ABOUT THE EVENT
The abundance of media options is a central feature of today’s information environment. The current
media landscape is extremely decentralized, with information simultaneously flowing through many
parallel channels (i.e., the web, social media, TV). In this talk I will discuss recent research in which we
tackle the challenge of measuring news exposure in a complex media environment. This research aims
to (1) test claims of increasing audience fragmentation and ideological segregation; (2) measure the
influence of automated accounts in distorting the salience of news sources on social media; and (3)
identify ideological asymmetries in social media news sharing. I will discuss the implications of this
research for how we think about news consumption in the digital media environment and how future
work can improve the current state of the art through better measurements.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Sandra González-Bailón is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, computational tools, and political communication. She is the author of Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). More information on her research can be found at https://sandragonzalezbailon.net and https://dimenet.asc.upenn.edu.
March 30, 2022, 3:30pm
https://washington.zoom.us/j/99322243194
Note: For security purposes, access to the Zoom link is restricted to individuals with UW netIDs. If you do not have a netID and wish to attend, please contact Yuan Hsiao (yahsiao@uw.edu) with the subject line “COM Colloquium.”