Research Network

Georgetown University

Exposure to misinformation can make people less sure of the truth and may undermine democratic institutions and norms. When users encounter misinformation, most choose to ignore it, allowing it to spread unchecked, while a minority opt to either report or correct misinformation. To better understand who is engaging in public corrections of others on social media, the barriers to correction that people who do not currently correct perceive, and how to motivate more people to provide accurate and effective corrections, this project will identify and experimentally test the effectiveness of a range of strategies for encouraging active correction.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Leticia Bode is an associate professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology master’s program at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and her bachelor’s degree from Trinity University. Her work lies at the intersection of communication, technology, and political behavior, emphasizing the role communication and information technologies may play in the acquisition and use of political information. It is cited in the Surgeon General’s Advisory, “Confronting Health Misinformation”, applied by Facebook, and used by the World Health Organization among others.

Georgetown University

More than 60 countries have placed restrictions on internet access and thus on free unfettered access to unbiased news and other communications. This project seeks to (1) understand how technology is being (mis)used to prevent citizens of undemocratic nations from freely accessing and contributing information online and to (2) develop new technologies for countering Internet censorship.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Micah Sherr is Callahan Family Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. His academic interests include privacy-preserving technologies, electronic voting, wiretap systems, and network security. Before arriving at Georgetown, he participated in two large-scale studies of electronic voting machine systems and helped to disclose numerous architectural vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems. Micah received his B.S.E., M.S.E., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.

Georgetown University

The team at Tech Foundations for Policymakers will continue and expand its efforts to bring up-to date, unbiased research evidence and expertise about the effects of technology on society to public officials, who seldom have the detailed technical understanding needed to write well informed policies.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

April Falcon Doss, Executive Director, Georgetown Institute for Technology Law and Policy, has worked in the field for twenty years. Before taking on her current role at Georgetown, April spent over a decade at the National Security Agency; she served as Senior Minority Counsel for the Russia Investigation in the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and she led the cybersecurity and privacy practice of a major U.S. law firm. She is on the faculty of Georgetown Law Center.

Georgetown University

As conflict and repression rise and environmental risks grow, people are fleeing their homes and seeking asylum worldwide. The resulting humanitarian crisis is being exacerbated by the rapidly spreading misinformation increasingly infecting all aspects of digital society. This project will pioneer new uses of public open-source organic data collected from trending social media and local news as well as more traditional data sources, to predict likely migrant flows to specific countries and to identify differences by area and topic in how misinformation spreads. The resulting tools would provide methods for early warning to humanitarian agencies, and inform those seeking to slow the spread of misinformation.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Dr. Lisa O. Singh is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Research Professor in the Massive Data Institute (MDI) at Georgetown University. Her areas of expertise are data mining, data science, and database systems. Her research interests include mining social networks and social media data, inference in the presence of noise, visual analytics, web privacy. Dr. Singh received her B.S.E. from Duke University and her M.S. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University. 

Georgetown University

Machine learning is revolutionizing all spheres of life and making inroads in several critical applications spanning medical diagnosis to credit risk assessment for financial institutions. However, the data required is often distributed across multiple sources and poses severe privacy protection challenges. This project will design and make publicly available, concretely scalable secure multiparty computation protocols that can be applied in a wide range of circumstances, opening up the ability of researchers from medicine to the social sciences to analyze “big data” containing PII without risk of compromising individual identity.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam is an expert in zero-knowledge proofs and blockchain applications, Muthu received his BTech degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2004. He studied at Cornell University, where he worked with Rafael Pass receiving his Ph.D. in computer science in 2011. Before arriving at Georgetown, he taught at the University of Rochester and he spent a year at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (NYU) as a postdoctoral researcher supported by the Computing Innovation Fellowship.

Sciences Po & Georgetown University

The médialab at Sciences Po and the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown envision creating joint research on the influence of digital technologies on society. The two institutes have independently established successful research agendas that analyze social media and how it both reflects and influences modern social and political life. Working together on areas of shared research interests, this partnership seeks to synergistically build on and advance the cutting-edge work happening at each institute and connect the resulting findings to action-oriented audiences.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Michael Bailey is the Colonel William J. Walsh Professor of American Government in the Department of Government and McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. He is Director of the Data Science for Public Policy Program. His research focuses on applying statistical techniques to answering questions at the intersection of political science, policy, law, and economics.

Georgetown University

This team proposes to identify and frame an integrated set of technical, regulatory, and policy reforms that would effectively constitute a novel restructuring of digital society. The package of legal and regulatory structures developed would redress harm and collectively place individuals on a more equal negotiating footing with the platforms while also developing a companion set of secure computer science tools and technologies that could be built into an application or protocol’s operations to make their effects on bias, user addiction, manipulation, etc. transparent to a wide range of governance bodies without compromising privacy.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Kobbi Nissim is a Professor and the Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S., and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. Term Chair in the Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science, Georgetown University, and an Affiliate Professor at Georgetown Law. Before joining Georgetown, he was at the Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard University. His research centers on establishing rigorous practices for privacy in computation: identifying problems that result from the collection, sharing, and processing of information, formalizing these problems, and studying them towards creating solid practices and technological solutions.

Sciences Po

Decentralized networks provide users with control over their personal information. Applied to the Internet, decentralization can reduce the market power of dominant firms, as it reduces their ability to learn consumers’ preferences. However, information sharing comes with the cost of constantly deciding whether to share information. Since the Internet is not decentralized, there is currently no data about how Internet users share information under decentralization. We, therefore, propose to analyze, estimate, and simulate a model of information sharing in an extensive decentralized network: shareholding of large corporations. We focus on shareholder activism over socially responsible issues to study the evolution of related shareholding information and the reactions of large nodes in the network (shareholders with dominant positions) to examine governance issues related to information sharing in decentralized networks. To do so, we exploit the news flow of digital media as exogenous shocks to shareholder preferences.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Michele Fioretti is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Sciences Po. His research focuses on applied microeconometrics with a special interest in firm strategies and social responsibility. He has published in leading journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics and the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

https://www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/en/researcher/michele-fioretti.html

Sciences Po

The last two decades have seen the emergence of different hypotheses about disorders of digital public spaces, such as fragmentation (or “bubbles”), polarization, extremism, and the role that algorithms mediating this space might have on them by pushing the visibility and virality of particular contents. Conclusive results, however, have proved elusive, as a growing body of research seems to present a contradicting picture: disorders might be pervasive, capturing the attention of policy makers and the general public, but with no widely-accepted definitions or metrics emerging to quantify them or the role algorithm might have on them, let alone actionable means to design better algorithms that would minimize identified negative outcomes. Meanwhile, growing evidence suggests that Recommender Systems might be leveraging political opinions of users and other features of public debate associated with societal cleavages. This project takes inspiration in ideological social network embedding methods and political surveys for the analysis of party systems in policy spaces to propose a double network and opinion space modeling of digital public spaces. Using this double network and spatial opinion analysis, this project then proposes to test whether algorithms learn and leverage political opinions of users through algorithmic explainability, how they affect information dynamics in public debate, and to open a path towards actionable tools capable of guiding algorithm design, governance, and policy.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Pedro Ramaciotti Morales (Research Scientist, médialab, Sciences Po), Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, conducts research in computer sciences and computational social and political sciences. He works on network embedding methods with applications to attitude and ideology estimation, and applications to the study of the consequences of algorithmic recommendation.

https://medialab.sciencespo.fr/en/people/pedro-ramaciotti-morales/

Sylvain Parasie (Professor of Sociology, médialab, Sciences Po) conducts research about how digital technologies transform information diffusion, media dynamics, and public debate, and in particular how digital transformation displaces established information production and consumption mechanisms.

https://medialab.sciencespo.fr/en/people/sylvain-parasie/

Sciences Po

What shapes whether people receive, believe, and share disinformation? The rise of ‘fake news’ has become an area of deep concern worldwide, raising questions about the role of information in democratic societies. Observers often point to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, based on falsehoods about election results, as a critical turning point in how disinformation has dire consequences. Despite a dramatic increase in disinformation research, a crucial and remaining puzzle is that a large number of people believe fake news claims while only a small number of people (often below 1%) consume fake news in their daily news diet (Allen et al. 2020; Fletcher and Nielsen 2018; Grinberg et al. 2019; Tsfati et al. 2020). How and why do people report that they trust unverified information if they are not actually consuming this news directly? To understand this empirical disconnect in the diffusion of disinformation in the digital era (3Ds), this mixed-methods research, DeCodingDisInfo advances the state of the art that selects on the dependent variable of digitally visible fake news and top-down levers of distribution. Current scholarship skews toward top-down powerful players: platforms (like Twitter), politicians (like Trump), or policies (like the GDPR). The audience for disinformation, however, is usually viewed as passive individuals without institutional affiliation. This extant research ignores the broader array of everyday bottom-up active media practices and mechanisms of sharing—or not sharing. Instead, DeCodingDisInfo, an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods project, will uncover how information – both fake news and otherwise – circulates in the digital media environment and in offline spaces. Taking a deeply contextualized and community-based approach, our team will harness the power of a two-country comparison and examine how ideology and institutions shape information flows. This will result in publicly available tools to better decode and deconstruct fake news..

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Jen Schradie – Assistant Professor and Scholar of Digital Data in a Societal Context. She graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School and received her PhD in sociology and new media from UC Berkeley. Her mixed-methods research on digital democracy has been featured on CNN and the BBC and in the New Yorker, Le Monde, and WIRED, among others. She is also a frequent analyst on France 24. She was awarded the UC Berkeley Public Sociology Alumni Prize and has directed six documentary films. Her Harvard University Press book, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, won the Charles Tilly Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association. For this book, she also developed a multi-method repertoire for studying digital networks. She has experience collecting and analyzing social media data, as well as extensive background conducting fieldwork in a variety of conditions. She has supervised over 25 undergraduate and graduate students doing research, including fieldwork, interviewing, social media data collection, and content and text analysis. Schradie is currently leading an open-ended survey response project as part of a collaborative multi-wave study on covid inequalities, as well a PI on a France-U.S. comparison of class and gender differences in the tech economy. She has also managed international projects in and out of academia.

https://www.sciencespo.fr/osc/fr/content/jen-schradie.html

Sciences Po

This research will be addressed in two successive calls for proposal. The objective of this preliminary project is to explore how speech regulation in digital discussion spaces can be based on users’ normative expectations. “You shouldn’t talk like that!”, “That’s wrong!”, “We don’t say that!”, “That’s nonsense!”, “It’s false”. Internet users who chat in forums, Facebook groups, or social network comment threads constantly challenge others to assess the legitimacy of speech and the limits of what can be said in public. With the massification of digital audiences and the diversity of speech spaces, it appears increasingly obvious that users do not share the same values regarding what can or cannot be said in public. The objective of this project is to map the differences and tensions between different conceptions of online speech. This proposal sets the framework for a project that brings together five perspectives that we will develop in future calls. The first four research axes propose to confront different perspectives on how users, public opinion, platforms and States define the possibilities and limits of speech in digital spaces. More applied, the fifth research axis will seek to design new types of digital speech spaces. This first proposal is based on an analysis of a large corpus of digital conversations and a set of qualitative and quantitative survey techniques enabling the study of the normative representations of Internet users. In the next phase, we would like to combine this bottom-up approach with the legal debate on the regulation of content within large digital platforms and to design speech spaces architectures allowing users to regulate themselves.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Dominique Cardon, professor of sociology at Sciences Po and director of the médialab, has conducted research on the governance of Wikipedia, on web algorithms and on the various forms of discussion in the digital public space. Manon Berriche, PhD student in sociology at Sciences Po médialab and at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity, working on the reception of misinformation and on the various verification strategies mobilized by Internet users. Valentine Crosset is a postdoctoral researcher at Sciences Po médialab and the Chair Good in Tech. Her current research focuses on content moderation on digital platforms, with a particular interest in the controversies and normative expectations of Internet users concerned with freedom of expression.

https://medialab.sciencespo.fr/equipe/dominique-cardon/

Sylvain Parasie (Professor of Sociology, médialab, Sciences Po) conducts research about how digital technologies transform information diffusion, media dynamics, and public debate, and in particular how digital transformation displaces established information production and consumption mechanisms.

https://medialab.sciencespo.fr/en/people/sylvain-parasie/

Sciences Po

Democracy is in retreat around the world. Over the past decade, the decline in democracy has been notable not only in countries that have just recently transitioned to democracy but also in advanced, stable democratic systems in Europe and North America (Diamond 2021). Political polarization and the spread of misinformation are often cited as culprits in the rise of contested democracy (Finkel et al. 2020; Kingzette et al. 2021; Osmundsen 2021; Vosoughi et al. 2018). In turn, the Online Public Sphere and more specifically the online media sphere have been implicated in both the growth of polarization and the spread of misinformation. The goal of our project is to understand the breadth and contours of the Online Public Sphere (both positive and negative) as well as investigate how it could be structured in ways that encourage more healthy behaviors and support good digital governance.

In this project we propose developing and administering an innovative research design for both understanding how people engage with the online public sphere as well as test interventions that are designed to cultivate healthier and more constructive online behaviors. We plan to do so in the context of the French presidential and legislative elections slated for spring 2022. Following the experience of the last national elections in France, we anticipate that the electoral campaign will be emotionally charged, polarizing, and filled with attempts to spread misinformation. Our research approach will cast a broad net by studying a wide range of attitudes and behavior, both on- and offline.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Kevin Arceneaux is Full Professor of Political Science. He studies how people make political decisions, paying particular attention to the effects of psychological biases. He has published articles on the influence of partisan campaigns on voting behavior, the effects of media on attitude formation, the political implications of individual variation in predispositions, and experimental methodology. His most recent book, Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability (Cambridge University Press, 2017) won the 2018 Robert E. Lane Best Book Awardand was co-winner of the 2018 APSA Experimental Research section’s book award. His first book, Changing Minds or Changing Channels: Partisan News in an Age of Choice (University of Chicago Press, 2013) was co-winner of the 2014 Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by the Harvard Kennedy School.

https://www.sciencespo.fr/cevipof/en/researcher/kevin-arceneaux.html

Martial Foucault is Full Professor of political science and Head of the CEVIPOF-Sciences Po. He received holds a PhD in economics from the University of Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne. His research agenda covers political economy, political behavior, political psychology and methods. In 2009, he also received the IIPF (International Institute of Public Finance) Young Economist Award for research commissioned by the NBER on fiscal decentralization in Benin. Before joining Sciences Po in 2013, he was Associate Professor at the University of Montreal, Director of the European Union Centre of Excellence (University of Montreal/McGill University) and Research Fellow in 2005/06 at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute (Italy).

https://www.sciencespo.fr/cevipof/en/researcher/martial-foucault.html

Sciences Po

In this project, PI propose to develop and test new solutions and methods to slow down or block the spread of false news and alternative facts. We propose solutions at two levels: upstream, to improve the regulation of platform companies and improve fact-checking procedures, and downstream, to enhance users’ ability to recognize false news. Our project will therefore both enhance digital governance, by proposing and evaluating changes to the design of social media, enhance the impact of fact checking, by evaluating best practices, and improve digital literacy, by designing and testing a training app that will be used in practice.

In the first pilar of the project, we will focus on the downstream actions of improving users’digital literacy and sensitivity to misinformation. Specifically, we propose to design a smartphone application based on two key principles. First, the app will train users to recognize false news and alternative facts. Second, the app will provide tools for users to realize the impact they have on others when they share. We will then carry out a randomized evaluation of the impact of this application on sharing true and false news on social media.

In the second part of pilar 1, we will explore solutions to improve digital governance. In particular, we will explore behavioral interventions that could discourage users from sharing false news. The intervention is to ask social media users to confirm their intention to share content. We will evaluate whether this simple intervention has a larger effect on false compared to true news

and propose a system to adapt this cost to the potential accuracy, using a system of user ratings.

We will also measure the benefits of exposure to checked vs. unchecked news for the receivers of information; this will allow us to carry out a welfare analysis of the intervention and propose optimal policies.

The key idea of Pilar 2 is to build a partnership with AFP Factuel, the largest fact-checking group in France part of the third largest international news agency in the world (the Agence France Presse), to first study the impact of fact-checking and second to improve the design of factchecking and propose innovative tools to tackle disinformation. The key objectives of this pilar are to evaluate the impact of fact-checking on the circulation of fake news. and to determine the optimal format of a fact check (length, level of detail), and the best timing to maximize its impact.

Our unique collaboration with the AFP Factuel allows us to study the universe of French language fake news topics, ranging from recent covid misinformation in Congo, antisemitic conspiracy theories in Canada or fake news during the upcoming French presidential election 2022. Our approach is thus suitable to establish best practices for fact-checking and social media platforms around the globe.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Julia Cagé is an economist specialized in the economics of the media and the political economy of information. She has already published two general-audience books on the media. Saving the Media has received awards and has been translated into 11 different languages. She is a board member of the Agence France Presse as well as of the daily newspaper Le Monde.

https://www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/en/researcher/julia-cage.html

Sergei Guriev studies political economy of populism and autocracy including the issues of misinformation, censorship and propaganda. He has published in the leading journals in economics (QJE, AER, REStud, AEJ, JEEA, EJ,) as well as political science (APSR and World Politics). His book “Spin Dictators” on modern autocrats’ manipulation of information is coming out in the Princeton University Press in March 2022.

https://www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/researcher/sergei-guriev.html

Emeric Henry is an economist who works in the general field of law and economics and has several papers on fake news and fact checking. He has published in the best journals in economics (AER, JPE, AEJ, JEEA) and outside (PNAS, PloSOne, Management Science).

https://www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/researcher/emeric-henry.html

Sciences Po

In the midst of the current debate surrounding the moderation of online content, the rise of decentralized social networks renews the interest and opportunities for user participation in the governance of online speech. However, the control over technology, data, and rules that decentralization offers to online communities might be not sufficient to improve the health and safety of online speech, if the participation of users remains mainly limited to choosing between platforms that better suit their values. A novel understanding of users’ role in moderation is needed, and filling this gap is the core research objective of this project. It proposes a combined approach, grounded in both sociology and design, to account for the diversity of user participation in moderation. Previous exploratory research has led us to hypothesize the existence of several moderation styles that represent the user expectations and practices of online speech, only partially connected to platform policies. In this project, we use those moderation styles as lines of inquiry into different sociotechnical assemblages involved in the performance of moderation as a moral issue. The resulting descriptions make visible networks of ethical relations and how these could afford more diverse types of user participation. In a bottom-up approach, we then test those descriptions through two experimentations: 1) Prototyping with user communities and designers in co-design workshops; 2) Testing with stakeholders and developers. The project wishes to interrogate to which extent such designs of moderation can encourage the reconfiguration of participatory practices. Overall this project aims at articulating the needs of a diversity of users with the promise of better self-regulated speech spaces.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Dominique Cardon, professor of sociology at Sciences Po and director of the médialab, has conducted research on the governance of Wikipedia, on web algorithms and on the various forms of discussion in the digital public space. Manon Berriche, PhD student in sociology at Sciences Po médialab and at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity, working on the reception of misinformation and on the various verification strategies mobilized by Internet users. Valentine Crosset is a postdoctoral researcher at Sciences Po médialab and the Chair Good in Tech. Her current research focuses on content moderation on digital platforms, with a particular interest in the controversies and normative expectations of Internet users concerned with freedom of expression.

Sylvain Parasie (Professor of Sociology, médialab, Sciences Po) conducts research about how digital technologies transform information diffusion, media dynamics, and public debate, and in particular how digital transformation displaces established information production and consumption mechanisms.

Donato Ricci is a designer and researcher. He specialises in the use of Design Methods in Human and Social Sciences. He is Assistant Professor of “Representação e Conhecimento” (Knowledge and Representation) at the Universidade de Aveiro. In his courses he exposes the representational mechanisms of diagrams and maps, repurposing them for Design practices. He is part of the SPEAP Programme in Political Arts within SciencesPo School of Public Affairs, where he fosters the use of political design as trigger for social change.

Sciences Po

Over the past few years, the issue of disinformation has become particularly salient around the world due to the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidency (see among other Allcott and Gentzkow 2017).

Citizens are not equal in front of misinformation. Less-educated people as well as younger ones seem to be more vulnerable to fake news. More generally, “information inequality” is an important concern: people in certain socio-economic segments are much more likely to be informed about recent political events – and to be able to confidently distinguish real news from fake news – than individual in other ones (see in particular Angelucci and Prat 2021). Free access to high-quality news is often discussed as one tool that could be of use to reduce information inequality. In this spirit, a number of countries such as France and Canada have recently introduced policies such as tax credit for a subscription to a newspaper. In 2019, as part of the “Protecting Journalism in the Age of Digital Platforms” report, Cagé, Prat and others argued in favor of “media vouchers”: give each adult a voucher to donate to her favored media outlets.

But to which extent giving free access to high-quality news (and ensuring high-quality news production) guarantees that citizens who do not consume news will do so when provided with free information, in particular in a digital world where news compete online with entertainment (Gavazza, Nardotto, and Valletti 2019) ? Past research has shown that people may decide to select themselves out of news (see e.g. Prior 2007), and the issue of whether people are used to consuming news is thus a central one. This seems of particular importance for young generations confronted from their early age with an infinite amount of choices. People indeed tend to develop a taste for high-quality news reporting when they are young, so with habit formation they might continue to consume high-quality journalism after they graduate.

While a small number of recent papers in the literature have measured the effects of exposing citizens to politically biased news outlets (Levy 2021; Broockman and Kalla 2021), this research project will be the very first to investigate whether exposing young people to high-quality digital news impacts their political knowledge and overall ability to fight misinformation.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Julia Cagé is an economist specialized in the economics of the media and the political economy of information. She has already published two general-audience books on the media. Saving the Media has received awards and has been translated into 11 different languages. She is a board member of the Agence France Presse as well as of the daily newspaper Le Monde.

Georgetown University

Leticia Bode and Emily Vraga envision creating a state-of-the-art research platform, which will be available to researchers around the world. The platform will imitate the popular social media platform Reddit and will be customizable by researchers who wish to change various design elements and attributes of the platform to make it look different to specific users. The data generated by users interacting with the platform (e.g., what they click on, like, share, etc.) will then be analyzable. Bode and Vraga will assess trends among users that witness a correction of misinformation on social media and how observing those corrections can impact truth-seeking behaviors. 

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Leticia Bode is an associate professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology master’s program at Georgetown University. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and her bachelor’s degree from Trinity University. Her work lies at the intersection of communication, technology, and political behavior, emphasizing the role communication and information technologies may play in the acquisition and use of political information.

Emily Vraga is an associate professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, where she holds the Don and Carole Larson Professorship in Health Communication. Her research focuses on how individuals respond to news and information about contentious health, scientific, and political issues in digital environments.

Georgetown University

Kevin Arceneaux, Martial Foucault and Jonathan Ladd study the effects of social media on people’s personal happiness, social well-being and political opinions. The team plans to conduct a field experiment on Facebook deactivation during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign. They will partner with a national survey research firm to find a national sample of Facebook users who say that they are willing to deactivate their Facebook accounts for 4 weeks in exchange for payment. The team will survey the treatment and control groups on their political views and a variety of other attributes and behaviors at the beginning and the end of the study to determine the impact social media has on political opinions.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Kevin (Vin) Arceneaux is Professor of Political Science at the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po Paris since June 2021. He studies how people make political decisions, paying particular attention to the effects of psychological biases. He has published articles on the influence of partisan campaigns on voting behavior, the effects of predispositions on attitude formation, the role of human biology in explaining individual variation in predispositions, and experimental methodology.

Jonathan Ladd is an associate professor, with appointments in the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Department of Government. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Massive Data Institute and the Lab for Globalization and Shared Prosperity, and a faculty adviser to the Institute of Politics and Public Service. He studies American politics, especially public opinion, the news media, partisan polarization, and the loss of confidence in institutions. He is Director of the American Institutional Confidence Poll which is a panel survey with waves in 2018 and 2021. It examines confidence in institutions, support for democratic principles and norms, overall satisfaction with democracy, and social connectedness in American society.

Georgetown University

Joshua Tucker and Tiago Ventura will focus on the causal effect of exposure to misinformation on WhatsApp on beliefs and political attitudes. Their research project will randomly assign users to a multimedia deactivation of WhatsApp, in which participants turn off their automatic download of any multimedia — image, video or audio — on WhatsApp and are incentivized not to access any multimedia content during the weeks leading up to elections across four different countries. Stakeholders across the technology and policy ecosystem are developing regulatory approaches and interventions to mitigate the harms — and amplify the benefits — of social media. Ventura and Tucker hope to use their findings to inform this work around the world but particularly in the Global South.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Joshua Tucker is a Professor of Politics, an affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and an affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University. He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia, a co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP), and a co-editor of the award winning politics and policy blog The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post. 

Tiago Ventura is an assistant professor at the McCourt School of Public policy. He is a computational social scientist exploring substantive issues on political communication and political behavior. His work focuses on content activation, news sharing, misinformation, and polarization on social media. He explores these issues primarily in Latin American countries. His comparative political behavior work explores issues of criminal violence and inequality in Latin America.

Georgetown University

Julie Cohen , Meg Leta Jones and Paul Ohm seek to draft a completely new blueprint for an effective approach to public oversight of firms operating in the information economy. The team hopes to design the administrative structures, cultures and expertise necessary to shape the information economy in furtherance of the common good. Their hope is that their blueprint will be used as a model for new legislation and regulation in the area of technology governance, inspiring new forms of oversight and a new generation of talented technology policy professionals.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Julie Cohen teaches at Georgetown University Law Center and writes about surveillance, privacy and data protection, intellectual property, information platforms, and the ways that networked information and communication technologies are reshaping legal institutions. She is the author of Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press, 2012), and numerous articles and book chapters, and she is a co-author of Copyright in a Global Information Economy (Wolters Kluwer, 5th ed. 2020). 

Meg Leta Jones is an Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University where she researches rules and technological change with a focus on privacy, memory, innovation, and automation in digital information and computing technologies. Meg’s research covers comparative information and communication technology law, critical information and data studies, governance of emerging technologies, and the legal history of technology.

Paul Ohm is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. In his research, service, and teaching, Professor Ohm builds bridges between computer science and law, utilizing his training and experience as a lawyer, policymaker, computer programmer, and network systems administrator. His research focuses on information privacy, computer crime law, surveillance, technology and the law, and artificial intelligence and the law.

Georgetown University

Anna Cave, Laura Donohue and Jenny Reichs’ work draws upon interdisciplinary methods like traditional legal research, design thinking and deliberative democratic political theory, bringing together diverse groups of stakeholders from across society to understand the full implications of biomanipulation for civil rights, national security and the future of the internet. They seek to foster a new public dialogue around biomanipulation and the future of social media and the internet. As part of their external engagement, the team is developing an AR/VR experience that will significantly deepen the understanding of participants, helping them conceive of what opportunities and vulnerabilities could exist in the future. Following this exhibition, Cave, Donohue and Reich hope to build out an ecosystem of policy working groups, industry events, scholarship and related academic infrastructure to increase understanding of biomanipulation as well as catalyze appropriate responses.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Anna Cave is the Executive Director of Georgetown Law’s Center on National Security, where she is responsible for developing and implementing a new strategy for the Center’s growth over the next ten years. Previously, she was the founding director of the Ferencz International Justice Initiative, where she developed a first-of-its-kind justice hub for designing and launching innovative justice strategies and action plans for communities affected by mass atrocities; built a large international network of cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary experts to support the Initiative’s justice hubs; oversaw research and publications on policy issues relating to international justice; and helped develop new education and training programs.

Laura K. Donohue is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, Director of Georgetown’s Center on National Security and the Law, and Director of the Center on Privacy and Technology. She writes on political theory, public law, constitutional law, federal courts, national security, and legal history. Her work on new and emerging technologies centers on social media, biometric identification, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and drones.

Jenny Reich is a Fellow and the Director of Emerging Technology Projects at the Georgetown Law Center on National Security. She is currently helping produce a report on artificial intelligence, social media, and the future of democratic norms globally. She was instrumental in the production and dissemination of the Center’s report on the future threats and opportunities of social media and emerging technologies domestically. 

Georgetown University

Rebecca Johnson’s research leverages advances in computing to create a systematic database of school board meeting deliberations across U.S. school districts, exploring automated text analysis to summarize meaningful themes in the deliberations and the role of the national news media in agenda setting surrounding these themes. Johnson hopes to create a more dynamic database that continually updates as new videos are posted on a given district’s YouTube channel so that the data can be useful for emerging education policy discussions. Johnson hopes that this database can also increase our understanding of the media’s role in selectively highlighting or amplifying certain issues. 

ABOUT THE RESEARCHER

Rebecca Johnson is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, where she teaches data science in the MS in Data Science for Public Policy and is affiliated with the Massive Data Institute. She is also a 2022 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow to support her research on ethics and targeting of resources in K-12 schools, and is affiliated with the American Bar Foundation and the federal Office of Evaluation Sciences.

Georgetown University

Evan Barba and Cassandra Ramdath have begun a multi-year collaboration to evaluate the effectiveness of Active Bystandership Training for Law Enforcement (ABLE-Trainer) in the context of a purpose-built VR training environment, called ABLE-Trainer. The initial deployment will use ABLE-Trainer as a testbed for a standardized active bystandership training curriculum currently deployed by the Center for Innovations in Community Safety and in use in 286 law enforcement agencies. Further extensions of the system will incorporate additional training and testing scenarios that will deliver proven ABLE training through virtual reality at scale.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Evan Barba is an Assistant Professor in the Communication, Culture and Technology Program at Georgetown University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Computer Science and the Program in Learning and Design. He is also co-director of CCT’s Technology Design Studio, a collaborative design space where students and faculty work together to develop new ideas. His research is interdisciplinary and at the crossroads of Design, Computing, Systems Science and Education. In particular, he focuses on the concept of scale and how it is employed to both define and solve problems.

Cassandra Ramdath, Ph.D., is the Director of Research and Evaluation at the Center for Innovations in Community Safety. Cassandra is a mixed-methods researcher with expertise in applying community-engaged methods to build equitable social justice impact. Her research portfolio focuses on systems reform, health and justice intersectionality, procedural fairness, and community safety.

Georgetown University

Pamela Herd, Sebastian Jilke and Don Moynihan seek to document whether it is possible for state governments to use technology for the common good by adopting and institutionalizing innovation from the civic tech community. Their work will analyze the process through which Code for America and the California government enact their GetCalFresh program, which aims to help California residents access SNAP benefits. Previous research has shown that greater access to those benefits makes citizens more educated and prosperous, and, critically, more likely to participate in democracy. Using technology to provide access to public programs therefore offers a means for technology to strengthen democratic citizenship.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Pamela Herd’s research focuses on inequality and how it intersects with health, aging, and policy. She is also an expert in survey research and biodemographic methods. Herd does research on administrative burden, or the bureaucratic obstacles that people encounter when trying to access government benefits, services, and rights. She has received grant awards for her work from the National Institutes for Health, National Institutes on Aging, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and AARP.

Sebastian Jilke is an Associate Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, where he also co-directs BGL — the Better Government Lab. His research applies insights from the behavioral sciences to public management and policy to study how government reforms affect public employees and the people they serve – especially with regard to social equity in access to public services and programs. 

Donald Moynihan is the inaugural McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy. His research seeks to improve how government works. He examines the behavioral effects of efforts to improve public sector outcomes through government reform, as well as the administrative burdens people encounter in their interactions with government. At the McCourt School, he co-directs the Better Government Lab.

Sciences Po

Even if virtual reality and augmented reality have been sources of research publications, the metaverse remains an emerging area of research. The objective of this project is to study the dynamics of metaverse communities’ users’ behaviors, i.e. real behaviors, to better understand the benefits and risks of such immersive technological universes and the determinants of their adoption. The expected results of the netnography (qualitative part of the project) will be a better understanding of the interactions on the metaverse and the governance of the communities. The quantitative part of the project (NLP, dynamic graphs, algorithmic community detection) will provide the insights on the communities’ structures, their dynamic evolution, and the role of intra and extra factors. Finally, on this basis we expect to provide the recommendations for the industrial actors, policy makers and users of metaverses communities. The coordination team includes complementary skills in sociology (Sciences Po), computer science, computational social sciences and management (IMT). Additionally, the research team has a strong expertise in analysis of online platforms, communities, and social networks.

The project will include the recommendations for the industrial actors, policy makers and users of metaverses communities as well as a specific report on the benefits and risks of metaverse communities based on real users’ experiences. These publications will be available on the GoodInTech website. In terms of impact and valorization of the results, 3 GoodInTech webinars, corresponding to the three parts of the project, will be organized during the course of the study. The project will end up with a final conference on the metaverse challenges.

This project aims at publishing minimum of three research papers in top-ranked academic journals. We will organize a final conference to present and discuss the results of our research. To enlarge the audience of our results, we will also elaborate the briefs with comments on the use of the metaverse for the general public. We will organize its diffusion through the usual distribution channels of the GoodInTech network and its partner institutions: sensibilization of students at IMT and Sciences Po campuses; You Tube Video shared on social media (LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok and Twitter); articles in traditional media.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Christine Balagué is Professor of Digital Management at IMT-BS, and founder of the Good in Tech research network (www.goodintech.org), interdisciplinary research network based on a partnership between Institut Mines Telecom (IMT) and Sciences Po, working on two research areas: 1/ data, algorithms and society 2/ Corporate Digital Responsibility. Her research focuses on modeling technology consumers’ behavior (specifically on social media), on networks analysis, on ethics of AI and on on-line disinformation. She is also member of several national committees (at Arcom, ministry of armies, HAS) and contributed to numerous national reports for different ministries in France.

Inna Lyubareva is Associate Professor (HDR) in economy and social sciences at IMT Atlantique. She develops original approaches using quantitative and qualitative methods at the interface between social sciences, statistics and computer science. Specific contributions of her research activity include analysis of the dynamics of business model innovation and its strategic and political implications; detection of latent social interactions on digital platforms and their impact on users’ opinions and preferences (see here-after for the selection of her work related to the present thesis project).

Cecile Bothorel is Associate Professor in computer science at IMT Atlantique. Her research focuses on studying Social Networks Analysis and more generally Complex Networks. Focusing more particularly on the detection of implicit and dynamic communities of interest/practice/competencies over the web, algorithms for graph mining, graph embeddings.

Kevin Mellet is Assistant Professor in Sociology at Sciences Po, affiliated with CSO (Sciences Po, CNRS). His work mainly draws on economic sociology and science and technology studies to study market techniques in the digital age. His recent research focuses on online advertising and data marketing professionals, and on processes of marketization on social media.

Sciences Po

The rise of misinformation challenges a common conceptualization of truth or accuracy shared by citizens in modern politics, especially so in the age of internet and artificial intelligence. This disruption of a shared understanding of reality undermines the quality of decision-making, cooperation, and communication in the social, political, and economic life and increases affective polarization and political radicalization (Lazer et al. 2018). To mitigate the deleterious effects of misinformation, social scientists and policy stakeholders have proposed a plethora of interventions on online media environments. However, the comparative effectiveness of these interventions has not been tested in a systematic manner until now.

The proposed project will examine the following question: How effective are the major behavioral interventions that aim to reduce the impact of misinformation on public opinion? To answer this question, the proposed study will examine the causal effect of exposure to misinformation and strategies to mitigate it on truth discernment, public trust, and political attitudes across different countries.

Drawing on classic and recent works in the literature of public opinion, political communication, psychology, and cognitive science, the study expects that citizens will update their attitudes in an explicable way as a function of their prior beliefs, their exposure to text-based and audiovisual misinformation, and the interventions to reduce its effect, i.e., debunking, prebunking, and accuracy prompts. More precisely, we test the hypotheses that misinformation mitigation strategies (MMS) will have substantively small effects on the ability of citizens to discern true from false information (H1a), trust in media outlets and politics (H1b), and political attitudes (H1c). Further, all effects of MMS will be in the direction of the treatment, that is there will be no backfire effects (H2). Finally, the variation of effects of MMS will be but minimal across cognitive thinking styles, political sophistication, partisanship, ideology, or personality traits (H3). This argument has two implications. On the one hand, existing mitigation strategies can only marginally reduce the harmful effects of misinformation. On the other hand, they do not have unintended negative consequences and are equally effective across different subgroups of the population.

The center piece of the proposed project will be two “megastudies” consisting of a series of large survey experiments with nationally diverse samples of the adult population in countries including but not limited to the US, Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Poland (target total N > 24,000), which collectively will provide evidence to test the above hypotheses. This megastudy will help policymakers and other stakeholders improve the quality of citizens’ online media diets based on reliable evidence from behavioral science. The most important advantage of this experimental design is that it allows to compare the most promising MMS as their effectiveness will be tested using the same interventions and outcome measures in the same period of time across different countries.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Nicolas Sauger is Professor of political science at Sciences Po and Director of the Center for Socio-Political Data, a center specialized in data and methods for social sciences. He has been an invited Fellow to the European University Institute and to the University of Oxford. Sauger has a long experience in the production of opinion surveys. He has been the National Coordinator for two large scale comparative surveys (the European social survey and the Comparative study of electoral systems) and the Scientific director of the Elipss Panel (a French probabilistic panel in general population). He is the principal investigator of series of surveys on both national (French national election study) and European elections (CED-EU14). He has been involved in the management of national, European and international research infrastructures as the scientific and technical director of the EquipEx DIME-SHS, as a member of the Scientific board of the European social survey, and a member of the Planning committee of CSES. Sauger has published more than 80 papers on survey methodology, electoral systems, electoral behavior, political institutions and web-based technologies of political communication. He has published in various journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, Electoral Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, Party Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Social Choice and Welfare, West European Politics.

George N. Georgarakis (Co-PI) is a Moritz Schlick postdoctoral fellow in Digital Political Communication in the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna, Austria. His research focuses on public opinion, political communication, and political psychology, primarily in the E.U. and the U.S. In his research, he relies on a variety of quantitative tools, including survey, conjoint, and online experiments as well as large panel and cross-sectional datasets. He is affiliated to the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) at Sciences Po Paris and the Polarization and Social Change Lab (PASCL) at Stanford University. He received a joint Ph.D. in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris and Columbia University in 2021. His research has been supported by the Moritz Schlick early-career program, the Alliance Program, the National Foundation of Political Science (France), the Onassis Foundation, and the Columbia Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals in Political Science, Political Communication and Psychology, including Political Psychology.

Sciences Po

In recent years, a decline in democracy has been observed across the world, not only in countries that have recently transitioned to democracy, but also in advanced, stable democratic systems (Diamond 2021). Political and affective polarization play a key role in explaining the spreading of misinformation on social media as well as support for democratic norms (Kingzette et al. 2021; Osmundsen et al. 2021). Scholars have conducted extensive research about the proliferation of false information on social media, a phenomenon which has had a detrimental effect on society by reducing public trust (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). Additionally, despite the fact that the immediate effects of unreliable websites and the spread of fake news on misperceptions may be short-lived (Hoes et al., 2022), it may have a greater impact on delegitimizing successful functioning of democracies.

The spread of misinformation, rumors, or conspiracies on social media is not new, and is particularly intense in periods of crisis (e.g., during the Covid-19 pandemic or following events such as earthquakes or school shootings). Social media platforms have tried different options (e.g., deleting bots, adding badges to the “real” profiles) to constrain the spread of fake news. These methods approach the problem from the angle of the “detection” of existing fake news. However, the underlying problem can be considered before its presence. In this manner, the lack of consistent empirical evidence has prevented academic recommendations for designing effective systems for these platforms and left them with gradual use of the identity verification tools in voluntary terms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram). For example, while some research indicates that individuals’ entrance to a platform through identity verification can efficiently prevent misbehavior on social media (Cho et al., 2012; Fu et al., 2013), other scholars pointed both to the promises of verified identification and to its unintended effects (Wang et al., 2021).

While much of the existing literature has focused on the detection of fake news after it has been shared (for a comprehensive review of the literature on the typology of fake news and detection techniques, please see Aïmeur et al., 2023), to the best of our knowledge, few studies have explored how to create an information system to address the issue prior to its emergence. Therefore, our proposal aims to understand how individuals’ social media behavior and their reaction to political news and messages is influenced by the presence of identity verification mechanisms. More precisely, we seek to deepen our understanding of how identity verification influences how people (1) evaluate (mis)information; (2) form social or political attitudes, and (3) react to (mis)information. In doing so, we would like to compare these various stances by manipulating identity verification.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Romain Lachat is associate professor at CEVIPOF-Sciences Po, which he joined in 2016. He obtained his PhD in political science at the University of Zurich in 2014. He was a visiting scholar at the political science departments of the University of Montreal (2006-2007) and of New York University (2007-2008). He also worked at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, as visiting professor (2010-2014) and associate professor (2014-2015). His research focuses on the comparative analysis of electoral behaviour and on political representation. He is particularly interested in the impact of political institutions and party characteristics on individual-level behaviour. He has published in several international political science journals, including Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, Political Behavior, and West European Politics.

Can Zengin is Research Assistant at SciencesPo. Broadly, he focuses on Comparative Politics from the Political Psychology perspective. In particular, he engages in psychological biases’ outcome in contemporary political behavior in Turkey and the United States. His thesis aims to explain the variance in outgroup bias through the lens of Self-Conscious Emotions. Given the importance of identity in political behavior and current affairs, his research seeks to demonstrate (i) how people’s predisposed tendencies may explain the variance in affective polarization across individuals, (ii) how social context shapes the relationship between shame/guilt and outgroup bias, and (iii) whether pride emotion provides an explanation for the right-wing populist movements.

Ákos Szegőfi is PhD student at the Department of Cognitive Science in CEU. He works on the human cognitive capacities that help us in assessing the truth-value of communicated information – also known as epistemic vigilance.

Sciences Po

AI decides, AI diagnoses, AI identifies, AI detects, AI learns and AI even writes, draws, reasons, and passes higher education and cognitive tests. AI is today described not only as tools but are granted some specific decision-making capacities. While this presentation can appear as only one way, among others, to describe AI, it may not be as neutral as it seems. Indeed, these descriptions are likely to incentivize individuals to apply to AI algorithms the same heuristics for evaluating decisions as those they apply to human beings. However, applying these heuristics to AI algorithms is likely to trigger misperceptions of AI outputs, and more precisely an overestimation of its accuracy, fairness and usability. Through three work packages combining applied and theoretical approaches, this project aims to investigate the misperceptions of AI that can arise from the intuitive reasoning on AI algorithms and to propose ready-to-use tools for fighting against these misperceptions and promoting a safe use of AI.

ABOUT THE RESEARCHERS

Lou Safra holds a PhD in cognitive science awarded by the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris in 2017. She is currently assistant professor in political psychology at CEVIPOF-Sciences Po and an associate researcher at the Institut d’Études Cognitives (Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives & Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Computationelles, École Normale Supérieure, Paris).

Lou is interested in the cognitive mechanisms underlying social and political behaviour, notably leader choice and cooperation. In particular, she adopts an ecological and evolutionary approach to better understand inter-individual differences in these domains, across both space and time. To do so, she relies on behavioural data, social surveys, computational modelling and, more recently, the analysis of cultural artefacts such as paintings and books.

Christine Balagué is Professor of Digital Management at IMT-BS, and founder of the Good in Tech research network (www.goodintech.org), interdisciplinary research network based on a partnership between Institut Mines Telecom (IMT) and Sciences Po, working on two research areas: 1/ data, algorithms and society 2/ Corporate Digital Responsibility. Her research focuses on modeling technology consumers’ behavior (specifically on social media), on networks analysis, on ethics of AI and on on-line disinformation. She is also member of several national committees (at Arcom, ministry of armies, HAS) and contributed to numerous national reports for different ministries in France.