Incentivizing news consumption on social media platforms using large language models and realistic bot accounts.

Polarization, misinformation, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to the US Exposure to verified and balanced news may make citizens more resilient to these threats. This project examines how to enhance users' exposure to and engagement with verified and ideologically balanced news in an ecologically valid setting. We rely on a 2-week long field experiment on 28,457 Twitter users.

Non-News Websites Expose People to More Political Content Than News Websites: Evidence from Browsing Data in Three Countries.

Most scholars focus on the prevalence and democratic effects of (partisan) news exposure. This focus misses large parts of online activities of a majority of politically disinterested citizens. Although political content also appears outside of news outlets and may profoundly shape public opinion, its prevalence and effects are under-studied at scale.

Truth and Bias, Left and Right: Testing Ideological Asymmetries with a Realistic News Supply.

The debate around "fake news" has raised the question of whether liberals and conservatives differ, first, in their ability to discern true from false information, and second, in their tendency to give more credit to information that is ideologically congruent. Typical designs to measure these asymmetries select, often arbitrarily, a small set of news items as experimental stimuli without clear reference to a "population of information." This pre-registered study takes an alternative approach by, first, conceptualizing estimands in relation to all political news.

Wolf attacks predict far-right voting.

Does the return of large carnivores affect voting behavior? We study this question through the lens of wolf attacks on livestock. Sustained environmental conservation has allowed the wolf ( to make an impressive and unforeseen comeback across Central Europe in recent years. While lauded by conservationists, local residents often see the wolf as a threat to economic livelihoods, particularly those of farmers.