Wired: Platforms Must Pay for Their Role in the Insurrection. “In their relentless pursuit of engagement and profits, these platforms created algorithms that amplify hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. This harmful content is particularly engaging and serves as the lubricant for businesses as profitable as they are influential. These platforms also enforce their terms […]
BuzzFeed News: In 2020, Disinformation Broke The US. “Disinformation and its fallout have defined 2020, the year of the infodemic. Month after month, self-serving social media companies have let corrosive manipulators out for dollars, votes, and clicks vie for attention, no matter the damage.”
Slate: Facebook Kowtowed to Conservatives and Got Nothing in Return. “Facebook has spent much of the past four years kowtowing to conservatives, treating right-wing news outlets with kid gloves even as they flouted its rules and spread disinformation, while bending over backward to avoid offending the Trump administration. By almost all accounts, the company hoped […]
New York Times: How Misinformation ‘Superspreaders’ Seed False Election Theories. “New research from Avaaz, a global human rights group, the Elections Integrity Partnership and The New York Times shows how a small group of people — mostly right-wing personalities with outsized influence on social media — helped spread the false voter-fraud narrative that led to […]
Washington Post: When Twitter fact-checks Trump’s tweets, it polarizes Americans even more, our research finds . “Scholars have studied when fact-checking political misinformation effectively changes what citizens believe. Sometimes, research finds that such rebuttals can backfire; individuals confronted with contrary views double down on their beliefs. Other research suggests that correction backfires are relatively rare. […]
Vanity Fair: “It’s the Trump Bubble”: The Right Has Created a Wave of COVID Patients Who Don’t Believe It’s Real. “A Texas nurse had a patient in a COVID ICU tell her the virus is ‘fake news.’ A California nurse was mocked for wearing a mask. As a new wave of COVID-19 sweeps the country, […]
UVA Today: Study: How Facebook Pushes Users, Especially Conservative Users, Into Echo Chambers . “Analyzing opt-in user data from 2012 to 2016, Brent Kitchens, Steven L. Johnson and Peter Gray, all faculty members in UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce, found that all three social media sites [Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter] connect their users to a […]
New York Times: Fact-Checked on Facebook and Twitter, Conservatives Switch Their Apps. “Corey Adam, a political comedian from Minneapolis, joined a mass social media switcheroo last week. That was when Mr. Adam, 39, a conservative and libertarian, watched Twitter and Facebook add labels to social media posts from President Trump and other Republicans who falsely […]
The Conversation: The Matrix is already here: Social media promised to connect us, but left us isolated, scared and tribal. “I’m a psychiatrist who studies anxiety and stress, and I often write about how our politics and culture are mired in fear and tribalism. My co-author is a digital marketing expert who brings expertise to […]
Politico: White House looks at cutting Covid funds, newborn screenings in ‘anarchist’ cities. “New York, Portland, Ore., Washington, D.C., and Seattle could lose funding for a wide swath of programs that serve their poorest, sickest residents after the president moved last month to restrict funding, escalating his political battle against liberal cities he’s sought to […]
Wall Street Journal (and not paywalled for me): Why Social Media Is So Good at Polarizing Us. “A growing body of research suggests that social media is accelerating the trend, and many political scientists worry it’s tearing our country apart. It isn’t clear how to solve the problem. And new research suggests that one often-proposed […]
Scientific American: Why Social Media Make Us More Polarized, and How to Fix It. “As a scientist who studies networks, I’m used to being surprised by the results of my experiments. Technology has allowed us to access more information and data about people’s social networks, debunking many of our assumptions about human behavior. But even […]
Washington Post: Parler and Gab, two conservative social media sites, keep alleged Russian disinformation up, despite report. “A mysterious European named Leo has offered a stream of familiar — and completely false — right-wing talking points on Parler, a social media site favored by conservatives: Mail-in voting amounts to fraud. Left-wing activists somehow infected President […]
Media Matters: Study: Vote-by-mail misinformation is all over YouTube thanks to right-leaning channels. “Media Matters identified the top 100 YouTube videos with at least 10,000 views that discuss mail-in voting and were posted within a six-month period from March through August. We analyzed those 100 videos and assessed the political ideology of the channels that […]
Politico: Why the right wing has a massive advantage on Facebook. “Throughout 2020, Democrats have denounced Facebook with growing ferocity as a ‘right wing echo chamber’ with a ‘conservative bias’ that’s giving an edge to Donald Trump in November. But Facebook says there’s a reason why right-wing figures are driving more engagement. It’s not that […]