We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking […] Read more »
Anxiety about gun crime may lead to a greater push for stricter gun laws
On Valentine’s Day, 2018 an eighteen year old man entered Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL armed with military-style weapons and opened fire on students and faculty. By the time he surrendered to police, he had killed 17 people, injuring others. The shooting put the issue of gun control […] Read more »
The Perils of Truth Decay: Q&A with Three RAND Leaders
“Truthiness” was still a punchline when Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year in 2006. Comedian Stephen Colbert had coined the term as an eye-roll at the march of bias and opinion over facts. There’s less to laugh at now: the Oxford word of the year for 2016 was […] Read more »
Study: Conservatives amplified Russian trolls 30 times more often than liberals in 2016
Conservatives were much more likely than liberals to retweet Russian trolls in the 2016 election, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Southern California released this month. It traced Russian efforts to influence America’s 2016 presidential campaign via Twitter using 45 million election-related tweets generated by […] Read more »
Avoiding the Echo Chamber about Echo Chambers: Why selective exposure to like-minded political news is less prevalent than you think
With critics decrying the “echo chambers,” “filter bubbles,” and “information cocoons” created by the rise of online news and social media, you’d think that the entire American public was consuming a near-exclusive diet of politically pleasing news. … However, these claims are vastly overstated. A deep dive into the academic […] Read more »
Exploring ‘Truth Decay’
Over the past two decades, the role of facts and analysis in American public life has been diminishing, posing a threat to democracy and policymaking. With donor support, RAND president and CEO Michael Rich initiated a project with RAND political scientist Jennifer Kavanagh to investigate the phenomenon of “Truth Decay.” […] Read more »