Hailey Reissman
With political polarization in the American public at a record high, determining where Americans get their political news is crucial to making sense of the impact of echo chambers, fake news, and misinformation on Americans’ democratic decision making and this ideological divide.
Researchers at the Computational Social Science (CSS) Lab at the University of Pennsylvania do just that, sifting through data on Americans’ media consumption, both on television and online, to determine just how partisan Americans’ news diets are and how much “fake news” they consume.
Now the lab, led by Stevens University Professor Duncan Watts, launches the Mapping the (Political) Information Ecosystem Dashboard — a set of interactive data visualizations that replicate and extend the findings of two previous lab publications about news in the U.S., one focusing on fake news and the other on partisan news diets online and on TV.