Computational Social Science Speaker Series

Abstract: 

In the talk, I will present the first large-scale study of image-based political misinformation on Facebook. Our team collected 13,723,654 posts from 14,532 pages and 11,454 public groups from August through October 2020, posts that together account for nearly all engagement of U.S. public political content on Facebook. We used perceptual hashing to identify duplicate images and computer vision to identify political figures. We found that twenty-three percent of sampled political images (N = 1,000) contained misinformation, as did 20% of sampled images (N = 1,000) containing political figures. This finding challenges many previous studies that suggest the problem of misinformation is small or negligible. Our research shows that new computer-assisted methods can scale to millions of images, and help address perennial and long-unanswered calls for more systematic study of visual political communication.

Bio:

Dr. Yang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University where he is also affiliated with the Data Justice Lab. His research aims to shed light on the emerging challenges within the political information landscape of a struggling American democracy. Dr. Yang's current work includes a forthcoming book on US right-wing media, titled Weapons of Mass Deception: How Right-wing Media Wage Information Warfare and Undermine American Democracy, a project that seeks to understand the participatory aspect of propaganda, projects that explore multimodal forms of problematic information, and a project that evaluates the influence of Russian media on US media. Dr. Yang is a member of the editorial board of Political Communication and is currently co-editing the journal's forthcoming special issue "Multi-platform Research."