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New Atlantic: Building trust in COVID-19 vaccines
From my new Atlantic article: This week is coming to a close with truly miraculous news: In the coming days, Americans across the country are expected to begin getting vaccinated against COVID-19, a virus that emerged just a year ago. But even miraculous vaccines do little good for public health if people refuse to take
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New WaPo: Five myths about misinformation
From my new piece in The Washington Post: Misinformation presents a challenge to the American political system. Unsupported claims can distort debate, deceive voters and encourage contempt for the other party. In the final days of the presidential race, for instance, hundreds of thousands of people in key states received mysterious text messages with falsehoods
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New WaPo: The media’s feckless approach to debate
From my new piece in The Washington Post: Tuesday night’s presidential debate perfectly illustrates how President Trump abuses our democratic institutions — and how feckless the media can be in the face of those violations. Since he first entered the presidential race, Trump has violated countless norms of public life, including making tens of thousands
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Recommendations for fair elections during a crisis
From our new UCI Law report by the Ad Hoc Committee for 2020 Election Fairness and Legitimacy (of which I am a member): Fair Elections During a Crisis: Urgent Recommendations in Law, Media, Politics, and Tech to Advance the Legitimacy of, and the Public’s Confidence in, the November 2020 U.S. Elections Even before the worldwide
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Foreign Affairs: COVID-19 is not like political speech
From my new Foreign Affairs article with Sarah Kreps: In the desperate fight against the novel coronavirus, social media platforms have achieved an important victory: they have helped limit the dissemination of life-threatening misinformation that could worsen the pandemic. But this success should not cause us to adopt a similar approach to political speech, where
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New Post Outlook: Why Democrats won’t attack Bernie
From my new column in the Washington Post Outlook section: How do you warn your party that its potential nominee is vulnerable in a general election without sinking your own campaign? That question now confronts Democratic rivals of Bernie Sanders, who are realizing that the iconoclastic Vermont socialist might really win the presidential nomination. In
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New Post Outlook: Tom Steyer’s bad ideas
From my new column in the Washington Post Outlook section: With so many entrants in the Democratic primary field, many observers have wondered what billionaire Tom Steyer’s candidacy adds to the race. Here’s one answer: Steyer is a gift to political scientists. His campaign offers us an unusual opportunity to explain why the “reforms” he
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New Bright Line Watch report on US democracy
From our new report: Perceptions of the overall performance of American democracy remain stable among both experts and the public since we began surveying each group, but assessments on certain specific democratic principles have declined substantially, erasing perceived gains observed in the period after the 2018 midterm elections. Especially sharp declines were observed for beliefs
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New Upshot: Exploiting Americans’ trust in local news
From my new Upshot column: The nature of the news misinformation problem may be changing. As consumers become more skeptical about the national news they encounter online, impostor local sites that promote ideological agendas are becoming more common. These sites exploit the relatively high trust Americans express in local news outlets — a potential vulnerability
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New GEN: Will extremist shootings change gun politics?
From my new column for GEN, the new site on politics, power, and culture from Medium: The weekend’s deadly massacres in El Paso and Dayton served as a grim reminder of past inaction on gun policy. Even posting the famous Onion headline “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” on