Research

Bridging Political Divides with Facebook Memes

April 28, 2022

Previous research by the Center for Media Engagement found that a sense of common humanity – where people recognize that their own failings are common human experiences – can help bring people together. Now we examine whether this feeling can be fostered with something as simple as a meme....
Bridging Political Divides with Facebook Memes
offensive comments

How the Public Views Deletion of Offensive Comment...

June 16, 2021

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....
How the Public Views Deletion of Offensive Comments

Journalist Engagement in Facebook Comments: Try Ac...

March 24, 2021

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....
Journalist Engagement in Facebook Comments: Try Acknowledging Commenters’ Emotions

What Americans Know and Don’t Know about Fac...

March 3, 2021

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....
What Americans Know and Don’t Know about Facebook and Google

Civic Signals: The Qualities of Flourishing Digita...

January 12, 2021

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....
Civic Signals: The Qualities of Flourishing Digital Spaces

Coronavirus Coverage: The Effects of Headlines and...

August 13, 2020

Coronavirus news can be overwhelming. To determine if newsrooms can help counteract the fatigue, the Center for Media Engagement tested the effects of three types of headlines and two types of images on news Facebook posts....
Coronavirus Coverage: The Effects of Headlines and Images on Facebook

Images That Generate Clicks Among Both Liberals an...

December 17, 2019

  The Center for Media Engagement partnered with ProPublica to determine if news story headlines and images can be crafted in ways that appeal to both liberals and conservatives. We…...
Images That Generate Clicks Among Both Liberals and Conservatives

Social Media: The Good, The Bad, and How Platforms...

November 7, 2019

As part of the Civic Signals initiative, the Center for Media Engagement is releasing an excerpt from a series of reports aimed at achieving more public-friendly digital spaces....
Social Media: The Good, The Bad, and How Platforms Can Do Better

Political Coverage on Facebook

June 28, 2018

With the help of a national newsroom, we conducted 118 experiments on Facebook to test the success of different headlines, images, and status updates on Facebook....
Political Coverage on Facebook

Social Media Buttons in Comment Sections

September 18, 2013

What if, instead of clicking a “Like” button, one could click “Respect”?...
Social Media Buttons in Comment Sections