News by Subject Social & Behavior

A new study from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania investigated the ways that institutions control who has access to Wi-Fi. The findings indicate that powerful institutions and privileged people use quality-of-life policing -- the report and/or arrest of individuals engaged in nonviolent offenses such as loitering, noise violations, and public intoxication -- to keep those with less privilege, including people of color, from accessing resources like the internet.

Disagreement seems to spread online posts faster and further than agreement, according to a new study from the University of Central Florida. The finding comes from an examination of posts labeled controversial on social news aggregation site Reddit. To perform the study, the researchers analyzed a Reddit dataset that was collected by DARPA.

In the United States, climate change is controversial, which makes communicating about the subject a tricky proposition. A recent study by Portland State researchers Brianne Suldovsky, assistant professor of communication, and Daniel Taylor-Rodriguez, assistant professor of statistics, explored how liberals and conservatives in Oregon think about climate science to get a better sense for what communication strategies might be most effective at reaching people with different political ideologies.

Although people in early 2020 were highly cautious about COVID-19, 11 months later the public pushed the envelope on pandemic safety precautions and ignored warnings as time went on, a new University of California, Davis, study suggests.

Vaccine negativity and reluctance is not a recent phenomenon but, to date, little research has been done to explore the dominance of negative vaccine-related information.

An analysis of the tone used in pandemic-related social media posts from U.S. Congress members over an 8-month period in 2020 finds clear partisan differences, with Democrats using a slightly negative tone compared with Republicans, who appeared to use more strongly positive language in their COVID-19 messaging. Democrats were also far more likely than

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