** We are hiring a summer AI Auditing Engineer ** 

Hello friends and colleagues–

Today, Penn MEDIATED is honored to welcome one of the foremost scholars of democratic governance, Penn President Emerita Amy Gutmann, as a faculty advisor. The longest-serving president in the University of Pennsylvania's history and an appointee of both President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden, Professor Gutmann brings decades of civic leadership, as well as a rare combination of scholarly rigor and real-world impact, to Penn MEDIATED.

"The health of our democracy depends on the health of our information ecosystem. Seeking truth and understanding is not a utopian ideal; it is a prerequisite for a functioning republic. I am proud to join Penn MEDIATED and contribute to its vision of translating our rigorous research into democratic well-being.”

President Emerita Amy Gutmann

Working towards a healthier information ecosystem and to strengthen democracy have been guiding themes of Professor Gutmann’s exemplary career. We are thrilled to welcome President Gutmann to the Center’s leadership and you can read more in the full announcement.

Penn MEDIATED–Digital Forensics Lab Partnership: Penn MEDIATED is excited to officially announce our partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab for the 2026 Digital Sherlocks program! Penn’s faculty, including Professors Danaé Metaxa and Jane Esberg, will contribute to the training, directly informing practitioners on the front lines of information integrity and democratic resilience. Drawing from their empirical research and expertise, each will teach a module that offers attendees a deeper understanding of the information ecosystem and its manipulation by autocratic governments.

We’re Hiring: As part of our LLM Civic Discourse project, we are hiring a part-time or full-time summer AI Auditing Engineer to develop and productionize software for auditing and monitoring of large language models (LLMs) on political issues, supervised by Danaé Metaxa, Raj & Neera Singh Assistant Professor of computer science. In addition to working with Professor Metaxa on their AI Watchman project, the engineer will collaborate with our partners at Princeton University, led by Professor Jake Shapiro. This role is likely a good fit for a PhD student or Postdoc passionate about AI auditing and longitudinal monitoring, especially on political issues.

LLM Civic Discourse Convening: On March 4th, Penn MEDIATED hosted an online convening of prominent academic researchers and civil society organizations to share results from, and approaches to, monitoring and evaluating LLM civic discourse—how LLMs discuss political topics, refer to politicians, and relate election information. We also launched a new dashboard tracking this expanding new research field, and wrote a two-page overview the state of the field, with more to come.

As part of the ongoing development of the Penn MEDIATED website, we have launched a new faculty visualization; redesigned the research compendium; launched a blog (A MEDIATED Feed); and published a dashboard for our LLM Civic Discourse project. 

We revamped the research compendium - our ongoing effort to comprehensively curate Penn’s research on the information ecosystem and its impact on democracy. We have added categorical tags and search, making it easier for you to find essential research about polarization, misinformation, persuasion, social media, and more.

We have launched an interactive visualization to demonstrate the breadth of Penn MEDIATED faculty research—explore the network to see how our 25 affiliated faculty study the media organizations, technology platforms, governments, elites, and everyday people that make up the information ecosystem.

Containing 56 papers, this project dashboard highlights recent research on how large language models (LLMs) shape civic discourse. The collection includes longitudinal monitoring of LLM outputs on political issues, papers on the emerging use of LLMs for content moderation online, and next we are adding research on LLMs as used for fact checking.

Our new blog! We will use it to share Center updates and also contextualize new computational research within debates of the day. Our new post digs into a new study co-authored by Penn MEDIATED affiliated faculty Sandra Gonzalez-Bailón and Deen Freelon, which finds that at least 40 million American Facebook and Instagram users were exposed to deceptive online networks ahead of the 2020 election—yet this content made up less than 0.3% of those users' total consumption.

The Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy (Penn MEDIATED) is committed to independent research on the information ecosystem and its impact on democracy. Learn more on our website, or follow us on Bluesky and LinkedIn.