Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, the award-winning PBS investigative documentary series housed at GBH in Boston, has been named journalist-in-residence at <...
Students in Aroostock County want to see a change in how classwork is given because they feel overwhelmed and that their voices aren’t being heard. Central Aroostook Junior/Senior High School in ...
MIT professor Ceasar McDowell discusses his work through the Center for Constructive Communication — designing tools, methods and systems to connect us and create a healt...
We are now grappling with some of the most serious threats to democracy since our nation’s founding, with many across the political spectrum agreeing that America’s “experiment in democracy...
“Trust in virtually all institutions has been on a half-century-long decline,” writes CCC’s Deb Roy, “with one significant exception: local news media. This positions journa...
The impact of social media—both positive and negative—demonstrates the great power of the underlying technologies. Technologists can design communication systems that foster and scale age-old p...
The latest and greatest technologies often start as projects in university laboratories across the country. Here are a handful of innovations in the works that could transform gov tech in the comin...
A team of six computer scientists and designers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Georgia Institute of Technology proved this by building a tool to optimize school zoning...
A Message from Deb Roy, Director: Thoughts on Elon Musk and Twitter // For me, Elon Musk’s impending takeover of Twitter is a wake-up call. It’s a very real reminder that to preserve our increa...
It’s not surprising that over the past few months I’ve frequently been asked for my take on Elon Musk’s proposed acquisition of Twitter. After all, for the past decade I’ve had a close conn...
“As the reporter, whether or not you agree, this is the best way to get the most honest, reliable information… It’s incredible how much you can learn about people and about the world when you...
We spend so much of our time online without knowing where we are—or how fragmented we’ve become. Locating ourselves can help us leave our bubble.
“We need to figure out how to give [ourselves] a chance to build up civic muscles,” said Barack Obama in his April 2022 speech on disinformation, mentioning the “great work” being done ...
In coordination with MIT’s Values Statement Committee, CCC is launching RealTalk@MIT, a cross-campus pilot program that will solicit honest perspectives from staff, students and faculty.
Welcome to the first issue of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication’s newsletter!
‘The way we’re speaking with others is fundamentally broken. In every measurable way, things are getting more fractured and polarized.’
For more than two decades, Roy has been ...
In 2017, after the shock of Brexit and then Donald Trump’s election, Christopher Bail, a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, set out to study what would happen if you for...
Boston Neighborhood Network and Real Talk for Change host a conversation with 2021 Boston Mayoral Candidate Michelle Wu.
In a community dialogue in East Boston this summer, a man named Alejandro inquired about whether the city’s high schools would receive the funding they need to thrive. In West Roxbury, a re...
For the past several months, Boston residents have heard a lot from the candidates running for mayor about their aspirations for leading this city. But on Monday, a half-dozen residents came ...
Deb Roy speaks at the Chautauqua Institution.
Ceasar McDowell, MIT professor of the practice of civic design and associate head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), has been named associate director for civic design at MIT...
Love it or hate it, the freedom to say obnoxious and subversive things is the quintessence of what makes America America. But our say-almost-anything approach to free speech is actually relatively ...
Thanks to prolonged isolation, we now experience much of our lives online, but disinformation, polarization over the reality of the pandemic, and politics have led to a less than healthy virtual en...
To read the diary of Gustave de Beaumont, the traveling companion of Alexis de Tocqueville, is to understand just how primitive the American wilderness once seemed to visiting Frenchmen. In a singl...
They came together late last year, about a dozen Black residents of St. Petersburg, to talk to each other and to the Tampa Bay Times about generational wealth. Generational wealth — financial ass...
Washington, DC, January 13, 2021 — Amid a period of unprecedented challenge to American democracy, Aspen Digital, the Aspen Institute’s program on the intersection of media, technology, and sec...
MIT researchers analyzed more than 800,000 online school reviews using advanced natural language processing, determining that reviews were largely associated with schools’ test scores — a measu...
We live in an age of social media and polarized broadcast media in which the loudest voices and most extreme opinions — often about issues that are distant from everyday concerns of most people ...
When Joe Biden assumes control of the White House on Wednesday, his message of “unity” will crash into the hard reality of a nation dented by a deadly pandemic and being pulled apart by histori...
The cross-campus effort will design human-machine systems that improve communication across divides and increase opportunity for underheard communities. The interdisciplinary Center for Constructiv...
Ramon Batista, a former police chief from Arizona, rose to the top as a favored candidate for the permanent Madison police chief position among members of the public who spoke at Wednesday’s Poli...
As the Police and Fire Commission considers who will be Madison’s next police chief, members of the public will have the chance to weigh in at two upcoming meetings.
The five-member PFC ...
The Task Force for Global Health and the Lab for Social Machines (LSM) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Media Lab are collaborating to develop and test a health campaign again...
While President Trump’s baseless accusations of election fraud are losing steam with some Republicans, interest in the topic on the biggest right-wing talk shows has only grown. In the eigh...
In a world with Facebook, Twitter, 24/7 news channels, talk radio, citizen journalism, fake news, real news, audiences are drowning in an overwhelming overload of information. Clearly a guidepost ...
For the 2020 elections, CapRadio is asking people who live, work and worship in one South Sacramento neighborhood — Meadowview — to share their questions and concerns to guide our election repo...
As RJI continues to explore the links between rebuilding local economies and futureproofing local media, we want to better understand how to incentivize local conversations and experiments that hel...
Throughout Alabama, thousands of people peacefully protested systemic racism after George Floyd’s death. Those protests prompted conversations about the criminal justice system and what our expec...
Opinions about the coronavirus crisis have quickly polarized along partisan and rural/urban lines. But how are Americans experiencing and understanding the crisis? The fact that small towns are not...
Having access to accurate information can mean the difference between life and death during a crisis. That’s why right now, journalists around the globe are working around the clock to make sure ...
When the 2016 presidential election left pundits and pollsters stunned over how they could have been so off base about the concerns of rural America, they came looking for Kathy Cramer. The UW–Ma...
MADISON, Wis. — First of all we appreciate the Madison Police and Fire Commission’s commitment to gathering citizen input in the search for a new police chief. It’s important both in te...
In our current age of political scandal, Twitter drama and “fake news,” most people’s trust in our state and national governments is wavering. In fact, in an April poll, only 17 percent of th...
Cortico, a nonprofit organization with the mission of fostering constructive public conversation in communities and the media, today announced it had received an additional $2 million in funding fr...
Technology has potential to bring us closer together, but we’re experiencing quite the opposite: a world where people are splintered by technology into insular tribes where hateful discourse, fal...
Last fall, Deb Roy, one of the US’s foremost experts on social media, attended a series of roundtables in small towns in middle America—places like Platteville, Wisconsin, and Anamosa, Iowa. It...
Mark Twain is said to have remarked that a lie can travel around the world and back while the truth is still lacing up its boots. In these modern times, of course, a lie can spread just about as fa...
Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information.
What if the scourge of false news on the internet is not the result of Russian operatives or partisan zealots or computer-controlled bots? What if the main problem is us? People are the princ...
Sunspring debuted at the SCI-FI LONDON film festival in 2016. Set in a dystopian world with mass unemployment, the movie attracted many fans, with one viewer describing it as amusing but strange. B...
Last year’s divisive American presidential race highlighted the extent to which mainstream media outlets were out of touch with the political pulse of the country. Deb Roy, the director of the La...
After violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, media coverage differed on what aspect of the event to cover. Using analyses from Cortico and the Laboratory for Social Machin...
His “FAKE NEWS” tweets don’t rocket like they once did. His exclamation points (!) don’t excite quite the same old way. Donald Trump’s 140-character volleys helped define the first ...
As the media class struggles to understand an election result few foresaw, some have blamed a quirk of modern technology. “The ‘Filter Bubble’ Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t Se...
The Obama administration’s social media archive plan includes everything from GIFs to Vines, the White House revealed Thursday. In a post, the White House shared links to several platfo...
When Donald Trump rode to victory in the Electoral College on Nov. 8, perhaps no group was more surprised than journalists, who had largely bought into the polls showing Hillary Clinton was consist...
For decades, news coverage of U.S. presidential elections has been focused on the so-called “horse race” — polls, predicted outcomes, fundraising — rather than on the policy issues that ult...
In case you hadn’t noticed, early voting is a thing this year. It’s been underway in some states for weeks ahead of Election Day. And like everything else election-related, it’s p...
The next President will face serious questions about the future of work in a technology-driven and increasingly automated economy. Advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic...
As the election draws to a close, Trump supporters are forecasting victory. Their model: Britain’s decisive vote earlier this year in favor of the Brexit referendum. The product of a popular revo...
A much-discussed research paper out of Oxford this month concluded that millions of tweets about the presidential election are generated by highly automated Twitter accounts. According to the autho...
How long was this election campaign, anyway? If it feels like years to you, you’re right; we’ve been analyzing it since the beginning of 2015. So as a public service, we’re about to give you ...
A new 15-state SurveyMonkey poll conducted with The Washington Post finds Hillary Clinton with a commanding lead over Donald Trump across battleground states three weeks before Election Day. We won...
Traditionally the presidential debates are a time for voters to focus on the substance of the campaign and for the nominees to air their differences on policy across a wide range of issues.But this...
Saturday’s New York Times exclusive about Donald Trump’s $916 million tax loss in 1995 and its potential implications for how much federal tax he paid (or didn’t) for years afterward sent con...
With Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump set to face off in the first debate of a contentious presidential election tonight, the MIT Media Lab is set to make sense of the firehose of chatter expected ...
On Sunday, as Hillary Clinton left a 9/11 memorial ceremony and entered her van, she buckled, stumbled, and nearly fell. Later, the Clinton campaign revealed that the Democratic presidential nomine...
The CPD has collaborated with technology, academic and media organizations to engage the American public in substantive conversations before, during and after the debates.
Who’s more likely to support Donald Trump on Twitter — men, or women? And what about Hillary Clinton?It turns out that while Clinton’s support is slightly more balanced between the genders, m...
Immigration, a major topic throughout this presidential campaign, has dominated the election-related conversation on Twitter in the past week. According to the Electome — a project of the L...
After receding to a relatively low simmer earlier this month, Race has boiled up again as a campaign issue, coinciding with Donald Trump’s attempt to reach out to minority voters. And Immigration...
What makes some election news stories go viral online, and others fall flat? Is it simply due to which presidential candidate has a greater (and more vocal) following?Here at the Electome, we analy...
Whatever you think of Trump’s now notorious comments, they present a case study in the power of social media to alter the national conversation with astonishing force and speed. And Trump’s new...
It turns out Donald Trump is not the only one with an itchy Twitter finger — his followers are also eager tweeters. And even though you might think that Trump’s stumbles since the conventions w...
Just how crude and insulting is the social conversation around Election 2016? And how does it vary by candidate?Electome, a set of algorithms created by data scientists here at MIT’s Laboratory f...
Political strategist James Carville created the mantra “It’s the economy, stupid” to exhort the staff in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign against George Bush. But as Hillary tries to become the...
Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine’s convention speech last night had the Internet abuzz with dad jokes.At the Laboratory for Social Machines, we like to focus on the issues driving...
Coming out of the Republican Convention, Foreign Policy/National Security and Race are the hot-button issues for both Trump and Clinton supporters.Here at the Laboratory for Social Machines, part o...
It’s official: a Donald Trump-Mike Pence 2016 GOP ticket for the White House. VP nominee Pence, unveiled to the public by Trump last week, will speak at the Republican National Convention this ev...
Lately, it often seems the biggest question on the minds of American voters is who Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will choose as running mates.That’s because one very influential group of peopl...
Nobody knows what issues will decide the 2016 election, because nobody knows what will happen over the next four and a half months. The things people care and talk about may depend heavily on world...
It’s hard to remember now, but there was once a time when even Republicans talked about the need for “comprehensive immigration reform.”It was a time when immigration was viewed a...
When Andrew Jackson ran against incumbent John Quincy Adams in 1828, things got nasty. Adams accused Jackson of adultery and his wife of bigamy. Jackson’s supporters countered by calling Adam...
In almost every stump speech, Republican presidential candidate John Kasich mentions his six years on the House Budget Committee and his work to produce a budget surplus. He brings a national-debt ...
We’ve heard a lot of … let’s say, colorful rhetoric this election cycle from US presidential candidates and their supporters. Now, a team of data scientists at MIT say they can actually...
Hilary Clinton’s “disgusting” bathroom break. The size of Donald Trump’s hands and other appendages. An unsubtle allusion to Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle. Little Marco. Lyin’ Ted. Gett...
It’s an election year, and so basically everything that happens in Washington is election-related. And that includes the Supreme Court vacancy and nomination. Our friends at MIT’s...
A national Washington Post-ABC News poll earlier this month asked Americans what issue is most important in their vote — with no options provided — and found 28 percent naming the economy and j...
When it comes to who is influencing the election online, the list looks much like the people who are leading the polls. Ahead of Super Tuesday, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rele...
With Super Tuesday just around the corner, we know one thing about this election: it’s the most riveting in years. But why? What makes it so different from everything that came before?The obvious...
When Iowans gather in their caucuses tonight, how important will the actual campaign issues be in determining the winners? And which issues in particular?…When I last wrote about this on Medi...
Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley were asked a lot of questions they hadn’t heard before at Fusion’s presentation of the Iowa Brown & Black Forum, where pr...
However, at this early moment in the 2016 presidential campaign, the broccoli rule has been suspended. Consumers are gobbling up coverage of how the candidates stand on national security and immigr...
As the Republican candidates and the media gather in Las Vegas for a CNN debate tonight — the fifth GOP debate of this election season — terrorism and foreign policy promise to be a big...
The world has changed dramatically in the last two decades. Across every imaginable industry and sector of society, digital technologies have flattened old institutions and hierarchies. The c...
The Electome, a new project developed by the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab, aims to use data science to help journalists, the public and candidates capture and analyze social ...
Thanks to Twitter, something new is hatching over at the MIT Media Lab. According to MIT News, the California-based social media site saw the potential to do something huge in terms of breaki...
The MIT Media Lab today announced the creation of the Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), funded by a five-year, $10 million commitment from Twitter. As part of the new program, Twitter will also...