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Although news negativity is often studied, missing is comparative evidence on the prevalence of and engagement with negative political and non-political news posts on social media. We use 6,081,134 Facebook posts published between January…
A recent article in $\textit{Science}$ by Guess et al. estimated the effect of Facebook's news feed algorithm on exposure to misinformation and political information among Facebook users. However, its reporting and conclusions did not…
Social media is increasingly being used as a news-platform. To reach their intended audience, newspapers need for their articles to be well ranked by Facebook's news-feed algorithm. The number of likes, shares and other reactions determine…
We report the first direct comparisons of multiple alternative social media algorithms on multiple platforms on outcomes of societal interest. We used a browser extension to modify which posts were shown to desktop social media users,…
The profusion of user generated content caused by the rise of social media platforms has enabled a surge in research relating to fields such as information retrieval, recommender systems, data mining and machine learning. However, the lack…
We measure trends in the diffusion of misinformation on Facebook and Twitter between January 2015 and July 2018. We focus on stories from 570 sites that have been identified as producers of false stories. Interactions with these sites on…
In this study, we closely look at the use of social media contents as source or reference in the U.S. news media. Specifically, we examine about 60 thousand news articles published within the 5 years period of 2013-2017 by 153 U.S. media…
Online platforms have transformed the way in which individuals access and interact with news, with a high degree of trust particularly placed in search engine results. We use web tracked behavioral data across a 2-month period and analyze…
Social media networks commonly employ content moderation as a tool to limit the spread of harmful content. However, the efficacy of this strategy in limiting the delivery of harmful content to users is not well understood. In this paper, we…
Despite Facebook's central role in American civic life, a clear, evidence-based understanding of users' long-term information environments has remained elusive, hindering assessments of the platform's societal impact. This study addresses…
The rapid growth of social media as a news platform has raised significant concerns about the influence and societal impact of biased and unreliable news on these platforms. While much research has explored user engagement with news on…
The social brain hypothesis fixes to 150 the number of social relationships we are able to maintain. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility up to the way we communicate, and might even…
News and social media are widely used to disseminate science, but do they also help raise awareness of problems in research? This study investigates whether high levels of news and social media attention might accelerate the retraction…
With the spread of false and misleading information in current news, many algorithmic tools have been introduced with the aim of assessing bias and reliability in written content. However, there has been little work exploring how effective…
The Facebook Privacy-Protected Full URLs Dataset was released to enable independent, academic research on the impact of Facebook's platform on society while ensuring user privacy. The dataset has been used in several studies to analyze the…
The disparity between news stories valued by journalists and those preferred by readers, known as the "News Gap", is well-documented. However, the difference in expectations regarding news related user-generated content is less studied.…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
In March 2025, Meta announced a new AI system to rank the order of the comments shown to Instagram users. With existing research showing how feed personalization systems can lead to increased polarization, the introduction of this new…
Social media feeds have become central to the Internet. Among the most visible are trending feeds, which rank content deemed timely and relevant. To examine how feed signals influence behaviors and perceptions, we conducted a randomized…
Fake news emerged as an apparent global problem during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Addressing it requires a multidisciplinary effort to define the nature and extent of the problem, detect fake news in real time, and mitigate its…