Press

Selected press, books, etc., on my research or quoting me

Why big changes early in life can help later on .
Peter Dizikes. MIT News. July 2023.

‘Mission impossible’: With Boston’s proof-of-vaccination mandate set to begin, businesses worry.
Anissa Gardizy. Boston Globe. January 2022.

A group of moms on Facebook built an island of good-faith vaccine debate in a sea of misinformation.
Elizabeth Dwoskin, Will Oremus & Gerrit De Vynck. Washington Post. August 2021.

What magic teaches us about misinformation.
Tim Harford. Financial Times. May 2021.

Confronting disinformation spreaders on Twitter only makes it worse, MIT scientists say.
Matthew Gault. Vice. May 2021.

Researchers have figured out a way to stop people from sharing misinformation.
John Biggs. Gizmodo. March 2021.

‘Hassle factor’ and distrust shadow wide U.S. vaccine hesitancy.
Emma Court & Olivia Rockeman. Bloomberg. March 2021.

Why public health messaging should emphasize vaccine acceptance, not hesitancy.
Sinan Aral & Dean Eckles. Los Angeles Times. February 2021.

Better than nothing: A look at content moderation in 2020.
Gilad Edelman. Wired. December 2020.

If states don’t coordinate lockdown procedures immediately, our future is grim.
Sinan Aral. Los Angeles Times. August 2020.

The Silicon Valley insider who says turn off your phone.
Ben Hoyle. The Times. January 2020.

How will Russian manipulation affect the 2020 election? We still have no idea.
Patt Morrison. Los Angeles Times. September 2019.

Are social media misinformation campaigns affecting elections? MIT researchers say there’s a way to find out.
Martin Finucane. The Boston Globe. August 2019.

There’s a way to know if Russia threw the election to Trump.
Christian Caryl. The Washington Post. January 2019.

Facebook explored unpicking personalities to target ads.
Rory Cellan-Jones. BBC News. April 2018.

The scant science behind Cambridge Analytica’s controversial marketing techniques.
Elizabeth Gibney. Nature. March 2018.

Facebook’s new data restrictions will handcuff even honest researchers.
Robbie Gonzalez. Wired. March 2018.

Cambridge Analytica’s ‘mindf*** tool’ could be totally useless.
Stephen Armstrong. Wired (UK). March 2018.

‘News’ spreads faster and more widely when it’s false.
Philip Ball. Nature. March 2018. Extended version at Prospect.

It’s time for a serious talk about the science of tech “addiction”.
Robbie Gonzalez. Wired. January 2018.

Facebook defends its simple 2-question survey on the trustworthiness of news publishers.
Hamza Shaban. Washington Post, January 2018.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.
Antonio García Martínez. HarperCollins. 2016. Part III.

Facebook wants to know why you’re sharing this bogus Obamacare story.
Dino Grandoni. Huffington Post, May 2014.

As Mark Zuckerberg celebrates his 30th birthday, is Facebook maturing too?
Alex Hern. The Guardian, May 2014.

Facebook open sources code for managing A/B tests.
Derrick Harris. GigaOm, April 2014.

Welcome to the brave new world of persuasion profiling.
Eli Pariser. Wired, May 2011.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You.
Eli Pariser. Penguin. 2011. Ch. 4-5.

Anti-social networks? We’re just as cliquey online.
Laura Sydell. NPR All Things Considered, February 2011.

Appland: How smartphones are transforming our lives.
Richard Fisher. New Scientist, August 2009.

Long ties, disruptive life events and economic prosperity. PNAS.
50 years after Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties”, we provide new evidence of the connection between network structure and economic prosperity. We also show how life events, like switching high schools, can result in more long ties, even decades later. This paper is accompanied by new public data on the Facebook networks of people in US and Mexican zip codes .

Algorithmic transparency and assessing effects of algorithmic ranking. Testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband.
This addresses the questions: How does algorithmic ranking in social media work? How can we assess algorithmic impact & amplification? What can policy-makers do here?

Seeding with costly network information. Operations Research.
Because of their position in a social network, some people can be much more influential than others, and so marketers and others often want to target them as “seeds”. But, outside of specific cases, one doesn’t fully observe the social network, but must probe it (with costly surveys or crawling). We develop techniques for selecting good seeds in arbitrary networks while limiting how much we need to probe the network.

Providing normative information increases intentions to accept a COVID-19 vaccine. Nature Communications.
When does sharing information about others’ behaviors cause more of that same behavior? This is both a central question in the social sciences and also important for effecting preventative health behaviors, including vaccination. We use a randomized experiment embedded in the international survey on COVID-19 we conducted with Meta and JHU to address this, providing evidence that these descriptive norms increase intentions to get vaccinated.