Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts

Tuesday, May 16, 2023
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
(Pacific)

Moghadam 123, Encina Commons

jennifer pan headshot on a green abstract background reading spring seminar series tuesday may 16

Join the Cyber Policy Center, together with the Program on Democracy and the Internet, on Tuesday May 16th from Noon – 1 PM Pacific, for Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts, a conversation with Jennifer Pan, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor of Communication. The session will be moderated by Jeff Hancock. This session is part of the Spring Seminar Series, a series spanning April through June, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance. Registration is required.

Social media companies have come under increasing pressure to remove misinformation from their platforms, but disagreements between Republicans and Democrats over what should be removed have stymied efforts to deal with misinformation in the United States. In light of the global nature of online information ecosystems and the prominent role US companies play in content moderation debates, this has ramifications for content moderation worldwide. While previous research on content moderation has documented partisan differences in support for content removal, the current understanding of the reason for such partisan difference is centered on a "fact gap''---differences in perceptions about what is misinformation. But partisan differences could also be due to "party promotion''---a desire to leave misinformation online that promotes one's own party---or a "preference gap''---differences in internalized preferences about whether misinformation should be removed. Pan will talk about research findings from a new paper that have important implications for policymakers, and indicate that settling factual disagreements is unlikely to resolve partisan conflict over content moderation.

Session is in Moghadam 123, in Encina Commons

About the Speaker

Jennifer Pan is a Professor of Communication and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Her research focuses on political communication and authoritarian politics. Pan uses experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity in China and other authoritarian regimes to answer questions about how autocrats perpetuate their rule. How political censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation work in the digital age. How preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result. Her book, Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers (Oxford, 2020) shows how China's pursuit of political order transformed the country’s main social assistance program, Dibao, for repressive purposes. Her work has appeared in peer reviewed publications such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and Science. She graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government.