Join us  Tuesday, December 7th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST for “Media Choices, Niche Behavior, and Biases in Online Information” featuring Sandra González-Bailón, Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania. This seminar series is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.  

The quality of our democracies relies on the quality of the information that citizens consume but we still know very little about how citizens engage with the news “in the wild”. In this talk, I will discuss two papers that examine that question in different settings. The first paper analyzes the media choices of a representative panel of the U.S. population (N ~ 55,000) as they consume TV, web, and YouTube content over a period of 44 months. Less than 10% of the panelists (N ~ 5,300) view and browse news on the three platforms. This small group of news hyper-consumers is formed predominantly by older male users with higher education. We find no evidence of substitution effects in the time these users spend consuming news on each of the three platforms, but consuming news across the media landscape is a choice that only a small and unrepresentative slice of the population makes. These results help us characterize the digital equivalent of the ‘opinion leaders’ first proposed to understand the effects of mass media. The hyper-consumers we identify in our analyses create the elite of opinion leaders that have a disproportionate influence in how news content is selected, circulated, and (ultimately) algorithmically amplified. That this small group is far from representing the population at large is one of the ways in which online information may perpetuate important biases in the salience of some topics over others. The second paper analyzes news sharing in social media during one of the largest protest mobilizations in U.S. history to examine ideological asymmetries in the posting of news content. We extract the list of URLs shared during the mobilization period and we characterize those web sites in terms of their audience reach and the ideological composition of that audience. We also analyze the reliability of the sites in terms of the credibility and transparency of the information they publish. We show that there is no evidence of unreliable sources having any prominent visibility during the protest period, but we do identify asymmetries in the ideological slant of the sources shared, with a clear bias towards right-leaning domains. Our results suggest that online networks are contested spaces where the activism of progressive movements coexists with the narratives of mainstream media, which gain visibility under the same stream of information but whose reporting is not necessarily aligned with the activists’ goals.

About the speaker:

Sandra González-Bailón is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, computational tools, and political communication. She is the author of Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). More information on her research can be found at https://sandragonzalezbailon.net/
 
Her articles have appeared in journals like PNAS, Nature, Science, Political Communication, The Journal of Communication, and Social Networks, among others. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). She serves as Associate Editor for the journals Social Networks, EPJ Data Science, and The International Journal of Press/Politics, and she is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. She leads the research group DiMeNet (/daɪmnet/) — acronym for Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication.

 

Join us Tuesday, November 30th from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for Understanding and Countering Problematic Information on Social Media Platforms featuring Tanu Mitra, Assistant Professor at University of Washington’s Information School. This seminar series is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. 

Online social media platforms have brought numerous positive changes, including access to vast amounts of news and information. Yet, those very opportunities have created new challenges—our information ecosystem is now rife with problematic content, ranging from misinformation, conspiracy theories, to hateful and incendiary propaganda. As a social computing researcher, Dr. Mitra’s work introduces computational methods and systems to understand and design defenses against such problematic online content. In this talk, she will focus on two aspects of problematic online information: 1) conspiracy theories and 2) extremist propaganda.

First, leveraging data spanning millions of conspiratorial posts on Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, Dr. Mitra will present scalable methods to unravel who participates in online conspiratorial discussions, what causes users to join conspiratorial communities and then potentially abandon them. Second, she will dive into a special type of problematic content: extremist hate groups. Merging theories from social movement research with big data analyses, Dr. Mitra will discuss the ecosystem of extremists’ communication and the roles played by them. Finally, she will close by previewing important new opportunities to address some of these problems, including conducting social audits to defend against algorithmically generated misinformation and designing socio-technical interventions to promote meaningful credibility assessment of information.

 

About the speaker:

Tanu Mitra is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, Information School, where she leads the Social Computing research group. She and her students study and build large-scale social computing systems to understand and counter problematic information online. Her research spans auditing online systems for misinformation and conspiratorial content, understanding digital misinformation, unraveling narratives of online extremism and hate, and building technology to foster critical thinking online. Her work employs a range of interdisciplinary methods from the fields of human computer interaction, data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing. Dr. Mitra’s work has been supported by grants from the NSF, DoD, Google, Social Science One, and other Foundations. Her research has been recognized through multiple awards and honors, including an NSF-CRII, an early career ONR-YIP, Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Researcher award and Virginia Tech College of Engineering Outstanding New Assistant Professor award, along with several best paper honorable mention awards. Dr. Mitra received her PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and her Masters in Computer Science from Texas A&M University

*For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.