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Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the…
Political news on social media rarely circulates in isolation: audiences actively engage, react, and clash. Whether these interactions reflect agreement or conflict may depend on the ideological discrepancy between publishers and the news…
Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…
If popular online platforms systematically expose their users to partisan and unreliable news, they could potentially contribute to societal issues like rising political polarization. This concern is central to the echo chamber and filter…
In a pre-registered algorithmic audit, we found that, relative to a reverse-chronological baseline, Twitter's engagement-based ranking algorithm amplifies emotionally charged, out-group hostile content that users say makes them feel worse…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…
We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives -- making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm's editorial policy. Using…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
Digital news outlets rely on a variety of outside contributors, from freelance journalists, to political commentators, to executives and politicians. These external dependencies create a network among news outlets, traced along the…
News articles containing data visualizations play an important role in informing the public on issues ranging from public health to politics. Recent research on the persuasive appeal of data visualizations suggests that prior attitudes can…
This work extends a model of simulating influence in a network of stochastic edge dynamics to account for polarization. The model built upon is termed Dynamic Communicators and seeks to understand the process which produces low volume, high…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Search engines are used and trusted by hundreds of millions of people every day. However, the algorithms used by search engines to index, filter, and rank web content are inherently biased, and will necessarily prefer some views and…
The paper develops a stochastic model of drift in human beliefs that shows that today's sheer volume of accessible information, combined with consumers' confirmation bias and natural preference to more outlying content, necessarily lead to…
As political polarization in the United States continues to rise, the question of whether polarized individuals can fruitfully cooperate becomes pressing. Although diversity of individual perspectives typically leads to superior team…
This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The…
With the growth of online news over the past decade, empirical studies on political discourse and news consumption have focused on the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Yet recently, scholars have revealed limited evidence…
While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For…
We study how personalized news aggregation for rationally inattentive voters (NARI) affects policy polarization and public opinion. In a two-candidate electoral competition model, an attention-maximizing infomediary aggregates source data…