Americans’ support for an authoritarian leader declined for the first time in two decades, according to a new report from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. “Follow the Leader: Exploring American Support for Democracy and Authoritarianism,” nevertheless finds worrying developments among the 29% of Americans who say that an authoritarian […] Read more »
More U.S. College Students Say Campus Climate Deters Speech
Sixty-one percent of U.S. college students agree that the climate on their campus prevents some people from expressing their views because others might find them offensive. In 2016, 54% of college students held this view. These results are based on a 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation survey of 3,014 randomly sampled U.S. […] Read more »
8 ways college student views on free speech are evolving
As college campuses across the United States grapple with questions surrounding the power and limits of free expression, a new Gallup-Knight Foundation survey of U.S. college students provides a view into how attitudes about the First Amendment on college campuses are evolving and what that means for our democracy. The […] Read more »
Kathleen Hall Jamieson: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Exploited US Media in 2016
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 »