{"id":309618,"date":"2026-10-19T03:34:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T03:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/309618\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T03:34:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T03:34:11","slug":"penn-researchers-analyze-social-media-impact-on-elections-ahead-of-2026-midterms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/309618\/","title":{"rendered":"Penn researchers analyze social media impact on elections ahead of 2026 midterms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication recently published two studies that analyze the impact of social media during elections.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Meta organized a 17-person team \u2014\u00a0including Communication professors Deen Freelon and Sandra Gonz\u00e1lez-Bail\u00f3n \u2014 to analyze the company\u2019s data and determine how it\u2019s platforms influenced the 2020 elections. This year, the team published the results of two studies that focused on the spread of untrustworthy information and deceptive online networks during that election cycle.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat we found in 2020 is that reach was highly concentrated: a handful of networks accounted for most of their users exposed, and much of that exposure happened because ordinary users reshared that content,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez-Bail\u00f3n wrote in an Oct. 7 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.asc.upenn.edu\/news-events\/news\/new-studies-investigate-exposure-misinformation-and-deceptive-online-networks-facebook-and-instagram\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">announcement<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One of the studies, published in Science Advances, measured how much unreliable source content users of platforms such as Facebook and Instagram were exposed to and the effects of reducing such exposure. The other study, published in Nature Human Behavior, reported that 37 million Facebook and 3 million Instagram users viewed misleading political content about the elections in 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Looking ahead to next month\u2019s midterm elections, Gonz\u00e1lez-Bail\u00f3n explained that the current question is whether artificial intelligence platforms are now detecting and demoting untrustworthy posts.<\/p>\n<p class=\"font-serif\">Get the DP delivered straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n<p>  <a href=\"https:\/\/thedp.us2.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=a96885e3aa3f8131c872ee329&amp;id=370b4800ba\" class=\"newsletter-btn font-sans no-underline\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\"> Sign Up<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Freelon added that the influx of content and stimuli on social networks contributes to the reason why any single form of media has only \u201ca remote chance\u201d of substantially altering beliefs.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>He also commented on a lack of distinction between the political and the apolitical in modern social media spaces.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople often discuss topics that have political implications but never bring up government, elections, or the courts,\u201d Freelon added.<\/p>\n<p>According to Gonz\u00e1lez-Bail\u00f3n, the team found that a small group of accounts and networks produced a large share of the problematic content they examined. She stated that while \u201cplatform design matters,\u201d so do the online behaviors of ordinary users who engage with this content.<\/p>\n<p>Looking ahead, the researchers cannot continue their work to the same extent because they no longer have access to the platform data Meta previously allowed them to obtain.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe timing couldn\u2019t be worse,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez-Bail\u00f3n wrote in the announcement, \u201cWe\u2019re being asked to judge these risks with little evidence and access to platform data.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Gonz\u00e1lez-Bail\u00f3n and Freelon will continue to research these topics through Penn\u2019s Center for Information Networks and Democracy and the Annenberg School\u2019s Politics, Identities, and Communication Lab.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication recently published two studies that&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-309618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}