Brendan Nyhan

UCLA Law panel on threats to democracy

New podcast - on Mike Pesca's The Gist

New podcast with Mike Pesca talking about the latest Bright Line Watch report and the state of American democracy:

New Bright Line Watch report/interview

From our new Bright Line Watch report:

• The gap between Republicans and Democrats in confidence in American elections remains large, but has diminished in the past year. Compared to November 2021, somewhat more Republicans recognize the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 victory and express confidence in the integrity of the vote count in the upcoming midterm elections.
• Both experts and the public, including four in five Republicans, say it is important for candidates who lose fair elections to publicly acknowledge defeat, but hundreds of 2022 Republican candidates for Congress or statewide office continue to deny that former President Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020 or question the legitimacy of Biden’s victory. Across the three most comprehensive media tallies, the estimated percentage of deniers among Republicans is 31% for Attorney General candidates, 49% for governor, 31–39% for Secretary of State, 41–55% for U.S. House, and 35–41% for U.S. Senate. These ratings are generally consistent; about 80% of ratings are identical between organizations.
• Experts rate the prevalence of 2020 election denialism among Republican candidates for statewide office as the most abnormal and important event of the past year and one of the most extreme to take place since 2016. 91% of experts rate a 2024 Trump candidacy as a threat to democracy, including 35% who rate it as an extraordinary threat and 39% who rate it as a serious threat.
• 70% of experts view a prosecution of Trump as beneficial to U.S. democracy, including 16% who rate it as an extraordinary benefit and 35% who rate it as a serious benefit.
• Majorities of the public believe Trump committed crimes in trying to overturn the 2020 election, in his actions related to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and in handling classified documents and favor prosecution for each. However, the partisan splits on these issues are profound – approximately 90% of Democrats favor prosecution and close to 90% of Republicans oppose it. Experts overwhelmingly support prosecution. The academic experts we surveyed anticipate that some high-profile candidates in the 2022 midterm elections will refuse to concede. They also anticipate continued politicization of Supreme Court appointments.
• Experts are divided, however, on whether the Supreme Court will endorse the Independent State Legislature theory, which would allow state legislatures to regulate elections without constraint from institutions such as state courts and constitutions.
• Assessments of the performance of U.S. democracy are stable and consistent with past surveys, but every group surveyed – experts and the public, Democrats and Republicans – anticipates a decline in the quality of U.S. democracy five and 10 years in the future.

My interview about the report with NPR's Here and Now:

Big Technology podcast interview

New SciAm: Open the social media black box

From our new piece in Scientific American:

Social media platforms are where billions of people around the world go to connect with others, get information and make sense of the world. These companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok and Reddit, collect vast amounts of data based on every interaction that takes place on their platforms.

And despite the fact that social media has become one of our most important public forums for speech, several of the most important platforms are controlled by a small number of people. Mark Zuckerberg controls 58% of the voting share of Meta, the parent company of both Facebook and Instagram, effectively giving him sole control of two of the largest social platforms. Now that Twitter’s board has accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion offer to take the company private, that platform will likewise soon be under the control of a single person. All these companies have a history of sharing scant portions of data about their platforms with researchers, preventing us from understanding the impacts of social media to individuals and society. Such singular ownership of the three most powerful social media platforms makes us fear this lockdown on data sharing will continue.

After two decades of little regulation, it is time to require more transparency from social media companies.

Panel with the Surgeon General on COVID-19 misinfo

FiveThirtyEight podcast interview

We discuss the latest Bright Line Watch report:

CBS Sunday Morning interview

Democratic lawmakers were scrambling this week to salvage support for President Joe Biden's social and environmental agenda. @jdickerson discusses the drama of the majority-party's political showdown. https://t.co/B22fJVvqwJ pic.twitter.com/ul9RZKd4ft

— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) October 3, 2021

Three new podcast interviews

New On the Media: The Green Lantern theory

From my new interview with On the Media:

Last weekend, the Biden administration began rolling out the American Rescue Plan: the $1.9 trillion act that has been lauded as "the most significant piece of legislation passed for working families in many, many decades." It includes major assistance for families, businesses, and community organizations struggling in the pandemic. But amidst this sea of stimulus was one glaring absence, one of Biden’s core campaign promises: the $15 minimum wage hike.

After a handful of moderate Democrats shot down that provision, some progressive journalists blamed Biden for not fighting tooth and nail to get it in the bill. This belief, that a president’s legislative shortcomings are the product of a lack of will, is what some media critics call “The Green Lantern theory of the presidency.” The Green Lantern Corps, for those unfamiliar with the DC Comics canon, are a class of superheroes who can conjure supernatural weapons using sheer willpower.

Whether Biden really could've done more is a mystery, but it's a perennial media narrative says Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, and the man who coined the Green Lantern theory of the presidency. He and Brooke discuss the limits on executive power, and the history of presidents who thought they could expand it.

New WaPo: Who watches extremist videos on YouTube?

From my new piece in The Washington Post:

YouTube is overshadowed by Facebook and Twitter in the debate over the harms of social media, but the site has massive reach — 3 in 4 Americans report using it. This growth has been driven by YouTube's use of algorithms to recommend more videos to watch, a feature that critics warn can lead people down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and racism.

In 2018, for example, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci described how YouTube started suggesting she check out "white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content" after she started watching videos of Donald Trump rallies in 2016, prompting her to warn about the site "potentially helping to radicalize billions of people."

Google — YouTube's parent company — has sought to address these concerns. In 2019, for instance, it announced new efforts to remove objectionable content and reduce recommendations to "borderline" content that raises concerns without violating site policies.

Has YouTube done enough to curb harmful material on the platform? In a new report published by the Anti-Defamation League, my co-authors and I find that alarming levels of exposure to potentially harmful content continue. When we directly measured the browsing habits of a diverse national sample of 915 participants, we found that more than 9 percent viewed at least one YouTube video from a channel that has been identified as extremist or white supremacist; meanwhile, 22 percent viewed one or more videos from "alternative" channels, defined as non-extremist channels that serve as possible gateways to fringe ideas.

New ADL report on extremist content exposure

From our new report:

How harmful is YouTube? Critics worry that it plays an outsized role among technology platforms in exposing people to hateful or extreme ideas, while the platform claims to have substantially reduced the reach of what it calls “borderline content and harmful misinformation.”1 However, little is publicly known about who watches potentially harmful videos on YouTube, how much they watch, or the role of the site’s recommendations in promoting those videos to users.

To answer these questions, we collected comprehensive behavioral data measuring YouTube video and recommendation exposure among a diverse group of survey participants. Using browser history and activity data, we examined exposure to extremist and white supremacist YouTube channels as well as to “alternative” channels that can serve as gateways to more extreme forms of content.

Our data indicate that exposure to videos from extremist or white supremacist channels on YouTube remains disturbingly common. Though some high-profile channels were taken down by YouTube before our study period, approximately one in ten participants viewed at least one video from an extremist channel (9.2%) and approximately two in ten (22.1%) viewed at least one video from an alternative channel.2 Moreover, when participants watch these videos, they are more likely to see and follow recommendations to similar videos.

New podcast: How much did Trump hurt democracy?

New podcast from the Niskanen Center:

Will Trump do lasting damage to American democratic institutions? He has repeatedly broken norms during his presidency and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election. How much is the U.S. undergoing democratic backsliding and what did his presidency reveal about the strength and limits of our institutions? Brendan Nyhan is an organizer of Bright Line Watch, an effort to survey experts and the public to track the erosion of democratic norms under Trump. He finds significant signs of weakness but acknowledges the many future unknowns. In this special year-end conversational edition, we review the damage and the evidence.

New Atlantic: Building trust in COVID-19 vaccines

From my new Atlantic article:

This week is coming to a close with truly miraculous news: In the coming days, Americans across the country are expected to begin getting vaccinated against COVID-19, a virus that emerged just a year ago. But even miraculous vaccines do little good for public health if people refuse to take them. What will persuade millions of Americans to take these new vaccines, which were developed and tested in record time?

To succeed in vaccinating the population against COVID-19, the United States must draw on the resources we already have: a population that generally supports vaccination and networks of trust that connect health-care professionals with their patients and people with their communities.

New WaPo: Five myths about misinformation

From my new piece in The Washington Post:

Misinformation presents a challenge to the American political system. Unsupported claims can distort debate, deceive voters and encourage contempt for the other party. In the final days of the presidential race, for instance, hundreds of thousands of people in key states received mysterious text messages with falsehoods about Democratic nominee Joe Biden (including that he wants to give “sex changes to second graders”). But how much of the news that average Americans consume is misinformation, and what impact does it have? Many news sources ironically misinform readers about its prevalence and influence. These five myths are particularly persistent.