For the last couple of weeks we have discussed questions of echo chambers and filter bubbles. For the next couple of weeks, we will be discussing another phenomenon that has seen lots of headlines of late: misinformation and fake news.
This is a phenomenon closely related to the rise of the Internet and so-called “high-choice” media environments where the production of information is less centralized than it was before.
And fake news, as well as misinformation, have been linked to a set of important political outcomes—from the result of elections to conspiracy belief or vaccine hesitancy (in the Covid-19 age).
Essential reading:
Allen et al. (2020)
Guess, Nyhan, and Reifler (2020)
Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral (2018)
Additional reading:
Bail et al. (2019)
Grinberg et al. (2019)
Juul and Ugander (2021)
Slides
Slides for this week are available here
Allen, Jennifer, Baird Howland, Markus Mobius, David Rothschild, and Duncan J. Watts. 2020.
“Evaluating the Fake News Problem at the Scale of the Information Ecosystem.” Science Advances 6 (14): eaay3539.
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539.
Bail, Christopher A., Brian Guay, Emily Maloney, Aidan Combs, D. Sunshine Hillygus, Friedolin Merhout, Deen Freelon, and Alexander Volfovsky. 2019.
“Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s Impact on the Political Attitudes and Behaviors of American Twitter Users in Late 2017.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (1): 243–50.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1906420116.
Grinberg, Nir, Kenneth Joseph, Lisa Friedland, Briony Swire-Thompson, and David Lazer. 2019.
“Fake News on Twitter During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Science 363 (6425): 374–78.
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau2706.
Guess, Andrew M., Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler. 2020.
“Exposure to Untrustworthy Websites in the 2016 US Election.” Nature Human Behaviour 4 (5): 472–80.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0833-x.
Juul, Jonas L., and Johan Ugander. 2021.
“Comparing Information Diffusion Mechanisms by Matching on Cascade Size.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (46).
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2100786118.
Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. 2018.
“The Spread of True and False News Online.” Science 359 (6380): 1146–51.
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559.