Measuring the news and its impact on democracy.
TLDR
This paper proposed a collective research agenda to measure the origins, nature, and prevalence of misinformation, broadly construed, as well as its impact on democracy, and sketched out some illustrative examples of completed, ongoing, or planned research projects that contribute to this agenda.Abstract:
Since the 2016 US presidential election, the deliberate spread of misinformation online, and on social media in particular, has generated extraordinary concern, in large part because of its potential effects on public opinion, political polarization, and ultimately democratic decision making. Recently, however, a handful of papers have argued that both the prevalence and consumption of "fake news" per se is extremely low compared with other types of news and news-relevant content. Although neither prevalence nor consumption is a direct measure of influence, this work suggests that proper understanding of misinformation and its effects requires a much broader view of the problem, encompassing biased and misleading-but not necessarily factually incorrect-information that is routinely produced or amplified by mainstream news organizations. In this paper, we propose an ambitious collective research agenda to measure the origins, nature, and prevalence of misinformation, broadly construed, as well as its impact on democracy. We also sketch out some illustrative examples of completed, ongoing, or planned research projects that contribute to this agenda.read more
Citations
More filters
Posted Content
Deepfake Detection by Human Crowds, Machines, and Machine-informed Crowds.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compare the performance of ordinary human observers against the leading computer vision deepfake detection model and find that participants with access to the model's prediction are more accurate than either alone, but inaccurate model predictions often decrease participants' accuracy.
Journal ArticleDOI
Misinformation about science in the public sphere.
TL;DR: In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic created an urgent demand, not just for scientific information and advice, but also for policy proposals that helped curb the spread of the virus while minimizing economic and other collateral societal effects as discussed by the authors.
MonographDOI
Digital Technology, Politics, and Policy-Making
TL;DR: In this article , the impact of digital technology on political communication, political participation, and policy-making in liberal democracies is discussed, with a focus on three key aspects of democratic politics.
Journal ArticleDOI
Fuentes informativas en tiempos de Covid-19: Cómo los medios en Chile narraron la pandemia a través de sus redes sociales
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed the use of social media sources by nine news outlets in Chile in regard to Covid-19 and identified the most frequently used types of sources, their evolution over time, and the differences between the various social media platforms used by the Chilean media during the pandemic.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
How Did Europe's Press Cover Covid-19 Vaccination News? A Five-Country Analysis
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors present an analysis of how the European press treated the Covid-19 vaccination issue in 2020-2021, collecting over 50,000 online articles published by 19 newspapers from five European countries over 22 months.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The spread of true and false news online
TL;DR: A large-scale analysis of tweets reveals that false rumors spread further and faster than the truth, and false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information.
Journal ArticleDOI
Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election
Hunt Allcott,Matthew Gentzkow +1 more
TL;DR: The authors found that people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks, and that the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them.
Book
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You
TL;DR: Pariser et al. as discussed by the authors described the filter bubble as a "unique, personal universe of information created just for you by this array of personalizing filters" and pointed out the problem of not having any sense of what is being edited out or why it is being censored.
Journal ArticleDOI
The science of fake news
David Lazer,Matthew A. Baum,Yochai Benkler,Adam J. Berinsky,Kelly M. Greenhill,Filippo Menczer,Miriam J. Metzger,Brendan Nyhan,Gordon Pennycook,David Rothschild,Michael Schudson,Steven A. Sloman,Cass R. Sunstein,Emily A. Thorson,Duncan J. Watts,Jonathan L. Zittrain +15 more
TL;DR: The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age as discussed by the authors. But much remains unknown regarding the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malicious actors.
Journal ArticleDOI
Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook
TL;DR: Examination of the news that millions of Facebook users' peers shared, what information these users were presented with, and what they ultimately consumed found that friends shared substantially less cross-cutting news from sources aligned with an opposing ideology.