Project Ratio
“Fake news,” broadly defined as false or misleading information masquerading as legitimate news, is frequently asserted to be pervasive online with serious consequences for democracy. The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. Particularly, since the 2016 US presidential election, the deliberate spread of misinformation on social media has generated extraordinary concern, in large part because of its potential effects on public opinion, political polarization, and ultimately democratic decision making. Inspired by “solution-oriented research”, the project Ratio aims to foster a news ecosystem and culture that values and promotes authenticity and truth.
However, proper understanding of misinformation and its effects requires a much broader view of the problem, encompassing biased and misleading–but not necessarily factually incorrect–information that is routinely produced or amplified by mainstream news organizations. Much remains unknown regarding the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malicious actors. Project Ratio measures the origins, nature, and prevalence of misinformation, broadly construed, as well as its impact on democracy. We strive for objective and credible information, providing a first-of-its-kind at scale, real-time, cross-platform mapping of news content, as it moves through the “information funnel,” from news production, through distribution and discovery, consumption, and absorption.
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Before the 2016 Election
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After the 2016 election
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KEY RESEARCHERS
Duncan Watts
Stevens University Professor & twenty-third Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor
David Rothschild
Research Scientist @ Microsoft
Homa Hosseinmardi
Research Scientist
PUBLICATIONS
Rebuilding legitimacy in a post-truth age
Duncan J. Watts and David Rothschild.
The current state of public and political discourse is in disarray. Outright fake news stories circulate on social media. The result has been a called a post-truth age, in which evidence, scientific understanding, or even just logical consistency have become increasingly irrelevant to political argumentation.
Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media.
Duncan J. Watts and David Rothschild.
Since the 2016 presidential election, an increasingly familiar narrative has emerged concerning the unexpected victory of Donald Trump. Fake news, was amplified on social networks. We believe that the volume of reporting around fake news, and the role of tech companies in disseminating those falsehoods, is both disproportionate to its likely influence in the outcome of the election and diverts attention from the culpability of the mainstream media itself.
The science of fake news
David M. J. Lazer, Matthew A. Baum, Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts and Jonathan L. Zittrain.
The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. We discuss extant social and computer science research regarding belief in fake news and the mechanisms by which it spreads.
DATA
DATA OVERVIEW
The burgeoning and rise of big data results in salience of the quantity of data, nourishing the soil for qualitative research and analysis, addressing social, economic, cultural and ethical implications and issues of social science. Converging computer science and social science, the project Ratio suggests use-inspired intellectual research style and data-driven methodological directions for computational social science, yielding a diversity of perspectives on explanation, understanding, and prediction of information flow and impact. Collaborating with various data providers, currently including Nielsen, PeakMetric, TVEyes and Harmony Labs, we seek to establish a large-scale data infrastructure for studying the production, distribution, consumption, absorption in the information ecosystem, illuminating each aspect of research on “fake news” in-depth and in-width.
Mapping How People Get Their (Political) News
New data visualizations from the Computational Social Science Lab show how Americans consume news....
The CSSLab Launches News Consumption Dashboard
The Computational Social Sciences Lab’s (CSSLab) new dashboard, Mapping the (Political) Information Ecosystem, is a set of four data visualizations that highlight Americans’ media consumption habits, with a focus on echo chambers and the news. This is the second of a series of dashboards launched by the CSSLab, as part of its PennMAP (Penn Media Accountability) project, and focuses on expanding knowledge on the media by translating research papers into interactive, digestible content.
Misleading COVID-19 headlines from mainstream sources did more harm on Facebook than fake news
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 30, 2024 – Since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, fake news on social media has been widely blamed for low vaccine uptake in the United States — but research by MIT Sloan School of Management PhD candidate Jennifer Allen and Professor David Rand finds that the blame lies elsewhere.
Reexamining Misinformation: How Unflagged, Factual Content Drives Vaccine Hesitancy
Factual, vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook has a greater overall effect than “fake news,”...
Homa Hosseinmardi and Sam Wolken Speak at Annenberg Workshop
Homa Hosseinmardi and Sam Wolken of the Computational Social Science Lab (CSSLab) were recently invited to speak at the Political and Information Networks Workshop on April 25-26. This workshop was organized by the Center for Information Networks and Democracy (CIND), a new lab under the Annenberg School of Communication. CIND studies how communication networks in the digital era play a role in democratic processes, and its research areas include Information Ecosystems and Political Segregation (or Partisan Segregation).
Estimating the Effect of YouTube Recommendations with Homa Hosseinmardi
In Analytics at Wharton’s Research Spotlight series, we highlight research by Wharton and...
Joe Biden’s (but not Donald Trump’s) age: A case study in the New York Times’ inconsistent narrative selection and framing
On the weekend of March 2-3, 2024, the landing page of the New York Times was dominated by coverage of their poll showing voter concern over President Biden’s age. There was a lot of concern among Democrats about the methods of the poll, especially around the low response rate and leading questions. But as a team of researchers who study both survey methods and mainstream media, we are not surprised that people are telling pollsters they are worried about Biden’s age. Why wouldn’t they? The mainstream media has been telling them to be worried about precisely this issue for months.
Hyperpartisan consumption on YouTube is shaped more by user preferences than the algorithm
Given the sheer amount of content produced every day on a platform as large as YouTube, which hosts over 14 billion videos, the need for some sort of algorithmic curation is inevitable. As YouTube has attracted millions of views on partisan videos of a conspiratorial or radical nature, observers speculate that the platform’s algorithm unintentionally radicalizes its users by recommending hyperpartisan content based on their viewing history.
But is the algorithm the primary force driving these consumption patterns, or is something else at play?
The YouTube Algorithm Isn’t Radicalizing People
About a quarter of Americans get their news on YouTube. With its billions of users and hours upon hours of content, YouTube is one the largest online media platforms in the world.
In recent years, there has been a popular narrative in the media that videos from highly partisan, conspiracy theory-driven YouTube channels radicalize young Americans and that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm leads users down a path of increasingly radical content.
New Insights on Common Sense Take the Spotlight on Canadian Radio
Mark E. Whiting was featured on Quirks and Quarks, a science and technology podcast on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio. The host, Bob McDonald, is a renowned Canadian science journalist who interviewed Whiting on his recent milestone. Their conversation, “Common sense is not that common, but it is widely distributed,” was aired on January 19, 2024.
