ to see how Democrats and Republicans seek out news sources and how they change their news consumption levels in response to different political events. (The data set is from YouGov and was also used in this paper.)”
CNET: Almost all political tweets come from just 10% of Twitter users
CNET: Almost all political tweets come from just 10% of Twitter users. “There’s no question that Twitter plays a major role in US politics, particularly with its policy of letting world leaders like President Donald Trump tweet what they want, even if those tweets violate the tech giant’s rules of engagement. But only 22% of Americans actually use Twitter, and of those, most political tweets are coming from a very small number, according to a Wednesday report from the Pew Research Center.”
The Divided States of America: How social media reveals social fragmentation (Phys .org)
Phys .org: The Divided States of America: How social media reveals social fragmentation. “Far from being an egalitarian melting pot of diverse opinions and worldviews, the Internet has grown to mirror the same social divisions that exist offline. The U.S. is fragmented into physically segregated communities with polarized idealogical differences. That is the conclusion of a new paper by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. This paper quantifies the oft-repeated complaint that social media has become an echo chamber.”
New York Times: Brace Yourself for the Internet Impeachment
New York Times: Brace Yourself for the Internet Impeachment. “As impeachment looms, disinformation experts are bracing for a fresh cyclone of chaos, complete with fast-twitch media manipulation, droves of false and misleading claims, and hyper-polarized audiences fiercely clinging to their side’s version of reality.”
Pew: An update on our research into trust, facts and democracy
Pew (PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!): An update on our research into trust, facts and democracy “A little over a year ago, Pew Research Center decided to intensify its research focus on the theme of trust, facts and democracy. The decision reflected a changing world: In the U.S. and abroad, anxiety over misinformation has increased alongside political polarization and growing fragmentation of the media. Faith in expertise and institutions has declined, cynicism has risen, and citizens are becoming their own information curators. All of these trends are fundamentally changing the way people arrive at the kind of informed opinions that can drive effective governance and political compromise.”
