Brendan Nyhan for WaPo: YouTube is overshadowed by Facebook and Twitter in the debate over the harms of social media, but the site has massive reach — 3 in 4 Americans report using it. This growth has been driven by… Continue reading

Protocol: In the months before and after the 2020 election, far-right pages that are known to spread misinformation consistently garnered more engagement on Facebook than any other partisan news, according to a New York University study published Wednesday.The study looked… Continue reading

NPR: While conspiracy theories aren’t new, experts say their reach is spreading — accelerated by social media, encouraged by former President Donald Trump and weaponized in a way that is unprecedented.

NYT: At 1:51 p.m. on Jan. 6, a right-wing radio host named Michael D. Brown wrote on Twitter that rioters had breached the United States Capitol — and immediately speculated about who was really to blame. “Antifa or BLM or… Continue reading

Deep dive from BuzzFeed: In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened.Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the… Continue reading

WaPo: Nearly a quarter of former president Donald Trump’s 6,081 Facebook posts last year contained extremist rhetoric or misinformation about the coronavirus, the election or his critics, according to a new analysis by the left-leaning group Media Matters for America.The… Continue reading

New from the Covid States Project: Two-thirds of respondents believe that the election was conducted fairly, while one-third believed that it was not. However, this aggregate pattern obscures enormous partisan gaps. Fully 96% of Democrats reported that the election had… Continue reading

Tom Edsall in the NYT: A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that … Continue reading

Smart Steve Mazie in The Economist: The First Amendment grants plenty of room for robust debate; plaintiffs seeking damages for defamatory statements face an appropriately steep climb. On the rare occasions when libel or slander claims stick, the defamed entity… Continue reading

New letter I spearheaded from Julia Azari, Associate Professor of Political Science, Marquette University; David Kaye, Clinical Professor of Law, UC Irvine; Jack Lerner, Clinical Professor of Law, UC Irvine; Janai Nelson, Associate Director-Counsel, NAACP-LDF; Cailin … Continue reading