Brendan Nyhan

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.

New WaPo: The media's feckless approach to debate

From my new piece in The Washington Post:

Tuesday night’s presidential debate perfectly illustrates how President Trump abuses our democratic institutions — and how feckless the media can be in the face of those violations.

Since he first entered the presidential race, Trump has violated countless norms of public life, including making tens of thousands of false claims. Such an approach to governing should inspire the media to modify the way it treats the president, including during the debates in which he takes part.

Yet Fox News host Chris Wallace attempted to moderate the debate as if Trump were like any other candidate.

Recommendations for fair elections during a crisis

From our new UCI Law report by the Ad Hoc Committee for 2020 Election Fairness and Legitimacy (of which I am a member):

Fair Elections During a Crisis: Urgent Recommendations in Law, Media, Politics, and Tech to Advance the Legitimacy of, and the Public’s Confidence in, the November 2020 U.S. Elections

Even before the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, close observers of American democracy worried about the public’s faith and confidence in the results of the upcoming November 2020 U.S. elections. Although a decade ago concerns about peaceful transitions of power were less common, Americans can no longer take for granted that election losers will concede a closely- fought election after election authorities (or courts) have declared a winner.

Current American politics feature severe hyperpolarization and an increasingly partisan media and social media environment. Mistrust is high. It is harder for voters to get reliable political information. Incendiary rhetoric about rigged or stolen elections is on the rise, and unsubstantiated claims of rigged elections find a receptive audience especially among those who are on the losing end of the election. American elections are highly decentralized, leaving pockets of weak election administration which can further undermine voter confidence in the process. The COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the United States hard beginning in March 2020, has only exacerbated concerns about the fairness and integrity of the 2020 elections.

The reasons for growing voter concern about the fairness and legitimacy of the U.S. election process are multifaceted, raising issues in law, media, politics and norms, and tech. This means that solutions to bolster American confidence in the fairness and accuracy of the elections must be multifaceted as well.

Recognizing the need for multifaceted solutions to the issue of the legitimacy and acceptance of fair election results in the United States, Richard L. Hasen, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at UC Irvine, convened both a conference and an ad hoc committee made up of a diverse group of leading scholars and leaders to tackle this issue from an interdisciplinary perspective. After public meetings and further online deliberations, this Committee makes the following fourteen recommendations for immediate change that should be implemented to increase voter confidence in the fairness and legitimacy of the 2020 elections. These recommendations listed below call for specific action from: journalists and editors deciding on headlines, what, and how to cover the election up to and including the election night itself; tech companies in the fray; legislators from federal to state to local levels; and nonprofits, citizens, and social media influencers...

Foreign Affairs: COVID-19 is not like political speech

From my new Foreign Affairs article with Sarah Kreps:

In the desperate fight against the novel coronavirus, social media platforms have achieved an important victory: they have helped limit the dissemination of life-threatening misinformation that could worsen the pandemic. But this success should not cause us to adopt a similar approach to political speech, where greater caution is required.

New Post Outlook: Why Democrats won't attack Bernie

From my new column in the Washington Post Outlook section:

How do you warn your party that its potential nominee is vulnerable in a general election without sinking your own campaign? That question now confronts Democratic rivals of Bernie Sanders, who are realizing that the iconoclastic Vermont socialist might really win the presidential nomination.

In recent days, Sanders has taken a narrow lead in early-state polls and betting markets. Though he attracts support from only a minority of Democratic voters, he could plausibly follow a Trump-like path to the nomination in which multiple other candidates doubt his viability and stay in the race to await his collapse, dividing the vote against him until it is too late.

One factor in Sanders’s success is how little scrutiny he has faced from rivals on the campaign trail and the debate stage. Media accounts that catalogue Sanders’s atypical history and decades-old comments are easy to find for anyone who cares to look. But no one knows how Sanders will fare when Democratic or Republican rivals attack him in a high-profile fashion, which to this point no one has seriously done.

New Post Outlook: Tom Steyer's bad ideas

From my new column in the Washington Post Outlook section:

With so many entrants in the Democratic primary field, many observers have wondered what billionaire Tom Steyer’s candidacy adds to the race.

Here’s one answer: Steyer is a gift to political scientists. His campaign offers us an unusual opportunity to explain why the “reforms” he champions as magical solutions to our political problems are likely to be anything but. Unlike other candidates in the race, who focus on substantive policies — like health care — Steyer is passionate about changing the procedures of democratic decisionmaking. Unfortunately, the ideas he champions are generally bad ones. My field has spent decades amassing evidence that his proposals, and overall approach to governing, would likely make our political system worse, not better.

New Bright Line Watch report on US democracy

From our new report:

• Perceptions of the overall performance of American democracy remain stable among both experts and the public since we began surveying each group, but assessments on certain specific democratic principles have declined substantially, erasing perceived gains observed in the period after the 2018 midterm elections. Especially sharp declines were observed for beliefs that government agencies are not used to punish political opponents, the presence of effective limits on the authority of the executive, the independence of investigations into wrongdoing by public officials, and keeping U.S. elections free from foreign influence — all topics that closely relate to the current impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives.
• Experts again rate numerous recent events that have taken place during the Trump presidency as both important and abnormal. President Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden, a potential 2020 election opponent, scores especially high on this dual metric (comparable to Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki).
• The public and expert consensus on actions that uphold democratic principles is strong — both groups (and especially experts) overwhelmingly rate actions like allowing peaceful protest as “democratic” rather than “undemocratic.” Moreover, most of the public rates actions that experts regard as transgressions against democracy, such as blocking peaceful protest, as “undemocratic”. The extent to which transgressions are viewed as undemocratic, however, is asymmetrical between supporters and opponents of President Trump. Both groups tend to rate such actions as undemocratic, but Trump supporters are less likely to do so than opponents, particularly for actions that President Trump has taken or ones that favor GOP interests.
• Both experts and the public view some “constitutional hardball” tactics as appropriate but see others as inappropriate. For example, impeachment, admitting Puerto Rico and Washington, DC as states, and determining the presidency by national popular vote are typically viewed appropriate. Conversely, gerrymandering, disenfranchising partisan opponents, and presidential self-pardons are all widely regarded as inappropriate.

New Upshot: Exploiting Americans' trust in local news

From my new Upshot column:

The nature of the news misinformation problem may be changing. As consumers become more skeptical about the national news they encounter online, impostor local sites that promote ideological agendas are becoming more common. These sites exploit the relatively high trust Americans express in local news outlets — a potential vulnerability in Americans’ defenses against untrustworthy information.

New GEN: Will extremist shootings change gun politics?

From my new column for GEN, the new site on politics, power, and culture from Medium:

The weekend’s deadly massacres in El Paso and Dayton served as a grim reminder of past inaction on gun policy. Even posting the famous Onion headline “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” on social media has become a kind of ritualistic cliché.

In the past, such atrocities have quickly faded from the public consciousness because gun-rights groups are better organized than their gun-control rivals, as well as able to more effectively inspire their members to vote their beliefs at the ballot box. Due to fears of the outsize political influence of pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA), few Republicans are willing to break ranks with the NRA, while Democrats who represent rural and swing districts often seek to avoid taking positions on guns that could endanger their seats.

However, the growing salience of high-profile shootings by white nationalists could change these dynamics...

New GEN: How Trump can erode democracy in defeat

From my new column for GEN, the new site on politics, power, and culture from Medium:

Does Donald Trump present a threat to American democracy, or is the system restraining him? As last week’s debate over the Census citizenship question illustrates, the answer is often both. That’s why it’s so difficult to reach a consensus about the nature and magnitude of the danger he poses.

A typical controversy in the Trump era starts when the president or an administration official challenges some previously uncontroversial democratic norm. This challenge becomes fodder for anti-Trump forces, who present it as an imminent threat to democracy as we know it. Bureaucratic and legal resistance then frequently limit the scope of what Trump can ultimately achieve. Many observers declare the threat thwarted at this point, suggesting that the president has failed to achieve his objectives and bashing critics for overhyping the threat in the first place. But such dismissals overlook the more subtle ways that Trump is changing our politics even in defeat.

New GEN: 2020 polls are useless right now

From my new column for GEN, the new site on politics, power, and culture from Medium:

Do the polls really show Donald Trump is headed for big trouble in his reelection campaign? That’s what you might think from watching coverage of early polls of the 2020 general election. In reality, though, it’s just too early to learn much from surveys testing how Trump would fare against various Democrats. Unfortunately, media reports frequently fail to convey this uncertainty, which may lead people to underestimate Trump’s chances.

New GEN: AOC is right - give Congress a raise

From my new column for GEN, the new site on politics, power, and culture from Medium:

Late Monday night, the Democratic leadership in the House decided to delay a vote on a spending measure that would reinstate a cost-of-living adjustment for members for Congress. Their reasoning was simple: bad optics.

Though congressional salaries have been frozen since 2009, even this modest pay increase was immediately demagogued by legislators on both sides of the aisle. Republican Senator Richard Shelby denounced the proposal, stating, “To go out and say we’re going to get a pay raise, that’s the wrong message and that’s not going to happen.” His GOP colleague Ben Sasse went even further: “Instead of writing a budget or reforming our bankrupt entitlement programs, House Democrats are angling for a pay raise,” the Nebraska senator said in a statement. “These jokers couldn’t hold down a summer job at Dairy Queen pulling this kinda crap.” Vulnerable House Democrats like Cindy Axne and Tom O’Halleran quickly disavowed the provision as well.

But this disparagement belies an uncomfortable truth in Washington, one that few people want to admit: Congress is wildly underpaid, a fact that has important repercussions for how our country is governed.

New Medium: Trump as the arsonist firefighter

From my new column at Medium:

One of Donald Trump's signature moves as president is to act as both arsonist and firefighter, taking credit for resolving pseudo-crises that he in fact initiated. The latest example came Friday, when Trump declared another immigration crisis at the country's southern border with Mexico, and threatened to impose tariffs on all goods imported from the country if it didn't take action to stem the flow of migrants. This latest escalation will likely end in Trump taking credit for an expected decline in immigration.

These tactics, of course, are not without precedent. Politicians frequently claim there is a crisis when they want to change public policy around an issue. Incumbents everywhere present themselves as responsible for the status quo when times are good. But we've seemingly never had a president who so frequently declares a crisis or even starts one — and then takes credit for solving it.

New Medium: Don't normalize election challenges

From my new column at Medium:

The greatest danger of Donald Trump's presidency is that seemingly abnormal things become seen as normal. After more than 10,000 false or misleading claims, even the president's outrageous assertions that Democrats support the murder of live infants barely seem newsworthy.

What's even worse, however, is that other political actors have started to normalize this behavior and adjust their expectations accordingly. First, Republicans acquiesced to Trump's controversial campaign in 2016. Most stood by when Trump fired the FBI director for investigating him, said there were very fine people on both sides of a white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, and endorsed the physical assault of a journalist. And now, even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a Democrat who vehemently opposes Trump — is taking behavior that should be unthinkable for an American president as a given.

New Bright Line Watch report on US democracy

From our new report:

Prior to the release of the Mueller report and subsequent escalation of conflict between the executive and legislative branches, Bright Line Watch conducted a new wave of surveys on the quality of democracy in the United States. From March 12–21, 2019, we fielded our eighth survey of academic experts and sixth survey of the general public. Since we began these surveys in 2017, assessments of U.S. democratic performance had generally declined among both groups. In the March 2019 surveys, our first since the 2018 midterm elections, we identified a substantial reversal of that trend (albeit one that is likely already eroding). This survey also includes our first expert ratings of the quality of democracy at the level of state government. The key results from these surveys are:

• Ratings of overall democratic quality increased among both experts and the general public between October 2018 and March 2019 (before the Mueller report's release).
• When we examined specific democratic principles separately, the biggest increases in perceived performance during the October 2018-March 2019 period were on items that include the effectiveness of judicial checks on executive authority, protections from political violence, and the impartiality of investigations.
• Trump supporters and opponents continue to have starkly different views about the state of American democracy. Overall increases in performance ratings prior to the Mueller report were driven by those who disapprove of President Trump. Within this group, the biggest perceived improvement was on Congress's ability to check the president. By contrast, Trump supporters believed that U.S. democratic performance on that principle had, in fact, declined since before the 2018 midterm elections.
• Assessments from our expert sample showed substantial variance in democratic quality at the state level. States rated highest tend to cluster in New England and on the West Coast, whereas many of those ranked lowest are in the South.

New Medium: Beware redaction conspiracies

From my new column at Medium:

As the political world anxiously awaits the release of Robert Mueller's report Thursday morning, much of the focus has been on what we won’t see. It's quite likely the version that's released to the public will be heavily redacted. Though legitimate reasons exist for the government to excise sensitive information from a public document, any omissions threaten to inspire conspiracy theories about why parts of the report was suppressed, particularly after Attorney General William Barr rushed out his own interpretation of Mueller's findings — which favored President Trump — in a letter to Congress within 48 hours of receiving the document.

New Medium: Why primaries need parties

From my new column at Medium:

For anyone concerned about democratic norms and the rule of law, the 2016 election offered a clear lesson: Parties need to exercise more control over candidate selection. In this era of high partisanship, the official party nomination puts any candidate within striking distance of the presidency. This great power thus carries a profound responsibility: to deny the party endorsement to would-be demagogues. So why are Democrats reducing the role of party elites in the primary process this time around?

New Medium: Evidence-based policy for social media

From my new column at Medium:

Even now, more than two years after the 2016 election, the debate over the influence of social media on our political system still relies largely on scary anecdotes (Twitter's 50,000-plus impostor accounts are sowing chaos!) and speculation (YouTube is turning our younger generations into conspiracy theorists!). As a result, governments around the world are taking actions to counter misinformation campaigns, many of them based on flawed understandings or illiberal impulses. It’s time for this debate to get serious and start drawing on actual research and evidence.

New Upshot: Why vaccination laws matter most

From my new Upshot column:

Social media companies face increasing scrutiny for amplifying fringe anti-vaccine sentiment amid measles outbreaks in several states like Washington. In response, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest recently made headlines by announcing initiatives to reduce vaccine misinformation on their platforms.

But the focus on anti-vaccine content on social media can obscure the most important factor in whether children get vaccinated: the rules in their home states, which are being revisited in legislative debates across the country that have received far less attention.

New Medium: A weak president can still be dangerous

From my new column at Medium:

Just as physicists spend decades seeking to resolve the seeming paradox that a photon is both a wave and a particle, observers of U.S. politics continue to struggle with the reality that Donald Trump is both an exceptionally weak president and an authoritarian threat. Since 2017, many commentators have treated this question as binary, suggesting that Trump’s failures as a president should invalidate any concerns over what his White House tenure might mean for the future of our democracy. But that’s an incorrect — and dangerous — assumption.

New Medium: A politician's authenticity doesn't matter

From my new Medium column:

With the 2020 presidential campaign officially underway, the worst excesses of political reporting are once again rearing their ugly heads — most notably, the media's preoccupation with candidates' authenticity, an obsession that has marred so many recent presidential campaigns. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand became the latest victim of the authenticity police on Saturday, after she had the audacity to ask whether it was appropriate to use her fingers or a fork to eat the fried chicken she was served at a women's brunch in South Carolina.

New York's Frank Rich asked on Twitter, "Is there anything Gillibrand has done that is not contrived and opportunistic? I ask the question seriously. Replies welcome." New York Times columnist Frank Bruni went further, writing that "you got the sense that she would have grabbed that chicken with her pinkie toes if she'd been told to… Anything to conform. Anything to please."

The incident, just the latest entry in the growing pantheon of political food gaffes, reveals how the media too often covers presidential candidates on the trail. With most candidates' speeches and rallies generating relatively few headline-worthy sound bites, reporters and commentators often instead turn their focus to theater critic–style assessments of a candidate's strategy and campaign skills. In its most dangerous form, this form of coverage centers on manufactured narratives about a candidate's personality.

New Medium: Why fears of fake news are overhyped

From my new column:

After the shock of the 2016 presidential election, many Americans found psychological refuge in a simple explanation for why Donald Trump won: "fake news." False or misleading information published by dubious for-profit websites had spread widely on Facebook, reaching millions of people in the final months of the campaign. This development provided a tidy narrative that resonated with concerns about potential online echo chambers.

More than two years later, we can now evaluate these claims. And it turns out that many of the initial conclusions that observers reached about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets. And, most notably, no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election.

The fake news panic echoes fears that prior forms of communication would brainwash the public. Just as exaggerated accounts of hysteria over Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast took advantage of doubts about radio, claims about the reach and influence of fake news express people's broader concerns about social media and the internet.

Many important concerns about online misinformation still remain, including the influence of the fake news audience, the difficulty of countering fake news at scale, the dangers of Facebook's size, and the threat of YouTube-based radicalization. But none of these questions can be adequately addressed without creating a reality-based debate that puts fake news in context as just one of the many sources of misinformation in our politics.

New report on fake news and misinformation in 2018

From my new report with Andy Guess, Ben Lyons, Jacob Montgomery, and Jason Reifler:

Concern has grown since the 2016 presidential election about the prevalence of misinformation in American politics and the ways social media has potentially exacerbated its reach and influence. In this report, we assess the quality and quantity of information flows during the 2018 midterm election campaign, focusing specifically on two new forms of media - "fake news" and political ads on Facebook. First, we examine visits to fake news websites. We find a substantial decline in the proportion of Americans who visited at least one fake news website in 2018 relative to 2016. However, evidence is mixed on changes in the average share of people's information diets that comes from fake news websites. Our data also reveal that exposure to political ads on Facebook was limited relative to other types of advertising and concentrated among a subset of targeted users who frequently use Facebook. Finally, we provide new evidence of how frequently Americans believe fake and hyperpartisan news as well as misperceptions promoted by elites that circulated on social media during the campaign.

New column: How technologists can counter misinfo

From my new column co-authored with Patrick Ball:

Since "fake news" rose to prominence during and after the 2016 election, the United States and countries around the world have struggled to determine how to most effectively address political misinformation. Though critics' worst fears about the influence of online misinformation are likely overstated, false or misleading political claims are being amplified by platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, deceiving voters and distorting public debate on an unprecedented scale.

As a result, these firms have faced increasing scrutiny from Congress and the media. However, calls for reform are increasingly coming not just from politics and journalism but from employees of the platforms themselves, the skilled computer engineers and managers who are Big Tech's most scarce – and thus most valuable – resource. For that reason, technologists could be a critical ally in the fight against online misinformation.

This article was published as part of Defusing Disinfo, a project of the Stand Up Republic Foundation.

New Bright Line Watch reports

We published two new reports today at Bright Line Watch:
-Wave 7 Report - new expert and public ratings of the state of U.S. democracy in October 2018
-Party, policy, democracy and candidate choice in U.S. elections - a new study estimating the effects of candidate support for democratic principles on vote choice

New Medium: The Trump backlash on immigration

From my new column:

Intweets and campaign rallies in recent days, President Trump has returned to his signature cause of immigration, inveighing against drug traffickers and a caravan of immigrants.

Trump’s strategy makes perfect sense politically. He hopes to prod the Republican base to turn out in the midterms in November. One of the most effective ways to motivate political action is to stoke fears among your supporters.

Strikingly, however, public opinion data suggest that Trump has failed to convince the public on immigration and has even helped to turn the public against his positions — an effect that may grow stronger as his anti-immigration campaign intensifies.

New Monkey Cage: Court legitimacy post-Kavanaugh

From my new Monkey Cage post on the potential consequences of Brett Kavanaugh's nomination for public attitudes toward the Supreme Court:

Could Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination undermine the public standing of the Supreme Court? Observers such as the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein think so. “Every time [Chief Justice John] Roberts would lean on Kavanaugh to construct a majority,” Brownstein writes, “the chief justice could further erode the Court’s already eroding public confidence.”

In general, public support for the court tends to be relatively stable. But this time could be different. Increased ideological and partisan divisions and pressure from the #MeToo movement could dent the court’s image, especially since the coalition backing the prospective new justice has such narrow support.

Document Journal essay on information overload

My 2017 essay for Document Journal on information overload is now online:

Critics of democracy have long lamented that people know too little about politics, but today we have more news and information available to us than at any moment in history.

I, for instance, start and end my days with Twitter: The ongoing stream of information it provides about the world is a relentless and sometimes oppressive presence in my life. Even my less politically obsessed friends and family members now find that the news has become an ongoing part of their days via the Facebook posts, push alerts, and other manners information finds its way to the devices and screens that surround us.

They aren't unique. According to a study from Pew Research Center in July 2016, 38 percent of American adults say they often get their news online. In particular, more than seven in 10 people get some of this information on their mobile devices, which have brought the news into parts of our day to day lives where it used to be largely invisible. Similarly, nearly 60 percent of adults say they often or sometimes watch cable news, which increasingly permeates common spaces like airports and coffee shops, making the news harder to escape even if we do not seek it out.

At a personal level, these trends can be discomforting. Surveys sponsored by the American Psychological Association found that people who frequently check online information sources are especially stressed. Though it is impossible to separate cause and effect in these data, it is noteworthy that approximately four in 10 of those "constant checkers" cite political and cultural controversies as a specific cause of stress. Overall, 57 percent of Americans report that the political climate is very or somewhat stressful. What is understood even less is how this deluge of information is affecting our lives as citizens. Are we truly better informed? Or are we becoming a nation of political amnesiacs, stumbling blindly from one breaking news event and meme to the next?

New Bright Line Watch report on U.S. democracy

The key results from our July expert and public surveys:

• American democracy is continuing to erode. Our expert respondents perceive a consistent, ongoing decline in the overall quality of American democracy from 2015 (assessed retrospectively) to our first expert survey in February 2017 and over the five subsequent surveys we have conducted since then.
• Public ratings of the quality of American democracy are continuing to polarize. Notably, those who disapprove of Trump report ongoing democratic erosion. However, those who approve of the president perceive the quality of democracy to have improved measurably during this period.
• Across a range of measures, President Trump’s supporters and his detractors are drawing conclusions about democracy that are not merely disconnected, but are often antithetical to each other.
• A number of recent political events are characterized by experts as both highly abnormal and important.

Read the report for more, including some striking graphs.

New report: Debunking "echo chamber" hype

From a new Knight Foundation report co-authored with Andrew Guess, Benjamin Lyons, and Jason Reifler:

Is the expansion of media choice good for democracy? Not according to critics who decry "echo chambers," "filter bubbles," and "information cocoons" — the highly polarized, ideologically homogeneous forms of news and media consumption that are facilitated by technology. However, these claims overstate the prevalence and severity of these pa erns, which at most capture the experience of a minority of the public.

In this review essay, we summarize the most important findings of the academic literature about where and how Americans get news and information. We focus particular attention on how much consumers engage in selective exposure to media content that is consistent with their political beliefs and the extent to which this pattern is exacerbated by technology.

As we show, the data frequently contradict or at least complicate the "echo chambers" narrative, which has ironically been amplified and distorted in a kind of echo chamber effect.

We instead emphasize three fundamental features of preferences for news about politics. First, there is diversity in the sources and media outlets to which people pay attention. In particular, only a subset of Americans are devoted to a particular outlet or set of outlets; others have more diverse information diets. Second, though some people have high levels of motivation to follow the latest political news, many only pay attention to politics at critical moments, or hardly at all. Finally, the context in which we encounter information matters. Endorsements from friends on social media and algorithmic rankings can influence the information people consume, but these effects are more modest and contingent than many assume. Strikingly, our vulnerability to echo chambers may instead be greatest in offline social networks, where exposure to diverse views is often more rare.

New NYT: Persuasion effects of fake news overblown

From my new Upshot column:

How easy is it to change people’s votes in an election?

The answer, a growing number of studies conclude, is that most forms of political persuasion seem to have little effect at all.

This conclusion may sound jarring at a time when people are concerned about the effects of the false news articles that flooded Facebook and other online outlets during the 2016 election. Observers speculated that these so-called fake news articles swung the election to Donald J. Trump. Similar suggestions of large persuasion effects, supposedly pushing Mr. Trump to victory, have been made about online advertising from the firm Cambridge Analytica and content promoted by Russian bots.

Much more remains to be learned about the effects of these types of online activities, but people should not assume they had huge effects.

New research on fake news consumption in 2016

My new research on fake news consumption with Andrew Guess and Jason Reifler:

Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign

Though some warnings about online “echo chambers” have been hyperbolic, tendencies toward selective exposure to politically congenial content are likely to extend to misinformation and to be exacerbated by social media platforms. We test this prediction using data on the factually dubious articles known as “fake news.” Using unique data combining survey responses with individual-level web traffic histories, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website from October 7-November 14, 2016. Trump supporters visited the most fake news websites, which were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. However, fake news consumption was heavily concentrated among a small group — almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news websites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets. We also find that Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news and that fact-checks of fake news almost never reached its consumers.

Coverage in today's New York Times:

Fake news evolved from seedy internet sideshow to serious electoral threat so quickly that behavioral scientists had little time to answer basic questions about it, like who was reading what, how much real news they also consumed and whether targeted fact-checking efforts ever hit a target.

Sure, surveys abound, asking people what they remember reading. But these are only as precise as the respondents’ shifty recollections and subject to a malleable definition of “fake.” The term “fake news” itself has evolved into an all-purpose smear, used by politicians and the president to deride journalism they don’t like.

But now the first hard data on fake-news consumption has arrived. Researchers last week posted an analysis of the browsing histories of thousands of adults during the run-up to the 2016 election — a real-time picture of who viewed which fake stories, and what real news those people were seeing at the same time.

The reach of fake news was wide indeed, the study found, yet also shallow. One in four Americans saw at least one false story, but even the most eager fake-news readers — deeply conservative supporters of President Trump — consumed far more of the real kind, from newspaper and network websites and other digital sources.

"You're Fake News!" The Poynter Media Trust Survey

From a new report released yesterday (co-authored with Andy Guess and Jason Reifler):

During the Trump presidency, the United States has witnessed unprecedented attacks on the press from the highest office in the land. It is essential to understand how these attacks have affected attitudes toward the press. This report presents results of a public opinion and behavioral study designed to gauge the public’s support for the media in these difficult times. Encouragingly, we find that the public supports the press, albeit weakly. However, this result masks dramatic polarization in media attitudes. Specifically, we show that Republicans and Trump supporters have far more negative attitudes toward the press than Democrats and Trump opponents, especially among respondents with high levels of political knowledge. Republicans and Trump supporters are also far more likely to endorse extreme claims about media fabrication, to describe journalists as an enemy of the people, and to support restrictions on press freedom. These differences in media attitudes are reflected in polarized information diets on our behavioral measures, though to a lesser extent than people’s self-reports of the outlets they read suggest. Finally, we show that exposure to anti-media messages, including an attack by Trump on “fake news,” have relatively limited effects on attitudes toward the press.

New Monkey Cage: A new way to fight misinformation

From my new Monkey Cage post (co-authored with Yusaku Horiuchi):

State-sponsored propaganda like the recently unmasked @TEN_GOP Twitter account is of very real concern for our democracy. But we should not allow the debate over Russian interference to crowd out concerns about homegrown misinformation, which was vastly more prevalent during and after the 2016 election...

One promising approach [to countering misinformation] is summary fact-checking — an increasingly popular format that presents an overview of fact-checking ratings for a politician. This is distinct from focusing on whether a single statement is true or false; rather, it evaluates a group of such statements, assessing a speaker’s overall truthfulness and reliability as a source. Though the statements in question are of course not randomly chosen, the format may be an effective way to increase the costs of repeatedly making false statements.

One of us (Nyhan) investigated the effect of this format in three experimental studies conducted in 2016 and 2017 in collaboration with different undergraduate co-authors at Dartmouth.

New NYT: Facebook's fact-checking should be checked

From my new Upshot column:

Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Facebook has taken a number of actions to prevent the continued distribution of false news articles on its platform, most notably by labeling articles rated as false or misleading by fact checkers as “disputed.”

But how effective are these measures?

To date, Facebook has offered little information to the public other than a recent email to fact checkers asserting that labeled articles receive 80 percent fewer impressions. But more data is necessary to determine the success of these efforts. Research (including my own) suggests the need to carefully evaluate the effectiveness of Facebook’s interventions.

New Bright Line Watch survey results

The results of our third survey of the state of American democracy are out:

Given widespread concern about the possible erosion of democracy in the United States, Bright Line Watch has conducted expert surveys since early 2017 asking thousands of professional political scientists to identify the dimensions of democracy they see as most important and to rate how well the U.S. is performing on them. But does the public agree with those assessments?

...The public is quite concerned about the state of U.S. democracy, especially those who disapprove of President Trump. Americans’ ratings of democratic performance are often worse than those of experts, especially in the areas experts identify as the most important. In general, experts seem to have a less negative view of how well U.S. democracy is doing than the public.

From coverage by Ezra Klein at Vox:

In February 2017, four political scientists formed Bright Line Watch. Their mission was a chilling sign of the times, a reflection of the fears that swept across the United States as Donald Trump swept into office. They existed, they said, to “monitor the status of democratic practices and highlight potential threats to American democracy.” The danger was from our new president, and from ourselves...

Since the launch of Trump’s presidency, Bright Line Watch has conducted repeated surveys of political scientists on the state of American democracy. The third wave of results, which will be presented at a conference on threats to American democracy on Friday, contains good news of a sort: Trump’s presidency, at least in the view of these experts, has not done visible damage to the workings of the American political system.

New NYT: Why Puerto Rico misperceptions matter

From my new Upshot column (co-authored with Kyle Dropp):

More than three million Americans in Puerto Rico are struggling to meet basic needs after a devastating strike from Hurricane Maria, but their plight seems to be attracting far less public or political attention than the woes caused by the recent hurricanes in Texas and Florida.

One potential explanation is the congested news environment. Over the weekend, for instance, President Trump reignited a debate over whether N.F.L. players should kneel during the national anthem, crowding the hurricane out of the headlines.

The lack of functioning power and communications in Puerto Rico has also hindered reporting on the storm.

But another explanation is simpler: Many Americans don’t realize that what happened in Puerto Rico is a domestic disaster, not a foreign one.

New Politico Magazine: Why norms matter

From my new article in the ideas issue of Politico Magazine:

The calls for Donald Trump to release his tax returns began early during the campaign and never really let up. It was easy to assume he eventually would make good on his promises to turn them over. Every president since Jimmy Carter had released his taxes; Trump would have to do the same, right?

What we’ve learned since then, of course, is that Trump didn’t have to reveal anything. The Constitution doesn’t require disclosure; plenty of federal officials need to submit their tax returns to the Senate, but not the president. It’s just a norm.

One of the crucial lessons of the past year, turns out, is just how much of American politics is governed not by written law, but by norms like these.

New Vox interview on Trump's misinformation

I'm interviewed by Carlos Maza of Vox in this video about the difficulty of correcting Donald Trump's misinformation. Here's the text introduction:

President Donald Trump made roughly 500 false statements in the first 200 days of his presidency, according to the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale. That’s an impressive amount of misinformation, and it’s turned news networks into full-time fact-checking organizations, with journalists frequently having to pause their regular programming to debunk Trump’s latest tweet or public statement.

But all that fact-checking hasn’t stopped many Trump supporters from believing misinformation to be true. Two-thirds of Republican voters still believe millions of people voted illegally during the election. A majority of Trump supporters think Obama spied on him during the campaign, and almost half still think Trump won the popular vote.

How is that possible? Why isn’t fact-checking enough to convince people to abandon inaccurate political beliefs?

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist who’s spent years studying the effects of fact-checking, says the durability of those false beliefs isn’t unique to Trump supporters — it represents a basic problem with human psychology.

On the Media interview on the backfire effect

My new interview with Brooke Gladstone of On the Media about my new research into the effects of corrective information and the role of doubt in science (MP3):

Once people have a misconception about the news, it can be extremely difficult to make them change their minds – even in the face of hard evidence. Studies have even shown the existence of a “backfire effect,” whereby facts can make people double-down on their false ideas. As Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth College and one of the researchers behind the discovery of the backfire effect, explained to Brooke in 2009, “people were so successful at bringing to mind reasons the correction was wrong that they actually ended up being more convinced than the people who didn’t receive the correction.”

After new research, however, it seems that the backfire effect might not be as strong as once thought – giving hope to anyone invested in the pursuit of a more truthful world. Brooke speaks with Nyhan again about the significance of this new finding and the role of doubt in moving science forward.