5 papers
AI-Powered Browsers Are Broadly Accurate News Summarizers That Reduce Political Bias and Negative Affect
Yan Xia, Dominik Batorski, Erin Wertz +3
Web browsers now provide AI-generated news summaries for millions of users. Despite their popularity and influence, we lack a systematic understanding of how these systems transfor…
Closing the Motivation Gap: Incentives Enhance Visual Misinformation Discernment and Verification
Sijia Qian, Cuihua Shen, Jingwen Zhang +1
Cheapfakes, or real images presented misleadingly or in unrelated contexts, are an increasingly prominent form of visual misinformation. While media literacy interventions can enha…
The Prosocial Ranking Challenge: Reducing Polarization on Social Media without Sacrificing Engagement
Jonathan Stray, Ian Baker, George Beknazar-Yuzbashev +42
We report the first direct comparisons of multiple alternative social media algorithms on multiple platforms on outcomes of societal interest. We used a browser extension to modify…
Changes to the Facebook Algorithm Decreased News Visibility Between 2021-2024
Szymon Talaga, Erin Wertz, Dominik Batorski +1
Platforms, especially Facebook, are primary news sources in the US. In its widely criticized "War on News," Meta algorithmically deprioritized news and political content. We use da…
Negative news posts are less prevalent and generate lower user engagement than non-negative news posts across six countries
Szymon Talaga, Dominik Batorski, Magdalena Wojcieszak
Although news negativity is often studied, missing is comparative evidence on the prevalence of and engagement with negative political and non-political news posts on social media.…