Abstract: The circulation of information requires prior exposure: we cannot disseminate what we do not see. In online platforms, information exposure results from a complex interaction between social and algorithmic forms of curation that shapes what people see and what they engage with. In this talk, I will discuss recent research investigating the social and technological factors that shape what information we encounter online and how it diffuses from user to user. I will also discuss why it is important we adopt a systematic approach to mapping the information environment as a whole – this approach is needed to capture aggregate characteristics that go unnoticed if we only focus on individuals. Networks, I will argue, offer measurement instruments that can help us map that landscape and identify pockets of problematic content as well as the types of audiences more likely to engage with it.
Speaker: Sandra González-Bailón is the Carolyn Marvin Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Director of the Center for Information Networks and Democracy (cind.asc.upenn.edu). She also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Sociology at Penn. Prior to joining Penn, she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (2008-2013). She completed her doctoral degree in Nuffield College (University of Oxford) and her undergraduate studies at the University of Barcelona. Her research agenda lies at the intersection of computational social science and political communication. Her applied research looks at how online networks shape exposure to information, with implications for how we think about political engagement, mobilization dynamics, information diffusion, and the consumption of news. Her articles have appeared in journals like PNAS, Science, Nature, Political Communication, the Journal of Communication, and Social Networks, among others. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020).
Recording: Social and algorithmic choices in the transmission of (mis)information