Brendan Nyhan

WHYY interview about assassination rumors

Quoted on All Things Considered about conservative media

Uncertain podcast on backfire effect persistence

For more, see my article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences "Why the backfire effect does not explain the durability of political misperceptions".

PBS NewsHour interview about Trump's rhetoric

From my interview with PBS NewsHour: 

Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College:

In this case, it may have been a metaphor. It's hard to tell with him. He was using that language in the context of a discussion of the auto industry, but his meaning was ambiguous.

Given the way he so frequently calls for or endorses violence, I think it's appropriate to be concerned when he invokes it even in a seemingly metaphorical way.

Geoff Bennett:

Dartmouth College political science professor Brendan Nyhan has closely followed Mr. Trump's commentary about immigrants over the last decade. He says Donald Trump 's rhetoric should be viewed through an historical lens.

Brendan Nyhan:

Donald Trump 's descriptions of people from other countries and other racial and ethnic groups as subhuman animals is the kind of language we see in countries before they have ethnic violence or even genocide. It's the kind of language we see when authoritarian movements rise to power.

He's appealing to the worst aspects of humanity. It's straight out of the textbooks, and we should be very worried with how mundane it now seems.

NPR interview about Trump's rhetoric

New podcast on a second Trump term

New podcast on polarization and democracy

90. Are American politics more polarized than ever? Brendan Nyhan thinks social media just helps us see it more.

New podcast on US 2020 Facebook study

89. Facebook scores your politics with a number. Brendan Nyhan figured out what they do with it. (Part 1 of 2)

New podcast interview on Sean Carroll's Mindscape

New study, report, and podcast

I'm one of the lead authors on a new article in Nature titled "Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing" that was published today. It's one of four articles published today from the US 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study on which I was coauthor (the other three were published in a special issue of Science).

We also just released a new Bright Line Watch report on expert and public perceptions of the legal cases against Donald Trump.

I talked about both of them with Mike Pesca on The Gist:

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.