Publications by authors named "Nilima Pisharody"
A growing concern is that as local newspapers disappear, communities lose trusted gatekeepers and develop information voids, creating openings for misinformation to thrive. Previous work has not evaluated whether residents of news deserts have developed different information acquisition habits. We fill this gap by directly comparing information consumption and referral patterns inside and outside of news deserts in a novel dataset of engagement with online media by millions of users on the Edge browser.
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- Research shows that search engine algorithms, like Bing's, don't typically expose users to unreliable websites.
- Most interactions with unreliable sources happen when users specifically search for those sites, which is a very small part of overall searches.
- This indicates that user preferences play a significant role in engaging with unreliable information, rather than the algorithms themselves.
Anti-vaccine content and other kinds of misinformation are hypothesized to be more heavily monetized than other kinds of online content. We test this hypothesis by applying several novel and scalable measures of website monetization strategies to more than 400,000 links shared by 261 anti-vaccine Facebook pages and 190 pro-vaccine ones. Contrary to expectations, websites promoted in pro-vaccine venues do more to monetize attention than those promoted in anti-vaccine venues.
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