How Cable News Has Diverged From Broadcast News News / June 11, 2025 Walter Cronkite was often cited as “the most trusted man in America” as he delivered the news on CBS in the 1960s and ’70s — a time when fewer news options created a “shared reality” that scholars argue fostered civic engagement, empathy, and shared national identity. The situation looks quite... Read More
From Cracks to Gardens: Creating a Thriving Social Media Through Research News / April 10, 2025 Early advocates of social media believed that the creation of these platforms would lead to positive outcomes. When Facebook was launched in 2004, it was praised for its ability to “connect the entire world.” In hindsight, many of these ideals were optimistic at their time as social media platforms are... Read More
How the Media Distorts Perceptions on Chronic Disease Risks News / February 28, 2025 Silent illnesses, or chronic diseases, contribute to 70% of deaths in the US annually and six in ten Americans suffer from at least one chronic condition. Despite this, coverage of this public health crisis is disproportionately overshadowed by sensational risks, including terrorism, homicide, and traffic accidents- incidents that are far... Read More
Violent Language in Films Has Increased Since the 1970s: A New Study News / January 21, 2025 Violent entertainment has made it into the public discourse due to rising concerns about the graphic nature of highly popular video game franchises including Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and Call of Duty. But what about violence in films which are enjoyed by a much larger and more diverse audience? After... Read More
Overcoming the Challenges of GPS Mobility Data in Epidemic Modeling News / October 3, 2024 Epidemic modeling is a framework for evaluating the location and timing of disease transmission events, and is a part of the larger field of human mobility science. The COVID-19 pandemic put existing epidemic models to the test, with many institutions and corporations employing models that utilized smartphone location data to... Read More
Misunderstanding the Harms of Online Misinformation News / July 31, 2024 In 2006, Facebook launched its News Feed feature, sparking seemingly endless contentious public discourse on the power of the “social media algorithm” in shaping what people see online. Nearly two decades and many recommendation algorithm tweaks later, this discourse continues, now laser-focused on whether social media recommendation algorithms are primarily... Read More
Mapping Media Bias: How AI Powers the Computational Social Science Lab’s Media Bias Detector News / June 25, 2024 The CSSLab’s Media Bias Detector empowers users to analyze bias in major news outlets, not just based on their political leaning, but on the topics they choose to cover. Read More
Mapping How People Get Their (Political) News News / June 13, 2024 With political polarization in the American public at a record high, determining where Americans get their political news is crucial to making sense of the impact of echo chambers, fake news, and misinformation on Americans’ democratic decision making and this ideological divide. Researchers at the Computational Social Science (CSS) Lab... Read More
Reexamining Misinformation: How Unflagged, Factual Content Drives Vaccine Hesitancy News / May 30, 2024 What threatens public health more, a deliberately false Facebook post about tracking microchips in the COVID-19 vaccine that is flagged as misinformation, or an unflagged, factual article about the rare case of a young, healthy person who died after receiving the vaccine? According to Duncan J. Watts, Stevens University Professor... Read More
