Research

The COVID-19 pandemic upended many people’s day-to-day lives, and moved more interactions online. In this report, we analyze how the pandemic affected people’s use of search, social, and messaging platforms as well as their thoughts about the platforms. Read More

The Center for Media Engagement partnered with the Dallas Free Press to explore how Dallas residents perceive local media and how they think that media can better serve their communities. Read More

The Center for Media Engagement teamed up with researchers in three countries to examine how the public perceives comment deletion and the moderators who do it. Read More

We asked adults about a range of hot-button issues to find out how much the American public knows about contentious political issues. Read More

We tested journalist responses to Facebook comments on news stories in order to find out which responses led to more positive perceptions regarding the news outlets and its comment moderation. The messages were tested in the U.S. and Germany to see how well they worked across different cultures. Read More

The Center for Media Engagement asked American adults to answer questions about how platforms like Facebook and Google operate. The answers we received revealed important gaps in what the American public knows about how these platforms work. Read More

The disclosures by NYPD – the first required by the POST Act – raise substantial questions about how police in New York acquire and maintain data across dozens of surveillance systems, how NYPD thinks about safety and possible harms to society, and reveal new details about the suite of technologies enabling covert police activities on social media networks.  Read More

The Center for Media Engagement tested several versions of a Knowledge Panel — a search sidebar that provided information about a news outlet — to see which elements affected trust. Read More

Discussions of digital space often focus on eliminating troubling content or improving the user-friendliness of the design. We’re proposing that digital spaces, like the physical spaces we inhabit, should use public-friendly design. Read More

The public frequently turns to television news for updates on the coronavirus pandemic — but not all viewers are getting the same story. Our report shows stark coverage differences across networks, revealing a troubling trend of politicized coverage of the virus. Read More

The Center for Media Engagement examined how Chicago newsrooms covered coronavirus on Facebook. Read More

The Center for Media Engagement partnered with Vox and Spaceship Media to explore whether the design of online discussion groups can affect conversation quality and if Facebook Messenger can be used as an engagement tool. Read More

The Center for Media Engagement asked Black Americans how news organizations can better cover their communities to help bridge the divide between them and the media. Read More

New forms of direct communication, such as campaign apps and digital wallet passes on smartphones, are poised to bring political messaging to even higher levels of intimacy and efficacy, and, disturbingly, render them factually impossible to audit by outsiders. Read More

The Center for Media Engagement propaganda research team spent the past year studying political manipulation on encrypted messaging applications (EMAs) in the U.S., India, and Mexico. Read More

We worked with 24 Gannett-owned newsrooms and Coral by Vox Media to engage in the most ambitious test to-date of what comment sections mean to news sites. Read More

The Center for Media Engagement's propaganda research team reports on the phenomenon of social media influencers as an avenue for political campaign communications, describes the challenges this issue poses to platforms and governments, and briefly explores solutions. Read More

The Center for Media Engagement teamed up with the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life to examine how news organizations can best communicate information about how to register to vote. Read More

Being able to form relationships with people you disagree with or viewing them with compassion is not easy. In this study, the Center for Media Engagement wanted to find out what types of personal self-compassion are more common among people who are better at doing this. Read More

The Center for Media Engagement in the U.S. teamed up with researchers from Erasmus University in the Netherlands and NOVA University in Portugal to figure out how people from these three countries define hateful speech and whether they differentiate it from profanity. The results offer global guidance for social media platforms and news outlets on how to effectively create moderation guidelines that limit confusion about why certain posts and comments are removed while others are allowed. Read More