Kathleen Hall Jamieson chronicles how Russian trolls and hackers exploited U.S. media routines and social media structures in order to sow discord, undermine Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and bolster Donald Trump’s electoral prospects. (From March 5, 2018.) USC Annenberg Read more »
The spread of true and false news online
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 »
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 »
Most Americans think Trump hasn’t done enough on Russian interference
… A new USA Today poll conducted with Suffolk University found that only a quarter of Americans thought that the Trump administration had done enough to counteract Russian meddling — but looking a bit more closely at the data reveals some interesting differences. One of the things that Suffolk does […] 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 »
A Generation Gap Widened by the Conservative Media
… The partisan differences between the youngest and eldest cohorts of voters have not received the same public attention as other forms of contemporary political conflict, but they are now bigger in size than the more celebrated divisions between men and women, the college-educated and the non-college-educated, and the residents […] Read more »