Computational Social Science Lab (CSSLab) Director Duncan Watts presented: “Fake News, Echo Chambers, and Algorithms: A Data Science Perspective” at an ASSET(AI-enabled Systems: Safety, Explainability and Trustworthiness) Weekly Seminar on April 23, 2025.
“Before the 2016 election, fake news was not considered a term,” Watts noted. Since then, the prevalence of “fake news” has been extensively discussed in political discourse, but Watts’s work over the last four years challenges the claim that fake news is widespread.
Duncan Watts, Stevens University Professor in Computer and Information Science
In the seminar, Watts shared his findings from several CSSLab touchstone papers, including: Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem (Science Advances, 2020), Quantifying partisan news diets in Web and TV audiences (Science Advances, 2022), Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube (PNAS, 2021), Causally estimating the effect of YouTube’s recommender system using counterfactual bots (PNAS, 2024), and Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook (Science, 2024), where he and his colleagues found that fake news is actually rare.
What Duncan Watts also found is that factually but misleading information is more harmful than fake news because it reaches a wider audience and has larger persuasive effects. Biased information is another research area of Watts, where he concluded his presentation by introducing the Media Bias Detector, the CSSLab’s latest dashboard that exposes bias in the mainstream media in close to real-time.
ASSET (AI-enabled Systems: Safety, Explainability and Trustworthiness) is a new center established by the Penn School of Engineering and Applied Science, focused on supporting large-scale research projects aimed at building decision-making AI systems that are safe, transparent, and trustworthy. The center will also foster collaborations and partnerships within the Engineering School and the wider Penn community, as AI increasingly becomes integrated into more aspects of society.
“The true potential of AI can only be realized if its users can trust the underlying technology,” “With its partnership with clinicians, health care experts, and social science researchers, Penn Engineering is uniquely positioned to play a leadership role in this field,” says Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering.
Learn more about the ASSET Center here.
AUTHORS
Delphine Gardiner
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Senior Communications Specialist