Speaker: Professor David Lazer
Time: 4pm – 5:30pm
Location: Open Space 7th floor, Center for Data Science, NYU, 60 5th Ave.
Abstract: The spread of fake news on social media became a public concern in the United States after the 2016 presidential election. We examined exposure to and sharing of fake news by registered voters on Twitter and found that engagement with fake news sources was extremely concentrated. Only 1% of individuals accounted for 80% of fake news source exposures, and 0.1% accounted for nearly 80% of fake news sources shared. Individuals most likely to engage with fake news sources were conservative leaning, older, and highly engaged with political news. A cluster of fake news sources shared overlapping audiences on the extreme right, but for people across the political spectrum, most political news exposure still came from mainstream media outlets.
Bio: David Lazer is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Prior to coming to Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009). In 2019, he was elected a fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration. His research has been published in such journals as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Organization Science, and the Administrative Science Quarterly, and has received extensive coverage in the media, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News. He is among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation, with highly cited papers in Science on fake news in 2018 and 2019. He is lead author of the paper in Science in 2014 that critiqued Google Flu Trends, which has emerged as an important piece in the use of “big data” to understand human behavior. He is lead author on the 2009 Science paper on computational social science, which has been described as the manifesto for the emerging field. His papers on algorithmic auditing and online personalization, published in top peer reviewed computer science conferences, have received widespread attention inside and outside of the academy. His online experimental work on deliberation garnered best paper of the year in the American Political Science Review. Dr. Lazer has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), cofounder of the Political Networks conference and APSA section, reviewing editor for Science, and numerous other editorial boards and program committees.