During the 2016 Zika virus outbreak, the Annenberg Public Policy Center surveyed tens of thousands of people over more than seven months to learn about the American public’s behavior, attitudes, and knowledge about the virus as it spread to the United States. Yet over the same period, an even larger […] Read more »
Tracking National Attention toward Mass Shootings with Google Trends Data
Many often lament that attention toward mass shootings and subsequent debate they engender is fleeting. In a matter of a week, if not days, national discussion about the tragedy itself as well as measures to prevent future ones (largely centered around gun control) quickly evaporate. However, with the most recent […] 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 »
Infocalypse Now
In mid-2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet — so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco’s Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of […] Read more »
Facebook hired a full-time pollster to monitor Zuckerberg’s approval ratings
Tavis McGinn applied for a job at Facebook last year hoping to work in market research. He had previously spent three years at Google, where he helped large advertisers refine their marketing campaigns across the company’s family of products. But part way through the interview process at Facebook, the recruiter […] Read more »
Both Sides of the Aisle Agree: The Media Is a Problem
A recent Knight Foundation/Gallup report on Americans’ perceptions of the media and its role in democracy contains many alarming findings for those who work in the media, and for Americans concerned about the relationship between a free press and the public. For example, Americans are much more likely to say […] Read more »