Communications

The Annenberg School for Communication’s Victor Pickard discussed conservative news channel Newsmax and its recent deal with Comcast. If Comcast is “feeling the heat from the right, it will make sense to appease some of those critics,” said Pickard.

Damon Centola of the Annenberg School for Communication discussed the counterintuitive results of information exchanges across political party lines on social media. While one might think that stepping outside one’s echo chamber would improve understanding, Centola found that “communication in a highly polarized context increases polarization.”

Damon Centola of the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Engineering and Applied Science led a team of researchers studying the impact of visible political logos on social learning.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center discussed sensationalist newspapers’ effects on the 2016 election. “You might say nobody reads the tabloids, but actually most of us do—through inadvertent exposure,” she said.

Writing in The New York Times, Joseph Turow of the Annenberg School for Communication shared his findings on internet users’ misperceptions of online privacy policies.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Kathleen Hall Jamieson weighed in on the difficulty of parsing out fact from fiction or opinion in journalism and social media. “I don't blame the public for being confused,” she said.

Damon Centola of the Annenberg School for Communication explained the phenomenon of dangerous viral challenges: “Slightly dangerous or slightly risky challenges may have the best combination of high-enough riskiness to make it easy to create emotional excitement about participating, but low-enough risk that they can spread with only moderate levels of social reinforcement.”