Online misinformation promotes distrust in science, undermines public health, and may drive civil unrest.
All Publications
Missing Persons: The case of public participation in AI strategies
Governance requires trust. If policy makers inform, consult and involve citizens in decisions, policy makers are likely to build trust in their efforts. Public participation is particularly important...
Data Dysphoria: The Governance Challenge Posed by Large Learning Models for Generative AI
Only 8 months have passed since Chat-GPT and the large learning model underpinning it took the world by storm. This article focuses on the data supply chain—the data collected and then utilized to...
White Supremacy, Democrats, and Anti-Abortion Support
White supremacist attitudes are on the rise in the United States. In this paper, we assert that there are latent white supremacist sentiments, deeply connected to the changing racial demographics of...
How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?
Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the...
Reshares on social media amplify political news but do not detectably affect beliefs or opinions
Researchers studied the effects of exposure to reshared content on Facebook during the 2020 US election by assigning a random set of consenting, US-based users to feeds that did not contain any...
Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook
Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? This group of researchers analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US...
Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing
Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the...
Asian American Racial Threat and Support for Racially Discriminatory Policy
Across a series of experiments, Professor Thompson shows that racial threat from a stereotypically nonthreatening racial minority group, Asian Americans, has a direct impact on white Americans' views...
Evaluating Twitter's COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation Removal Policy
Researchers concluded that Twitter's vaccine misinformation removal policies do not appear to have been associated with a detectable reduction in content from misinformative, compared to non-...