Leticia Bode
Georgetown University, Communication, Culture, and Technology, Faculty Member
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Extending previous research, we test two solutions for addressing misinformation by pairing news literacy (NL) messages with corrective responses to health misinformation shared on Twitter. Importantly, we consider a range of outcomes,... more
Extending previous research, we test two solutions for addressing misinformation by pairing news literacy (NL) messages with corrective responses to health misinformation shared on Twitter. Importantly, we consider a range of outcomes, including not just credibility or misperceptions, but also feelings of news literacy and support for its value. Using an experiment, we find that user corrections of a meme containing false information reduced credibility assessments of the misinformation post and misperceptions but seeing misinformation also produced lower perceptions of personal news literacy and its value for society, regardless of whether it is corrected or not. Exposure to an NL message did not enhance the effectiveness of these corrective responses nor boost NL attitudes and may have generated cynicism. We discuss the challenges of designing NL messages for social media that achieve the wide range of goals news literacy interventions aspire to address.
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Since December 2019, COVID-19 has been spreading rapidly across the world. Not surprisingly, conversation about COVID-19 is also increasing. This article is a first look at the amount of conversation taking place on social media,... more
Since December 2019, COVID-19 has been spreading rapidly across the world. Not surprisingly, conversation about COVID-19 is also increasing. This article is a first look at the amount of conversation taking place on social media, specifically Twitter, with respect to COVID-19, the themes of discussion, where the discussion is emerging from, myths shared about the virus, and how much of it is connected to other high and low quality information on the Internet through shared URL links. Our preliminary findings suggest that a meaningful spatio-temporal relationship exists between information flow and new cases of COVID-19, and while discussions about myths and links to poor quality information exist, their presence is less dominant than other crisis specific themes. This research is a first step toward understanding social media conversation about COVID-19.
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Citizens often attempt to interact with government through online modes of communication such as email and social media. Using an audit study, we examine when and how American municipalities with populations of over 50,000 respond to... more
Citizens often attempt to interact with government through online modes of communication such as email and social media. Using an audit study, we examine when and how American municipalities with populations of over 50,000 respond to online requests for information. We develop baselines for municipal responsiveness, including the average rate, time, and quality of responses, and examine whether these response attributes vary based on the mode of communication or the tone of the request. Overall, municipalities responded to 54% of email requests and 38% of Twitter requests. A majority of responses were received on the same business day. Responses are slightly faster on Twitter, but of higher quality on email. Governments are more likely to respond to frustrated constituents on email, but respond faster to frustrated queries on Twitter, though with lower quality responses. These findings contribute to our understanding of local government responsiveness and have significant implications for democratic accountability and resident compliance with and the effectiveness of local government policies. Furthermore, our scholarly understanding of local government communications with residents, and particularly the promise of social media as a tool of two-way communication, may be underdeveloped.
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Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-nms-10.1177_1461444821998691 for Assessing the relative merits of news literacy and corrections in responding to misinformation on Twitter by Emily Vraga, Melissa Tully and Leticia Bode in New Media & Society
Supplemental material, online_supp_-_IJPP_Supplemental_information_file for Testing the Effectiveness of Correction Placement and Type on Instagram by Emily K. Vraga, Sojung Claire Kim, John Cook and Leticia Bode in The International... more
Supplemental material, online_supp_-_IJPP_Supplemental_information_file for Testing the Effectiveness of Correction Placement and Type on Instagram by Emily K. Vraga, Sojung Claire Kim, John Cook and Leticia Bode in The International Journal of Press/Politics
Harnessing social media data for social science research entails creating measures out of the largely unstructured, noisy data that users generate on different platforms. This harnessing, particularly of data at scale, requires using... more
Harnessing social media data for social science research entails creating measures out of the largely unstructured, noisy data that users generate on different platforms. This harnessing, particularly of data at scale, requires using methods developed in computer science. But it also typically requires integrating these methods with assessments of measurement quality along social science criteria -- reliability, validity and unbiasedness. In this paper, we outline measurement issues that arise when using social media data. We show examples of how to construct measures and discuss different measurement considerations and best practices. We conclude with a discussion of ways to accelerate research in this space, highlighting contributions that can be made by both social scientists and computer scientists.
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In U.S. politics, the main narrative tends to manifest as left vs right, Democrat vs. Republican, but is this reflected in the social media sphere as well? In new research which maps how hashtags in political tweets were used in the lead... more
In U.S. politics, the main narrative tends to manifest as left vs right, Democrat vs. Republican, but is this reflected in the social media sphere as well? In new research which maps how hashtags in political tweets were used in the lead up to the 2010 Congressional midterm elections, Leticia Bode, Alex Hanna, JungHwan Yang, and Dhavan V. Shah found that some hashtags occurred in discussion groups that were there ideological opposite. They write that this ‘hashjacking’ was a way in which conservatives were able to enter and disrupt a more liberal community’s online discussion.
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Extending previous research, we test two solutions for addressing misinformation by pairing news literacy (NL) messages with corrective responses to health misinformation shared on Twitter. Importantly, we consider a range of outcomes,... more
Extending previous research, we test two solutions for addressing misinformation by pairing news literacy (NL) messages with corrective responses to health misinformation shared on Twitter. Importantly, we consider a range of outcomes, including not just credibility or misperceptions, but also feelings of news literacy and support for its value. Using an experiment, we find that user corrections of a meme containing false information reduced credibility assessments of the misinformation post and misperceptions but seeing misinformation also produced lower perceptions of personal news literacy and its value for society, regardless of whether it is corrected or not. Exposure to an NL message did not enhance the effectiveness of these corrective responses nor boost NL attitudes and may have generated cynicism. We discuss the challenges of designing NL messages for social media that achieve the wide range of goals news literacy interventions aspire to address.
Research Interests:
More than in any election in the past decade, Donald Trump was able to use Twitter as a means of reaching out to his core constituency. But how do other politicians take advantage of this new way of communicating? In new research, Leticia... more
More than in any election in the past decade, Donald Trump was able to use Twitter as a means of reaching out to his core constituency. But how do other politicians take advantage of this new way of communicating? In new research, Leticia Bode analyzed over 10,000 tweets and nearly 1,000 television ads from the 2010 Senate elections. She finds that compared to traditional ads, Twitter is not constrained by a predetermined campaign message strategy and can be easily adapted to respond to new information in real time.
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The convergence of methods and relevant theories between computer scientists and social scientists is a necessary condition for leveraging social media data to understand this increasingly important window into human societies. This paper... more
The convergence of methods and relevant theories between computer scientists and social scientists is a necessary condition for leveraging social media data to understand this increasingly important window into human societies. This paper focuses on issues of data acquisition, sampling, and data preparation. These topics incorporate data collection methods, sampling strategies, population mismatch adjustments, and other data acquisition and data preparation decisions.
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Despite a wealth of research examining the effectiveness of correction of misinformation, not enough is known about how people experience such correction when it occurs on social media. Using a study of US adults in late March 2020, we... more
Despite a wealth of research examining the effectiveness of correction of misinformation, not enough is known about how people experience such correction when it occurs on social media. Using a study of US adults in late March 2020, we measure how often people witness correction, correct others, or are corrected themselves, using the case of COVID-19 misinformation on social media. Descriptively, our results suggest that all three experiences related to correction on social media are relatively common and occur across partisan divides. Importantly, a majority of those who report seeing misinformation also report seeing it corrected, and a majority of those who report sharing misinformation report being corrected by others. Those with more education are more likely to engage in correction, and younger respondents are more likely to report all three experiences with correction. While experiences with correction are generally unrelated to misperceptions about COVID-19, those who correc...
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The World Health Organization has declared that misinformation shared on social media about Covid-19 is an “infodemic” that must be fought alongside the pandemic itself. We reflect on how news literacy and science literacy can provide a... more
The World Health Organization has declared that misinformation shared on social media about Covid-19 is an “infodemic” that must be fought alongside the pandemic itself. We reflect on how news literacy and science literacy can provide a foundation to combat misinformation about Covid-19 by giving social media users the tools to identify, consume, and share high-quality information. These skills can be put into practice to combat the infodemic by amplifying quality information and actively correcting misinformation seen on social media. We conclude by considering the extent to which what we know about these literacies and related behaviors can be extended to less-researched areas like the Global South.
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Citizens often attempt to interact with government through online modes of communication such as email and social media. Using an audit study, we examine when and how American municipalities with populations of over 50,000 respond to... more
Citizens often attempt to interact with government through online modes of communication such as email and social media. Using an audit study, we examine when and how American municipalities with populations of over 50,000 respond to online requests for information. We develop baselines for municipal responsiveness, including the average rate, time, and quality of responses, and examine whether these response attributes vary based on the mode of communication or the tone of the request. Overall, municipalities responded to 54% of email requests and 38% of Twitter requests. A majority of responses were received on the same business day. Responses are slightly faster on Twitter, but of higher quality on email. Governments are more likely to respond to frustrated constituents on email, but respond faster to frustrated queries on Twitter, though with lower quality responses. These findings contribute to our understanding of local government responsiveness and have significant implicatio...
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This study investigated the content of parenting information shared on social media by identifying the range and frequency of topics shared by parenting-focused accounts on Twitter. Using the Twitter API, a universe of 675,069 tweets were... more
This study investigated the content of parenting information shared on social media by identifying the range and frequency of topics shared by parenting-focused accounts on Twitter. Using the Twitter API, a universe of 675,069 tweets were gathered from 74 of the most-followed parenting-focused accounts, or ‘hubs’, from January 2016 to June 2018. Using a custom, semi-automated topic modeling approach, we identified the topics – and subtopics within topics – parenting hubs shared with their followers and investigated whether any meaningful differences in topical focus existed between accounts targeting mothers versus fathers. Results indicate that over one third of tweets were about Parenting Behavior and nearly one quarter about Health, with Entertainment, School and Motherhood and Fatherhood generally as less tweeted topics. Mother-focused accounts tweeted more about Health than father-focused accounts, which tweeted more than others about Entertainment. Implications for future pare...
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With the increasing salience of online privacy as an issue, concern has focused on the ability to delete outdated personal information. In response, several varieties of a law mimicking the European “Right to be Forgotten” have been... more
With the increasing salience of online privacy as an issue, concern has focused on the ability to delete outdated personal information. In response, several varieties of a law mimicking the European “Right to be Forgotten” have been introduced at the state and federal level in the United States, despite limited measurement of public opinion on the issue. Because policymakers and courts often consider public opinion when deciding what laws to make and how to interpret those laws, public opinion is an important consideration when thinking about the potential for a right to be forgotten in the United States. In order to determine likely levels of support, as well as what predicts public backing of such a law, we analyze survey data collected from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (N = 1,380). We find that women are more likely to support such a law, as are those who are particularly concerned about online privacy, and those who express greatest confidence in Google. Those who think the gove...
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ObjectivesThis study examines how the perceived role of poor lifestyle and irresponsible behaviour in contracting HIV, human papilloma virus (HPV) and diabetes affects public support for government-provisioned prevention efforts in... more
ObjectivesThis study examines how the perceived role of poor lifestyle and irresponsible behaviour in contracting HIV, human papilloma virus (HPV) and diabetes affects public support for government-provisioned prevention efforts in Britain. It assesses whether public attitudes on healthcare spending are broadly sensitive to ‘lifestyle stigmas’.MethodsWe conducted an online survey of 738 respondents in Britain and embedded three separate survey experiments to measure support for government-provisioned interventions for HIV, HPV and type 2 diabetes. In each experiment, we manipulated language used to describe the extent to which the diseases are caused by lifestyle choices. Most respondents participated in all three experiments, but assignment was randomised within each condition. Analysis compared support among respondents exposed to ‘lifestyle’ treatment (information emphasising the disease’s lifestyle causes) versus control treatment. We estimated three separate t-tests in which su...
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The purpose of this article is to determine to what extent engagement in easy political behaviors on social media occurs across the range of political interest, what predicts such engagement, and what effect such engagement may have on... more
The purpose of this article is to determine to what extent engagement in easy political behaviors on social media occurs across the range of political interest, what predicts such engagement, and what effect such engagement may have on other political behaviors. It pits the idea that social media may activate the politically uninterested against the idea that social media is just another outlet for the politically interested to demonstrate their engagement. Analyzing survey data collected by the Pew Research Center, it concludes that many people, including the politically uninterested, do engage in easy political behaviors like liking and commenting on political content on social media. When they do, it can lead to greater political activity offline. However, those most likely to engage in easy political behaviors are also those who engage in harder political behaviors, offering support for both the interest and activation hypotheses.
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ObjectiveOne of the recent late‐night political comedy successes is John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, which includes frequent calls to action at the end of a segment, encouraging viewers to do something about the problem they have just... more
ObjectiveOne of the recent late‐night political comedy successes is John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, which includes frequent calls to action at the end of a segment, encouraging viewers to do something about the problem they have just learned about.MethodsUsing an experimental design, this study investigates the effects of these calls to action on the likelihood of engaging with the issue of net neutrality.ResultsFindings suggest that exposure to political comedy activates viewers to engage in small but meaningful behaviors, but does not spill over to encourage more difficult political behaviors, nor does it boost political efficacy.ConclusionThe call to action, encouraging viewer participation in remedying a problem addressed in a political comedy show, seems effective at encouraging viewers to participate. However, it may not make them feel more equipped to do so.
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This article examines the evolving nature of volunteering among American youth, ages 12 to 17, focusing on emergent pressures to volunteer, as required by high schools or to improve one's employment or education prospects after... more
This article examines the evolving nature of volunteering among American youth, ages 12 to 17, focusing on emergent pressures to volunteer, as required by high schools or to improve one's employment or education prospects after graduation. Using survey data (N = 736, mean age = 14.78, 75.1% white, 49.1% female), it finds these pressures are prevalent, related to a desire to volunteer, and both of these motivations are positively associated with volunteering. It further concludes that volunteering supplements, rather than replaces or subsumes both online and offline political behaviors among youth. This has important implications for how we understand the role of volunteering in the youngest American age cohorts, and practical implications for educators and civic proponents in terms of determining what actually increases volunteering activity.
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Purpose Despite the growing use of social media by politicians, especially during election campaigns, research on the integration of these media into broader campaign communication strategies remains rare. The purpose of this paper is to... more
Purpose Despite the growing use of social media by politicians, especially during election campaigns, research on the integration of these media into broader campaign communication strategies remains rare. The purpose of this paper is to ask what the consequences of the transition to social media may be, specifically considering how Senate candidates’ use of a popular social network, Twitter, is related to their messaging via broadcast media in the form of campaign advertising, in terms of content and tone. Design/methodology/approach To address this research question, a unique data set combining every tweet (10,303) and every television ad aired (576,933 ad airings) by candidate campaigns for the US Senate during the 2010 campaign is created. Using these data, tweets and ads are analyzed for their references to issues as well as their overall tone. Findings Findings demonstrate that social messaging often resembles broadcast advertising, but that Twitter nonetheless occupies a uniq...
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7. Conclusion Over the past two decades, the Internet has increasingly become part of the everyday life of US citizens. Seventy-one percent now report using the Internet on a daily basis, and their activity online is no longer limited to... more
7. Conclusion Over the past two decades, the Internet has increasingly become part of the everyday life of US citizens. Seventy-one percent now report using the Internet on a daily basis, and their activity online is no longer limited to emailing and checking NCAA scores (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2009). Citizens are using the Internet in new ways: to find information and products, to entertain themselves, and to communicate with others in ways that extend beyond email. And with each passing year, the Internet offers more ...
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Misinformation spreads on social media when users engage with it, but users can also respond to correct it. Using an experimental design, we examine how exposure to misinformation and correction on Twitter about unpasteurized milk affects... more
Misinformation spreads on social media when users engage with it, but users can also respond to correct it. Using an experimental design, we examine how exposure to misinformation and correction on Twitter about unpasteurized milk affects participants’ likelihood of responding to the misinformation, and we code open-ended responses to see what participants would say if they did respond. Results suggest that participants are overall unlikely to reply to the misinformation tweet. However, content analysis of hypothetical replies suggests they largely do provide correct information, especially after seeing other corrections. These results suggest that user corrections offer untapped potential in responding to misinformation on social media but effort must be made to consider how users can be mobilized to provide corrections given their general unwillingness to reply.
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Given concerns about the persuasive power of video misinformation on social media for health topics, we test two techniques - exposure to a news literacy video and user corrections - to limit the effects on misperceptions. An online... more
Given concerns about the persuasive power of video misinformation on social media for health topics, we test two techniques - exposure to a news literacy video and user corrections - to limit the effects on misperceptions. An online sample of American adults from August of 2019 was randomly assigned to view two simulated Facebook videos. The first video manipulated the presence of news literacy concepts. The second video either promoted sunscreen use or made inaccurate claims regarding its dangers; scrolling comments either debunked or did not address the sunscreen misinformation in the video. Our results demonstrate that video misinformation heightened beliefs in sunscreen myths and reduced acceptance of sunscreen facts and intentions to wear sunscreen compared to a promotional video. Real-time user corrections were partially successful in reducing the effects of the misinformation video on beliefs but not intentions. Additionally, exposure to a news literacy video did not inoculate people to the misinformation. We discuss the implications of these findings for best practices regarding correcting video misinformation on health topics.
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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-scx-10.1177_1075547020981375 for Correcting Misperceptions About Genetically Modified Food on Social Media: Examining the Impact of Experts, Social Media Heuristics, and the Gateway Belief Model by Leticia... more
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-scx-10.1177_1075547020981375 for Correcting Misperceptions About Genetically Modified Food on Social Media: Examining the Impact of Experts, Social Media Heuristics, and the Gateway Belief Model by Leticia Bode, Emily K. Vraga and Melissa Tully in Science Communication