partisan

Remember Julian Assange? Having dominated headlines in the 2010s, the WikiLeaks founder has dropped out of sight having been confined at London’s Belmarsh prison since 2019. And that was kind of the plan, this impassioned documentary asserts, with the aid of staunch defenders including the late John Pilger, Tariq Ali, Jill Stein, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsworth and Assange family members. “The persecution of Julian has been a long, slow form of killing somebody,” says Pilger; witnessing Assange’s trajectory from a…

Credit: Partisan Animosity and America—The Path to the 2024 Presidential Election: Partisan Violence, (2024) Despite political chatter about a new civil war, Americans' support for partisan violence remains very low, according to a new report issued by the Polarization Research Lab. Led by Sean Westwood, an associate professor at Dartmouth, and…

Ad campaign characteristics.(A) Cumulative ads by date (in millions). (B) Each dot represents a given YouTube channel on which the ad was shown over 1000 times (with only a handful of these channels labeled for readability). The vertical axis shows the number of times (in units of 1000) that the ad showed on a given channel, and the horizontal axis orders channels in descending order by the number of times the ad showed. (C) Histogram of the number of…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain People make better and less biased judgments about misinformation after searching the internet for corroborating evidence, according to a new University of Michigan study. If members of a large panel of people, described as lay raters or crowdworkers, each were to make independent judgments after…

From Thanksgiving dinner conversations to pop culture discourse, it’s easy to feel like individuals of different political ideologies are occupying completely separate worlds, especially online. People often blame algorithms—the invisible sets of rules that shape online landscapes, from social media to search engines—for cordoning use off into digital “filter bubbles” by feeding us content that reinforces our preexisting world view. Algorithms are always biased: Studies have shown that Facebook ads target particular…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Partisan conflict can be largely explained as differing views on two crucial tasks of society, according to a new theory developed by a pair of prominent social scientists. In a new article published May 8, 2023, in the journal Psychological Inquiry, Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman say societies…

New research co-authored at UC Berkeley finds that loyal liberal viewers of MSNBC and CNN and conservative devotees of Fox News have a tendency to get locked in to partisan echo chambers. Credit: Neil Freese A startling number of Americans are in "partisan echo chambers," where they only consume TV news that reinforces their existing political and social biases, according to new research co-authored at UC Berkeley.…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Offering a tiny cash reward for accuracy, or even briefly appealing to personal integrity, can increase people's ability to tell the difference between misinformation and the truth, according to a new study. The findings suggest that fake news thrives on social media not only because people are…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Russian Twitter campaigns during the 2016 presidential race primarily reached a small subset of users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, shows a new study by NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics. In addition, the international research team found that despite Russia's influence operations on the platform, there were no measurable changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting…

Tesla is becoming a partisan brand – losing the support of Democrats and gaining support from Republicans, according to a survey. Leaders of large companies selling consumer products, like automakers and tech companies, generally refrain from showing direct support to any political party, especially in the US. Due to the polarizing nature of politics in the US and its two-party system, it’s better to stay away from definitive statements of support one way or the other since you risk…