Misinformation Speaker Series
The Speaker Series on Misinformation invites academic experts in the fields of mis- and disinformation research to present their research. The series is co-sponsored by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, the NULab at Northeastern University, and the Internet Democracy Initiative
Spring 2025 Events
Quantifying the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical Content on Facebook | Jennifer Allen
Register | This is a hybrid event. Join us in person at 177 Huntington Ave
Abstract: Low uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in the US has been widely attributed to social media misinformation. To evaluate this claim, we introduce a framework combining lab experiments (total N = 18,725), crowdsourcing, and machine learning to estimate the causal effect of 13,206 vaccine-related URLs on the vaccination intentions of US Facebook users (N ≈ 233 million). We estimate that the impact of unflagged content that nonetheless encouraged vaccine skepticism was 46-fold greater than that of misinformation flagged by fact-checkers. Although misinformation reduced predicted vaccination intentions significantly more than unflagged vaccine content when viewed, Facebook users’ exposure to flagged content was limited. In contrast, mainstream media stories highlighting rare deaths after vaccination were not flagged by fact-checkers, but were among Facebook’s most-viewed stories. Our work emphasizes the need to scrutinize factually accurate but potentially misleading content in addition to outright falsehoods. Additionally, we show that fact-checking has only limited efficacy in preventing misinformed decision-making and introduce a novel methodology incorporating crowdsourcing and machine learning to better identify misinforming content at scale.
Bio: Jenny is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. In Fall 2025, she will join NYU Stern as an Assistant Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics and a core faculty member of the Center for Social Media and Politics. She received her PhD in Management Science from MIT in 2025 and previously worked at Meta and Microsoft Research. Her research interests include misinformation, political persuasion, and crowdsourcing.
Upcoming Speakers
February 25, 2:00 PM – Jennifer Allen
April 14 – Skylar Johnson
April 21 – Naomi Oreskes
May (date TBD) – Renee Diresta