… Consider what a person can do in just the time it takes to wait for a bus: text, watch a comedy skit, play a video game, buy concert tickets, take five selfies, each with a different set of cartoon ears. Learning how that behavior shapes an individual’s life experience […] Read more »
Could Russia swing the next presidential election?
… Congress should appropriate money now to fund an independent, nonpartisan task force to study the effects of Russian electoral interference in the 2020 election. … The American public deserves to know whether Russia’s election interference operation might actually alter election outcomes. If not, any federal regulation of social media […] Read more »
In the war against misinformation, fact-checking works. Big Tech needs to do more of it
Amid a continued public outcry over the influence of fake news and misinformation, tech companies are scrambling to generate effective solutions. … Our new research shows that fact-checking prevents misinformation from shaping our thoughts — even our automatic and uncontrollable perceptions. When fact-checking calls out what isn’t credible, much of […] Read more »
Worry About Facebook. Rip Your Hair Out in Screaming Terror About Fox News.
… Just about every political lie that has dominated American discourse in the past two decades — the Swift Boaters and the birthers, death panels, the idea that undocumented immigrants pose an existential threat but climate change does not — depended, for its mainstream dissemination, on the Fox News machine. […] Read more »
Why the Internet Is So Polarized, Extreme, and Screamy
… Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are many things at once—a modern railroad crossed with a modern telephone network, mixed with a modern phone book, on top of a modern Borgesian library. Above all, social media are a mechanism for allowing people to find like-minded individuals and to […] Read more »
How the news took over reality
… In recent years, there has been enormous concern about the time we spend on our web-connected devices and what that might be doing to our brains. But a related psychological shift has gone largely unremarked: the way that, for a certain segment of the population, the news has come […] Read more »