Social Media

Companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook have access to vast and rapidly growing amounts of personal data from their users. How this information should be stored and protected is part of the ongoing debate over online privacy. Although social networking sites and smartphone operating systems offer security preference options, it is unclear if merely offering these privacy controls within the application — and requiring users to proactively “opt in” — is sufficient.

The 2016 presidential election cycle has been filled with speculation about what could happen at the Republican and Democratic party conventions this summer, given the highly contested nature of both primaries.

Conservatives are more likely than liberals to endorse conspiracy theories. Many are highly knowledgeable about politics and have little trust in institutions, a new study finds.

The Issue: Need directions? Or a restaurant recommendation? These days, you’d probably seek help on your smartphone — a handy know-it-all device that can spit out answers to almost anything anywhere at any time. But a mere ten years ago, you may have asked someone — a neighbor, a stranger — for help. A new paper looks at the unseen social costs of this change in how we obtain information and interact with others.

The announcement in May 2015 that nine news organizations, including the New York Times, NBC News, the BBC and BuzzFeed, would begin serving up some of their content natively to Facebook’s platform has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the media and publishing world.

Questions about how social media platforms may drive users into “filter bubbles” — increasingly like-minded communities whose views are reinforced and become more extreme — have been swirling for several years now. As the debate has developed in popular discourse, scholars and data scientists have continued to make insights on what is often referred to in the academic literature as online “homophily,” or colloquially as the “birds of a feather flock together” phenomenon.

Recent weeks have brought a deluge of new findings about the digital media space, crowned by the Pew Research Journalism Project’s 2014 State of the News Media report.