Explore the richness of knowledge captured when whiteness is decentered from mis- and disinformation studies
The bulk of research on mis- and disinformation studies English-language cases and communities—but we know that identity plays an important role in how we consume, interpret, and share information. In a piece for the HKS Misinformation Review, Sarah Nguyen, Rachel Kuo, Madhavi Reddi, Lan Li, and Rachel Moran summarize some early observations from their work studying how mis- and disinformation spread within Asian diasporas. They also offer recommendations for additional research into how false and misleading information circulates in historically marginalized communities.
Digital political ads are key for political candidates; but federal laws governing those ads lag behind
In partnership with the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), the Center for Media Law and Policy has been researching and summarizing state laws that impose disclosure and/or recordkeeping requirements on online platforms that carry digital political advertisements.
Digital political ads have become an increasingly important tool for political candidates and committees, yet existing federal laws governing political advertisements focus primarily on traditional mediums of communication. While the Federal Election Commission has detailed sponsorship disclosure requirements for political advertising on television and radio, the agency currently does not regulate online political advertising in the same way. Congress proposed legislation in 2017, 2019, and 2021 to extend existing disclosure requirements for political advertisements to online political advertisements, but no action has been taken on these bills.
To fill this regulatory gap, a handful of states have enacted new legislation or amended their existing election laws to increase transparency by imposing sponsorship disclosure and/or recordkeeping requirements for online political advertisements. As of 2020, six states had enacted such laws, which we analyzed in a report written by Ashley Fox and Dr. Tori Ekstrand, “Regulating the Political Wild West: State Efforts to Disclose Sources of Online Political Advertising,” and summarized on the CITAP Digital Politics website under the section on State Disclosure and Recordkeeping Requirements for Digital Political Ads.
Since 2020, three additional states, Alaska, Colorado, and Virginia, have enacted their own laws requiring sponsorship disclosure for online political ads. We’ve updated the CITAP Digital Politics pages to include summaries of the new laws, which you can read here.
In 2017, Russian trolls interacted with people on Twitter who were already highly polarized
There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. The authors study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users from late 2017 merged with nonpublic data about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) from Twitter. Using Bayesian regression tree models, they find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted 6 distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a 1-mo period. We also find that interaction with IRA accounts were most common among respondents with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network, high interest in politics, and high frequency of Twitter usage. Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized. The author conclude by discussing several important limitations of our study—especially our inability to determine whether IRA accounts influenced the 2016 presidential election—as well as its implications for future research on social media influence campaigns, political polarization, and computational social science.