**The Wharton School and the Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy invite applications for a Knight Postdoctoral Fellow with expertise in the quantitative study of the information ecosystem, especially news, media, and advertising.**
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An Introduction from Center Co-Directors Duncan Watts and Christopher Yoo |
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Dear colleagues,
As faculty co-directors of the new Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy, we wanted to take a moment to tell you more about the Center—why we built it, what we are learning, and where we hope it can go.
A line from a book that one of us wrote in 2011, Everything Is Obvious, anticipated what we are trying to accomplish:
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Just as the invention of the telescope revolutionized the study of the heavens, so too by rendering the unmeasurable measurable, the technological revolution in mobile, Web, and Internet communications has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of ourselves and how we interact.
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In the almost fifteen years since, a number of people have (appropriately) questioned the telescope metaphor, but the reality is that we have made enormous progress in measuring—and to some degree understanding—social behavior at scale. The challenge now is not whether we can measure things, but whether we are measuring the right things.
Take one question that many people worry about: Has social media driven us into partisan echo chambers? The short answer: probably not in the way people think.
When we actually look at the data, we find that television, not social media, remains the dominant source of news for Americans. And it is there—not on Facebook or X—that we see the strongest evidence of ideological segregation. From 1980 to 2022, broadcast news viewership fell by over half, while cable news—especially partisan outlets—grew steadily. Between 2016 and 2019, 17% of Americans lived in TV echo chambers, compared to just 4% of those consuming news primarily online. There is also a clear asymmetry: Fox News has become increasingly partisan over time, and MSNBC and CNN fluctuate, but remain less extreme overall.
Using large language models as analytical tools, we can now measure partisanship at the level of individual sentences in TV transcripts and news articles. This allows us to map not just what stories are told, but how they’re told. For example, in one study, we found that political headlines are systematically less polarized than the articles they introduce, suggesting an editorial layer that subtly moderates tone before publication.
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Of course, some of this may sound obvious in hindsight. But that is exactly the point: many “obvious” stories about media and democracy turn out, when measured, to be incomplete or even wrong. If everyone already “knew” TV news was more partisan than online news, why does so much academic research focus on the Internet and so little on television? Why are so many papers on “fake news,” which makes up only about 0.15% of Americans’ news diets?
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Our data increasingly show that misinformation, which is almost universally operationalized as false information, is not the core problem. More often, the issue lies in framing—how information is selected, contextualized, and repeated. Experiments show that biased framing of true facts can be just as persuasive as outright falsehoods. These are the kinds of questions we’re pursuing in the Computational Social Science Lab and through the new Center’s broader collaborations.
Looking Ahead
This research has clarified a related point: understanding the information ecosystem—and improving it—requires new infrastructure, methods, and collaborations. The Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy will focus on these aspects:
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Taking a broad view: We want to study how people actually encounter information. That means not assuming the preeminence of any one media—e.g., social media—at the outset, but rather taking as broad a view as possible: including social media, but also the internet in general, TV, podcasts, and even radio (if possible). We are already building datasets to track these domains.
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Data Infrastructure: We need longitudinal, shared datasets that can support systematic analysis rather than isolated case studies. With support from the Knight Foundation, we are supporting the Computational Social Science Lab in expanding access to PennMAP data for large-scale data sharing across research teams.
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Quantitative Methods: The information ecosystem operates at a scale that defies anecdote. Quantitative methods—machine learning, network analysis, computational linguistics—are essential tools for making sense of it. Through the just-awarded Information & Democracy Research Grants, we are investing in this capacity across Penn.
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Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Understanding information systems requires input from communications, engineering, law, political science, business, and social policy. Our research seminar series brings together this community, as does our cohort of Knight PhDs and Postdocs, and we’re currently seeking a new Knight Postdoctoral Fellow in the Wharton School for a scholar working at this intersection.
- Public impact: Research matters only if it informs the public sphere. We are committed to convening an annual conference and other initiatives to share what we learn with policymakers and civil society institutions to ensure that evidence, not intuition, guides how we think about the media environment.
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We are just getting started, but we believe that careful measurement and open collaboration can help us move beyond speculation—and toward real understanding of how information shapes democracy.
Duncan J. Watts and Christopher S. Yoo
Co-Directors, Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy
(Now back to Executive Director Alex Engler, on all of our recent progress).
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We’re hiring! The Wharton School and the Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy invite applications for a Knight Postdoctoral Fellow with expertise in the quantitative study of the information ecosystem, especially news, media, and advertising.
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We hosted our first public event on the Democratic Repercussions of Media Fragmentation, and you can watch the recording at the link. Penn Professors Duncan Watts and Sandra Gonzalez-Bailón dive into recent research on how media fragmentation will impact polarization and political echo chambers. S. Mitra Kalita, CEO of URL Media, discussed how media fragmentation poses challenges for media executives, while offering new ideas for sustainable journalism.
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We are extremely enthusiastic to welcome Prithvi Iyer as the Center’s new Communications and Research Manager. Prithvi was previously the Program Manager at Tech Policy Press, where he managed the organization's fellowship program, helped execute community engagement initiatives, and wrote over 50 pieces on technology policy and research. Before that, he was a research assistant at the Indian think tank Observer Research Foundation, where he published extensively on topics including mental health implications of political conflict, the role of behavioral science in shaping foreign policy, and technology's role in exacerbating inter-group conflict in South Asia.
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Information & Democracy Research Grants - The Center funded 12 grants for a total of $160,000, including projects that will build essential datasets, develop valuable software tools, define novel taxonomies, apply emerging computational and AI methods, and experimentally test new interventions. In broad terms, many of the awarded projects seek to (1) evaluate the role of AI/LLMs in shaping the online public discourse online; (2) examine the role of the media and advertising in constructing narratives; or (3) assess how interpersonal conversations and social groups impact political beliefs. Half of the grants are jointly led by investigators and faculty in different Penn schools, with the Annenberg School of Communication, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Wharton School, the Carey Law School, the School of Arts and Science, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center represented in these interdisciplinary cross-institution grants.
- New Penn Research and Events - we're still working on a comprehensive digest for Penn's research in this field, but for now, here are a few highlights:
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Penn Professors Duncan Watts and Chris Callison-Burch, with co-authors, published a new paper introducing the Media Bias Detector, a real-time assessment of the topics, tone, political lean, and facts of news articles. Publisher level results can also be seen in the platform's dashboard.
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In PNAS, Penn Professor Yphtach Lelkes with Derek Holliday and Sean Westwood (a recent guest at the Center's research seminar), published Why Depolarization is Hard. The paper finds that depolarization is remarkably difficult to remediate – in evaluating 77 different interventions, the average treatment makes only an incremental difference, and even repeating or stacking treatments doesn’t meaningfully enhance the impact.
- In a mega-analysis of 16 MRA datasets, Professor Emily Falk and co-authors demonstrate that message effectiveness is associated with brain activity related to reward expectation and social processing. The paper sheds new light on the cognitive processes underpinning effective messaging.
- Executive Director Alex Engler spoke on a Brookings Institution Panel on The Future of the Internet in the Age of AI, discussing the challenges of AI regulation and online platform governance.
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Lastly, we’re excited to welcome Northeastern University’s new Institute for Information, the Internet, and Democracy into our greater academic community and congratulate them on their new grant from the Knight Foundation. We were glad to attend their recent workshop on Transatlantic Perspectives on Information, the Internet, and Democracy at their Dublin Innovation Institute, focused on advancing transatlantic research and guiding essential issues of the implementation of the EU’s Digital Services Act.
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The Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy is committed to independent research on the information ecosystem and its impact on democracy.
Learn more on our website: https://infodem.upenn.edu/
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