How much "fake news"—ersatz content from seemingly legitimate publishers—was shared in 2016 and 2020, and by whom? This talk will walk through the tricky methodological challenges in counting suspect content, evaluate the patterns of sharing fake news, and discuss the implications for potential interventions to control exposure to misinformation.
David Lazer is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He co-directs the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Prior to joining Northeastern University, Lazer was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009) and was director of its Program on Networked Governance.
About the series — This event is hosted by the UMass Computational Social Science Institute (CSSI), a diverse interdisciplinary community using computational models and methods to help us understand the social world. CSSI hosts periodic talks and workshops related to current events and longer-term research in computational social science. To be notified of these events directly, please subscribe to CSSI-events by sending email to cssi-events-subscribe@cs.umass.edu. To join CSSI as a faculty affiliate, please email David Jensen and Ina Ganguli.
