write a speech on how media influences public opinion

8. Class 11 & 12 Speech Writing : ‘How Media Influences public  ‘Opinion’

Media has a strong hold on society. Write a speech in 150-200 words on: ‘How Media Influences public ‘Opinion’ to be delivered in the morning assembly.

Ans.                                         ‘How Media Influences public  ‘Opinion’

Good morning to all. Today I have got an opportunity to share my views with you on: ‘How Media influences public opinion’.

 The media nowadays is engaged in distorting critical facts, omitting vital stories and supporting people with the power to keep their secrets. On the other hand, it is also benefiting society by revealing stories, scams, etc, The influence of media is such that we know essentially nothing other than what we hear from them. Society absorbs whatever the media depicts. The media also sometimes respond to public demand and provides the information that the public craves for. Unfortunately, the public knows and desires more information about movie stars than they do about political development. The reason for this is that the public is more likely to watch shows with the kind of information.

A positive aspect of the media’s bias has been that it has facilitated change in people’s perception and exposed people to other cultures, made people aware of environmental needs and about the people far away.

The relationship of media content to audiences is not singular or one way.

One thing that can be done to rely on true information is to look for different sources. Just relying only on TV will not suffice. We, the public, should become more aware and smart to know the vitality of any issues or news.

Download the above Speech in PDF (Printable)

Related Posts

The Power of Media: How It Shapes Public Opinion and Society

by Danny Ballan | Apr 7, 2023 | General Spotlights , Social Spotlights

• ·         Agenda Setting
• ·         Selective Reporting
• ·         Framing
• ·         Opinion Leaders
• ·         Social Media

The Impact of Media on Society

The role of the media in shaping public opinion.

From the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, we are constantly bombarded with news from the media, whether it be through television, newspapers, or social media. As a result, the media plays a crucial role in shaping our opinions on various topics, from politics to entertainment and beyond.

In this article, we will explore the ways in which the media influences public opinion and the impact it has on society as a whole.

· Agenda Setting

One of the most significant ways the media shapes public opinion is through agenda-setting. This is the process by which the media decides which topics and issues to cover and how they are presented to the public. Essentially, the media has the power to frame the conversation around certain topics, which can ultimately influence how people think about them.

For example, during election seasons, the media may focus heavily on certain candidates or issues, leading the public to form opinions based on what they see and hear. In this way, the media has the power to sway public opinion in favor of one candidate or political party over another.

· Selective Reporting

Another way the media can shape public opinion is through selective reporting. This is the process by which the media chooses which stories to report on and which to ignore. By selectively reporting on certain stories and ignoring others, the media can influence how the public perceives a particular issue.

For example, if the media only reports on negative news about a particular group or organization, the public may develop a negative perception of that group or organization, even if there is positive news that is not being reported. In this way, the media has the power to shape public opinion by selectively reporting on certain stories.

· Framing

Framing is the way in which the media presents information to the public. By framing information in a certain way, the media can influence how people interpret it. For example, if the media presents a story about a politician in a negative light, the public may view that politician negatively, even if there are positive aspects to their character or policy positions.

On the other hand, if the media presents a story in a positive light, the public may view the subject of the story in a more positive light. In this way, the media has the power to frame the conversation around certain topics, which can ultimately influence how people think about them.

· Opinion Leaders

Opinion leaders are individuals or groups that have a significant impact on public opinion. The media can play a role in shaping public opinion by highlighting the opinions of opinion leaders. For example, if a celebrity or influential public figure expresses an opinion on a particular topic, the media may give that opinion more weight and influence how the public thinks about the issue.

· Social Media

Social media has become an increasingly powerful tool for shaping public opinion. Through platforms like Twitter and Facebook, individuals can share their opinions and perspectives with a global audience. Social media also allows for the rapid dissemination of information, making it easier for individuals and groups to influence public opinion on a particular issue.

However, social media also has its downsides. With the rise of fake news and misinformation, it can be difficult to discern what is true and what is not. This can lead to the spread of false information and conspiracy theories , which can ultimately shape public opinion in dangerous ways.

The media’s influence on public opinion can have a significant impact on society. For example, media coverage of police shootings and racial inequality has led to a growing awareness of these issues and a call for change. Similarly, media coverage of environmental issues has led to increased awareness and action to address climate change .

However, the media can also have a negative impact on society . For example, sensationalized reporting can lead to a distorted perception of reality , leading to fear, anxiety, and even panic among the public. This can be particularly problematic in times of crisis, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or pandemics, where the media’s coverage can exacerbate the situation and cause harm to individuals and communities.

Moreover, the media’s influence on public opinion can also have political implications. In democracies, the media plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion and influencing political outcomes. Media coverage of political campaigns, for example, can affect voters’ perceptions of candidates and their positions, ultimately influencing the election results.

However, the media’s influence on politics can also be problematic, particularly when it comes to issues of bias and partisanship. In recent years, the media has been criticized for promoting certain political agendas or ideologies and for perpetuating a polarized political environment.

The media plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion on a wide range of issues, from politics to social and environmental issues. Through agenda setting, selective reporting, framing, opinion leaders, and social media, the media has the power to influence how people think and feel about certain topics.

However, the media’s influence on public opinion is not without its drawbacks. Sensationalized reporting, fake news, and biased reporting can distort reality and perpetuate negative stereotypes and misconceptions. Moreover, the media’s influence on politics can be problematic, particularly when it comes to issues of bias and partisanship.

As media consumers, it is important to be aware of the media’s influence on our opinions and to critically evaluate the information we receive. By doing so, we can ensure that our opinions are based on accurate information and that we are not being unduly influenced by media bias or sensationalism.

• Media : Forms of communication that reach large audiences, such as television, newspapers, and the internet.
• Public Opinion : Views held by a group of people about a particular issue, product, or person.
• Society : A group of individuals living in a particular geographic area who share a common culture and institutions.
• Agenda Setting : The process by which the media decides which topics and issues to cover and how they are presented to the public.
• Selective Reporting : The process by which the media chooses which stories to report on and which to ignore.
• Framing : The way in which the media presents information to the public.
• Opinion Leaders : Individuals or groups that have a significant impact on public opinion.
• Social Media : Online platforms that allow users to create, share, and exchange information and ideas with others.
• Misinformation : False or inaccurate information that is spread unintentionally or deliberately.
• Fake News : Deliberately misleading or fabricated news stories.
• Sensationalized Reporting : Reporting that exaggerates or sensationalizes the facts in order to attract attention or increase viewership.
• Bias : Prejudice or favoritism towards a particular group or ideology.
• Partisanship : Strong support for a particular political party or ideology.
• Polarization : The process by which individuals and groups become more ideologically divided and less willing to compromise.
• Democracy : A system of government in which power is held by the people, usually through elected representatives.
• Natural Disasters : Events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods that are caused by natural forces.
• Terrorism : The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.
• Pandemics : An outbreak of a disease that spreads across a large geographic area and affects a large number of people.
• Environmental Issues : Problems related to the natural world, such as climate change , pollution, and habitat destruction.

Election Results : The outcome of an election, usually determined by the number of votes cast for each candidate or political party.

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Influence Insider

How media influences public opinion.

As we know, media is a powerful tool for influencing how individuals perceive life experiences and develop beliefs and behaviors. This influence can be positive or negative depending on what messages people are exposed to.

Many things about our society have contributed to the growing divide in our country. Political ideologies are one of the main drivers of this division. People who subscribe to an ideology that emphasizes individualism over socialization and equality over inequality are increasingly outnumbered by people with opposite views.

Another area where media has strong impacts is through its coverage of important issues. An example of this is the constant barrage of news stories telling us whether something or someone is good or bad for our health and wellbeing.

Given all these effects, it is no wonder that some feel overwhelmed by the amount of content media offers. There’s just too much information!

This article will focus on three major ways that media influences public opinion . These are: direct effect, indirect effect, and internal effect.

How the media affects public opinion

The way the media covers stories can have a significant impact on how people perceive events . Stories that are biased or overemphasized contribute to creating an emotional response in readers, viewers, and listeners.

This effect is very powerful because we trust sources more than we trust each other.

We look up to journalists as experts who tell us what’s going on through their lens of knowledge. Plus, they get paid for it!

So when they report about something, you should believe them. It's their job to know if what happened is important or not, so why shouldn't you?

But while there is some value in having reporters spread positive information , there is also value in being aware of all of the ways the media influences public opinion . This is your responsibility as an informed citizen.

It's your duty to do your part in protecting our democracy by using media literacy skills to evaluate reports, assess biases, and determine the true importance of a story.

Message boards

There are many ways that media influences public opinion , including through message board websites. Users of these sites become very invested in their beliefs or biases they already have before going into such forums.

Message board users typically look at pre-existing material to determine what stance an article or argument will get posted as a comment. Material that is controversial will always be left for someone to reply to, thus creating more discussion around the topic.

The way that people respond to comments also contributes to how much attention each side gets. If you read one bad thing about a product, then the opposite side’s comments will mostly focus on why the bad review is wrong and/or poor quality merchandise.

Regularly visiting such sites can lead to developing strong emotional ties to certain products. This influence is not only felt by those who own them, but also by those who simply like their style.

Social media

With the explosion of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, it is increasingly difficult to limit young people’s access to information. As we know, exposure to different messages can have an effect on someone’s perception of the world.

Social media has become one of the most important ways that children get messages about how to live their lives. Messages spread quickly within online communities so it is very easy to see what other people are doing and thinking.

Parents must be aware of this and make sure that they control which sites their kids use by creating limited accounts for them. This will help prevent false beliefs from developing.

It was found that before social media, only 10% of teens owned a smartphone. Now almost everyone does because it offers instant access to lots of information. Teens spend up to eight hours a day on average using smartphones, making it hard to avoid encountering propaganda.

On top of this, nearly half (46%) of all teenagers own at least one item with internet access, like a phone or computer. The vast majority of these teens (95%) say they use the internet for something more than just looking at pictures and videos; 64% report using the web for activities that require software, such as working, shopping, banking, and emailing.

If you want to protect your child from misinformation, teach them how to evaluate sources thoroughly and don’t let them watch television alone.

Recent events have shown how much influence the media has on public opinion. With the constant stream of information that people are exposed to, it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction – or propaganda.

The media is a powerful tool in society. They promote an agenda, which is influenced by who is paying for advertising or what political party they belong to. Technology now makes it easy to compare different sources and get different perspectives ; you don’t need to trust just one source.

As we know, the media is not always truthful, honest, or pure. Due to this, the general public does not trust the media as much as before. People believe the media is trying to push its own agenda and product.

There was a time when only major newspapers had enough readers to make a difference with their editorial content. Now anyone with a smartphone has access to online journalism. This means that even if someone doesn’t like your candidate or team, they can find out more about him or her than originally planned!

Another problem is false balance. A company will pay for advertisement space or airtime in an effort to spread knowledge and inform the audience of both sides of an argument. But because of money involved, they may lean towards only promoting one side .

What people read

People are increasingly relying on media to inform their opinions. As technology advances, individuals have access to more sources of information than ever before.

This is good as it allows for greater knowledge diversity and options for information. It also gives you the opportunity to choose whether or not to trust what source of information you find credible and convincing.

However, this trend raises concerns about how much influence major media corporations will have over public opinion. More and more companies are offering services that allow for personalized content, which may be more influential than general, mass-appeal publications.

Major publishers make money off of advertising, so they want your attention longer term – not just for an hour while you browse through the website. This creates potential problems when their messages are not in agreement with yours.

What people watch

People spend lots of time watching media , so it has a substantial influence on how they perceive the world. If you want to change someone’s opinion about something, then you have to expose them to different perspectives.

People who are very invested in an ideology may not be open to other points of view. They may even begin to believe their own propaganda because that is all they hear.

On the contrary, individuals with diverse backgrounds can learn things from various sources.

These lessons can contradict their original beliefs, which helps them reevaluate what they thought was true before. This process is important for anyone looking to enhance their knowledge or achieve their personal goals.

The more aware you are of one area, the better you will be at your job. It is equally valuable whether you are trying to convince others of a particular argument or yourself of a certain theory.

Political campaigns

A lot of people use media to evaluate how politically active or informed you are. Whether it is looking at your YouTube subscriptions, what brands you purchase products from, how many times you visit popular political websites , or even going through your Instagram profile, there are always eyes watching!

Political advertisements can be expensive, which is another reason why politicians will spend money to make sure they have enough exposure for their campaign.

Businesses gain an understanding of what voters care about by observing what types of ads get attention and then creating ads with similar messages or concepts.

For example, most people know about the dangers of smoking due to extensive advertising, so cigarette companies invest in ads that appeal to emotions like fear or hope. They want to influence your opinion so that you either choose to smoke or not – very powerful.

Another way advertisers try to sway public opinions is by sponsoring events or sports teams. By investing in this, the advertiser supports the team or event, and people who see the advertisement may feel more inclined to show support as well.

Personal experiences

Recent studies show that it is not just what people are being told to believe by the media, but also how they perceive things due to their personal experiences.

This effect seems particularly strong when it comes to political issues.

It was mentioned earlier in this article how different media sources can offer contradictory information, making it difficult for individuals to form an opinion.

But beyond this, individual members of the public have differing perceptions based on their own life experiences.

These experiences influence whether someone is more likely to be influenced by positive or negative effects of a situation, or if they develop feelings towards certain people or groups.

For example, someone who has lived through similar situations as another person may make assumptions about them based on their personality.

Alternatively, someone might assess those people based on something they read about them in the news or heard from a friend.

Whether these assessments are accurate or not doesn’t matter much because people bring into play all sorts of other factors when trying to determine who they feel will help them achieve their goals.

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POLSC101: Introduction to Political Science

How mass media forms public opinion.

As described in the last section, the "media" is considered an important agent of political socialization, as it can teach people certain political beliefs or values. Besides the socializing role, the media also serves as a "watchdog", drawing attention to government corruption or mistakes, which promotes government transparency and accountability. The media can also serve an agenda-setting role. By covering some news stories and not others, the media has the power to shape what people will think or talk about. Similarly, by "framing" a story from a particular perspective, the media often influences both public opinion and influence government leaders.

Media can have an important effect on public opinion in several ways.

Learning Objectives

Explain the different ways that the mass media forms public opinion

• Mass media frame the details of the story.
• Mass media communicate the social desirability of certain ideas.
• Mass media sets the news agenda, which shapes the public's views on what is newsworthy and important.
• Increasing scandal coverage, as well as profit-motivated sensationalist media coverage, has resulted in young people holding more negative, distrustful views of government than previous generations.
• framing: the construction and presentation of a fact or issue "framed" from a particular perspective
• mass media: The mass media are media technologies like broadcast media and print media that are designed to reach a large audience by mass communication.

Mass media effects on public opinion

• Setting the news agenda, which shapes the public's views on what is newsworthy and important
• Framing the details of a story
• Communicating the social desirability of certain kinds of ideas

The formation of public opinion starts with agenda-setting by major media outlets throughout the world. This agenda-setting dictates what is newsworthy and how and when it will be reported. The media agenda is set by a variety of different environmental and network factors that determines which stories will be newsworthy.

Another key component in the formation of public opinion is framing. Framing is when a story or piece of news is portrayed in a particular way and is meant to sway the consumers' attitude one way or the other. Most political issues are heavily framed in order to persuade voters to vote for a particular candidate. For example, if Candidate X once voted on a bill that raised income taxes on the middle class, a framing headline would read "Candidate X Doesn't Care About the Middle Class". This puts Candidate X in a negative frame to the newsreader.

Social desirability is another key component of the formation of public opinion. Social desirability is the idea that people in general will form their opinions based on what they believe is the popular opinion. Based on media agenda setting and media framing, most often a particular opinion gets repeated throughout various news mediums and social networking sites until it creates a false vision where the perceived truth is actually very far away from the actual truth.

Public opinion can be influenced by public relations and political media. Additionally, mass media utilizes a wide variety of advertising techniques to get their message out and change the minds of people. Since the 1950s, television has been the main medium for molding public opinion, though the internet is becoming increasingly important in this realm.

Using Media to Influence Public Opinion

After the tumultuous Watergate scandal, President Gerald R. Ford engaged the media to positively influence public opinion about the presidency.

Social Studies, U.S. History

Gerald R. Ford became the 38th President of the United States after Richard Nixon resigned due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Ford set out almost im mediately to rebuild the public ’s broken image of the presidency.

Gerald and Betty Ford reached the American people through media such as television, newspapers, and radio. President Ford granted the media access to his day-to-day activities. Betty Ford also stepped into the public arena, lending her voice to causes such as the Equal Rights Amendment.

Gerald and Betty Ford’s increased visibility, as they opened up their life through media, began to restore the public’s trust in the presidency.

• After assuming the presidency upon Richard Nixon’s resignation, Gerald R. Ford amassed a 71 percent approval rating.
• Betty Ford held press conferences and answered questions about women in politics, abortion rights, and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
• In September of 1974, Betty Ford was diagnosed with breast cancer and disclosed her medical condition to the world—an act that broke social conventions of the time.

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Media effects on public opinion.

Because there are various concepts of public opinion there are no general statements about the effects of mass media on it. Instead, the effects of mass media have to be related to specific concepts. Moreover, different study designs and methods have to be taken into consideration. According to the quantitative concept , public opinion is regarded as the distribution of individual opinions within a population and measured by representative opinion polls. According to this approach, the intensity and tone of media coverage directly influence public opinion. Most studies are based on a linear-effect model: the more often the media cover an issue, the more people believe it to be important; and the more often the media present certain opinions, the more people adopt these opinions. The intensity and tone of media coverage are measured by quantitative content analysis. In some studies, they are not measured but estimated; possible effects are concluded from media use (Robinson 1976). As well as the intensity and tone of media coverage, the framing of news stories can influence public opinion. Framing refers to the media’s reporting of issues or events structured along certain perspectives, and to the audience’s processing of that content according to predetermined schemas. As demonstrated in several studies, people’s interpretations and conclusions are mostly in line with media frames.

Media Effects In The Quantitative Concept Of Public Opinion

Methodological designs.

The assumed influence of media coverage on public opinion can be analyzed using cross-sectional or longitudinal designs. In cross-sectional designs , the distribution of media coverage on several issues, or the distribution of various opinions on one issue, is compared over a short period of time (several days or weeks) to the distribution of corresponding opinions within the population.

In longitudinal designs , the development of intensity and/or tone of media coverage on individual issues (or persons, institutions, etc.) during a rather long period of time (several months or years) is compared to the development of corresponding opinions (Ader 1995). In most studies, general trends in media coverage are compared with general trends in public opinion (aggregate data analysis). Here, the intensity of media use and the type of coverage presented by different mass media is neglected (MacKuen 1981; Page & Shapiro 1992, pp. 341–347). In a few studies, based on the intensity of individual media use and the type of coverage presented by the relevant media, an index of media input is calculated and related to opinions held by individuals (individual data analysis; Kepplinger et al. 1991). If media coverage has an effect on public opinion, trends in public opinion should be predictable from data about trends of media coverage. This has been done using advanced mathematical models of the relationship between causes and effects (Fan 1988; Zaller 1992).

As the term implies, media coverage is related to something which gets covered – events, opinions, etc. Media coverage might or might not present an adequate picture of the distribution of opinions or the changing number of certain events in the course of time. Some people might have first-hand information about the reality covered by the media, others might not. Opinions can be influenced by either individual experience or media coverage, or by both sources of information. In these cases information based on personal experience can contradict or support information provided by the mass media. Depending on the mixture of information, personal experience can minimize or maximize media effects. Therefore, several authors have tried to separate the relative influence of real-world indicators and media coverage on public opinion (Combs & Slovic 1979; Erbring et al. 1980; Behr & Iyengar 1985).

Influence On Behaviors

Media-induced public opinion may influence behavior . For example, in the early seventies the coverage of German news media painted a picture showing that a breakdown of the oil supply in the country was ahead – although there was enough crude oil in stock. Because people became concerned they took precautions and bought unusual quantities of gasoline and diesel, which in turn led to scattered bottlenecks in delivery and sharp price increases. Six years later, when the quantity of imported oil really had dropped considerably, the media rarely covered this development and, in consequence, the population did not become concerned and did not change their habits (Kepplinger 1983).

Media-induced images of reality are also relevant for voting decisions. For example, although in 1992 there was an economic upturn in the US, the television networks presented the situation of the economy as twice as bad as in the previous year. Thus most Americans thought of the economic situation as bad (Ladd 1993). Since the assessment of the economic situation has a strong impact on the image of leading politicians, George Bush’s popularity went into free-fall and challenger Bill Clinton won the election (Katz & Baldassare 1994).

Influence On Social Perception

According to the functional concept of public opinion, societies need a consensus on some basic issues. A consensus can only be achieved if at least a significant minority accepts which issue should be discussed, and if the formation of opinions is based on individual insight (see below) or on social forces. The functional concept stresses the importance of the latter. In this case, media coverage can be regarded as an intervening variable which modifies the psychological dynamic of opinion formation. As Walter Lippmann (Lippmann 1922) and others have stressed, the pictures in our heads about groups, events, and the like are often attended with representations of how other people think about these objects. Likewise one’s own opinions, attitudes, and intended behavior are seen in the light of the positions held by others. The formation of public opinion thus emerges from the individual’s actual interaction with other people together with the symbolic interaction with generalized others; both influence one’s own opinions and behavior.

Perceptions of how most other people think stem from the individual’s direct experience, mainly through conversation, as well as indirectly from the media. Media coverage therefore influences not only how people imagine politicians, whom they have rarely met personally, for example, but also how they imagine the climate of opinion (Fields & Schuman 1976; Gunther 1998). The perception of the climate of opinion can affect whether people are willing to speak out in public or whether they keep silent. For example, in the eighties the German news media covered nuclear energy unfavorably. In consequence, an increasing part of the population thought the majority would oppose nuclear power plants. Supporters of nuclear energy were decreasingly willing to voice their position in public. In the course of ten years the relative majority of supporters became a minority while the initial minority of opponents became the relative majority (Noelle-Neumann 1991).

If the mass media present an inadequate picture of the distribution of opinion in society, they may convince members of the minority that they represent the majority opinion and make members of the majority believe they belong to a minority. These conclusions might be suggested by most people’s conviction that the media have a stronger impact on other people than on themselves. This in turn can influence individuals’ willingness to express their opinions in public (Mutz 1989), and thus explain the emergence of a silent majority: through the agency of the mass media the views of elites and avant-gardes may incorrectly appear as being widely held. The minority position can thus appear as a majority opinion, which causes the actual majority to keep silent or reduces their willingness to speak out.

Media Role In The Qualitative Concept Of Public Opinion

According to the qualitative concept public opinion is the consequence of intellectual insights. In this approach the media serve as a forum for discourse, and media coverage is not primarily seen as the cause of opinions but as the prerequisite of reasonable conclusions (Habermas 1989). Because only a small portion of the population is interested in such discourse and has enough knowledge to take part (Neuman 1986), the qualitative concept is also referred to as the “elite concept of public opinion.”

According to the qualitative concept, media coverage and public opinion are more or less identical. This is especially true for the coverage of high-quality media such as the leading newspapers. Therefore, public opinion can be deduced from media coverage. This is an idea held by many politicians, who often distrust opinion polls (Herbst 1998). As far as media coverage shapes the opinions of the majority, there are similarities between the qualitative and quantitative concept that have largely been neglected: present trends in media coverage can be interpreted as future trends in mass opinions. For instance, the spread of minority positions in society can be analyzed by multi-step models which include direct and indirect media effects on various types of individuals and groups (Hilgartner & Bosk 1988).

References:

• Ader, C. R. (1995). A longitudinal study of agenda setting for the issue of environmental pollution. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly , 72, 300–311.
• Behr, R. L., & Iyengar, S. (1985). Television news, real-world cues, and changes in the public agenda. Public Opinion Quarterly , 49, 38–57.
• Combs, B., & Slovic, P. (1979). Newspaper coverage of causes of death. Journalism Quarterly , 56, 837–843.
• Erbring, L., Goldenberg, E. N., & Miller, A. H. (1980). Front-page news and real-world cues: A new look at agenda-setting by the media. American Journal of Political Science , 24, 16–49.
• Fan, D. P. (1988). Predictions of public opinion from the mass media: Computer content analysis and mathematical modeling . New York: Greenwood.
• Fields, J. M., & Schuman, H. (1976). Public beliefs about the beliefs of the public. Public Opinion Quarterly , 40, 427–448.
• Gunther, A. C. (1998). The persuasive press inference: Effects of mass media on perceived public opinion. Communication Research , 25, 486–504.
• Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society . Cambridge, MA: MIT, Press.
• Herbst, S. (1998). Reading public opinion: How political actors view the democratic process . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Hilgartner, S., & Bosk, C. L. (1988). The rise and fall of social problems: A public arenas model. American Journal of Sociology , 94, 53–78.
• Katz, C., & Baldassare, M. (1994). Popularity in a freefall: Measuring a spiral of silence at the end of the Bush presidency. International Journal of Public Opinion Research , 6, 1–12.
• Kepplinger, H. M. (1983). German media and oil supply in 1978 and 1979. In N. Smith & L. J. Theberge (eds.), Energy coverage – media panic: An international perspective . New York: Longman, pp. 22–49.
• Kepplinger, H. M., Brosius, H.-B., & Staab, J. F. (1991). Opinion formation in mediated conflicts and crises: A theory of cognitive-affective media effects. International Journal of Public Opinion Research , 3, 132–156.
• Ladd, E. C. (1993). The 1992 US National Election. International Journal of Public Opinion Research , 5, 1–21.
• Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion . New York: Macmillan.
• MacKuen, M. B. (1981). Social communication and the mass policy agenda. In M. B. MacKuen & S. L. Coombs (eds.), More than news: Media power in public affairs . London: Sage, pp. 19–144.
• Mutz, D. C. (1989). The influence of perceptions of media influence: Third person effects and the public expression of opinions. International Journal of Public Opinion Research , 1, 3–23.
• Neuman, R. W. (1986). The paradox of mass politics: Knowledge and opinion in the American electorate . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Noelle-Neumann, E. (1991). The theory of public opinion: The concept of the spiral of silence. In J. A. Anderson (ed.), Communication yearbook , 14. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, pp. 256–287.
• Page, B. J., & Shapiro, R. I. (1992). The rational public: Fifty years of trends in Americans’ policy preferences . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Robinson, M. J. (1976). Public affairs in television and the growth of political malaise: The case of “The selling of the Pentagon.” American Political Science Review , 70, 409–432.
• Zaller, J. (1992). The nature and origins of mass opinion . Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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8 How the News Media Persuades: Framing Effects and Beyond

Thomas J. Leeper, London School of Economics and Political Science

Rune Slothuus, Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University

• Published: 06 November 2019
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Framing research has greatly advanced our understanding of how mass communication shapes public opinion and political behavior. However, the dominance of the framing concept has limited integration across different theoretical approaches and concepts like priming, belief change, and persuasion, leading to theoretical confusion and empirical sloppiness. This chapter proposes a way to integrate various approaches to media effects and obtain more coherent, cumulative knowledge on how mass communication shapes political opinion. First, it distinguishes framing from other concepts, most notably persuasion, using the expectancy-value model as a common framework. Second, it discusses the implications of this more rigorous conceptualization for research design and offers an example of an experiment disentangling emphasis framing and persuasive information. Third, it highlights promising avenues for mass communication research emphasizing competition, dynamics over time, and struggle between political parties as key features of democratic politics.

A quarter century ago, Mutz, Sniderman, and Brody ( 1996 , 1) called for the creation of “political persuasion” as a distinctive field of study, arguing that, “even today, despite all the notable studies that have been accomplished, it is difficult to point to a body of cumulative studies establishing who can be talked out of what political positions and how.” Much was at stake, they asserted, because a fundamental premise of democratic politics is the ubiquitous attempts by political entrepreneurs and citizens alike to influence the preferences and behaviors of others through communication: “Politics, at its core, is about persuasion.”

Even though it is debatable how distinct the study of political persuasion is from work on attitude change in general (Fabrigar and Petty 1999 ), democratic politics has several important features that scholars need to take into account to adequately understand how and under what conditions mass communication will influence political opinion and behavior. Most notably, political communication usually takes place in competitive environments where multiple actors try to push their message (Chong and Druckman 2007b ; Sniderman and Theriault 2004 ). Politics, moreover, is inherently dynamic, with competing communications being delivered over time, and the timing of messages and their effects can be pivotal (e.g., around elections and major policy decisions) (de Vreese and Semetko 2004 ; Druckman and Leeper 2012 ). Likewise, competition in the realm of politics primarily takes place as a partisan struggle between political parties (e.g., in elections and as key sources in the news) with citizen audiences sensitive to the partisan sources of messages (Slothuus and de Vreese 2010 ).

How far have we come toward establishing a field of political persuasion research? In one sense, not very far. Still today it is difficult to see an integrated, cumulative body of research on “who can be talked out of what political positions and how.” In another sense, however, research on mass communication effects on political opinion and behavior has made remarkable progress over the past decades, just under a different name: framing research. Over the past decades, there has been a dramatic growth in published studies on framing (Scheufele and Iyengar 2017 ), and this research has brought us a long way in understanding how citizens’ political opinions and behaviors are affected by the way communicators choose to frame—that is, selectively present and interpret—political issues and events. Furthermore, this work has illuminated how framing effects are conditioned by factors like the type of frame, the source promoting the frame, audience characteristics, context and timing of delivering the frame (e.g., one-sided framing versus competing frames), and more (for comprehensive reviews, see Busby, Flynn, and Druckman 2018 ; Chong and Druckman 2007a ; de Vreese and Lecheler 2012 ; Lecheler and de Vreese 2018 ; Nelson, Bryner, and Carnahan 2011 ).

The success of framing research is impressive and has helped us advance a much deeper understanding of how political communication through the news media shapes public opinion and political behavior. However, a downside of the dominance of the framing concept in literature on mass communication and political opinion is a limited integration across different theoretical approaches and related communication concepts. Worse, the same labels—especially “framing”—have been subject to considerable conceptual slippage (Caciattore, Scheufele, and Iyengar 2016 ), leading to theoretical confusion and empirical sloppiness. Yet, as we will argue in this chapter, this confusion is unnecessary as a reasonably coherent theory of mass communication effects that entails simply the transmission of information and the emphasis upon distinct considerations can encompass nearly all of the processes that have been called framing, priming, belief change, and persuasion. Furthermore, we suggest that taking conceptual distinctions seriously—and developing empirical designs accordingly—will deepen our understanding of precisely how and why news media work to influence opinion. In fact, following one such more rigorous approach, we find that much of the apparent extant experimental evidence for framing is evidence for information-driven persuasion rather than emphasis framing.

Our aim with this chapter is to propose some steps toward better integration between various approaches to media effects and more cumulative development of knowledge on how mass communication shapes political opinion. We proceed in three steps. First, we review the usage of the framing concept and explain how it can be distinguished from other concepts, most notably persuasion. This leads us to elaborate the expectancy-value model as a common framework for how to integrate various types of communication effects. In this model, opinions reflect a mix of durable balances of affective and/or cognitive considerations that can be temporarily or permanently adjusted by exposure to new information. Second, we discuss the implications of this more rigorous conceptualization for research design and offer an example of how an experiment disentangling emphasis framing and persuasive information can be designed accordingly. Third, we highlight some promising avenues for further research on questions vitally important for understanding the political aspects of mass communication effects. In the end, our goal is to inspire further development toward a coherent, cumulative literature on political persuasion broadly conceived.

The Concept of Framing and a General Framework

Framing is commonly thought of as one among many types of media effects, with persuasion, priming, and agenda-setting and sometimes cueing pointed to as alternative ways that media might influence the public (Iyengar and Kinder 1987 ; Kinder 2003 ). 1 These varied forms of media influence differ in their emphasis on informational richness, depth or durability of influence, and the outcomes thought to be affected by media inputs. That there are so many alternative views of how, when, and in what ways the news media can influence opinion and behavior reflects a long-running and now familiar distinction between the traditions of “maximal” and “minimal” effects. Some scholars have believed that media can have pervasive, deep, and indeed “hypodermic” influence on the content of citizens’ thinking and their opinions toward objects in the social and political world. Others are more skeptical, taking a view that media are shallowly, temporarily, and/or only partially influential on these kinds of outcomes. The maximalist and minimalist schools of thought have waxed and waned over the past century of theorizing and the debate continues to this day (Bennett and Iyengar 2008 ; Holbert, Garrett, and Gleason 2010 ). Yet there remains little controversy over the core belief that media can—at least sometimes, in some ways—influence public views, opinions, and behaviors.

Emphasis Framing Defined

At the core of debates about media effects lies one of the most important, but most confused, concepts in the social sciences: framing. This concept is used in different ways across disciplines (for reviews, see de Vreese and Lecheler 2012 ; Druckman 2001 ; Kinder 2003 ), and recent scholars have gone so far as to argue that the concept should be abandoned as its meaning is lost in a confusion of alternative definition (Caciattore, Scheufele, and Iyengar 2016 ). Scheufele and Iyengar ( 2017 , 620) describe the framing literature as in a “state of conceptual confusion” where “any attribute of information is treated as a frame and any response from the audience is deemed a framing effect. From this perspective, framing cannot be distinguished from other forms of media or social influence such as agenda setting, learning or persuasion” (also see Chong and Druckman 2007a , 115–116; de Vreese and Lecheler 2012 , 299). While we agree with this diagnosis, we disagree with Scheufele and Iyengar’s prescription to focus on only one variant of framing: equivalence framing.

Equivalence framing presents an issue in different ways by using “different, but logically equivalent, words or phrases” (Druckman 2001 , 228). An example of this is how Kahneman and Tversky ( 1984 ) frame the effectiveness of a program to combat “an unusual Asian disease” in terms of 200 out of 600 people who “will be saved,” or in terms of 400 out of 600 people who “will die.” While we appreciate the precision in this type of frame, equivalence framing is clearly not the most widespread in the news media. Most work on framing effects in politics has instead focused on “emphasis framing” (Druckman 2001 ); hence, we concentrate on this type of framing.

Despite the muddle, (emphasis) framing remains a highly useful concept. Rather than be abandoned, we believe that its original meaning should clarified and its theoretical implications put to greater use. To make this concrete, we think there is a remarkable degree of clarity and consistency among early research on emphasis framing regarding the definition of both “framing” and a “framing effect.” In studies of how frames influence public opinion, a frame is “an emphasis in salience of some aspects of a topic” (de Vreese 2003 , 27), it “suggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue” (Gamson and Modigliani 1987 , 143), and it stresses “specific elements or features of the broader controversy, reducing a usually complex issue to one or two central aspects” (Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley 1997 , 568). A frame is simply an organizing idea, dimension, or principle that colors interpretations of an issue. 2

However, this familiar usage is not the most precise definition. Indeed, an emphasis frame is better defined more narrowly as a message that provides an interpretation of an issue or policy by emphasizing which aspect of the issue is relevant for evaluating it, without the frame itself providing any new substantive information about the issue (Nelson, Oxley, and Clawson 1997 ; Price and Tewksbury 1997 ). As Kinder ( 2003 , 359) summarizes, “It might be said that in pure form, frames supply no new information. Rather, by offering a particular perspective, frames organize —or better, reorganize —information that citizens already have in mind. Frames suggest how politics should be thought about, encouraging citizens to understand events and issues in particular ways.” 3

It is here that we make an important distinction, often muddled in discussions of framing and communication effects generally, between emphasis and information : frames provide a lens through which to characterize and understand an issue. Frames may therefore be relatively devoid of information, merely guiding audiences to think about that which they already know (i.e., frames may be mere emphasis), or they may be information-rich in a way that focuses only on a subset of considerations relevant to an issue (i.e., frames may entail information and emphasis). Even without providing new information—but merely emphasizing existing considerations—frames can matter because citizens often possess a mix of considerations that could be used to form an opinion on a given issue. These considerations might point in different directions, each pushing the individual to support or oppose the issue (Chong 1993 ; Feldman and Zaller 1992 ), thus “leaving citizens often confused and conflicted about where to stand . . . Frames help to resolve this confusion by declaring which of the many considerations is relevant and important, and which should be given less attention” (Nelson and Kinder 1996 , 1058). Accordingly, a framing effect on opinion “occurs when in the course of describing an issue or event, a speaker’s emphasis on a subset of potentially relevant considerations causes individuals to focus on these considerations when constructing their opinions” (Druckman and Nelson 2003 , 730; emphasis added).

This practical distinction between mere emphasis and information has been used to argue that framing should be understood as emphasis only, in contrast to other processes of media effects such as persuasion effects that work through the transmission of new information. Using the distinction between emphasis and information, it is clear that framing stands in sharp contrast to the traditional direct influence theory of persuasion. Indeed, persuasion means changing people’s opinions by “the supply of arguments and evidence through which people are induced to change their minds about some aspect of politics” (Kinder 2003 , 367; see also Chong and Druckman 2007a , 115; Zaller 1992 , 118).

The Expectancy-Value Model as a Framework for Mass Communication Effects

To appreciate the distinction between emphasis framing and information-based persuasion, we suggest using the expectancy-value model of attitude formation (Ajzen and Fishbein 1980 ) as a general framework for understanding mass communication effects. This psychological theory was first introduced to the framing literature by Nelson, Oxley, and Clawson ( 1997 , 225–228) and further elaborated by Chong and Druckman ( 2007a , 105–106; also see Jerit 2009 , 412; Slothuus 2008 ). Despite drawing on the expectancy-value model, framing scholars have maintained a focus on the emphasis component while doing less to illuminate the component regarding the content of information. In the expectancy-value model, an opinion toward an object (e.g., a policy) reflects the weighted sum of a set of evaluative beliefs about that object:

where consideration i is the evaluative belief on dimension i and weight i is the subjective weight or importance the individual attaches to that consideration. The first component of opinion is considerations, that is, “any reason that might induce an individual to decide a political issue one way or the other” (Zaller 1992 , 41). The second component of opinion is emphasis : the weight of importance or salience attached to particular considerations. Using this model, an opinion toward, for example, a healthcare policy might be the result of a positive consideration that the policy will improve patients’ health (i.e., a reason to support the policy) and a negative consideration that it will increase costs (i.e., a reason to oppose the policy). Depending on the relative weight or importance an individual attaches to each of these considerations, opinion on the policy might be positive, negative, or neutral. And while these examples of considerations are cognitive in nature, such considerations might also be purely affective or running tally evaluative summaries of previously encountered information (Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh 1989 ).

This psychological model highlights that there are necessarily two processes by which opinions might change: change in the content of opinion-relevant considerations (i.e., information) and change in the weights attached to considerations already in memory (i.e., emphasis). Indeed, persuasion theory explains opinion change to occur when, “ in light of new information , people come to think that the president is smarter than he first seemed, or that school segregation is ineffective and should be abandoned” (Kinder 2003 , 367; emphasis added). In the previous example, persuasive information might alter the content of considerations to make an individual think that the specific policy will do little to improve the health of patients and, in turn, decrease policy support.

We suspect research on media effects using related concepts or different theoretical approaches will benefit from using the expectancy-value model as an integrative framework. First, using the expectancy-value model to distinguish between emphasis framing and persuasion effects highlights why it might be problematic that the majority of studies of mass communication effects in politics have focused on framing, or at least have been presented as framing studies. Even though changing opinions by altering the content of citizens’ considerations might be as important as changing opinions by altering the emphasis on each consideration, the dominance of framing means that we know much more about one half of the model—the emphasis framing component—than about the other half involving persuasive information to change content of considerations. To the extent that “framing studies” are indeed only about the emphasis component of this model, comparatively fewer studies have explicitly studied the role of arguments (Cobb and Kuklinski 1997 ), although some recent work studies the influence of policy information (Boudreau and MacKenzie 2014 ; Bullock 2011 ). Consequently, we still need to know much more about how arguments can be used to change citizens’ opinion and behavior and what the comparable effects of attempts to frame and persuade are.

Second, bearing the logic of the expectancy-value model in mind can help scholars be more consistent not only in conceptualization but also in the empirical testing of media effects. Rather than merely emphasizing a dimension in order to activate existing considerations, many experimental framing studies as part of their “framing stimulus” provide new information that could modify the content of considerations. An example from our own work is the study by Druckman and Leeper ( 2012 ) on opinion toward the Patriot Act. In their experiment, the policy was framed as either about “weakening the protection of citizens’ civil liberties” or a way “to identify terrorist plots on American soil and to prevent attacks before they occur.” In addition to emphasizing these alternative dimensions of the issue, however, the experimental manipulations presented study participants with different information about policy content—either, in the former framing condition, that under the Patriot Act, “the government has access to citizens’ confidential information from telephone and e-mail communications” or, in the latter framing condition, that “the government has more resources for counterterrorism, surveillance, border protection, and other security policies.” This combination of framing and information creates an experimental confound that muddles the means through which opinions in the study changed.

This operational confounding of framing and information in many political communication experiments is further confused by the sometimes casual use of “frames” and “arguments” as interchange synonyms (e.g., Chong and Druckman 2007b , 641; Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus 2013 , 57). Such design features make extant emphasis framing studies vulnerable to the alternative interpretation that their results showcase effects on opinion that are, at least partly, caused by variation in the content of information, not emphasis alone. That is to say, they might manipulate the persuasive information along with the framing, blurring the two causes of opinion formation. As a way forward, we hope revitalizing the expectancy-value model can help to call attention to the persuasive information component of mass communication as well as lead to more careful experimental and observational research designs.

Improving Fit between Theoretical Concepts and Empirical Design

As we have explained, emphasis framing effects are theorized to occur through changes in the weights individuals put on their existing considerations about an issue. Yet there has been a remarkable lack of clean empirical testing of framing effects on opinion formation. The empirical testing of framing has rarely, if ever, followed the strict definition of framing as purely about changing the emphasis or importance of a belief, not the content of beliefs. Instead, existing framing studies—whether experimental or observational—have assessed the impact of framing by varying both information (e.g., factual policy information and persuasive arguments) and emphasis. Hence, it is difficult to know if what we have taken from extant literature to be framing effects are really caused by the framing alone and not by the provision of information and arguments embedded in stimuli meant to induce emphasis on a subset of those considerations.

Our solution has been experimental designs that cleanly separate the communication of new information from the communication of emphasis on a subset of issue-relevant considerations. One possible strategy for doing so would be to measure individuals’ pre-existing beliefs about an issue and then later randomly assign participants to experiences that emphasize distinct subsets of those considerations. That strategy, however, suffers from numerous limitations. For one, considerations may be affective or contain a mix of affective and cognitive elements, leading people to express few beliefs about a given dimension even though it may factor in their subsequent opinions. Another is that information about issues is not likely to be evenly or arbitrarily distributed in the public—individuals who have particular beliefs about an issue are likely to be different from individuals who hold other beliefs about the same issue, due to previous media experiences or deliberation.

To overcome these limitations, we have developed a two-stage experimental design that manipulates beliefs through the provision of information and separately manipulates emphasis on different issue dimensions through a later stimulus that provisions no new information (Leeper and Slothuus n.d. ). In one of our experiments, we provide information about an issue by randomly exposing individuals to different combinations of information about the cost and impact of an electronic medical records policy. Specifically, we tell respondents:

The first study you will participate in is about the quality of journalism. We are interested in how well journalists write about the news. You will read a few short excerpts from a news article and then we will ask you some questions to see how well you understood what was written.

We are asking different people to read articles on different topics. You are being asked to read excerpts from an article about electronic medical records.

We then expose them to one of five informational conditions that describe the policy as (1) Low Cost/Low Impact, (2) High Cost/Low Impact, (3) Low Cost/High Impact, or (4) High Cost/High Impact; we also include a control condition that receives no information about the policy. Thus respondents in conditions 1–4 all have been exposed to the same set of issue dimensions but the belief content along each of those dimensions is randomly varied. 4

We then later, independently, assign respondents to either a “cost emphasis” or “impact emphasis” condition, creating a 5x2 full factorial design. In the cost emphasis condition we lead respondents to think about the issue in terms of costs without providing any information about those costs :

Some support the proposal. Others are opposed because they say that we should judge the proposal based on whether it is costly. Indeed, much of the debate over the proposal now revolves around the question of costs.

Based on whether you think the proposal will mean higher or lower costs, to what extent do you favor or oppose this proposal?

The manipulation emphasizing patient impact is similar:

Some support the proposal. Others are opposed because they say that we should judge the proposal based on whether it will affect the health of average Americans. Indeed, much of the debate over the proposal now revolves around the question of the proposal’s impact on patients’ health.

Based on whether you think the proposal will have a large or small impact on patients’ health, to what extent do you favor or oppose this proposal?

In each case, the emphasis manipulation simply and cleaning asks respondents to emphasize and give weight to the cost (or impact) considerations related to the policy, without providing them information about that dimension. We thus obtain a clean estimate of the emphasis framing effect, stratified by all possible combinations of beliefs individuals might hold about the policy. Figure 8.1 displays treatment group means and standard errors for all conditions.

Mean opinion by information and emphasis condition.

Note: Points are mean levels of policy support, by information and framing conditions. Gray points represent cost frame conditions and black points represent impact frame conditions. Bars represent one and two standard errors of the treatment group mean.

The results are strikingly clear, along the vertical axis are the five informational conditions, with the gray dot corresponding to respondents assigned to the cost emphasis condition and the black dot corresponding to the respondents assigned to the impact emphasis condition. While the treatment group means vary considerably across the various information conditions—with those in the high cost/low impact condition being particularly unfavorable to the policy, and those in the low cost/high impact condition being particularly favorable—the variation within each informational condition across the cost versus impact emphasis is small. Indeed, in the control condition and the two high cost information conditions, there is no difference whatsoever in opinions between those framed to emphasize cost and those framed to emphasize impact. Only in the low cost conditions is there an apparent framing effect, but the differences in each case are 0.05–0.06 on a 0–1 scale, the equivalent of one-third of a response scale category.

This experiment—and several others like it reported in Leeper and Slothuus ( n.d. )—demonstrate both the inferential limitations of traditional framing experiments and the value of cleanly conceptualizing and operationalizing the expectancy-value model of opinion formation. Whereas past work is typically unable to disentangle any impact of emphasis alone from any impact of information alone on opinion formation, our experimental design separately manipulates each, while holding emphasis constant in the informational manipulation and providing no new information in a separate emphasis manipulation. This approach shows that “framing” as typically discussed and studied in the experimental literature likely works through the transmission of new information rather than through emphasis alone (Leeper and Slothuus n.d ). Indeed, given that almost any political message is likely to contain both emphasis framing and the transmission of new information, the traditional view of framing as emphasis only is less useful than it might seem. Taking account of both components of the expectancy-value model of framing effects is likely to be a much more fruitful empirical foundation for future research than treating framing as a stylized, emphasis-only process.

What is Next for Research on Framing and Beyond?

The concept of framing has powered a significant theoretical and empirical advancement in the study of both media effects and opinion formation. The next generation of framing research has many questions left to answer and we discuss some of these possible directions next. We have already suggested one clear step forward: better conceptualization and experimental design that cleanly disentangles the information and emphasis components of framing’s underlying expectancy-value theory. This will require much more careful experimental work, more serious attention to the impacts of specific information and arguments apart from any emphasis they entail, and perhaps a greater reliance on a mixture of methods for understanding how communication processes are used in real-world politics. More broadly, the most important next directions for framing research relate to efforts to improve the realism of framing experiments and the degree to which framing theory can explain the political realities that surround and accompany framing processes. We suggest framing researchers should focus on four main avenues for improved realism: generalizability of results, over-time dynamics, competitive and partisan framing, and the strategic construction and dissemination of frames.

Generalizability of Results

Some of the most important questions related to empirical research on framing effects address questions of how well existing results generalize beyond the particular contexts, individuals, issues, and frames used in past research. While framing constitutes a general theory of media effects and framing effects should materialize in a broad array of political contexts, there is little reason to believe that a set of frames will all have similar sized effects on individuals with different sets of beliefs or ideology or similar sized effects across different issues. These questions are profoundly important because the answers tell us about how politically important framing effects can be regardless of how large the effects of some frames appear to be in laboratory-like settings.

Indeed, there is remarkably little research on framing effects across political contexts. With a few exceptions—like Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley’s ( 1997 ) classic hate rally experiment—few published framing studies have been replicated in other geographical locales, on different populations, or amid different political contexts. This may not matter if effects are relatively homogeneous across these various contextual variations but lacking evidence, we simply do not know whether that is the case. Similarly, while framing research has traditionally been performed mostly on convenience samples, national populations of survey-experimental respondents are now commonly used for studying framing. At broad glance, it does not appear that the sample characteristics used in framing experiments have dramatically affected the insights gained from these experimental studies (see, for example, Mullinix et al. 2015 ) but again lacking more systematic research on the question, we do not know much framing effects vary across types of samples.

More interesting questions about the generalizability or replicability of framing effects results relate to variation in effects across issues and across frames themselves. Given most framing research examines a single frame—or two alternative frames—on a single issue, there is markedly little research examining how frames affect opinion across types of issues. Observational research (Bjarnøe 2016 ; Boydstun 2013 ; Chong and Druckman 2011 ; Hänggli 2020 ; Hopkins 2018 ) has shown that on most issues, relatively few frames tend to quickly come to dominate most debates. As a result, the set of applicable and broadly recognizable frames for any given issue tends to be quite small. It is these frames that are typically used in experimental studies or pilot tests to determine the even smaller set of frames used. As a result, there are substantial gaps between the set of frames that appear to emerge organically in political debates, the sets of frames studied experimentally, and the universe of possible frames that might be applied to any given issue. Systematic attempts to map the political issue space provide a potential basis for identifying the set of issues that might be studied in framing research, but it is comparatively much more difficult to identify the set of frames that might possibly be relevant to a given issue. As a result, research—both observational and experimental—will necessarily tend to examine frames that are in some sense strong , leading us to believe that framing is quite impactful when in reality we only know that strong frames are quite impactful.

Yet despite our knowledge being limited in this way, we tend to lack insight into what makes frames strong. To know that, we would need to study a broader set of frames across a wide array of issues in order to assess which combinations of frames and issues (and people and contexts) generate large framing effects as opposed to smaller effects. Yet even this hypothetical issue-by-frame matrix of experiments will only generate a pattern of experimental results—it will not answer the essential question of why particular frames are strong for particular issues. Indeed, that question invites tautological answers: strong frames produce large effects because they are stronger than weak frame. An alternative would be to use a theory-driven approach that deductively arrives upon likely strong frames and evaluates whether theoretical expectations about features of strong frames hold empirically.

Over-Time Processes

A second area of framing research in need of considerably more theoretical and empirical attention relates to how temporal dynamics influence framing processes. While Chong and Druckman ( 2010 , 663) pointed out that “[w]e know little about how the public processes sequences of messages received at different points in time rather than simultaneously,” there has been remarkably little subsequent research examining such processes. Druckman and Leeper ( 2012 ) showed that once exposed to messages, individuals respond to subsequent information exposure in different ways conditional on the strength of the opinions formed initially. Lecheler and de Vreese ( 2013 ) prominently used experimental manipulations of message exposure embedded within long-running panel surveys to measure the durability of framing effects and the degree to which repeated exposure impacts opinions. Those studies demonstrated that repetitive exposure to messages alone does not increase opinion shifts while any effects that do emerge in response to media exposure decay over relatively short periods of time.

Yet this constitutes a relatively small body of theoretical and empirical work that only scratches the surface of possible over-time dynamics associated with opinion formation. More complex interplays between message exposure, message selection (see, for example, Druckman, Fein, and Leeper 2012 ), and opinion formation are not well understood. The reasons for this are obvious: it is costly and difficult to repeatedly interview the same individuals and to design experimental stimuli that play out over multiple, time-separated sessions. Yet the increasingly—indeed almost universal—reliance on online survey panels mitigates many of the logistic challenges involved in such research, albeit with potentially high costs. Logistical challenges aside, framing researchers should also work to develop richer theoretical explanations of over-time framing processes where new information is received in sequences rather than simultaneously, where considerations are emphasized by different actors in a strategic interplay, and where opinions are allowed to evolve in more naturalistic ways.

Acknowledging Partisan Competition

This realism with respect to over-time dynamics of framing is also likely to naturally invite what we see as a third key direction for framing research: greater attention to competitive framing, particularly competitive framing between partisan actors. As Leeper and Slothuus ( 2014 , 130) argued, political psychology must be understood as partisan political psychology. Our efforts to understand how citizens think, reason, and feel about politics is necessarily inseparable from the partisan nature of politics. Framing theory should be viewed in the same light. Bullock ( 2011 , 511) notes that political parties “rarely take a position without trying to frame it in a way that will garner support for it.” Thus, it is difficult to talk of “framing effects” without considering how those influences might vary across different (typically partisan) sources and across different (typically partisan) message recipients.

Some studies have begun to explore how framing effects are conditioned by the political parties sponsoring the frames (Slothuus and de Vreese 2010 ). Others show how citizens’ prior issue beliefs might constrain the ability of political parties to frame opinion even among their own supporters (Slothuus 2010 ) or how the structure of partisan competition might help citizens connect their values to specific policies (Petersen, Slothuus, and Togeby 2010 ). Another strand of research explores how party cues interact with policy information and arguments to influence opinion (Boudreau and MacKenzie 2014 ; Bullock 2011 ), and how the degree of elite partisan polarization will determine the relative influence of these types of communication in citizens’ opinion formation. Messages from political parties might also shape how partisans interpret factual information about real-world developments (Bisgaard and Slothuus 2018 ). All of these recent studies point to important interactions between partisan sources and their attempts to influence opinion by the emphasis they put on various considerations and the persuasive information they provide. Drawing on the expectancy-value model might help highlight differences and similarities between these studies and further their integration.

While political parties are not the only sources that compete in politics—interest groups, think tanks, corporations, and other entities may also act to frame issues—attention to the sources of frames, the reasons behind their strategic choice of frames, and variation in responses to frames across partisan audiences, will rightly steer attention toward the kinds of real political competition that occurs outside experimental laboratories. Indeed, research into the sources of frames and variation in framing effects across partisan audiences, will naturally invite important questions about framing competition more broadly, a topic that despite making waves in the mid-2000s (Chong and Druckman 2007b ; Sniderman and Theriault 2004 ) has led to little published research. A possible takeaway from research into competitive framing is that, in the face of rival frames, no frame is particularly strong or influential. Yet the evidence base supporting this stylized fact is remarkably small. Ultimately, we know little about how frames interact with one another.

Strategic Frame Construction

A final avenue for future framing research relates to the supply side of frames and the processes that lead particular frames to be used by different actors and to become salient in public debate. As we already noted, much observational research shows that political debates rarely involve more than a few key arguments or dimensions. Abortion balances considerations of rights of women and rights of fetuses. Minimum wage laws balance considerations related to well-being of workers and well-being of enterprises. Antiterrorism policies balance considerations of national security and individual rights. While almost any political issue might be debated and thought about along a wide array of dimensions of competition, most issues come to be debated along relatively few. Moreover, partisan actors deploy information and emphasis in a manner meant to influence public opinion in a strategically beneficial way. Yet, aside from research by Hänggli and Kriesi ( 2010 , 2012 ; Hänggli 2020 ), there is remarkably little work on how the set of frames that come to be prominent—and thus come to be used in observational and experimental studies of framing processes—come into being or how they are chosen by key political actors to be deployed.

Our ignorance about these processes of frame construction highlight the lack of realism in extant framing research. While we know about the effects of frames on a wide array of issues (because framing experiments are relatively easy and cost-effective to deploy), we know little about the political contexts about which those experiments are meant to lead to inference. This is all the more important in the twenty-first century where it is not only political elites who are engaged in process of frame construction and dissemination but also political amateurs operating on social media who construct, debate, and disseminate information to one another without the involvement of political parties or traditional media.

Framing effects research to date largely presupposes that a relatively narrow set of non-partisan frames can be studied in a one-off setting to understand opinion formation on a given issue. Yet the realities of the twenty-first century media and political landscapes mean that frames may emerge much more organically and be distributed in much more complex and diffuse manners than those emulated by stylized framing experiments. The framing concept has been essential to our current understanding of political communication and political psychology. In order for it to continue to be relevant, researchers need to adapt framing theory and framing research to the realities of modern political framing.

Framing has become and is likely to remain among the most important concepts in contemporary media effects research, with good reason: framing is an intuitive concept and research on framing effects has generated considerable insight into the apparent ease with which media and political actors can use framed communications to influence public opinion. Yet there is also much that we do not know about the limits of framing effects, the generality of framing effects, or the processes by which frames come to dominate particular issues and particular ways of thinking about those issues.

In this chapter, we have advanced the argument that framing remains a useful theory of media effects, indeed one so useful it should generate considerably more research moving forward. Rather than being discarded, framing theory should be renewed in light of the expectancy-value model’s capacity to encompass a broad area of communication and psychological processes of interest to multiple social sciences. We have suggested a number of paths that research might take: for example examining generalizability across a range of factors, pursing more theoretically driven research into competitive framing, and investigating processes of frame construction and diffusion. We have also, perhaps implicitly, suggested some directions that we think media effects research should not take, namely, the pursuit of isolated research into different processes of such effects. Priming, framing, agenda-setting, persuasion, cueing, and learning all entail processes of either information transmission or emphasis or both; that is to say all of these processes involve the two mechanisms theorized in framing research to impact upon opinion. Rather than pitting these processes as theoretical rivals, we think a synthesis is in order whereby processes of information transmission and processes of emphasis are, respectively, theoretically unified and empirically integrated. Much more progress can be made in understanding media effects when the semantic differences between these processes are set aside in favor of a thorough investigation of how information and emphasis work together and separately to shape public views.

Our argument is therefore that framing theory provides an umbrella for encompassing a disparate array of media effects theories. While Cacciatore, Scheufele, and Iyengar ( 2016 ) are right to argue that the concept of “frame” has become muddled, we feel that the expectancy-value model of opinion formation at the core of framing theory shines through. Rather than debate what precisely is a “frame,” we feel we can advance our understanding of political communication much more by focusing on separate influences of information and emphasis and studying the generality of any results. Rather than limit framing to the narrow notion of mathematical equivalence (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky 1984 ), we believe framing theory retains considerable value. Rather than abandon theory, we suggest that researchers should attempt to be particularly clear about what information and what emphasis is at stake in any particular experimental manipulation or any observational measurement of media content.

One final concern worth noting about framing is the risk that the collective enterprise of framing research generates a considerable file drawer, limiting our ability to generate theoretical and empirical progress. As a mature academic theory, it is easy for new research into framing to be seen as trivial or lacking the novelty necessary for publication. If that view of new framing studies leads to publication bias, then much of our call for new research into the generality of framing effects will be for naught. Of course, simple extensions of existing work are just that, extensions; but social science disciplines need to reckon with how to publish and accumulate bodies of research in this kind of mature field without leaving “null effects” and replications in the file drawer. This may require innovative forms of publishing, greater space for note-length articles, and much more systematic accumulation of new experimental findings through meta-analysis.

Ultimately, we feel that we have learned a considerable amount from existing framing research and yet there is much left to be learned. How media and elites transmit information to the public and thus shape the views of those whom they are meant to represent constitutes one of the most important and normatively interesting problems of contemporary politics. Now is the time for more rather than less framing research.

Portions of this section first appeared as part of a working paper (Leeper and Slothuus n.d. ).

Taken to an extreme, a frame is a heresthetic device that makes only one side of an issue publicly palatable (Riker 1986 ).

In fact, equivalence frames are emphasis frames in the sense that they emphasize gains or losses, for example, but the frames contain the same factual information.

Even those these two dimensions—cost and impact on patients’ health—have been implicitly emphasized, individuals in every experimental condition have had the same dimensions evenly emphasized.

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Twitter and Tear Gas with Zeynep Tufekci

The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

Join us for this firsthand account and incisive analysis of modern protest, revealing internet-fueled social movements’ greatest strengths and frequent challenges.

Digital Rights and Online Harassment in the Global South

featuring Berkman Klein Affiliate, Nighat Dad

An inside look at the challenges facing women, human rights defenders, and other internet users in Pakistan, from online harassment to privacy and free expression.

The International State of Digital Rights, a Conversation with the UN Special Rapporteur

David Kaye in conversation with Nani Jansen Reventlow

UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, David Kaye, is joined in conversation by Nani Jansen Reventlow, a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center…

A More Perfect Internet

Promoting Digital Civility and Combating Cyber-Violence

An exploration of issues related to digital incivility with an emphasis on cyber-violence. When digital turns incivil, how does the law respond?

Fake News, Concrete Responses

At the Nexus of Law, Technology, and Social Narratives

Join us for a special Harvard Law School-Berkman Klein Fake News Lunch Panel moderated by Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law School

An Introduction to Media Cloud

Mapping the attention and influence of news

The recent US election, and related conversations about misinformation, have brought questions about media influence to the forefront of internet research and communications…

#Republic: Divided

Democracy in the Age of Social Media

In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today's Internet is driving political…

Public Health Echo Chambers in a Time of Mistrust & Misinformation - Digital Health @ Harvard, February 2017

with Berkman Klein fellows Natalie Gyenes and Brittany Seymour

Research shows that public health information networks online have been largely unsuccessful in driving an evidence-based information network narrative around key health topics…

Berkman Klein Center and MIT Media Lab to Collaborate on the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence

Supported by the Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Hewlett Foundation, and more

Several foundations and funders today announced the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, which will support interdisciplinary research to ensure that AI develops…

Defining Hate Speech

This essay seeks to review some of the various attempts to define hate speech, and pull from them a series of traits that can be used to frame hate speech with a higher degree of…

Grassroots Perspectives on Hate Speech, Race, and Inequality in Brazil and Colombia

Through interviews with leaders of civil society organizations (CSOs) and a review of existing literature, this study discusses efforts and interventions that CSOs have employed…

Preliminary Findings on Online Hate Speech and the Law in India

This briefing paper outlines preliminary issues that we noted while conducting a detailed study of hate speech laws in India. It teases out some of the major concerns that arise…

Understanding Harmful Speech Online

This paper offers reflections and observations on the state of research related to harmful speech online.

Digital Racist Speech in Latin America: Narratives and Counter-Narratives

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society hosts a conference to explore the dynamics of hate speech targeted toward Afro-descendent populations in Latin America, and the existing…

Mobilization for Change

The role of the networked public sphere in advancing civic participation and collective action in the Arab region

“Mobilization for Change” is a series of reports examining the role of the networked public sphere in advancing civic participation and collective action in the Arab region.

Berkman at the Internet Governance Forum

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a multistakeholder forum for policy dialogue on issues of Internet governance. The Berkman Center and our colleagues from the Network of…

Youth Online and News: A Phenomenological View on Diversity

Journal Article

Cortesi, S., &amp; Gasser, U. (2015). Youth online and news: A phenomenological view on diversity. International Journal of Communication. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article…

Score Another One for the Internet? The Role of the Networked Public Sphere in the U.S. Net Neutrality Policy Debate

A new paper from the Media Cloud team concludes that a diverse set of actors working in conjunction through the networked public sphere played a central, arguably decisive, role…

Who Gets a Press Pass?

Media Credentialing Practices in the United States

This study, the first of its kind to perform a quantitative examination of media credentialing in the United States, surveys the experience of journalists throughout the country…

The Challenges of Defining 'News Literacy'

This brief seeks to stimulate a discussion among the grantees about different approaches to defining, framing, and understanding core concepts such as 'news' and 'news literacy',…

Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate

This paper uses a new set of online research tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed legislation in the United States designed to give prosecutors and…

Filling the News Gap in Cambridge and Beyond: Citizen Journalism and Grassroots Media

The event will explore the quickly expanding world of citizen journalism: how technology is fueling its growth; how that growth is changing the way we see our world, enact change,…

E-books in Libraries: A Briefing Document developed in preparation for a Workshop on E-Lending in Libraries

This briefing document was developed with helpful inputs from industry stakeholders and other practitioners in preparation for the “E-Books in Libraries” workshop, hosted on…

Salience vs. Commitment: Dynamics of Political Hashtags in Russian Twitter

Social media sites like Twitter enable users to engage in the spread of contagious phenomena: everything from information and rumors to social movements and virally marketed…

Guide to the IRS Decision-Making Process under Section 501(c)(3) for Journalism and Publishing Non-Profit Organizations

Until and unless there is action in Congress to facilitate tax exemptions for journalism non-profits, news organizations seeking 501(c)(3) status must learn how to structure their…

Mapping Russian Twitter

Drawing from a corpus of over 50 Million Russian language tweets collected between March 2010 and March 2011, the Berkman research team created a network map of 10,285 users…

Truthiness in Digital Media

a symposium that seeks to understand and address propaganda and misinformation in the new media ecosystem

As the networked media environment increasingly permeates private and public life, driven in part by the rapid and extensive travels of news, information and commentary, our…

Exploring Russian Cyberspace: Digitally-Mediated Collective Action and the Networked Public Sphere

This paper summarizes the major findings of a three-year research project to investigate the Internet’s impact on Russian politics, media and society. We employed multiple methods…

Media Law in the Digital Age: The Rules Have Changed -- Again

Co-produced by the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Kennesaw State's Center for Sustainable Journalism, Media Law in the Digital…

Law School for Digital Journalists

A Pre-Conference of the Online News Association's 2011 Conference

The Online News Association, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy present Law School for Digital Journalists, part of the…

Account Deactivation and Content Removal: Guiding Principles and Practices for Companies and Users

In partnership with colleagues at the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Berkman Center is pleased to release a report on “Account Deactivation and Content Removal: Guiding…

Political Change in the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing

In this paper, we discuss the possible impact of digital technologies in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes.

Mapping the Russian Blogosphere

Hosted by USIP’s Center of Innovation for Science, Technology & Peacebuilding, researchers from the Berkman Center and their collaborators at Morningside Analytics will present…

Public Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere: Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization

This paper is the first release from the Berkman Center's Russian Internet research project. It analyzes the Russian blogosphere, with an emphasis on politics and public affairs.

2010 Circumvention Tool Usage Report

This paper evaluates the usage of blocking-resistant circumvention tools, simple web proxies, and VPN services and finds that overall usage of circumvention tools is still very…

Media Law in the Digital Age: The Rules Have Changed, Have You?

We're pleased to announce that the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center and the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University are co-hosting a…

The Rise of the News Aggregator: Legal Implications and Best Practices

This white paper attempts to answer the question of whether news aggregators violate current law by examining the hot news misappropriation and copyright infringement claims that…

Symposium: Journalism's Digital Transition: Unique Legal Challenges and Opportunities

The Berkman Center's Citizen Media Law Project and Cyberlaw Clinic are pleased to announce a one-day symposium and CLE program to celebrate the launch of the Online Media Legal…

Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle

Jure Leskovec, assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University

Jure will discuss his analysis of approximately 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs for a period of three months, covering about 1 million articles per day.

CRCS Lunch Seminar: Media Cloud and Quantitative News Media Analysis

Hal Roberts and Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center

Ethan and Hal will present their prototype system to retrieve, tag, cluster and analyze blog and newspaper data, and discuss how the Media Cloud platform will be used in our…

Online Discourse in the Arab World: Dispelling the Myths

at the United States Institute of Peace

The Internet & Democracy presents the Berkman Center's new research on the Arabic blogosphere, which analyzes over 10,000 blogs from 18 countries and which follows last year's …

Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent

This case study is part of a series produced by the Internet and Democracy project. It analyzes the composition of the Arabic blogosphere and its possible impact on political and…

Mediactive: Why media consumers, not just creators, need to be active users

Dan Gillmor, Berkman Fellow

The supply side of tomorrow's media is emerging quickly, if messily, in a democratization of media-creation tools that give us a vast and growing amount of content of all kinds,…

Three Case Studies from Switzerland: Smartvote, Electronic Voting, and Political Communication

With the globalization of Internet use, the deployment of technology to improve democracy has rapidly gained worldwide attention. These case studies are organized around three…

The Internet and Democracy: Lessons Learnt and Future Directions

This event, organized in collaboration with the OII and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism brought together leading researchers to assess the current state of…

2007 Circumvention Landscape Report: Methods, Uses, and Tools

A large variety of different projects have developed tools that can be used to circumvent Internet filtering, allowing people in filtered countries access to otherwise filtered…

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Online Audiences and the Paradox of Web Traffic

Dr. Matthew Hindman, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University

Many areas of Internet scholarship make strong--and often erroneous--assumptions about patterns of Web traffic. Still, there has been little comprehensive research on how online…

The Tao of the Web: China and the future of the Internet

Rebecca MacKinnon

Most English-language discussions about "the future of the Internet" approach the subject from an Anglo-American and European perspective. But what if you take China - now with…

The Blogging Revolution: Going online in repressive regimes

Antony Loewenstein

In 2007, Australian journalist, author and blogger Antony Loewenstein traveled to Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China to investigate how the net was challenging…

Russia Online: the Russian-Language Blogosphere and Participatory Internet

An all-day conference in New York City made possible by the collaboration of the Harriman Institute and the School of Journalism at Columbia University, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Conference Wiki: http://cyber.harvard.edu/russiaonline/Main_Page User: russiaonline PW: columbia This conference is open to the public. Seating may be limited. To reserve…

Digitally Networked Technology in Kenya's 2007-2008 Post-Election Crisis

Using the lens of the 2007-2008 Kenyan Presidential Election Crisis, this case study illustrates how digitally networked technologies, specifically mobile phones and the Internet,…

The Role of the Internet in Burma’s Saffron Revolution

This case study is part of a series produced by the Internet and Democracy project. It analyzes the role of the Internet and technology in the 2007 civic crises of Burma’s Saffron…

Blogging, Journalism and Reality

Persephone Miel, Berkman Fellow

Persephone Miel presented her work on the Media Re:public project.

Citizen Media Law Project @ 1

David Ardia, Sam Bayard, Tuna Chatterjee

David Ardia, Sam Bayard, and Tuna Chatterjee of CMLP discussed trends in online publishing and previewed the CMLP database of subpeonas, cease-and-desist letters, and other…

Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere

(English and Persian translation)

This case study is part of a series produced by the Internet and Democracy project. It analyzes the composition of the Iranian blogosphere and its possible impact on political and…

It’s 2013: Do You Know Where Your News Is?

Examining scenarios for the future

One of the few areas of agreement among observers of the news environment is that there is much more change to come. In this session we’ll discuss scenarios that illustrate…

Digital Dilemmas: A Multi-stakeholder Response to Internet Censorship and Surveillance

NYU Law Information Law Institute Colloquium, co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School

Participants discussed the role that corporations should play in response to government-mandated Internet censorship and surveillance.

Berkman Buzz: Week of March 3, 2008

A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.

Digitally-Empowered Activists: Getting the Tools to the People Who Need Them

Hosted by the Internet & Democracy Project

The Berkman Center's Internet & Democracy Projected hosted an event on "Digitally-Empowered Activists: Getting the Tools to the People Who Need Them," in Istanbul, Turkey.

Internet & Democracy

Victoria Stodden, Harvard Law School

Victoria Stodden By discussing the potentials and pitfalls of the internet in a democratic society, Victoria Stodden examined "Internet & Democracy."

The Citizen Journalism Web Site 'OhmyNews' and the 2002 South Korean Presidential Election

This paper is one of the first in a series of case studies that examines the impact of the Internet and technology on democracy. This specific case investigates the influence of…

The Role of Digital Networked Technologies in the Ukrainian Orange Revolution

This working paper is part of a series examining how the Internet influences democracy. This report is a narrative case study that examines the role of the Internet and mobile…

Reluctant Gatekeepers: Corporate Ethics on a Filtered Internet

Corporations are increasingly finding themselves caught in the crosshairs as they are asked by local authorities to carry out censorship and surveillance online. This chapter…

Citizens' Media

Dan Gillmor on Citizens' Media and the Center for Citizen Media which exists to study, encourage, and enable new forms of grassroots media.

Community 646

A new book has amplified fierce debate around teens, mental health and smartphones.

Joe Bak-Coleman speaks about the debate on kids' mental health and the relationship to social media and smartphones. “Ninety percent of this debate&nbsp;is basically just back…

Joe Bak-Coleman

Transgender attorney says Musk's handling of X is 'extremely concerning'

Alejandra Caraballo discusses her experiences with content moderation issues on Elon Musk's X and the lack of trust and safety mechanisms on the platform.

Alejandra Caraballo

The Grim High-Tech Dystopia on the US-Mexico Border

Petra Molnar writes about the AI technology incorporated at the southern border and the human rights implications.

Petra Molnar

Sam Bankman-Fried is going to prison. The crypto industry isn’t any better for it

Molly White discusses the state of the crypto industry following Sam Bankman-Fried's sentencing.

Molly White

Data in movement: the social movement society in the age of datafication.

BKC Faculty Associate Stefania Milan and David Beraldo put the studies of data and social movements in conversation with each other.

Stefania Milan

Democracy, social media, and the world’s biggest election year.

BKC Affiliate Sahar Massachi explores challenges and potential solutions for safeguarding online democracy in a rapidly shifting digital world. 

Sahar Massachi

Breaking the silence: marginalized voices in the tech industry.

Read about Nadah Feteih and Anika Collier Novaroli's conversation at the Berkman Klein Center on marginalized voices in the tech industry.

Nadah Feteih

What to Do About the Junkification of the Internet

Nathaniel Lubin writes about internet "junkification."

Nathaniel Lubin

How to Use Apps to Actually Make Friends

Jeffrey Hall discusses making friends online.

Jeffrey Hall

Can we talk an argument for more dialogues in academia.

BKC Employee Fellow Manon Revel argues that more communication is key to facing the world's toughest issues.

Manon Revel

Opinion: Many Americans believe migrants bring fentanyl across the border. That’s wrong and dangerous

Susan Benesch and Catherine Buerger use the context of fentanyl and border crossings to explain the dangers of combining facts, lies, and emotional language.

Susan Benesch

Nobody knows which political ads work and why.

BKC Affiliate Nathaniel Lubin comments on a recent study released by himself and co-authors, as well as what political ads may look like this election cycle.

TOWARDS TRANSNATIONAL DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

BKC Faculty Associate Magda Romanska and Kasia Lech provide the story and vision for The Theatre Times.

Magda Romanska

Cfpb’s proposed data rules would improve security, privacy and competition.

Bruce Schneier writes about the CFPB's proposed data rules and its benefits.

Bruce Schneier

Social media is getting smaller—and more treacherous.

Ethan Zuckerman writes about social media getting smaller, allowing for more people to connect, but also more extremism to arise. 

Ethan Zuckerman

Ai is destabilizing ‘the concept of truth itself’ in 2024 election.

Aviv Ovadya speaks to The Washington Post about AI and the 2024 elections across the country. 

Aviv Ovadya

The unbearable oldness of generative artificial intelligence: or the re-making of digital narratives in times of chatgpt.

BKC Faculty Associate Nishant Shah offers accounts of two moments in computational history to reframe conversations around generative AI.

Nishant Shah

Can cities shape future tech regulation.

Aileen Nielsen writes about city lawmaking compensating for national regulations in technology. 

Aileen Nielsen

Addressing the epidemic of high drug prices

Ruth Okediji discusses the Biden administration's recent proposal to use federal "march-in" rights to lower drug costs.

Ruth L. Okediji

What AI Will Do to Elections

“It just makes the generation and dissemination of very realistic deepfakes and realistic-seeming deepfakes much, much easier,” Rumman Chowdhury told Foreign Policy when…

Rumman Chowdhury

Algorithmic Institutionalism

In a new Oxford University Press book, Virgilio Almeida delves into the&nbsp;increasing presence of algorithms in everyday decisions, exploring their social and political impacts…

Virgilio Almeida

How to identify and counter dangerous speech.

BKC Faculty Associate Susan Benesch provides recommendations for recognizing and countering hateful online speech.

Online ‘likes’ for toxic social media posts prompt more − and more hateful − messages

RSM Visiting Scholar Joseph Walther explains the social approval theory of online hate: that posters of hateful messages are motivated by the approval of like-minded individuals.

Joseph B. Walther

With the end of the hollywood writers and actors strikes, the creator economy is the next frontier for organized labor.

RSM Visiting Scholar David Craig writes about creators and the upcoming labor revolution

David Craig

Members of congress don’t dance on tiktok.

RSM Visiting Scholar Anupam Chander, and Donara Aghanjani and Alyanna Apacible discuss the fraught dynamic between Congressional distrust of TikTok and TikTok's potential for…

Anupam Chander

How a TV Show Changed the Cold War

RSM Visiting Scholar David Craig recounts how a tv show changed the history of Cold War and comments on how media can impact society now.

War in Gaza has some posting more than ever. Others are going dark.

Rebooting Social Media Visiting Professor Joe Walther comments on online communications during times of heightened tension.

Ten Ways AI Will Change Democracy

BKC Affiliate Bruce Schneier explores beyond AI generated disinformation to detail other novel ways in which AI might alter how democracy functions.

Should we be worried about rising heat of political discourse? Yes.

BKC Faculty Associate Susan Benesch discusses the relationship with heated political speech and real-world violence.

Reimagining Democracy for AI

BKC Affiliate Aviv Ovadya argues that reinventing our democratic infrastructure is not just possible, it is necessary.

Centering Community Voices: How Tech Companies Can Better Engage with Civil Society Organizations

Nadah Feteih and Elodie Vialle argue that companies should involve at-risk communities in the design process of new technologies.

Elodie Vialle

Ai disinformation is a threat to elections - learning to spot russian, chinese and iranian meddling in other countries can help the us prepare for 2024.

BKC Affiliate Bruce Schneier argues that AI disinformation is a threat to democratic processes.

Queer and feminist reflections on sextech

Zahra Stardust co-authors commentary reflecting on sextech futures.

Zahra Stardust

Effects of negativity type and active involvement on the likelihood of responding to negativity in stream live chats.

RSM Visiting Scholar Jeffrey Hall studies whether chat negativity and the degree to which live chat rule sets encourage active (vs. passive) involvement influence participants’…

Social media, extremism, and radicalization

BKC Faculty Associate Aaron Shaw discusses the connection between social media platforms and extremist movements. 

Re-imagining democracy for the 21st century, possibly without the trappings of the 18th century

BKC Affiliate Bruce Schneier reflects on his workshop that brought together a wide variety of people to discuss the reimagination of democracy for the twenty-first century.

The Future of Online Speech Shouldn’t Belong to One Trump-Appointed Judge in Louisiana

BKC Rebooting Social Media Visiting Scholar Kate Klonick writes about a federal court ruling that restricted the Biden administration’s communications with social media platforms.

Kate Klonick

Competition for Twitter is good. Threads, thus far, is not.

BKC Faculty Associate Ethan Zuckerman argues that while competition for Twitter is a good thing, Threads, Facebook’s competitor to Twitter, leaves much to be desired.

How to Assess Platform Impact on Mental Health and Civic Norms

BKC Affiliate Nathaniel Lubin writes about methods and approaches of evaluating effects of digital platforms on mental health.

We've Been Thinking About the Internet All Wrong

BKC Affiliate Nathaniel Lubin writes about using the field of public health as inspiration for a new metaphor for the internet.

AI could shore up democracy – here’s one way

BKC Affiliate Nathan Sanders writes about the drawbacks and the opportunities AI can provide to strengthen democracy.

Nathan Sanders

Artificial intelligence doesn’t have to be inhumane.

Sue Hendrickson and BKC Responsible AI Fellow Rumman Chowdhury write about the role of global governance alongside the development of AI.

Sue Hendrickson

There Will Never Be Another Twitter

BKC Faculty Associate Ethan Zuckerman discusses the fate of Twitter and the future of digital public squares.

Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

BKC Affiliate Molly White discusses her blog, Web3 Is Going Just Great, that tracks crypto scams and hacks.

Uncommon Naledge: Meredith Clark

Jabari Evans talks with Incoming RSM Fellow Meredith Clark about media, journalism, and Black community.

Jabari Evans

Legal questions surround montana's tiktok ban.

BKC Affiliate Bruce Schneier discusses the practical considerations of Montana's TikTok ban.

A history of metaphors for the internet

BKC Faculty Associate Judith Donath discusses metaphors for the internet.

Judith Donath

Section 230 just survived a brush with death.

Tweets by Rebooting Social Media Visiting Scholar Kate Klonick are referenced in a discussion of Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh.

Rethinking democracy for the age of AI

BKC Affiliate Bruce Schneier delivers a keynote speech during the RSA Conference in San Francisco on April 25, 2023 about the risks and promise of AI for democracy.

Google draws backlash from Brazil with lobbying against ‘fake news’ bill

Rebooting Social Media Visiting Scholar and BKC Faculty Associate David Nemer discusses Google's lobbying against a Brazilian bill aimed at curbing the spread of “fake news.”

David Nemer

Just wait until trump is a chatbot.

BKC Affiliates Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier write about how AI will change the nature of campaigning.

Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk

Rest of World reports on analysis of Twitter's compliance with government orders for censorship or surveillance using data from BKC's Lumen database.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Aid Democracy

BKC Affiliates Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier write about AI's potential to advance the public good by helping democracy.

The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social

Jonathan Zittrain comments on BKC's Institute for Rebooting Social Media and its projects creating and experimenting with new social networks.

Twitter quietly changes its hateful conduct policy to remove standing protections for its transgender users

Clinical instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic Alejandra Caraballo comments on changes to Twitter's content moderation rules and enforcement since Elon Musk's takeover.

Twitter is for roasting Donald Trump. Building a democracy? Not so much.

BKC Affiliate Nathan Sanders' policymaking project, the Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement, or MAPLE, is discussed as an alternative to Twitter.

The Abortion Medication Ruling Threatens Free Speech Online

Clinical instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic Alejandra Caraballo writes about how the US district court decision blocking access to the abortion pill mifepristone has also…

Teaching kids how to use social media smartly and safely

BKC Faculty Associate Judith Donath discusses the threat social media poses to children and realistic solutions to mitigate that threat.

Grindr sends Egypt users a warning after alleged entrapments and arrests

BKC Affiliate Afsaneh Rigot comments on the arrests of LGBTQ+ people in Egypt.

Afsaneh Rigot

Supreme Court to hear case on ‘Bad Spaniels’ v. Jack Daniel’s

Rebecca Tushnet discusses the Rogers test as a standard for trademark infringement which is implicated in a current Supreme Court case involving a dog toy company spoofing Jack…

Rebecca Tushnet

Has Asian representation in film improved with ‘Everything, Everywhere, All At Once’?

BKC Affiliate Jenny Korn sits down with GBH News to discuss whether the success of “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” means that opportunities for Asian actors have paid off.

Stories on racial justice give power of memory to the slain

BKC affiliate Leonard Cortana was profiled by United Nations Human Rights for his work in human rights.

Leonard Cortana

Photographs have always been manipulated. Will AI make things worse?

BKC Fellow Juliana Castro-Varon writes as a graphic designer about the effect AI image generators will have on a potentially unsuspecting public who might not understand how the…

Juliana Castro-Varon

Meta oversight board with julie owono.

BKC Affiliate Julie Owono discusses Facebook and Instagram content moderation via the Meta Oversight Board, of which Owono is an inaugural member, and freedom of expression.

Julie Owono

A better kind of social media is possible — if we want it.

Jonathan Zittrain is quoted discussing digital governance of social media platforms.

The Amendment the Court Forgot in Twitter v. Taamneh

Evelyn Douek writes with Genevieve Lakier about the free speech ramifications of Twitter v Taamneh...

Evelyn Douek

Platforms are fighting online abuse—but not the right kind.

BKC Responsible AI Fellow Rumman Chowdhury co-writes a piece on the shortfalls of platforms fighting online abuse.

Teaching the legacy of Dulcie September and other assassinated anti-racist figures of resistance as poetry for collective liberation

"They erased Dulcie September, who remained a name in schools, streets, and cultural centers but nothing about her intellectual production and incredible life story as an anti…

I Watched Elon Musk Kill Twitter’s Culture From the Inside

Rumman Chowdhury writes about her time at Twitter as the engineering director of the META team...

Can ‘we the people’ keep AI in check?

"Emad [CEO] at Stability [AI, the open-source AI company,] says he’s ‘democratizing AI.’ Well,&nbsp;wouldn’t it be nice to actually be using democratic processes to figure out…

The Scramble to Save Twitter’s Research From Elon Musk

"We were rightfully worried about what this leadership change would entail...There's a lot of ideology and misunderstanding about the kind of work ethics teams do as being part of…

I am a student and activist. I won’t be silenced.

BKC Research Assistant Pratika Katiyar writes about the effort to silence student voices and the need to codify protections for student journalists.

Pratika Katiyar

Chatgpt and beyond: what’s behind the ai boom.

"...what are the kinds of harms and stereotypes that exist in society that these machines can pick up on? These models are simply reflecting the data that is being put into them,…

Expert warns of AI tools’ potential threat to democracy

"Democracy is fundamentally a human way of organizing ourselves, and where an AI, whether it's a ChatGPT that is writing human text or another AI that is figuring out human…

ChatGPT could be a useful AI tool. So how are we regulating it?

"My observation would be that the serious legislation that's been successfully passed for regulating machine learning in general has been painfully slow and insufficient to keep…

Exploring the emotional and relational labour of Black women rappers in sexual dance economies on OnlyFans

BKC Faculty Associate Jabari Evans writes about the subscription platform OnlyFans and the Black women rappers and video models who use it.&nbsp; “Ultimately, this study…

Tech has an innate problem with bullshitters. But we don’t need to let them win

BKC Faculty Associate Ethan Zuckerman writes about technoculture's unique susceptibility to a mixture of falsehood and persuasive bluffing he refers to as "bullshit." "If we…

Misinformation in countries with limited technological literacies: How people in sub-Sahara Africa engage with fake news

BKC Faculty Associate Greg Gondwe writes about variations in digital access and literacy among people in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Greg Gondwe

Two Years Ago This Brazilian Expert on the Far Right Predicted Their Insurrection

BKC Faculty Associate David Nemer was interviewed about his accurate prediction of a "January 6-like event" following Brazil's elections. "I wasn’t totally surprised. I’ve been…

How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy

"So while it’s impossible to predict what a future filled with A.I. lobbyists will look like, it will probably make the already influential and powerful even more so." BKC…

Social media can be polarizing. A new type of algorithm aims to change that.

BKC Affiliate Aviv Ovadya discusses social media algorithms that burst, otherwise known as bridging systems.

1/3/23 RT Panel

BKC Faculty Associate Fran Berman joined Alan Chartock of WAMC Northeast Public Radio, Jim Ketterer, and Sarah Rogerson in a roundtable discussion of issues in the news and beyond.

Francine Berman

How To Ask People Not To Share Photos Of Your Kids On Social Media

BKC Youth and Media Director Sandra Cortesi commented on the practice of sharing photos of children on social media.

Sandra Cortesi

Why the ‘Twitter Files’ Are Falling Flat

Joan Donovan writes about the Twitter Files and Elon Musk’s failing attempts to shape the media’s narrative. “In fact, what the “Twitter Files” reveal is what we already knew…

Joan Donovan

Facebook and the Problem of Truth

Jonathan Zittrain sits down with Jill Lepore in a podcast discussing his idea of assigning high school students the role of vetting advertisements, including political ads, on the…

For Black Folks, Digital Migration Is Nothing New

Kishonna Gray discusses digital migration and Black Twitter with Chris Gilliard.

"Twitter changed leadership from one mercurial billionaire to another, and in that regard it affirms that the site was never 'ours'..."

Kishonna Gray

The meta oversight board has some genuinely smart suggestions.

RSM Visiting Scholar Kate Klonick writes about the positive steps Meta’s Oversight Board recently took, and how it can improve separation within platforms.&nbsp; “The board…

Musk boosts Twitter’s right-wing appeal with moderation changes, ‘Twitter Files’

David Weinberger discusses the shift in Twitter’s appeal to the right following Musk’s takeover. “It’s easy to understand why the right is overall so happy with what Musk has…

David Weinberger

How to Decarbonize Crypto

BKC Affiliate Bruce Schneier writes about decarbonizing crypto and the opportunity to curb its massive environmental impact. "The good news is that cryptocurrencies don’t have…

Africa Is Waiting for What You Promised, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey

Ifeoma Ajunwa reflects on the lack of benefits seen in Africa despite massive investments by tech billionaires with grandiose visions.

"A worry still is that these nations will never see any true benefits from tech investments until tech investors address the lack of the basic infrastructure necessary to support…

Ifeoma Ajunwa

Exhibition in Kansas centers voices of formerly incarcerated women

“How the Light Gets In,” created by Sarah Newman and metaLAB (at) Harvard, in collaboration with the KU Center for Digital Inclusion.

“Freedom is the most beautiful thing life has to offer.” “I am not a criminal I was a drug addict.” “Beautiful things are never perfect.” Those words, written by formerly…

Sarah Newman

Incendiary speech that spurs violence is rising in us, but tools exist to shrink it.

Faculty Associate Susan Benesch writes about incendiary speech in political American discourse, and the rampant rise of it. "We have found that dangerous speech is uncannily…

Twitter Is Not Rocket Science—It’s Harder

RSM Assembly Fellow Joe Bak-Coleman writes about the challenges of managing human behavior, especially as applied to Twitter.&nbsp; “On a social network, interactions between…

These Tiny Greek Islands Have Become Unlikely Laboratories for Global Corporations

BKC Fellow Petra Molnar discusses surveillance and the use of tiny islands as spaces for large tech companies.&nbsp; Petra Molnar, a lawyer specialising in technology and human…

Would Twitter get online publisher immunity in fake 'blue check' suits?

"Under that reasoning, said Alejandra Caraballo of the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, the key question for Twitter is whether tweets from fake corporate accounts would have…

The impact of the blockchains for Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law

BKC Fellow&nbsp;Florian Martin-Bariteau&nbsp;assembled a report to the Council of Europe on blockchain opportunities. "The impact of the blockchains for Human Rights, Democracy…

Florian Martin-Bariteau

A Harvard Law Professor Breaks Down Vogue’s Lawsuit Against Drake and 21 Savage

Rebecca Tushnet breaks down&nbsp;Vogue's seven-figure lawsuit for copyright infringement against Drake and 21 Savage. "Part of what makes this case so interesting is that it…

Why Does Every Tech Company Want to “Democratize” Something?

"Kendra Albert, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, has studied “legal talismans”—terms like “free speech” that tech companies use to give legitimacy to…

Kendra Albert

All tech is human library podcast series #15 | sahar massachi.

Sahar Massachi joins David Ryan Polgar to discuss "the importance of fostering a generation of integrity workers to transform our technology ecosystem." “For me, I like the…

Stuck in the Mud: How a Tiny, Beloved Driving Game Sparked a Bizarre, Decade-Long Feud

Micaela Mantegna spoke to IGN about the Spintire controversy. "Given how confounding this entire investigation has been, I spoke with video game lawyer and Berkman Klein Center…

Micaela Mantegna

Trial By Teenager, Part I

With Jill Lepore, Jonathan Zittrain talks about his idea of using high school students as vetters of online political ads.

With Jill Lepore, Jonathan Zittrain talks about his idea of using high school students as vetters of online political ads. “Not only would you...have enough high school…

'People were sucked into schemes': Inside Molly White’s campaign against crypto

BKC&nbsp;affiliate Molly White&nbsp;spoke about her interests, web3, &amp; blockchain. "I'm hoping to keep doing what I'm doing. I feel like the site has been pretty successful…

We should try to prevent another Alex Jones

BKC Faculty Associate Zeynep Tufekci&nbsp;writes about disinformation and "prevent[ing] another Alex Jones." “It has become so easy to lucratively lie to so many people, and we…

Zeynep Tufekci

How social media amplifies misinformation more than information.

Rebooting Social Media Assembly Fellow and Integrity Institute Co-founder Sahar Massachi's work with the Integrity Institute's weekly misinformation dashboard was featured in The…

Explaining Brazil #218: Demons, Freemasons, and cannibalism

Rebooting Social Media Visiting Scholar and BKC Faculty Associate David Nemer&nbsp;discusses social media strategies and their implications in the Brazilian presidential election…

Rights holders got Google to remove 6 billion links from Search over 10 years

Lumen project manager Adam Holland and Rebecca Tushnet spoke about Google’s efforts to take down links considered pirated. “Google's partner in tracking all of its takedown…

Adam Holland

Threats prompt hospitals to strip websites of info on gender-affirming care

Cyberlaw clinic’s Alejandra Caraballo discusses how children’s hospitals are taking down websites as a result of harassment and threats. Removing too much information comes…

Big Tech Should Support the Iranian People, Not the Regime

BKC Affiliate Afsaneh Rigot and Kendra Albert write about Big Tech and how they should support the Iranian people. "Expanded services...are no longer hindered by sanctions…

How a Texas law could impact First Amendment rights and content moderation online

BKC Harvard affiliate Julie Owono discusses online content moderation. "Is it okay in a modern democratic society to leave two private companies the decision on what we can say…

Forgetful Advertising: Imagining a More Responsible Digital Ad System

BKC Faculty Associate Ethan Zuckerman writes about responsible digital ad systems. “As Silicon Valley giants sketch their preferred future for digital advertising, an…

The Uber Hack Exposes More Than Failed Data Security

BKC Fellow Bruce Schneier writes about the Uber hack. "In all of these cases, the victimized organizations could have very likely protected our data better, but the reality is…

First Amendment Hurdle Looms for California’s Social Media Law

Rebecca Tushnet discusses the potential challenges to California’s new social media law under the First Amendment.&nbsp; “Knowing how many reports they got and whether or when…

Brazil on Fire: Nazis on Your Street

David Nemer speaks about Brazil and the history of fascism, and the role cyberactivism plays in emboldening it. “Misinformation without hate, fortunately, doesn’t go very far…

Jair Bolsonaro, A Perfect Example Of Why Autocrats Hate Women

David Nemer analyzes the antipathy towards women that world leaders like Jair Bolsonaro have. 

Manifesto for Sex Positive Social Media

Zahra Stardust and collaborators set out seven demands for platforms, governments, and policymakers.

As part of her Berkman Klein fellowship, Zahra Stardust organized a Community Lab at RightsCon 2021 on "Alternative Frameworks for Sexual Content Moderation." The Lab was…

GOP reacts to Trump search with threats and comparisons to ‘Gestapo’

Susan Benesch, faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet &amp; Society at Harvard University, said when it comes to “dangerous speech ... what matters most is how…

Exploring Social Media Contexts for Cultivating Connected Learning with Black Youth in Urban Communities: The Case of Dreamer Studio

BKC Faculty Associate Jabari Evans writes about engaging Black youth in learning and career pathways through hip-hop and social media.

How industrial standards help explain Russia’s economic motives for invading Ukraine

Mark Wu discusses the economic motives behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Several former Soviet states use Russia’s industrial standards, which creates a captive market for…

Why Elon Musk’s Twitter might be (more) lethal

Susan Benesch writes about how Elon Musk buying Twitter may be dangerous. “Dangerous speech forms a category because it is strikingly similar from one case to another, across…

Telegram’s Embrace of Contradiction

Will Marks and David Nemer assess Telegram's content moderation.

William Marks

How wikipedia gets to define what’s true online.

Ethan Zuckerman traces Wikipedia's transformation from controversial to trusted source.

Of Noisy Songs and Mighty Rivers

Is the "marketplace of ideas" fact or fantasy? Yochai Benkler assesses the future of free speech in a world of what he calls an "epistemic crisis" of disinformation and distrust.

Yochai Benkler

Treating social media like a city.

Sahar Massachi speaks on a new way of fostering Internet health.

Spotify's Joe Rogan problem

evelyn douek speaks on Spotify's controversial involvement in the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Why Hermès Probably Can’t Stop the MetaBirkin

Primavera De Filippi explains the implications of an NTF collection featuring fuzzy versions of Hermès bags.

Primavera De Filippi

How to make better algorithms: start with the people who train the machines

Ethan Zuckerman writes that algorithms can be improved by focusing on the people who train the machines — and society at large.

The Ethics of the Metaverse

Micaela Mantegna brings up crucial privacy and ethical concerns that come with the emergence of the metaverse.

Has Godwin’s Law, the Rule of Nazi Comparisons, Been Disproved?

Dariusz Jemielniak speaks on his research on Godwin's Law.

Shared Autonomy & Work

Sandra Wachter assesses the benefits and drawbacks about autonomous robots and the future of work.

Sandra Wachter

Amid the Hype over Web3, Informed Skepticism Is Critical

Elizabeth Renieris urges skepticism amid the overwhelming hype around Web3.

Elizabeth Renieris

Bolsonaro crafts new social media strategy ahead of Brazil election

David Nemer discusses Bolsonaro supporters’ migration from WhatsApp to Telegram.

The complexities of online content moderation

Julie Owono shares why digital rights should have the same protections as offline ones.

Tech giants banned Trump. But did they censor him?

Chinmayi Arun discusses the consequences for democracy if major social media platforms arbitrarily blocked political leaders.

Chinmayi Arun

Inside the Institute for Rebooting Social Media

Hilary Ross dives deep into the mission of the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at All Tech is Human's Responsible Tech University Summit.

Hilary Ross

Leave fact-checking to the fact-checkers.

In Nieman Lab's predictions for journalism in 2022, Jonas Kaiser explores the need for fact-checking — and who should be doing it.

Jonas Kaiser

A prayer for a humbler media.

In the Nieman Lab's predictions for journalism in 2022, j. Siguru Wahutu expresses hope for a humbler media ecosystem.

j. Siguru Wahutu

How to fix the internet.

Ethan Zuckerman points to a mailing list in rural Vermont as a potential way forward for a more equitable Internet. "We need people to take responsibility for fixing…

Does Godwin’s law (rule of Nazi analogies) apply in observable reality? An empirical study of selected words in 199 million Reddit posts

Godwin's Law states that the likelihood of referencing Nazis increases as online discussions grow. But after analyzing nearly 200 million Reddit posts, Dariusz Jemielniak and…

#MeToo Anti-Network

A metaLAB (at) Harvard project illustrates how a movement such as #MeToo is constituted by masses of unobserved tweets.

Kim Albrecht

Matthew Battles

Trends in Mobile Journalism: Bearing Witness, Building Movements, and Crafting Counternarratives

Allissa Richardson examines how African American mobile journalism became a model for marginalized people’s political communication across the United States.

Allissa Richardson

Why online anonymity matters.

Afsaneh Rigot writes that requirements for real identities on the Internet pose immense safety and security issues — especially for marginalized persons.

Why the rest of the world shrugged at the Facebook Papers

evelyn douek offers an explanation for why the Facebook Papers have failed to make as much of an impact internationally.

Silos! Silos everywhere!

Katya Abazajian writes about the difficulties that arise when government agencies are reluctant to share information with each other.

Katya Abazajian

Facebook has a misinformation problem, and is blocking access to data about how much there is and who is affected

Ethan Zuckerman points out room for improvement in Facebook's openness to misinformation research.

Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago

Ethan Zuckerman writes that his dismal experience creating and experiencing metaverses almost 30 years ago could be a lesson for Facebook.

Behind the scenes: How Twitter decided to open up its image-cropping algorithm to the public

Twitter’s recent opening of its image-cropping algorithm is a step forward in social media research, Sasha Costanza-Chock tells Morning Brew.

Sasha Costanza-Chock

Social media companies need to take a lesson from 16th-century bavaria.

John Bowers, Will Marks, and Jonathan Zittrain propose a path forward for how to improve content moderation

John Bowers

A Harvard professor predicted COVID disinformation on the web. Here’s what may be coming next

Joan Donovan explains the dangers of spreading falsehoods on social media and the challenges with stopping misinformation.

The Lawfare Podcast: Facebook’s Thoughts on Its Oversight Board

evelyn douek explores the impacts of the Facebook Oversight Board

The Former Harvard Law Dean Who Wants Government to Save the News Business

Martha Minow explains why the government must save local news.

Martha Minow

Public health’s next shot at fixing its data problem

Joan Donovan shares insights on the government's ability to control misinformation on social media.

Policy-palooza: How Congress, state and local governments can stabilize local news

Hilary Ross comments on how government may be able to help the state of local news. 

Design for Democratic Discourse

Jonathan Zittrain and Deb Roy will teach a seminar on the design of digital media at Harvard Law School in Fall 2021.

Expanding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to Fund Local News

Hilary Ross calls for the expansion of public media to combat disinformation.

The Lawfare Podcast: Can America Save the News?

Martha Minow and evelyn douek share how the decline of local news hurts democracy.

3 Minutes with Julie Owono

Julie Owono shares challenges of maintaining freedom of expression on the internet.

Can Disinformation Be Stopped?

Joan Donavan and Yochai Benkler share insights on the causes and effects of disinformation

Deplatforming the far-right: An analysis of YouTube and BitChute

Jonas Kaiser and colleague evaluate the impact of deplatforming

Oh, what a tangled web we weave

The Harvard Law Bulletin showcases work from members of the Berkman Klein community on mis- and disinformation and the Center’s projects and programs that produce it.

John Palfrey

The Empire (Facebook) Strikes Back (at the Oversight Board’s Trump Decision)

evelyn douek shares the limitations of the Facebook Oversight Board's ruling on Donald Trump's account.

Facebook Won’t Talk About the Insurrection

evelyn douek and Joan Donovan comment on Facebook’s response to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Where did the microchip vaccine conspiracy theory come from anyway?

Joan Donovan shares findings from her research on vaccine misinformation.

Joan Donovan explores vaccine disinformation and the election.

More Content Moderation Is Not Always Better

evelyn douek says simply erasing things from the internet comes at a cost and it might not be worth it.

When to Reply on Social Media—and When to Not

Sameer Hinduja shares insights on how to address cyberbullying.

Sameer Hinduja

Rechanneling Beliefs: How Information Flows Hinder or Help American Democracy

Bruce Schneier and colleague Henry Farrell published a new report via the Johns Hopkins Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

Facebook Oversight Board’s Decision on Trump Ban in a Global Context: The Treatment of Political Leaders

Chinmayi Arun examines the Oversight Board’s decision in the context of the options before it.

Forum Logic: Topical, with a side of toxicity

Looking back at topic-based social networks may offer one way forward for social media

Fix Section 230 and hold tech companies to account

Danielle Citron says making social media sites act on content such as nonconsensual porn and violent conspiracies would make the internet more equal and free

Danielle Citron

Stop Showing Violent Police Videos

Allissa Richardson interviewed by WBUR

Somebody Has to Do It

evelyn douek says Facebook’s made-up court is filling an enormous legal void.

It's Not Over. The Oversight Board's Trump Decision is Just the Start.

evelyn douek explains details of Facebook Oversight Board’s recent decision and what they reveal about Facebook’s rules, and the FOB’s role in reviewing them.

Facebook and Trump are at a turning point in their long, tortured relationship

evelyn douek weighs in on the Facebook Oversight Board’s upcoming decision

Delving into Disinformation

Harvard students explore disinformation on online platforms during the Assembly Student Fellowship

Zenzele Best provides an overview of the 2020-2021 Assembly Student Fellowship

From the Existential Issue: Post-truth and the press

Joan Donovan discusses “post truth,” press manipulation, and right-wing media lies

Trump in the Rearview Mirror: How to Better Regulate Violence-Inciting Content Online

Susan Benesch says human rights law could guide social media companies to regulate hateful speech

On Social Media, American-Style Free Speech Is Dead

A Q&A with evelyn douek

The Verdict, the Video, and the Unreasonable Burden of Proof

Allissa Richardson joins Slate’s Amicus podcast

Misinformation Is Destroying Our Country. Can Anything Rein It In?

BKC community members weigh in on political misinformation

Robert Faris

Hal Roberts

You have the right to film police. Here’s how to do it effectively — and safely.

Allissa Richardson discusses filming police encounters

What Facebook Did for Chauvin’s Trial Should Happen All the Time

evelyn douek says that if Facebook can discourage hate speech and incitements to violence on a special occasion, it can do so all the time.

We have enough proof

Allissa Richardson argues against sharing videos of violent police encounters in an op-ed for Vox.

Here's why one journalism professor argues graphic video of Black deaths shouldn't be broadcast

Dr. Allissa Richardson spoke with WUSA9 about having Black deaths aired on TV

Platform Accountability Through Digital “Poison Cabinets”

Preserving records of what user content is taken down—and why—could make platforms more accountable and transparent

Elaine Sedenberg

Inside QAnon

Joan Donovan discusses QAnon with CNN.

Trump faces a narrow path to victory against Facebook suspension

evelyn douek comments on the Facebook Oversight Board

Assembly Student Fellowship: A Seminar with James Mickens

James Mickens discusses combatting disinformation in a seminar for the Assembly Student Fellows of 2021.

James Mickens

YouTube says it’s getting better at taking down videos that break its rules. They still number in the millions.

Joan Donovan discusses disinformation on YouTube with The Washington Post.

Facebook's 'supreme court' struggles to set global free speech rules

evelyn douek speaks with Politico about the Facebook Oversight Board

A meta-proposal for Twitter's bluesky project

Members of BKC community share suggestions for building bluesky

Boaz Sender

Crystal Lee

Nana Mgbechikwere Nwachukwu

Peter Suber

Mitigating Medical Misinformation

Joan Donovan and colleagues publish a whole-of-society approach to countering spam, scams, and hoaxes

If Mark Zuckerberg won’t fix Facebook’s algorithms problem, who will?

evelyn douek and Julie Owono talk with Vox Recode about the Facebook Oversight Board

On Google Podcasts, a Buffet of Hate

Jessica Fjeld speaks with New York Times about content moderation on Google Podcasts

Jessica Fjeld

What we can learn from early online platforms

Berkman Klein event explores the early years of online platforms, the state of current platforms, and the future

How ‘digital witnesses’ are documenting history and challenging the status quo

Three community members discuss how young Black people use technology for activism around the world

Hannane Ferdjani

Amazon Is Pushing Readers Down A "Rabbit Hole" Of Conspiracy Theories About The Coronavirus

evelyn douek discusses Amazon profiting from sales of conspiracy theory books

How a racialized disinformation campaign ties itself to The 1619 Project

Research from Joan Donovan and colleague shows how right-wing media enabled a disinformation campaign around The 1619 Project

COVID Skeptics Don’t Just Need More Critical Thinking

Crystal Lee speaks about her research on COVID skeptics with Slate

With Trump Out Of Office, Disinformation Online Is On A Decline

Joan Donovan speaks with NPR

Anatomy of a lie: How the myth that Antifa stormed the Capitol became a widespread belief among Republicans

Joan Donovan talks to CNN about political disinformation campaigns.

Disinformation experts aren’t happy about the trailer for HBO’s QAnon series

Joan Donovan in The Verge

Improving Social Media: Misinformation & Free Expression

Jasmine McNealy joins a discussion on tackling misinformation and disinformation

Jasmine McNealy

India Has Its Own Alternative To Twitter. It's Filled With Hate.

evelyn douek discusses the increasing use of alternative platforms

Improving Social Media

Oumou Ly and Ethan Zuckerman featured in a publication from All Tech Is Human on Improving Social Media.

Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us

Yochai Benkler weighs in on tech's impact on democracy in The New York Times

Fighting Zika With Honey: An Analysis of YouTube’s Video Recommendations on Brazilian YouTube

Jonas Kaiser and colleagues publish in International Journal of Communication

Yasodara Córdova

Aliens Among U‪s‬

Oumou Ly discusses conspiracy theories on the ‘Things That Go Boom’ podcast.

Trump Isn’t the Only One on Trial. The Conservative Media Is, Too.

Jonathan Zittrain speaks to the New York Times

Zeynep Tufekci on why everyone should stop 'doomscrolling'

Lawsuits Take the Lead in Fight Against Disinformation

Yochai Benkler spoke to the New York Times about election disinformation lawsuits

The Case for Trump’s Permanent Ban From Social Media

Danielle Citron and colleague argue that Trump should not be allowed back on social media

Tracking QAnon: how Trump turned conspiracy-theory research upside down

Joan Donovan discusses QAnon, disinformation, and platform responsibility in Nature.

The GameStop Chaos Is Coming for Politics, Too

Joan Donovan draws parallels between Occupy Wall Street and GameStop

Deconstructing the ‘Karen’ meme

Apryl Williams puts memes in historical, cultural context

Apryl A. Williams

Effects of democratic strains on journalism.

An interview with james Siguru Wahutu

Big tech was allowed to spread misinformation unchecked. Will Biden hold them accountable?

Joan Donovan and colleague argue that antitrust enforcement will hold platforms accountable

De-platforming Is a Fix, But Only a Short-Term One

Will Marks discusses the “Great Deplatforming” in Just Security.

Let’s fix Facebook’s content issues

Julie Owono says content moderation needs a more global approach

Why Is Big Tech Policing Speech? Because the Government Isn’t

evelyn douek discusses the deplatforming of Donald Trump with The New York Times.

The High Cost of Online Attacks Against Women

Sarah Sobieraj on online attacks against women, what they mean for America, and what can be done about them.

Sarah Sobieraj

Biden’s vital but fraught battle against domestic terrorism.

Joan Donovan describes how disinformation can contribute to radicalization in The New Yorker.

Facebook outsources its decision to ban Trump to oversight board

evelyn douek discusses Facebook’s decision to refer Trump’s case to its oversight board with The New York Times

Judge Refuses To Reinstate Parler After Amazon Shut It Down

evelyn douek discusses content moderation – and who makes the decisions – with NPR.

Americans Mistrust Government. Is That a Bad Thing?

Ethan Zuckerman on WNYC

How Participatory Media Promote Coverage of Social Movements

An excerpt of Ethan Zuckerman’s book, “Mistrust”

Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online

Crystal Lee and colleagues publish a preprint of their paper ahead of ACM CHI 2021.

Can We Restore A Collective Understanding of Reality, Please?

Joan Donovan and Rob Faris pen op-ed calling for media accountability

‘Disinformation can be a very lucrative business, especially if you’re good at it,’ media scholar says

Joan Donovan discusses the Capitol attack and disinformation

The Capitol Rioters Are Giving Insurrection a Bad Name

Ethan Zuckerman says insurrectionism can be a civically responsible form of social change

For Prof. Ruth Okediji, ‘grievous’ Capitol insurrection holds hopeful lessons

Ruth Okediji reflects on the attacks on the U.S. Capitol, the state of democracy, and the role of digital technologies in politics today.

Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news

Mutale Nkonde and colleagues publish in HKS Misinformation Review

Mutale Nkonde

Momin M. Malik

Inside Twitter’s Decision to Cut Off Trump

evelyn douek weighs in on Twitter removing Trump

Twitter Under Pressure Over 'Double Standards' After Donald Trump, MAGA Crackdown

Shagun Jhaver speaks to Newsweek about his Twitter research

Shagun Jhaver

Banning Trump from Twitter and Facebook isn’t nearly enough

Woodrow Hartzog and colleague argue social media companies should be held accountable

Woodrow Hartzog

‘The Internet Is a Crime Scene’

Politico interviews Joan Donovan about misinformation

Jonathan Zittrain on the Great Deplatforming

Jonathan Zittrain joins the Lawfare Podcast

Blocking the president

Harvard Law experts Yochai Benkler and evelyn douek weigh in on the suspension of President Trump’s social media accounts

The deadly consequences of Trump’s gradual and insidious rhetoric

Susan Benesch pens an op-ed about the dangers of Trump’s rhetoric.

Facial Recognition Technology Isn’t Good Just Because It’s Used to Arrest Neo-Nazis

Joan Donovan and colleague warn against using facial recognition technology in Slate

The real lesson of Trump's social media silencing

Ethan Zuckerman calls for a new vision of social media

The Facebook Oversight Board Should Review Trump’s Suspension

evelyn douek pens an op-ed on Facebook’s Oversight Board

The Capitol siege was the biggest media spectacle of the Trump era

Joan Donovan and colleagues say the storm on the Capitol was the culmination of a presidency defined by media manipulation and networked conspiracism

Twitter, FB have deplatformed Trump. Is it enough?

Joan Donovan on what lawmakers and companies need to do to address the weaponization of social media and disinformation

Trump Is Banned. Who Is Next?

evelyn douek says tech giants must not treat their crackdown on the president’s social accounts as an edge case. The social web should be different now.

Trump scrambles to find new social network after Twitter ban, as White House prepares to blast big tech

Yochai Benkler talks with The Washington Post

Covering pro-Trump rallies and far-right groups

Joan Donovan shares four tips for journalists covering pro-Trump rallies and far-right groups for Journalist’s Resource.

‘Free Speech’ Platforms Are Emerging as Facebook and Twitter Suspend Trump

evelyn douek speaks with OneZero about content moderation and alternative social media platforms

Insurrection could be a turning point for social media

Joan Donovan joins Marketplace Tech podcast

Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech?

Rebecca Tushnet in the New York Times

It’s Time to Kick Trump Off Twitter

Danielle Citron says Twitter should change their rules for public officials.

Trump pushed QAnon and 4chan-created conspiracy theories in Georgia call

Joan Donovan speaks with NBC News

The Year That Changed the Internet

In 2020, the need to contain misinformation about COVID-19 pushed Facebook and Twitter into a role they never wanted—arbiters of the truth.

Better Than Nothing: A Look at Content Moderation in 2020

evelyn douek shares her thoughts on content moderation in 2020

How YouTube helps form homogeneous online communities

Jonas Kaiser and colleague discuss YouTube's recommendation algorithm

Black Memes Matter: #LivingWhileBlack With Becky and Karen

Apryl Williams publishes in Social Media + Society

We hardly ever talk about YouTube and disinformation. Not anymore.

evelyn douek joins Marketplace Tech podcast to discuss YouTube and disinformation

Toward a wehrhafte journalism

Jonas Kaiser shares his predictions for journalism in 2021 with NiemanLab.

Social media bet on labels to combat election misinformation. Trump proved it's not enough

Yochai Benkler speaks with CNN about media coverage of misinformation

Beyond “yellow banners on websites”: How to restore moral and technical order in a time of misinformation

NiemanLab shares takeaways from Joan Donovan’s BKC webinar

Examining Digital Anonymity

Elizabeth Renieris spoke with Good ID about the importance of anonymity online

What Makes Trump’s Subversion Efforts So Alarming? His Collaborators

Trump and fellow Republicans are trying to dismantle beliefs in democracy, argue Bruce Schneier and Henry Farrell

Why Isn't Susan Wojcicki Getting Grilled By Congress?

YouTube is a major vector for election and other disinformation. evelyn douek asks why its CEO wasn’t with Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey on Capitol Hill.

Twitter says it labeled 0.2% of all election-related tweets as disputed

evelyn douek discusses content moderation and the 2020 election

Biden’s plan to fight online harassment could set up new confrontation with tech companies, experts say

Joan Donovan comments on platform approaches to harassment and what it means for researchers

YouTube Election Loophole Lets Some False Trump-Win Videos Spread

evelyn douek talks with Bloomberg about YouTube’s election response

‘Be the Twitter that you want to see in the world’

Platform governance and the 2020 Presidential Election

The Danger in White Moderates Setting Biden’s Agenda

Tressie McMillan Cottom says the new president will be inclined to do less. He must be pushed to do more.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Why social media can’t keep moderating content in the shadows

Online platforms aren’t transparent about their decisions—which masks the true costs of misinformation

Facebook removes pro-Trump Stop the Steal group over 'calls for violence'

Joan Donovan comments on Facebook’s takedown efforts during the election

How viral videos helped blast voting lies across the Web

evelyn douek explains YouTube’s content moderation policies

Unclear Result a Recipe for Disinformation, Researchers Say

Joan Donovan discusses misinformation in the wake of the 2020 US presidential election.

Election robocalls: what we know and what we don’t

Rebecca Tushnet talks First Amendment and voter suppression campaigns

Tressie McMillan Cottom on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

Tressie McMillan Cottom joined The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on election night to discuss early election results, American politics, and the electoral college.

What Do COVID-19 and Extreme Inequality Mean for American Democracy?

Danielle Allen joins the Ask a Harvard Professor podcast to discuss COVID-19 and American democracy.

Danielle Allen

Where Is US Election Misinformation Coming From? Hint: It's Not Russia

Yochai Benkler discusses election misinformation with NPR

It’s the End of an Era for the Media, No Matter Who Wins the Election

evelyn douek and Zeynep Tufekci are cited by The New York Times

How disinformation infiltrated the mainstream

Joan Donovan joins the Today show to talk about disinformation.

How Three Election-Related Falsehoods Spread

Joan Donovan talks to the New York Times about election misinformation.

Disinformation in 2020

Joan Donovan explains recent disinformation campaigns

Poll Worker Numbers Have Many Election Officials Breathing Sigh Of Relief

Quentin Palfrey weighs in on poll workers in the lead-up to the November 3 election

Quentin Palfrey

’Media Manipulation Casebook’ from Harvard teaches how to detect misinformation campaigns

A new resource from Joan Donovan and the Shorenstein Center was featured in a newsletter from The Washington Post.

Who Will Win the 2020 Meme War?

Joan Donovan asks, “when does a meme become disinformation?”

Technology matters, but how real are our virtual lives at work and play?

A Q&A with Mary Gray

The Disinformation Age

Mutale Nkonde joined the No More Normal podcast to discuss misinformation and algorithms.

I Spoke to a Scholar of Conspiracy Theories and I’m Scared for Us

Joan Donovan profiled by New York Times for her work on disinformation

Women and gamers of color detail experiences with online harassment in games like Call of Duty

Kishonna Gray discusses online harassment in gaming with Good Morning America.

A double-edged sword: hopes and fears for children as fast internet reaches Pacific

Amanda Third and colleagues produce report on online safety in the Pacific.

Amanda Third

Benkler: newest right-wing ‘email’ story seems like a rerun.

Yochai Benkler joins Brian Selter on CNN’s Reliable Sources to discuss the US 2020 Election

Twitter Changes Course After Republicans Claim ‘Election Interference’

evelyn douek speaks to The New York Times about Twitter blocking the link to a New York Post article.

Black Cellphone Videos and Protest Journalism

Allissa Richardson talks protest journalism on the Start Making Sense podcast

Bigger than sports: Identity politics, Colin Kaepernick, and concession making in #BoycottNike

New paper published in Computers in Human Behavior

Rob Eschmann

How not to cover voter fraud disinformation.

Journalists should treat systematic disinformation campaigns from President Trump and his party no differently than those from Russian propagandists and Facebook clickbait artists

Should Big Tech Be Setting the Terms of Political Speech?

evelyn douek, Dipayan Ghosh talk with the Centre for International Governance Innovation

Dipayan Ghosh

To secure elections, paper ballots, risk-limiting audits and fighting misinformation are required

Abbey Stemler discusses the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration to secure elections

Abbey Stemler

COVID at the White House, voter disinformation, and how to report around the propaganda

Yochai Benkler joins the Columbia Journalism Review’s podcast

Allissa Richardson thinks it’s time to shatter a few myths about citizen journalism

Allissa Richardson discusses her new book and the myth of objective journalism

Disinformation, QAnon efforts targeting Latino voters ramp up ahead of presidential election

Oumou Ly talks with The Hill

A 2020 Roundup Of Asian Representation In Film And TV

Jenny Korn discusses Asian representation in film and TV in 2020

Facebook's long-awaited oversight board to launch before US election

Julie Owono and evelyn douek discuss Facebook Oversight Board

International Human Rights Law Is Not Enough to Fix Content Moderation’s Legitimacy Crisis

Should tech companies follow human rights law to govern online speech?

Brenda Dvoskin

What the us needs to do to secure election 2020.

Abbey Stemler and colleagues publish paper on disinformation and election insecurity

Mental health and journalism

Allissa Richardson on mental health of Black journalists covering the anti-police brutality and Black Lives Matter protests

Cheap Fakes on the Campaign Trail

Danielle Citron joins Lawfare podcast to discuss manipulated video and audio content.

The Problem With Police-Shooting Videos

Smartphone footage of police brutality highlights a dire need to tell more humane stories about Black victims, Allissa Richardson says

TV Ratings for Biden and Trump Signal an Increasingly Polarized Nation

Yochai Benkler discusses partisan media with the New York Times

Are We Already Living in a Tech Dystopia?

Gizmodo asks experts, including Jonathan Zittrain, for their answers

How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right

Zeyenp Tufecki featured in The New York Times

Police Monitoring Of Social Media Sparks Concerns In Black And Brown Communities

Desmond Patton interviewed by NPR about police monitoring social media

Desmond Patton

How a TikTok ban would affect the influencer economy

The Verge interviews Taylor Lorenz

Taylor Lorenz

Sick of unwanted Twitter replies? New feature lets users limit who can reply to tweets

Jasmine McNealy discusses the feature and the First Amendment

Why All News Sounds the Same

Ethan Zuckerman uses Media Cloud to explain the narrowing media agenda

Facebook Must Better Police Online Hate, State Attorneys General Say

Danielle Citron spoke with The New York Times about Facebook’s hate speech policies.

Congress’ Antitrust Hearing Was Actually Pretty OK

Dipayan Ghosh and Stephen Wicker reflect on Congress’ antitrust hearing

Data collection is not the solution for Europe's racism problem

Structural racism can be combatted only if there is political will, not more data.

Nani Jansen Reventlow

Why congress should look at twitter and facebook.

“We cannot build a healthy democracy on top of an ailing communication system”

Twitter Brings Down the Banhammer on QAnon

Twitter’s QAnon response underlines “how powerful and unaccountable” companies are, evelyn douek says.

Twitter Finally Cracked Down on QAnon—but There’s a Catch

evelyn douek discusses Twitter’s recent plans to mitigate QAnon with Slate

What Did People Use Before Google to Search the Web?

Ethan Zuckerman discusses web search before Google with Gizmodo

A Nixon Deepfake, a 'Moon Disaster' Speech and an Information Ecosystem at Risk

Jonathan Zittrain, Danielle Citron, and Joan Donovan provide expert commentary

The Twitter Hacks Have to Stop

Bruce Schneier explains the recent Twitter hack

Surveillance of Black Lives

Apryl Williams, Mutale Nkonde, and Allissa V. Richardson speak at event

On Platforms and Power

Elizabeth Renieris on social media platforms, their leaders, and democracy

Decoder Ring examines the rise of The Karen, Barbecue Becky, Permit Patty, and the history of names as code words.

Apryl Williams joins Slate podcast to discuss “The Karen”

'Too big to fail': why even a historic ad boycott won’t change Facebook

Susan Benesch talks to The Guardian

Disinformation by Design: How Media Manipulation Campaigns Are Constructed

Joan Donovan discusses new article on platform design and disinformation

#BlackLivesMatter saw tremendous growth on social media. Now what?

Jenny Korn discusses the use of #BlackLivesMatter on social media

What Does “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior” Actually Mean?

There’s no clear definition, and that’s worrisome, evelyn douek says.

You Purged Racists From Your Website? Great, Now Get to Work

Joan Donovan says social media sites can—and must—take action to control the content on their sites.

Ken and Karen are White Supremacists

Apryl Williams explains that although memes are humorous, Karens and Kens of the world express a dangerous, audacious kind of White supremacy

Advertisers retreating from Facebook amid backlash over hate speech on social media

evelyn douek joins Australian Broadcasting Corporation to discuss backlash over hate speech on social media

A Guide to Covering Hate Speech Without Amplifying It

Jasmine McNealy says the U.S. Constitution needs to be understood within a power framework

Twitter’s Least-Bad Option for Dealing With Donald Trump

Every plausible configuration of social media in 2020 is unpalatable, Jonathan Zittrain says.

Proposals for Improved Regulation of Harmful Online Content

Report features seven recommendations for Internet companies

Games may be the killer weapon to fight off disinformation

Julia Reda comments on media literacy to combat disinformation

How the 'Karen Meme' Confronts the Violent History of White Womanhood

Apryl Williams discusses the historical context, significance of the ‘Karen Meme’

Australia warned to not ignore domestic misinformation in social media crackdown

evelyn douek spoke to Australia’s Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media about misinformation.

Bot or not?

Jonas Kaiser talks with German radio station about social media bots, his recent paper

Who’s a Bot? Who’s Not?

Joan Donovan and Jonas Kaiser discuss challenges with studying automated bots on social media

Has Twitter just had its saddest fortnight ever?

Sorrow alone doesn’t tell the whole story, Desmond Patton says.

Why We Should Care That Facebook Accidentally Deplatformed Hundreds of Users

evelyn douek discusses content moderation and different types of speech

Keeping An Eye On You

Mutale Nkonde joins panel to discuss data privacy, surveillance, sophisticated bots, racially biased tech and misinformation

Anxiety from social media around the anti-racism movement

Kishonna Gray discusses social media during the anti-racism movement

What Does President Trump’s “Crackdown” on Twitter Do?

A forthcoming article by Danielle Citron lends insight to this question

White People: Learn How To Become Better Allies

Apryl Williams discusses how white allies can express solidarity without centering the conversations on themselves.

The 'Concerned Citizen Who Happens To Be Armed' Is Showing Up At Protests

Joan Donovan talks to NPR about riot rumors and disinformation

Protest misinformation is riding on the success of pandemic hoaxes

Joan Donovan says misinformation about police brutality protests is being spread by the same sources as covid-19 denial.

What Is the Male Version of a Karen?

Apryl Williams on how to make sense of memes as an act of resistance, and what it means to be a Ken

Bail organizations, thrust into the national spotlight, are targeted by online trolls

Joan Donovan talks with NBC News

Conspiracy theories run rampant online amid Floyd protests

Joan Donovan explains the power social media has in spreading misinformation

Why filming police violence has done nothing to stop it

Ethan Zuckerman says evidentiary images on their own don’t bring about change. What’s missing is power.

Facebook’s Small Business Grants Come With a Big Catch: Your Data

Elizabeth Renieris spoke with Digital Privacy News about Facebook's small business grants program

People Can’t Stop Watching Videos of Police and Protesters. That’s the Idea.

Supercuts of police behavior are receiving enormous numbers of views.

Community and technology

Noa Gafni on how citizens are self-organizing during the COVID-19 crisis

Free Speech is Circular

Trump, Twitter, and the Public Interest

Elettra Bietti

Trump's executive order is the most futile attack on 230 yet.

Though his executive order follows a line of misguided, bipartisan swings at the protections for online platforms, this one is distinctively terrible, John Bowers says.

Boiling Point

Apryl Williams examines the Karen meme and what it tells us about criticism of privilege in the pandemic and Jessie Daniels discusses the history of white women in racial dynamics…

Jessie Daniels

Trump Is a Problem That Twitter Cannot Fix

When a duly elected president is bent on spreading misinformation, tech companies can rein him in only so much, writes evelyn douek.

Twitter Grapples Anew With Its Trump Conundrum

Joan Donovan weighs in on Twitter creating a carve-out for public leaders

Digital Bingeing: Time On Screens During COVID-19

We're turning to screens more than ever during the coronavirus pandemic. But what are the implications of spending so much time online?

Leah Plunkett

Social media users think politicians should pay heavy price for spreading false covid-19 information.

Dipayan Ghosh explains why social media platforms need to be more transparent about their policies on politicians spreading misinformation.

Ruth Okediji encourages the graduating class to cultivate the courage to try something new

The Harvard Law Professor and BKC director’s "Last Lecture"

Study shows vulnerable populations with less education more likely to believe, share misinformation

Hyunjin Seo leads the research, forthcoming in the journal New Media & Society

Hyunjin Seo

Political ads put Twitter, Facebook and Google in a bind. Here's why.

Joan Donovan weighs in on targeted ads on social media

New Leadership for Global Health

How the Adaptive Leadership Framework can help the international health community

Ashveena Gajeelee

'Dangerous speech' fuelled by fear in crises can be countered with education

Fear is the biggest motivator in spreading 'dangerous speech' in times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, says BKC’s Susan Benesch

Social Network Construction Kit

Zuckerman discusses the history of public broadcasting, and potential alternative models for the future.

Real Reporting on Fake News

evelyn douek interviews Craig Silverman, the media editor for Buzzfeed News, for the Lawfare Podcast.

Rethinking Digital Platforms for the Post-COVID-19 Era

As long as COVID-19 is a global concern, many aspects of daily life will be mediated by platform companies that see human interactions as content to be moderated, and as sources…

Citation Needed

Mindy Seu talks about pursuing independent projects, the internet’s other histories and futures, archives, and spreadsheets with Frontier.

evelyn douek talks about the Facebook Oversight Board

douek speaks with Columbia Journalism Review’s Mathew Ingram

“What Kind of Oversight Board Have You Given Us?”

evelyn douek explains Facebook’s Oversight Board

The Facebook Oversight Board: An Experiment in Self-Regulation

Chinmayi Arun says Oversight Board might be the most interesting development in social media self-regulation in a decade

Disinformation by Design: The Use of Evidence Collages and Platform Filtering in a Media Manipulation Campaign

A new paper co-authored by BKC affiliate Joan Donovan explores tactics of disinformation to show how platform design and decentralized communication contribute to advancing the…

Covid hoaxes are using a loophole to stay alive—even after content is deleted

Pandemic conspiracy theorists are using the Wayback Machine to promote “zombie content” that evades moderators and fact-checkers

Waide Warner on the state of Internet connectivity in Massachusetts

Listen to the BKC affiliate on "In it Together" from WGBH

Waide Warner

It’s been a month since the WHO launched its Covid-19 WhatsApp information service, is it effective?

Lessons the WHO can take from the BBC messaging app

Yvonne MacPherson

How Harvard’s medical and public health students are helping to #FlattentheCurve

BKC’s Jenna Sherman discusses the work of the group she co-founded at Harvard, Students against COVID-19. 

Jenna Sherman

The Internet’s Titans Make a Power Grab

Facebook and other platforms insisted that they didn’t want to be “arbiters of truth.” The coronavirus changed their mind overnight.

Be very wary of Trump’s health surveillance plans

Danielle Citron on why technology’s promise is only as good as those who control it

COVID-19 and the Digital Rights Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an equally urgent digital rights crisis.

Social-media companies must flatten the curve of misinformation

The pandemic lays bare the failure to quarantine online scams, hoaxes and lies amid political battles.

Vote and Die: Covering Voter Suppression during the Coronavirus Pandemic

Journalists must cut through rampant disinformation around the pandemic to robustly report on efforts to suppress voting and delegitimize election results writes Joan Donovan

Say Hello to Your New Local Bank—The Fed

BKC affiliate Patrick Murck on why newly introduced bills creating a U.S. “Digital Dollar” as part of the coronavirus stimulus package would radically upend the banking and…

Patrick Murck

Coronavirus-killing silver, fake tests, CDC impersonators: Feds rush to stamp out scams

Joan Donovan on the dozens, if not hundreds of scams that have popped up online as quickly as the coronavirus itself

An ethical plan for ending the pandemic and restarting the economy

Danielle Allen describes how the US could use technology to ethically and democratically address both the public health emergency and economic crisis by scaling up "smart testing."

Her name was Marielle Franco…

Two years after the assassination of Marielle Franco, BKC fellow and filmmaker Leonard Cortana reflects on the subject of his documentary

Republicans Want Twitter to Ban Chinese Communist Party Accounts

That’s a Dangerous Idea

We need a collaborative society more than ever

How collaborative society has come to the rescue where late capitalism has failed.

Don’t Believe the COVID-19 Models

Zeynep Tufekci says that’s not what they’re for

Alarm, Denial, Blame: The Pro-Trump Media’s Coronavirus Distortion

Yochai Benkler discusses why Trump’s loyalists benefited from having told people not to believe what they were hearing.

Location, Location, Location. And the Virus.

evelyn douek discusses content moderation and COVID-19

Silicon Valley gets used to its new role as digital saviour as coronavirus leaves millions isolated

With many offices and schools now closed, people are seeking out human connection using the same online tools that have been widely criticized for fostering digital addiction and…

As Trump signals readiness to break with experts, his online base assails Fauci

Rob Faris discusses the “politicization of public health”

COVID-19 and Social Media Content Moderation

evelyn douek on changes to content moderation on social media platforms as a result of the pandemic

Confronting Viral Disinformation

Danielle Citron discusses misinformation about COVID-19

'Coughing while Asian': living in fear as racism feeds off coronavirus panic

Racist incidents are increasing while Trump promotes racism by calling coronavirus ‘the Chinese virus’

To Pre-Empt Future Pandemics, Governments Should Invest in the Welfare State, Not Private Surveillance

BKC affiliate Elettra Bietti and Jennifer Cobbe argue that governments should strengthen the social safety net, not technology companies.

Coronavirus misinformation makes neutrality a distant memory for tech companies

Facing the prospect that hoaxes or misinformation could worsen a global pandemic, tech platforms are taking control of the information ecosystem like never before.

It Wasn’t Just Trump Who Got It Wrong

America’s coronavirus response failed because we didn’t understand the complexity of the problem.

With Outbreaks Come Misinformation. Covid-19 Is No Exception.

In Covid-19’s wake, uncertainty about the emerging outbreak has propagated mis- and disinformation across the internet. BKC's Hal Roberts weighs in.

A side effect of COVID-19 is a booming collaborative society

BKC’s Dariusz Jemielniak on how "we can unite, rise up to the challenge and return stronger" despite the destruction caused by the pandemic

How the Coronavirus Challenges our Model of Economic Growth

Despite heart-wrenching images in the media of people standing together and political calls for solidarity, the pandemic has laid bare the problems with globalisation and…

Padmashree Gehl Sampath

Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired

To help manage the shortage, the authorities sent a message that made them untrustworthy.

Here’s how social media can combat the coronavirus ‘infodemic’

With millions on lockdown, Facebook and Twitter are major sources of Covid-19 news. They’re also where misinformation thrives. How can platforms step up?

In fast-moving pandemic, sources of falsehoods elude authorities

Misleading text messages claiming that President Trump was going to announce a national quarantine buzzed into cellphones across the country over the weekend, underscoring how…

The Lawfare Podcast: Kate Starbird on Pandemics and Infodemics

evelyn douek speaks with Kate Starbird, an expert in crisis informatics, or the study of how information flows during crisis events.

Minecraft ‘loophole’ library of banned journalism

BKC affiliate Helmi Noman weighs in on a library filled with articles by censored journalists, hosted in the game Minecraft

Helmi Noman

The Best of Worst Times

Fellows Advisory Board member Judith Donath on the privilege of working online

How new rules at Facebook and Twitter led to a warning beneath a Trump retweet

A video of Joe Biden that was deceptively edited to make it appear as if he endorsed President Donald Trump for re-election triggered warning labels from Twitter and Facebook

How Wikipedia’s volunteers became the web’s best weapon against misinformation

BKC affiliate Ryan Merkley on the importance of reliable access to knowledge when making important choices:

Ryan Merkley

In facebook groups, coronavirus misinformation thrives despite broader crackdown.

Dozens of public and private Facebook groups totaling hundreds of thousands of members have become a haven for conspiracy theories, medical equipment promotion and unproven cures.

Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U.S.

Getting ready for the possibility of major disruptions is not only smart; it’s also our civic duty

Taylor Lorenz Makes Sense of Online Culture for the Rest of Us

The BKC affiliate reveals how social media is encouraging individual expression.

Don't Panic, It's Just The Collapse Of Neoliberalism

Video of a recent talk by Yochai Benkler at the Shorenstein Center

The Internet Unleashed

BKC affiliate Joan Donovan spoke at the Knight Media Forum

Ethiopia’s new law banning online hate speech

Julie Owono explains the concern over the law

Podcast: Election Meltdown

BKC faculty associate Danielle Citron joins former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, director of the ACLU’s voting-rights initiative Dale Ho, and election law…

How the Coronavirus Revealed Authoritarianism’s Fatal Flaw

China’s use of surveillance and censorship makes it harder for Xi Jinping to know what’s going on in his own country.

5 Questions on Data and Context with Desmond Patton

The BKC faculty associate discusses the importance of meaningful interaction with the people behind data

Many Tech Experts Say Digital Disruption Will Hurt Democracy

Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center canvassed technology experts in the summer of 2019 to gain their insights about the potential future…

« Les Misérables », affaire classée ?

Leonard Cortana on why France’s entry for the Best International Feature Film at the&nbsp;Academy Awards,&nbsp;Les Misérables,&nbsp;should be&nbsp;inscribed in the history of…

Imagine Otherwise: Sasha Costanza-Chock on Design Justice

How can putting marginalized people at the very center of design and technology change the world for the better?

Under whose thumb? Inside a Rolling Stones copyright mystery

BKC faculty associate Jennifer Jenkins on the differences between European and US copyright law when it comes to the rights of musicians

Jennifer Jenkins

The Hard Tradeoffs of the Internet

Alex Stamos discusses his experience at Facebook handling 2016 election interference, as well as his work on cybersecurity, disinformation, and end-to-end encryption with evelyn…

The Rise of Content Cartels

evelyn douek urges transparency and accountability in industry-wide content removal decisions

China’s coronavirus app will only inspire panic, experts say

Dariusz Jemielniak on a Chinese app that tracks the spread of the coronavirus.

The Speaker, the President, and the Case of (the) Ripped Up Speech

Jonathan Zittrain argues that while platforms might consider labeling videos like these as manipulated, they should not remove them entirely.

Can Public Infrastructure Fix Social Media?

Ethan Zuckerman at Cornell

J. Nathan Matias

How Campaigns Can Counter Deepfakes

Danielle Citron devised an eight-point plan for political campaigns to protect against fabricated video and audio

Understanding Internet Culture

Taylor Lorenz shares her views on “Ok Boomer,” the “flattening” of politics by social media and the internet, and the causes of the United States’ internet regulation vacuum.

Coronavirus Rumor Mill Rampant With Bogus News

For those who want help finding out what’s true when it comes to the coronavirus, BKC affiliate Mary Minow says public libraries are a great resource.

'Wake-up call': Iowa caucus disinformation serves as warning about 2020 election

The specificity of both Twitter and Facebook’s rules around disinformation leave room for known disinformation agents to work during elections, said Joan Donovan.

Who Needs the Russians?

Don’t blame shadowy foreign hackers for the chaos in Iowa. Blame Shadow’s caucus app, says faculty associate Zeynep Tufekci.

The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities

Russell Newman joins Jasmine McNealy to dicuss his book, “The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities”

Russell Newman

Le « blackface », une hypocrisie française.

Leonard Cortana on the inadequate response of the French media to racist incidents

Coronavirus misinformation surges, fueled by clout chasers

Joan Donovan and Natalie Gyenes spoke to NBC News about the coronavirus and misinformation

Natalie Gyenes

Facebook announces new details about independent oversight board for content moderation

evelyn douek weighed in on the upsides and shortcomings drawbacks of Facebook‘s new content moderation policy. 

Facebook, Google and Twitter scramble to stop misinformation about coronavirus

Joan Donovan spoke to The Washington Post about the coronavirus and misinformation.

Intersection of Race and Technology

BKC fellow Mutale Nkonde in conversation about disinformation targeted towards Black communities.

How YouTube shields advertisers (not viewers) from harmful videos

The difference between the protections YouTube offers its advertisers and those it provides consumers is stark.

Digital Public Infrastructure… and a few words in defense of optimism

Ethan Zuckerman argues the case for Digital Public Infrastructure

How To Spot Fake News

Joan Donovan participated in a panel of scholars who study media manipulation, digital resources, and the spread of misinformation on how to spot “fake news” in an age of…

YouTube and Radicalization

Joan Donovan talks with Mathew Ingram of Columbia Journalism Review

Tech companies tried to help us spend less time on our phones. It didn’t work.

Ethan Zuckerman adds to the discussion about whether concerns about “time well spent” are overblown.

The Future of Politics Is Robots Shouting at One Another

They’ll be controlled by foreign actors, domestic political groups, even the candidates themselves, says BKC fellow Bruce Schneier.

“Marielle’s Legacy Will Not Die”

An interview with the documentary filmmaker and BKC fellow Leonard Cortana

Internet Deception Is Here to Stay—So What Do We Do Now?

Judith Donath’s work from 1998 on the effects of trolling on Usenet groups was highlighted in a recent Wired article on disinformation.

Social media hosted a lot of fake health news this year.

Here’s what went most viral.

The most common concerns among health professionals when it comes to misinformation online is compliance with health treatments or prevention efforts.

A call for context

Jasmine McNealy on why “context is ever more important in this era of data-driven elections, social media, and emerging technology.”

"Technology isn't the driver of social movements, it's the other way around"

A Q&A with BKC faculty associate Sasha Costanza-Chock

Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists

Jonas Kaiser on what journalists can learn from the late 2000s when it comes to misinformation

Western journalists, learn from your African peers

Faculty associate james Wahutu on what he hopes media organizations in the U.S. and the UK will do in 2020.

Mutale Nkonde on Race-Based Disinformation

BKC fellow discusses the role race plays in election interference efforts on the City on the Hill podcast.

Building a More Honest Internet

Ethan Zuckerman imagines a different kind of Internet—one propelled by public concerns instead of the interests of large corporations.

High school students, social media and the illusion of free speech

Joan Donovan shares insights on a recently released report on high school students’ views on First Amendment protections

Hardly Anybody Shares Fake News

Radio and cable TV are bigger conduits for conspiracy theories.

Let Juries Review Facebook Ads

Social-media giants can’t decide how far is too far, but a panel of regular people can.

Building better online communities

Researcher uses high-performance computing to understand how online communities work

Benjamin Mako Hill

Facebook’s new dating service is flopping..

BKC fellow Apryl Williams sheds light on online dating and context collapse

What Does Twitter's Ban on Political Ads Mean for Platform Governance?

Joan Donovan and Elizabeth Dubois weigh in

Connecting the (Far-)Right Dots: A Topic Modeling and Hyperlink Analysis of (Far-)Right Media Coverage during the US Elections 2016

Research discusses the relevance of alternative media for the US (far-)right

Nikki Bourassa

Danielle Citron on Deepfakes and the Representative Katie Hill Scandal

Danielle Citron reflects on her career, current events, and the future

Facebook, free speech, and political ads

Jonathan Zittrain and evelyn douek weigh in on the power of platforms like Facebook

Israeli Supreme Court Justice on combating propaganda in elections

Yochai Benkler moderated a discussion on measures the Israeli Supreme Court took to shut down deceptive election posts

evelyn douek talks Facebook and Speech

BKC affiliate discusses free speech, platform regulation, political advertising, and Facebook’s oversight board.

Protecting Information Consumers

Jonathon Penney proposes a new comprehensive regulatory framework to hold social media platforms accountable

Navigating the Tech Stack: When, Where and How Should We Moderate Content?

Joan Donovan describes content moderation in the context of a tech stack

How memes got weaponized: A short history

Memes come off as a joke, but some people are starting to see them as the serious threat they are.

The embarrassing epilogue to the media’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails

BKC paper cited in reflection on media coverage of the Clinton email "scandal."

Bruce Etling

Cautionary Notes on Disinformation and the Origins of Distrust

We need to look at long-term patterns of loss of trust in institutions, Yochai Benkler says.

Facebook’s new Oversight Board is a step forward – but it can’t help Kashmiris

If Facebook decides incorrectly that local laws in India require it to silence Kashmiri calls for self-determination, the Board will not be able to review this.

Guns on social media: complex interpretations of gun images posted by Chicago youth

“How should we interpret gun images on social media?” Desmond Patton asks

The Modern Bystander Effect

Desmond Patton talks to PBS about violence Facebook Live

Sticks and Stones

Susan Benesch discusses our complicated legal right to speak.

Why International Human Rights Law Cannot Replace Content Moderation

CJEU’s Ruling in Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook and the Conflicting Regulation of Prior Restraint in Regional Human Rights Systems

Do We Need to Break Up Facebook?

Breaking up Facebook isn’t enough, says evelyn douek

Trudeau’s Blackface: The Chilling Effects of Disinformation on Political Engagement

During election season, journalists should be ready for even more sophisticated attempts to plant false narratives and to spin disinformation via legitimate news stories

Donald Trump plays a dangerous game with rhetoric of ‘treason’ and ‘civil war’

Susan Benesch says it isn’t normal for American presidents to suggest that their political opponents be arrested for treason

In an impeachment hearing, we are all jurors

If this is our moment of something like national jury duty, what are we called to judge?

Whose deaths matter? New research on Black Lives Matter and media attention

A Quantitative Analysis of Media Attention to Deaths of Black Americans in Police Confrontations

An inspiring conversation about democracy

What a democratic policy agenda would look like, how to talk to strangers, and why we need to reform civic education.

Why White Supremacists Love Facebook

Far from deplatforming racists, Facebook is moving toward private groups that will be harder to monitor.

Using digital information to manipulate public opinion

Joan Donovan explains how digital information is weaponized

Facebook Expands Definition of Terrorist Organizations to Limit Extremism

evelyn douek shares her perspective with The New York Times

Finally, Facebook Put Someone in Charge

Deciding which postings to take down is a difficult and unpopular job. So Mark Zuckerberg is outsourcing it, says evelyn douek

Source hacking: How trolls manipulate the media

Data & Society report aims to create a taxonomy of trolling tactics.

Host Violent Content? In Australia, You Could Go to Jail

Australia has held itself up as a model for cracking down on violent extremist material online since the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand. But the limits to its approach have…

Policing User Content on Social Media

Policy experts debate what legal responsibility social media companies should have under the 1996 Communications Decency Act

Source Hacking: Media Manipulation in Practice

Data & Society report uses case studies to illustrate four main techniques of source hacking

With This Statement, I Give Notice That Instagram Owns Your Soul

People posting a pseudo-legal declaration may believe they're in a two-way dialogue with the company. The opposite is true.

Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube

Research from faculty associate paints a comprehensive picture of user radicalization on YouTube

Researchers Model Online Hate Networks In Effort to Battle Them

Susan Benesch provides an external review of the study

How YouTube Misinformation Resolved a WhatsApp Mystery in Brazil

WhatsApp and YouTube formed a powerful feedback loop of extremism and misinformation

Announcing Assembly: Disinformation

New program explores disinformation in the digital public sphere from a cybersecurity perspective

David O'Brien

Salomé Viljoen

Fox News has no comment on its venomous rhetoric

Network Propaganda research on media ecosystems informs recent events

8 Ways to Stay Ahead of Influence Operations

With election meddling inevitable in 2020, the United States needs a powerful kill chain

How YouTube Radicalized Brazil

Research informs New York Times investigation into YouTube’s recommendations

What is YouTube Pushing You to Watch Next

Research shows that YouTube’s recommendation system pushes users toward extremist content.

Combating Hate Speech Through Counterspeech

What we can learn from cataloging extremely toxic speech on social media platforms and engaging with practitioners of “counterspeech”

Daniel Jones

Exploring the good – and very bad – political impacts of social media

Ethan Zuckerman discusses the opportunities and consequences of participatory media.

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Bot

An exploration of what happens when politically motivated humans impersonate vulnerable people or populations online to exploit their voices, positionality and power.

From Trump to Fox News to 8chan: the web of white supremacist rhetoric is wide

Trump is a politician perfectly fitted for a media ecosystem that amplifies extreme emotion and allows the loud to drown out the calm

Siva Vaidhyanathan

The Lawless Way to Disable 8chan

The decision to disable an infamous message board fell to Matthew Prince, an internet executive who is deeply uncomfortable with his own power.

Dr. Joan Donovan, Shorenstein Center expert, comments on El Paso, 8chan, and what’s next

BKC affiliate responds to El Paso shooting, use of manifestos as a tactic, and explains how extremists manipulate the media to control public conversation

El Paso shooter wasn't a 'lone wolf' — and his so-called online 'manifesto' proves why

While we often think about those who commit mass violence as acting individually, we must reckon with the fact that these extremists are never alone online.

Can the U.S. regulate 8chan?

Incoming BKC fellow Mutale Nkonde says we need a legal definition for harmful speech that could be regulated

Why Conservatives Allege Big Tech Is Muzzling Them

Google and Facebook aren’t infringing on the right’s freedom of expression, but insisting otherwise is politically convenient.

It’s not just the Russians anymore as Iranians and others turn up disinformation efforts ahead of 2020 vote

BKC affiliate Simin Kargar says Iran for years has harassed journalists, political dissidents and artists in its internal disinformation campaigns

Simin Kargar

A Jeffrey Epstein-Clinton Conspiracy Theory Was Trending — And That’s a Problem

A report that the Epstein was injured in jail dredged up a conspiracy theory about the Clintons — and thanks to a hashtag, the baseless rumor likely has a whole lot of new…

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Home — Essay Samples — Business — Media — The Power of Media in Shaping Public Opinion

The Power of Media in Shaping Public Opinion

• Categories: Media

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Words: 1096 |

Published: Feb 7, 2024

Words: 1096 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Table of contents

Historical overview of media influence on public opinion, the role of media in influencing public opinion, case studies of media influence on public opinion, positive and negative effects of media influence on public opinion, enhancing media responsibility in influencing public opinion, a. agenda setting, d. persuasion, a. positive effects, b. negative effects, c. ethical considerations.

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Can ❤️s change minds? How social media influences public opinion and news circulation

Assistant Professor of Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University

Disclosure statement

Study 1 was approved by University College Dublin Office of Research Ethics (reference numbers: HS-E-20-110-Samahita and HS-E-20-134-Samahita) and funded by University College Dublin, Collegio Carlo Alberto, and the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. Data for Study 2 was accessed through the Academic Research Twitter API. The author has no direct relevant material or financial interest that relate to the research described.

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Social media use has been shown to decrease mental health and well-being, and to increase levels of political polarization .

But social media also provides many benefits, including facilitating access to information, enabling connections with friends, serving as an outlet for expressing opinions and allowing news to be shared freely.

To maximize the benefits of social media while minimizing its harms, we need to better understand the different ways in which it affects us. Social science can contribute to this understanding. I recently conducted two studies with colleagues to investigate and disentangle some of the complex effects of social media.

Social media likes and public policy

In a recently published article , my co-researchers (Pierluigi Conzo, Laura K. Taylor, Margaret Samahita and Andrea Gallice) and I examined how social media endorsements, such as likes and retweets, can influence people’s opinions on policy issues.

We conducted an experimental survey in 2020 with respondents from the United States, Italy and Ireland. In the study, we showed participants social media posts about COVID-19 and the tension between economic activity and public health. Pro-economy posts prioritized economic activities over the elimination of COVID-19. For instance, they advocated for reopening businesses despite potential health risks.

Pro-public health posts, on the other hand, prioritized the elimination of COVID-19 over economic activities. For example, they supported the extension of lockdown measures despite the associated economic costs.

We then manipulated the perceived level of support within these social media posts. One group of participants viewed pro-economy posts with a high number of likes and pro-public health posts with a low number of likes, while another group viewed the reverse.

After participants viewed the posts, we asked whether they agreed with various pandemic-related policies, such as restrictions on gatherings and border closures.

Overall, we found that the perceived level of support of the social media posts did not affect participants’ views — with one exception. Participants who reported using Facebook or Twitter for more than one hour a day did appear to be influenced. For these respondents, the perceived endorsements in the posts affected their policy preferences.

Participants that viewed pro-economy posts with high number of likes were less likely to favour pandemic-related restrictions, such as prohibiting gatherings. Those that viewed pro-public health posts with high number of likes were more likely to favour restrictions.

Social media metrics can be an important mechanism through which online influence occurs. Though not all users pay attention to these metrics, those that do can change their opinions as a result.

Active social media users in our survey were also more likely to report being politically engaged. They were more likely to have voted and discussed policy issues with friends and family (both online and offline) more frequently. These perceived metrics could, therefore, also have effects on politics and policy decisions.

Twitter’s retweet change and news sharing

In October 2020, a few weeks before the U.S. presidential election, Twitter changed the functionality of its retweet button . The modified button prompted users to share a quote tweet instead, encouraging them to add their own commentary.

Twitter hoped that this change would encourage users to reflect on the content they were sharing and to slow down the spread of misinformation and false news.

In a recent working paper , my co-researcher Daniel Ershov and I investigated how Twitter’s change to its user interface affected the spread of information on the platform.

We collected Twitter data for popular U.S. news outlets and examined what happened to their retweets after the change was implemented. Our study revealed that this change had significant effects on news diffusion: on average, retweets for news media outlets fell by over 15 per cent.

We then investigated whether the change affected all news media outlets to the same extent. We specifically examined whether media outlets where misinformation is more common were affected more by the change. We discovered this was not the case: the effect on these outlets was not greater than for outlets of higher journalistic quality (and if anything, the effects were slightly smaller).

A similar comparison revealed that left-wing news outlets were affected significantly more than right-wing outlets. The average drop in retweets for liberal outlets was more than 20 per cent, but the drop for conservative outlets was only five per cent. This occurred because conservative users changed their behaviour significantly less than liberal users.

Lastly, we also found that Twitter’s policy affected visits to the websites of the news outlets affected, suggesting that the new policy had broad effects on the diffusion of news.

Understanding social media

These two studies underscore that seemingly simple features can have complex effects on user attitudes and media diffusion. Disentangling the specific features that make up social media and estimating their individual effects is key to understanding how social media affects us.

Like Instagram, Meta’s new Threads platform allows users to hide the number of likes on posts. X, formerly Twitter, has just rolled out a similar feature by allowing paid users to hide their likes. These decisions can have important implications for political discourse within the new social network.

At the same time, subtle changes to platforms’ design can have unintended consequences which depend on how users respond to these policies. Social scientists can play an important role in furthering our understanding of these nuanced effects of social media.

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• Published: 26 July 2021

Large-scale quantitative evidence of media impact on public opinion toward China

• Junming Huang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2532-4090 1 ,
• Gavin G. Cook 1 &
• Yu Xie 1 , 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  8 , Article number:  181 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Politics and international relations

Do mass media influence people’s opinions of other countries? Using BERT, a deep neural network-based natural language processing model, this study analyzes a large corpus of 267,907 China-related articles published by The New York Times since 1970. The output from The New York Times is then compared to a longitudinal data set constructed from 101 cross-sectional surveys of the American public’s views on China, revealing that the reporting of The New York Times on China in one year explains 54% of the variance in American public opinion on China in the next. This result confirms hypothesized links between media and public opinion and helps shed light on how mass media can influence the public opinion of foreign countries.

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Introduction.

America and China are the world’s two largest economies, and they are currently locked in a tense rivalry. In a democratic system, public opinion shapes and constrains political action. How the American public views China thus affects relations between the two countries. Because few Americans have personally visited China, most Americans form their opinions of China and other foreign lands from media depictions. Our paper aims to explain how Americans form their attitudes on China with a case study of how The New York Times may shape public opinion. Our analysis is not causal, but it is informed by a causal understanding of how public opinion may flow from the media to the citizenry.

Scholars have adopted a number of wide-ranging and even contradictory approaches to explain the relationships between media and the American mind. One school of thought stresses that media exposure shapes public opinion (Baum and Potter, 2008 ; Iyengar and Kinder, 2010 ). Another set of approaches focuses on how the public might lead the media by analyzing how consumer demand shapes reporting. Newspapers may attract readers by biasing coverage of polarizing issues towards the ideological proclivities of their readership (Mullainathan and Shleifer, 2005 ), and with the advent of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, traditional media are now more responsive to audience demand than ever before (Jacobs and Shapiro, 2011 ). On the other side of this equation, news consumers generally tend to seek out news sources with which they agree (Iyengar et al., 2008 ), and politically active individuals do so more proactively than the average person (Zaller, 1992 ).

Two other approaches address factors outside the media–public binary. The first, stresses the role of elites in opinion formation. While some, famously including Noam Chomsky, argue that news media are unwitting at best and at worst complicit “shills” of the American political establishment, political elites may affect public opinion directly by communicating with the public (Baum and Potter, 2008 ). Foreign elites may also influence American opinion because American reporters sometimes circumvent domestic sources and ask trusted foreign experts and officials for opinions (Hayes and Guardino, 2011 ). The second stresses how the macro-level phenomenon of public sentiment is shaped by micro-level and meso-level processes. An adult’s opinions on various topics emerge from their personal values, many of which are set during and around adolescence from factors outside of the realm of individual control (Hatemi and McDermott, 2016 ). Social networks may also affect attitude formation (Kertzer and Zeitzoff, 2017 ).

In light of these contradictory interpretations, it is difficult to be sure whether the media shape the attitudes of consumers or, on the other hand, whether consumers shape media (Baum and Potter, 2008 ). Moreover, most of the theories summarized above are tested on relatively small slices of data. In order to offer an alternative, “big data”-based contribution to this ongoing debate, this study compares how the public views China and how the news media report on China with large-scale data. Our data set, which straddles 50 years of newspaper reporting and survey data, is uniquely large and includes more than a quarter-million articles from The New York Times.

Most extant survey data indicate that Americans do not seem to like China very much (Xie and Jin, 2021 ). Many Americans are reported to harbor doubts about China’s record on human rights (Aldrich et al., 2015 ; Cao and Xu, 2015 ) and are anxious about China’s burgeoning economic, military, and strategic power (Gries and Crowson, 2010 ; Yang and Liu, 2012 ). They also think that the Chinese political system fails to serve the needs of the Chinese people (Aldrich et al., 2015 ). Most Americans, however, recognize a difference between the Chinese state, the Chinese people, and Chinese culture, and they view the latter two more favorably (Gries and Crowson, 2010 ). In Fiske’s Stereotype Content Model (Fiske et al., 2002 ), which expresses common stereotypes as a combination of “competence” and “warmth”, Asians belong to a set of “high-status, competitive out-groups” and rank high in competence but low in warmth (Lin et al., 2005 ).

The New York Times, which calls itself the “Newspaper of Record”, is the most influential newspaper in the USA and possibly even in the Anglophonic world. It boasts 7.5 million subscribers (Business Wire, 2021 ), and while the paper’s reach may be impressive, it is yet more significant that the readership of The New York Times represents an elite subset of the American public. Print subscribers to The New York Times have a median household income of $191,000, three times the median income of US households writ large (Rothbaum and Edwards, 2019 ). Despite the paper’s haughty and sometimes condescending reporting, it “has had and still has immense social, political, and economic influence on American and the world” (Schwarz, 2012 , p. 81). The New York Times may be a paper for America’s elite, and it may be biased to reflect the tastes of its elite audience, but the paper’s ideological slant does not affect our analyses as long as the its relevant biases are consistent over the time period covered by our analyses. Our analyses support the intuition of qualitative work on The Times (Schwarz, 2012 ) and show that these biases remain more or less constant for the decades in our sample. These analyses also illuminate some of the paper’s more notable biases, including the paper’s particular predilection for globalization.

The impact of social media on traditional media is not straightforward. While new media have certainly changed old media, neither has replaced the other. It is more accurate to say that old media have been integrated into new media and, in some ways, become a form of new media themselves. Twitter has accelerated the 2000s-era trends of information access that made it possible for news readers to find their own news and also enabled readers to interact with journalists (Jacobs and Shapiro, 2011 ), and the The New York Times seems to have made a significant commitment to the Twitter ecosystem. A quick glance at the follower count of The Times’ official Twitter account shows that it is one of the most influential accounts on the site, with almost 50 million followers. For comparison, both current president Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris have around 10 million followers. Most New York Times reporters additionally have “verified” accounts on the platform, which means that individual reporters may be incentivized to maintain public-facing profiles more now than in the past.

The media consumption patterns that made new media possible have changed the way The New York Times interacts with its audience and how it extracts revenue. The New York Times boasts a grand total of 7.5 million subscribers, but only 800,000 of them subscribe to the print edition. The Times’ digital subscription base has boomed since the election of Donald J. Trump, growing almost sixfold from a paltry 1.3 million in 2015 to a staggering 6.7 million in 2020 (Business Wire, 2021 ). The Times increasingly relies more on digital subscriptions and less on print subscriptions and ad sales for revenue (Lee, 2020 ). Ad revenue for most papers has been in sharp decline since the early 2000s (Jacobs and Shapiro, 2011 ), and this trend has only continued into the present. The New York Times now operates almost like a direct-to-consumer, subscription tech startup. New media have not replaced but have certainly changed old media. The full impact of these changes is beyond the scope of this paper, and we suggest it as an area for further research.

A small body of prior work has studied the The New York Times and how The New York Times reports on China. Blood and Phillips use autoregression methods on time series data to predict public opinion (Blood and Phillips, 1995 ). Wu et al. use a similar autoregression technique and find that public sentiment regarding the economy predicts economic performance and that people pay more attention to economic news during recessions (Wu et al., 2002 ). Peng finds that coverage of China in the paper has been consistently negative but increasingly frequent as China became an economic powerhouse (Peng, 2004 ). There is very little other scholarship that applies language processing methods to large corpora of articles from The New York Times or other leading papers. Atalay et al. is an exception that uses statistical techniques for parsing natural languages to analyze a corpus of newspaper articles from The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other leading papers in order to investigate the increasing use of information technologies in newspaper classifieds (Atalay et al., 2018 ).

We explore the impact of The New York Times on its readers by examining the general relationship between The Times and public opinion. Though some might contend that only elites read NYT, we have adopted this research strategy for two reasons. If the views of NYT only impacted the nation’s elite, the paper’s views would still propagate to the general public through the elites themselves because elites can affect public opinion outside of media channels (Baum and Potter, 2008 ). Additionally, it is a widely held belief that NYT serves as a general barometer of an agenda-setting agent for American culture (Schwarz, 2012 ). Because of these two reasons, we interpolate the relationship between NYT and public opinion from the relationship between NYT and its readers, and we extrapolate that the views of NYT are broadly representative of American media.

Our paper aims to advance understanding of how Americans form their attitudes on China with a case study of how The New York Times may shape public opinion. We hypothesize that media coverage of foreign nations affects how Americans view the rest of the world. This reduced-form model deliberately simplifies the interactions between audience and media and sidesteps many active debates in political psychology and political communication. Analyzing a corpus of 267,907 articles on China from The New York Times, we quantify media sentiment with BERT, a state-of-the-art natural language processing model with deep neural networks, and segment sentiment into eight domain topics. We then use conventional statistical methods to link media sentiment to a longitudinal data set constructed from 101 cross-sectional surveys of the American public’s views on China. We find strong correlations between how The New York Times reports on China in one year and the views of the public on China in the next. The correlations agree with our hypothesis and imply a strong connection between media sentiment and public opinion.

We quantify media sentiment with a natural language model on a large-scale corpus of 267,907 articles on China from The New York Times published between 1970 and 2019. To explore sentiment from this corpus in greater detail, we map every article to a sentiment category (positive, negative, or neutral) in eight topics: ideology, government and administration, democracy, economic development, marketization, welfare and well-being, globalization, and culture.

We do this with a three-stage modeling procedure. First, two human coders annotate 873 randomly selected articles with a total of 18,598 paragraphs expressing either positive, negative, or neutral sentiment in each topic. We treat irrelevant articles as neutral sentiments. Secondly, we fine-tune a natural language processing model Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) (Devlin et al., 2018 ) with the human-coded labels. The model uses a deep neural network with 12 layers. It accepts paragraphs (i.e., word sequences of no more than 128 words) as input and outputs a probability for each category. We end up with two binary classifiers for each topic for a grand total of 16 classifiers: an assignment classifier that determines whether a paragraph expresses sentiment in a given topic domain and a sentiment classifier that then distinguishes positive and negative sentiments in a paragraph classified as belonging to a given topic domain. Thirdly, we run the 16 trained classifiers on each paragraph in our corpus and assign category probabilities to every paragraph. We then use the probabilities of all the paragraphs in an article to determine the article’s overall sentiment category (i.e., positive, negative, or neutral) in every topic.

As demonstrated in Table 1 , the two classifiers are accurate at both the paragraph and article levels. The assignment classifier and the sentiment classifier reach classification accuracy of 89–96% and 73–90%, respectively, on paragraphs. The combined outcome of the classifiers, namely article sentiment, is accurate to 62–91% across the eight topics. For comparison, a random guess would reach an accuracy of 50% on each task (see Supplementary Information for details).

American public opinion towards China is a composite measure drawn from national surveys that ask respondents for their opinions on China. We collect 101 cross-sectional surveys from 1974 to 2019 that asked relevant questions about attitudes toward China and incorporate a probabilistic model to harmonize different survey series with different scales (e.g., 4 levels, 10 levels) into a single time series, capitalizing on “seaming” years in which different survey series overlapped (Wang et al., 2021 ). For every year, there is a single real value representing American sentiment on China relative to the level in 1974. Put another way, we use sentiment in 1974 as a baseline measure to normalize the rest of the time series. A positive value shows a more favorable attitude than that in 1974, and a negative value represents a less favorable attitude than that in 1974. Because of this, the trends in sentiment changes year-over-year are of interest, but the absolute values of sentiment in a given year are not. As shown in Fig. 1 , public opinion towards China has varied greatly from 1974 to 2019. It steadily climbed from a low of −24% in 1976 to a high of 73% in 1987, and has fluctuated between 10% and 48% in the intervening 30 years.

This time series is aggregated from 101 cross-sectional surveys from 1974 to 2019 that asked relevant questions about attitudes toward China with the year of 1974 as baseline. Years with attitudes above zero show a more favorable attitude than that in 1974, with a peak of 73% in 1987. Years with attitudes below zero show a less favorable attitude than that in 1974, with the lowest level of −24% in 1976. The time series is shown with a 95% confidence interval.

We begin with a demonstration of how the reporting of The New York Times on China changes over time, and we follow this with an analysis of how coverage of China might influence public opinion toward China.

Trend of media sentiment

The New York Times has maintained a steady interest in China over the years and has published at least 3,000 articles on China in every year of our corpus. Figure 2 displays the yearly volume of China-related articles from The New York Times on each of the eight topics since 1970. Articles on China increased sharply after 2000 and eventually reached a peak around 2010, almost doubling their volume from the 1970s. As the number of articles on China increased, the amount of attention paid to each of the eight topics diverged. Articles on government, democracy, globalization, and culture were consistently common while articles on ideology were consistently rare. In contrast, articles on China’s economy, marketization, and welfare were rare before 1990 but became increasingly common after 2000. The timing of this uptick coincided neatly with worldwide recognition of China’s precipitous economic ascent and specifically the beginnings of China’s talks to join the World Trade Organization.

In each year we report in each topic the number of positive and negative articles while ignoring neutral/irrelevant articles. The media have consistently high attention on reporting China government & administration, democracy, globalization, and culture. There are emerging interests on China’s economics, marketization, and welfare and well-being since 1990s. Note that the sum of the stacks does not equal to the total volume of articles about China, because each article may express sentiment in none or multiple topics.

While the proportion of articles in each given topic change over time, the sentiment of articles in each topic is remarkably consistent. Ignoring neutral articles, Figure 3 illustrates the yearly fractions of positive and negative articles about each of the eight topics. We find four topics (economics, globalization, culture, and marketization) are almost always covered positively while reporting on the other four topics (ideology, government & administration, democracy, and welfare & well-being) is overwhelmingly negative.

The panel reports the trend of yearly media attitude toward China in ( A ) ideology, ( B ) government & administration, ( C ) democracy, ( D ) economic development, ( E ) marketization, ( F ) welfare & well-being, ( G ) globalization, and ( H ) culture. The media attitude is measured as the percentages of positive articles and negative articles, respectively. US–China relation milestones are marked as gray dots. The New York Times express diverging but consistent attitudes in the eight domains, with negative articles consistently common in ideology, government, democracy, and welfare, and positive sentiments common in economic, globalization, and culture. Standard errors are too small to be visible (below 1.55% in all topics all years).

The NYT views China’s globalization in a very positive light. Almost 100% of the articles mentioning this topic are positive for all of the years in our sample. This reveals that The New York Times welcomes China’s openness to the world and, more broadly, may be particularly partial to globalization in general.

Similarly, economics, marketization, and culture are covered most commonly in positive tones that have only grown more glowing over time. Positive articles on these topics began in the 1970s with China–US Ping–Pong diplomacy, and eventually comprise 1/4 to 1/2 of articles on these three topics, the remainder of which are mostly neutral articles. This agrees with the intuition that most Americans like Chinese culture. The New York Times has been deeply enamored with Chinese cultural products ranging from Chinese art to Chinese food since the very beginning of our sample. Following China’s economic reforms, the number of positive articles and the proportion of positive articles relative to negative articles increases for both economics and marketization.

In contrast, welfare and well-being are covered in an almost exclusively negative light. About 1/4 of the articles on this topic are negative, and almost no articles on this topic are positive. Topics regarding politics are covered very negatively. Negative articles on ideology, government and administration, and democracy outnumber positive articles on these topics for all of the years in our sample. Though small fluctuations that coincided with ebbs in US–China relations are observed for those three topics, coverage has only grown more negative over time. Government and administration is the only negatively covered topic that does feature some positive articles. This reflects the qualitative understanding that The New York Times thinks that the Chinese state is an unpleasant but capable actor.

Despite the remarkable diversity of sentiment toward China across the eight topics, sentiment within each of the topics is startlingly consistent over time. This consistency attests to the incredible stability of American stereotypes towards China. If there is any trend to be found here, it is that the main direction of sentiment in each topic, positive or negative, has grown more prevalent since the 1970s. This is to say that reporting on China has become more polarized, which is reflective of broader trends of media polarization (Jacobs and Shapiro, 2011 ; Mullainathan and Shleifer, 2005 ).

Media sentiment affects public opinion

To reveal the connection between media sentiment and public opinion, we run a linear regression model (Eq. ( 1 )) to fit public opinion with media sentiment from current and preceding years.

where μ t denotes public opinion in year t with possible values ranging from −1 to 1. F k j s is the fraction of positive ( s  = positive) or negative ( s  = negative) articles on topic k in year j . Coefficient β k j s quantifies the importance of F k j s in predicting μ t .

There is inertia to public opinion. A broadly held opinion is hard to change in the short term, and it may require a while for media sentiment to affect how the public views a given issue. For this reason, j is allowed to take [ t , t  − 1, t  − 2, ...] anywhere from zero to a couple of years ahead of t . In other words, we inspect lagged values of media sentiment as candidate predictors for public attitudes towards China.

We seek an optimal solution of media sentiment predictors to explain the largest fraction of variance ( r 2 ) of public opinion. To reduce the risk of overfitting, we first constrain the coefficients to be non-negative after reverse-coding negative sentiment variables, which means we assume that positive articles have either no impact or positive impact and that negative articles have either zero or negative impact on public opinion. Secondly, we require that the solution be sparse and contain no more than one non-zero coefficient in each topic:

where r 2 ( μ , β , F ) is the explained variance of μ fitted with ( β , F ). The l 0 -norm ∥ β k , ⋅ , ⋅ ∥ 0 gives the number of non-zero coefficients of topic k predictors.

The solution varies with the number of topics included in the fitting model. As shown in Table 2 , if we allow fitting with only one topic, we find that sentiment on Chinese culture has the most explanatory power, accounting for 31.2% of the variance in public opinion. We run a greedy strategy to add additional topics that yield the greatest increase in explanatory power, resulting in eight nested models (Table 2 ). The explanatory power of our models increases monotonically with the number of allowed topics but reaches a saturation point at which the marginal increase in variance explained per topics decreases after only two topics are introduced (see Table 2 ). To strike a balance between simplicity and explanatory power, we use the top two predictors, which are the positive sentiment of culture and the negative sentiment of democracy in the previous year, to build a linear predictor of public opinion that can be written as

where F culture, t −1,positive is the yearly fraction of positive articles on Chinese culture in year t  − 1 and F democracy, t −1,negative is the yearly fraction of negative articles on Chinese democracy in year t  − 1. This formula explains 53.9% of the variance of public opinion in the time series. For example, in 1993 53.9% of the articles on culture had a positive sentiment, and 46.9% of the articles on democracy had negative sentiment ( F c u l t u r e ,1993,positive  = 0.539, F democracy,1993,negative  = −0.469). Substituting those numbers into Eq. ( 2 ) predicts public opinion in the next year (1994) to be 0.208, very close to the actual level of public opinion (0.218) (Fig. 4 ).

The public opinion (solid), as a time series, is well fitted by the media sentiments on two selected topics, namely “Culture” and “Democracy”, in the previous year. The dashed line shows a linear prediction based on the fractions of positive articles on “Culture” and negative articles on “Democracy” in the previous year. The public opinion is shown with a 95% confidence interval, and the fitted line is shown with one standard error.

By analyzing a corpus of 267,907 articles from The New York Times with BERT, a state-of-the-art natural language processing model, we identify major shifts in media sentiment towards China across eight topic domains over 50 years and find that media sentiment leads public opinion. Our results show that the reporting of The New York Times on culture and democracy in one year explains 53.9% of the variation in public opinion on China in the next. The conclusion that we draw from our results is that media sentiment on China predicts public opinion on China. Our analysis is neither conclusive nor causal, but it is suggestive. Our results are best interpreted as a “reduced-form” description of the overall relationship between media sentiment and public opinion towards China.

While there are a number of potential factors that may complicate our conclusions, none would change the overall thrust of our results. We do not consider how the micro-level or meso-level intermediary processes through which opinion from elite media percolates to the masses below may affect our results. We also do not consider the potential ramifications of elites communing directly with the public, of major events in US–China relations causing short-term shifts in reporting, or of social media creating new channels for the diffusion of opinion. Finally, The New York Times might have a particular bias to how it covers China.

In addition to those specified above, a number of possible extensions of our work remain ripe targets for further research. Though a fully causal model of our text analysis pipeline may prove elusive (Egami et al., 2018 ), future work may use randomized vignettes to further our understanding of the causal effects of media exposure on attitudes towards China. Secondly, our modeling framework is deliberately simplified. The state affects news coverage before the news ever makes its way to the citizenry. It is plausible that multiple state-level actors may bypass the media and alter public opinion directly and to different ends. For example, the actions and opinions of individual high-profile US politicians may attenuate or exaggerate the impact of state-level tension on public sentiment toward China. There are presumably a whole host of intermediary processes through which opinion from elite media affects the sentiment of the masses. Thirdly, the relationship between the sentiment of The New York Times and public opinion may be very different for hot-button social issues of first-line importance in the American culture wars. In our corpus, The New York Times has covered globalization almost entirely positively, but the 2016 election of President Donald J. Trump suggests that many Americans do not share the zeal of The Times for international commerce. We also plan to extend our measure of media sentiment to include text from other newspapers. The Guardian, a similarly elite, Anglophonic, and left-leaning paper, will make for a useful comparison case. Finally, our analysis was launched in the midst of heightened tensions between the US and China and concluded right before the outbreak of a global pandemic. Many things have changed since COVID-19. Returning to our analysis with an additional year or two of data will almost certainly provide new results of additional interest.

Future work will address some of these additional paths, but none of these elements affects the basic conclusion of this work. We find that reporting on China in one year predicts public opinion in the next. This is true for more than fifty years in our sample, and while knowledge of, for example, the opinion diffusion process on social media may add detail to this relationship, the basic flow of opinion from media to the public will not change. Regarding the putative biases of The New York Times, its ideological slant does not affect our explanation of trends in public opinion of China as long as the paper’s relevant biases are relatively consistent over the time period covered by our analyses.

Data availability

All data analyzed during the current study are publicly available. The New York Times data were accessed using official online APIs ( https://developer.nytimes.com/ ). We used their query API to search for 267,907 articles that mention China, Chinese, Beijing, Peking, or Shanghai. We downloaded the full text and date of each article. The survey data were obtained from three large public archives/centers, namely Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (ROPER), NORC at the University of Chicago, and Pew Research Center (Pew Research Center, 2019 ; Smith et al., 2018 ). See Supplementary Information for a full list of surveys. The source codes and pretrained parameters of the natural language processing model BERT are publicly released by Google Inc. on its github repository ( https://github.com/google-research/bert ). The finetuned BERT models and the inferred sentiment of The New York Times articles in our corpus are publicly available at Princeton University DataSpace. Please check the project webpage ( http://www.attitudetowardchina.com/media-opinion ) or the DataSpace webpage ( https://doi.org/10.34770/x27d-0545 ) to download.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Chesley Chan (Princeton University), Wen Liu (Renmin University of China), Yichun Yang (Renmin University of China), and Emily Yin (Princeton University) for coding The New York Times articles with the topic-specific sentiment. The authors thank Chih-Jou Jay Chen (Academia Sinica), Cheng Cheng (Singapore Management University), Shawn Dorius (Iowa State University), Theodore P. Gerber (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Fengming Lu (Australian National University), Yongai Jin (Renmin University of China), Donghui Wang (Princeton University) for valuable discussions. The authors thank Xudong Guo (Tsinghua University) for helping fine-tune the BERT model and analyze the calculation results. The authors thank Tom Marling for proofreading the manuscript. The research was partially supported by the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University and Guanghua School of Management at Peking University.

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Junming Huang, Gavin G. Cook & Yu Xie

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Huang, J., Cook, G.G. & Xie, Y. Large-scale quantitative evidence of media impact on public opinion toward China. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8 , 181 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00846-2

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Received : 26 December 2020

Accepted : 22 June 2021

Published : 26 July 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00846-2

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