Ben Lyons

Honored to be among this @carnegie.org cohort. The fellowship will support my research on how the partisan loyalty of older adults and institutional distrust among younger adults create different paths to polarization, with the goal of developing age-specific solutions. #CarnegieFellows

Some exciting news: The 2027 PolMeth annual conference is taking place at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City! Save the date: July 15-17, 2027 I'll be organizing with my fantastic colleague Yuree Noh. Reach out with questions, and see you there!

Misinformation and the Aging American is now out in print! Very cool to finally see the finished product and thankful to all who helped along the way. Print: global.oup.com/academic/pro... Digital: academic.oup.com/book/63327

Importantly, upstream definitional choices fundamentally alter the downstream audience demographics. "Network Importance" influencers reach significantly older, whiter audiences, while Follower and engagement-based definitions yield significantly younger audiences.

🚨New paper🚨out in @socialmedia-soc.bsky.social w/ John Wagner and @jenny-oser.bsky.social 🎉 We all know who's a political influencer on social media, right? Well... we may THINK we do, but what we're actually measuring is very different. How different? 🧵👇

New Nature Health perspective w/ @harryyan.bsky.social, @yang3kc.bsky.social, and @fil.bsky.social. The invisible risks of AI-generated health information: doi.org/10.1038/s443... We argue that these risks are largely invisible to the institutions responsible for protecting public health.

Our research group under the supervision of Kevin Munger is starting a presentation series at EUI called PING (Politics and the INternet Group). We’re accepting applications for the fall term. Come present and hang out in Florence! I will link the website and call in the comments. Pls share widely

Most people oppose ant-democratic practices, but a fair number of people are neutral about them. New research (N > 48,000) finds that neutrality is a threat to democracy--this large segment of the public tolerates anti-democratic elites www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Convenience or quota-based sampling for surveys? Christenson et al. assessed the potential pitfalls of convenience sampling in an expansive cross-national study, yet found a striking amount of consistency across platforms. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

Question to survey methods folks: is there a paper that shows/examines whether putting items in a matrix makes them more correlated as opposed to including them as separate individual items? Thanks in advance!

I’m excited to be on a panel at the Trust & Safety Research Conference @techimpactpolicy.bsky.social on Oct 1, w @ryanmoore.bsky.social, @nadiabrashier.bsky.social & Doug Shadel. We'll be talking all about older adults & untrustworthy info online. #TSRConf #TrustAndSafety #OnlineSafety #TechPolicy

Happy to report that my next book titled Diverse and Divided: How Demographic Changes Shape our Politics will be out next year and published by Columbia University Press. In this book, i track how demographic changes (growing racial diversity, education, etc), affect American political competition

Misinformation and the Aging American: The Paradox of Engagement and Truth Discernment - new book forthcoming from my excellent coauthor @benlyons.bsky.social www.amazon.com/Misinformati...

Extremely impressive field experiment by @nmalhotra.bsky.social et al. had few effects on election attitudes among conservatives in TX despite being "exposed to an average of 20 online videos, 18.5 cable TV videos, 23.9 display ads, 3 text messages, and 3 postcards" www.science.org/doi/full/10....

🚨🚨 New publication: 🚨🚨 Does affective polarization (AP) change citizens’ willingness to support democratic norms or participate? 🧵1/10 Full paper here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

NEW - 'The Power of the Crowd: How the Public Can Both Spoil and Improve Social Media as a Source of Information' This Cambridge Element by F. Stöckel, S. Stöckli, B.A. Lyons, H. Kroker & @jasonreifler.bsky.social is free to read for 2 weeks. cup.org/4344Tyl #cambridgeelements #politics #Polisky

New WP, would love feedback. Across datasets, age seems to be important to understanding support for violence & norm breaking more broadly. Antisocial traits (good predictors generally) are concentrated among younger adults & also more strongly associated w support among them osf.io/preprints/ps...

Special issue at Psych Science on psychological science in the real world! Send us your best work looking at whether effects from the lab (or from theories) hold up in ecologically valid settings. Submission deadline: 15 January 2027 www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

meta analysis on illusory truth effect looks cool www.nature.com/articles/s41... but also a small plug for this dataset that may be useful for future iterations - a large test for political headlines in a national rep sample (N = 8,730) misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/olde...

📣 Reminder: 26 days left! Submit an extended abstract for the special issue: "Who Are We Studying in Communication Research? Revisiting Audience in a Transforming Media Environment" 📌 Extended abstracts due August 31, 2026 📝 Full papers due March 2027 Learn more: academic.oup.com/hcr/pages/sp...

seems super important for how we make sense of this going forward

Now Out on FirstView: Beyond Single-Shot Designs: Repeated Treatments, Affective Polarization, and Democratic Norms

A large field experiment found that platforms can dramatically reduce exposure to repeat untrustworthy sources, but doing so did not produce measurable changes in users' beliefs or attitudes. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1 month left to submit. send us your extended abstracts by Aug 31

One month left to submit! HCR Special Issue on "Revisiting Audience in a Transforming Media Environment". Open to research papers 📊 and short commentaries 💬

I have a new paper out in @sociologicalsci.bsky.social w/ the briliant @aybukeatalay.bsky.social and @aliaelkattan.com We show that what we pay attention to online is a lot more politically diverse than what public engagement signals would suggest... sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

data viz is my passion

Why do arguments often change people’s beliefs without changing their attitudes? In a new APSR with @scottclifford.bsky.social and @patrickpliu.bsky.social, we point to belief relevance: arguments are more persuasive when they grapple with the idiosyncratic reasons people hold their political views.

New from my outstanding coauthors @dowonkim.bsky.social and @glciampaglia.com et al.

In our Elements we demonstrate using survey experiments and observational data from five countries that democratic backsliding is rarely, if ever, ethnically neutral, and that citizens are much more open to tolerating anti-democratic actions against ethnic minorities.

Across two national samples, worries about social media, AI, and modernity load on a single anti-technology factor (alpha=.85). Who is the most anti-technology? Conspiracy thinking is the strongest correlate by far, stronger than loneliness or partisanship.

How should we conceptualize political interest? In POQ, Laffineur et al. demonstrate that political interest and disinterest are distinct social identities through a newly developed methodological approach. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

The authors (led by @williambrady.bsky.social) concluded that "reducing the influence of extreme users can curb algorithmic distortions without diminishing user experience." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So affective polarization has a causal impact on interpersonal relations & democratic attitudes, but its effects depend on political context. @eelcoharteveld.bsky.social spearheaded study & paper👏 with @andrejkokkonen.bsky.social @hayleekelsall.bsky.social @jonaslinde.bsky.social Dahlberg & me.

Does affective polarization itself actually threaten democracy? Recent experiments from the US suggest maybe not. In our new @ejprjournal.bsky.social paper, we revisit this question comparatively with a survey experiment in 9 democracies (18,000 respondents). #polisky

Call for Papers - Human Communication Research We're now accepting submissions for a special issue: "Who Are We Studying in Communication Research? Revisiting Audience in a Transforming Media Environment" Extended abstract deadline: August 31, 2026 Full details: academic.oup.com/hcr/pages/sp...

Who is the "audience" in comm research today? 📣 New HCR special issue — revisiting audience for a transforming media environment, co-edited by @benlyons.bsky.social, @adrianmeier.bsky.social, and me. 🔗 Full CFP: academic.oup.com/hcr/pages/sp... 🗓️ Extended abstracts due August 31, 2026

Who is the "audience" in comm research today? 📣 New HCR special issue — revisiting audience in a transforming media environment, co-edited by @benlyons.bsky.social, @yesuncomm.bsky.social, and me. 🔗 Full CFP: academic.oup.com/hcr/pages/sp... 🗓️ Extended abstracts due August 31, 2026

🚨 Special Issue @hcr-journal.bsky.social cfp 🚨: Who Are We Studying in Communication Research? Revisiting Audience in a Transforming Media Environment Guest eds @yesuncomm.bsky.social @adrianmeier.bsky.social & me Extended abstracts due Aug. 31 More info: academic.oup.com/hcr/pages/sp...

".... differences, however, attenuate substantially once we account for online activity, suggesting that disparities in exposure reflect differences in browsing intensity more than demographic characteristics alone."

Announcing the 2026 Andrew #CarnegieFellows! Selected from a record 381 nominations, 24 fellows will each receive $200K to examine the causes of political polarization — and how to reduce it. 🔗 Read more: www.carnegie.org/news/article... #Polarization #Research

WOW!!! The 2026 Carnegie Fellows have been announced and what a LIST! Some of my absolute FAVES to read& cite! Huge congrats to @wzcmarsh.bsky.social @eunjikim.bsky.social @benlyons.bsky.social Kristin Lunz Trujillo @chriswarshaw.bsky.social Stuart Soroka etc. etc.! www.carnegie.org/awards/andre...

New paper led by @hnxue.bsky.social : "#MakeBeefGreatAgain: A Cross-Platform Analysis of Early #MAHA Discourse" arxiv.org/html/2604.23...

🚨 New in @science.org: CDC communication undermines trust in vaccines Link to the publication: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... I’m excited to share this paper, which I wrote together with @schneali.bsky.social, @corneliabetsch.bsky.social & @laulilleholt.bsky.social (1/5)