
Leticia BodeGeorgetown University | GU · Communication Culture and Technology
Leticia Bode
PhD, Political Science, University of Wisconsin
About
86
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2012 - present
Publications
Publications (86)
The mixing of misinformation with high-quality news and information on social media has reinvigorated interest in the value of news literacy (NL) to build audience resiliency to misinformation. Optimizing NL messages for social media environments—where they may be seen alongside misinformation—allows these messages to reach audiences when they are...
Anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic grew at an alarming rate, leaving much to understand about the relationship between people’s vaccination status and the information they were exposed to. This study investigated the relationship between vaccine behavior, decision rationales, and information exposure on social media over time. Usin...
Observed corrections of misinformation on social media can encourage more accurate beliefs, but for these benefits to occur, corrections must happen. By exploring people’s perceptions of witnessing and performing corrections on social media, we find that many people say they observe and perform corrections across the United States, the United Kingd...
This study expands on existing research about correcting misinformation on social media. Using an experimental design, we explore the effects of three truth signals related to stories shared on social media: whether the person posting the story says it is true, whether the replies to the story say it is true, or whether the story itself is actually...
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. Us...
Political campaigns often feature jarring revelations against candidates. This study examines how audiences come to understand major campaign events, the extent to which they shape evaluations of candidates, and how their impact is filtered through an increasingly partisan news media environment. Using national rolling cross-sectional survey data c...
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...
Twitter provides a new and important tool for political actors. In the 2010 midterm elections, the vast majority of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and virtually all candidates for U.S. Senate and governorships used Twitter to reach out to potential supporters, direct them to particular pieces of information, request campaign contr...
This is the fifth in a series of white papers providing a summary of the discussions and future directions that are derived from these topical meetings. This paper focuses on issues related to analysis and visual analytics. While these two topics are distinct, there are clear overlaps between the two. It is common to use different visualizations du...
In this paper, the fourth in a series of white papers, we provide a summary of the discussions and future directions that came from the topical meeting that focused on model construction with social media data. A particularly interesting aspect of this meeting was, in our view, discussion of the different disciplines’ requirements and approaches to...
The World Health Organization declared the deluge of publicly available information about COVID-19 to be an “infodemic,” comprising both facts and misinformation. Researchers don’t know exactly the degree to which people believe the misinformation they see online, but, in the case of COVID-19, belief in conspiracy theories related to the virus is a...
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. Us...
Although correction is often suggested as a tool against misinformation, and empirical research suggests it can be an effective one, we know little about how people perceive the act of correcting people on social media. This study measures such perceptions in the context of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, introducing the concept of valu...
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...
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-...
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...
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. Us...
Efforts to address misinformation on social media have special urgency with the emergence of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). In one effort, the World Health Organization (WHO) designed and publicized shareable infographics to debunk coronavirus myths. We used an experiment to test the efficacy of these infographics, depending on placement and sourc...
We experimentally test whether expert organizations on social media can correct misperceptions of the scientific consensus on the safety of genetically modified (GM) food for human consumption, as well as what role social media cues, in the form of “likes,” play in that process. We find expert organizations highlighting scientific consensus on GM f...
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...
Introduction: Under austerity, governments shift responsibilities for social welfare to individuals. Such responsibilization can be intertwined with pre-existing social stigmas, with sexually stigmatized individuals blamed more for health problems due to ‘irresponsible’ sexual behavior. To understand how sexual stigma affects attitudes on governmen...
This article investigates the prevalence of high and low quality URLs shared on Twitter when users discuss COVID-19. We distinguish between high quality health sources, traditional news sources, and low quality misinformation sources. We find that misinformation, in terms of tweets containing URLs from low quality misinformation websites, is shared...
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 part...
This chapter examines one possible explanation for what social media data might be revealing; social media may well provide a window into public attention rather than attitudes and opinions. It describes an empirical test of the assumption that Twitter might provide a window into what Americans were thinking about in the run‐up to the 2016 US Presi...
Social media provides a rich amount of data on the everyday lives, opinions, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors of individuals and organizations in near real-time. Leveraging these data effectively and responsibly should therefore improve our ability to understand political, psychological, economic, and sociological behaviors and opinions across time...
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, a...
Despite concerns about misinformation across social media platforms, little attention has been paid to how to correct misinformation on visual platforms like Instagram. This study uses an experimental design on a national sample to test two features of user-based correction strategies on Instagram for a divisive issue on which misinformation abound...
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 s...
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 s...
A number of solutions have been proposed to address concerns about misinformation online, including encouraging experts to engage in corrections of misinformation being shared and improving media literacy among the American public. This study combines these approaches to examine whether news literacy (NL) messages on social media enhance the effect...
Objectives
This 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’.
M...
The question of how to measure exposure to different types of content on social media grows in importance with increased use of these platforms. Social media further complicate this task by bringing diverse content into the same space, raising the question of whether selective exposure or incidental exposure theories best explain attention patterns...
As concerns grow about the spread of misinformation through social media, scholars have called for improving the public’s media literacy as a potential solution. This study examines the effectiveness of deploying news literacy (NL) messages on social media by testing whether NL tweets are able to affect perceptions of information credibility and NL...
Technological innovations offer opportunities for governments to connect with citizens and improve service provision efficiency and effectiveness, but why do some governments adopt these innovations while others do not? Using a mixed methodological approach, including interviews with city officials and multivariate analysis of a novel data set of m...
How do different types of host partisanship affect viewers of political talk shows? An experiment replicated on 2 age cohorts examines how different manifestations of partisanship in the cable news environment —explicit partisanship in which the host makes clear his views, and implicit partisanship in which the host gives more time to the guest on...
As American and British gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals have made major wins for “pinnacle rights,” such as same-sex marriage, attention has increasingly moved to a previously overshadowed part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community: transgender (trans) people. Alongside more visibility in popular culture, trans people have...
Objective
One 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.
Methods
Using an experimental design, this study investigates the effects of these calls to action...
When political disputes devolve into heated partisan conflicts, do the factors known to trigger electoral political engagement continue to operate, or do they change? We consider this question during a divisive electoral context—a gubernatorial recall—focusing on how media consumption, conversations, and interactions with social media feed into the...
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 th...
This study tests whether the number (1 vs. 2) and the source (another user vs. the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC]) of corrective responses affect successful reduction of misperceptions. Using an experimental design, our results suggest that while a single correction from another user did not reduce misperceptions, the CDC on its o...
High quality cross-platform research is difficult and expensive to perform in political communication. Yet studying media platforms in isolation ignores the realities of the contemporary media experience. As platforms multiply, the media environment itself has become more complicated, as classic understandings of media ecology give way to a growing...
This study extends past research on the relationship between news use and participation by examining how youth combine news exposure across an array of media devices, sources, and services. Results from a national survey of U.S. youth ages 12 to 17 reveal four distinct news repertoires. We find that half of youth respondents are news avoiders who e...
Social media are often criticized for being a conduit for misinformation on global health issues, but may also serve as a corrective to false information. To investigate this possibility, an experiment was conducted exposing users to a simulated Facebook News Feed featuring misinformation and different correction mechanisms (one in which news stori...
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 prevale...
Social media are often criticized as serving as a source of misinformation, but in this study we examine how they may also function to correct misperceptions on an emerging health issue. We use an experimental design to consider social correction that occurs via peers, testing both the type of correction (i.e., whether a source is provided or not)...
Selective exposure is a growing concern as people become more reliant on social media for political information. While self-reports often ask about exposure to political content on social media, existing research does not account for the fact that even those exposed to political content may still choose to ignore it. To effectively account for this...
This study considers the effects of exposure to political satire versus traditional news on issue-specific learning and engagement. Using data from an experiment conducted in January 2016 (N = 296), we employ ANOVA analysis to test the differential effects of exposure to net neutrality coverage from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight versus ABC News o...
This study uses an experimental design to examine whether and under what circumstances Americans support the so-called “right to be forgotten”—a legal right that allows citizens to petition to have information about them taken down from the Internet. Findings indicate people are most concerned about who will be in charge of executing such a right....
Despite the democratic significance of citizen talk about politics, the field of communication has not considered how that talk is weathering stresses facing our civic culture. We examine political talk during an archetypal case of political contentiousness: the recall of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin in 2012. Pairing qualitative and quantitat...
This study seeks to understand how American youth (aged 12–17 years) learn to consume the news, with specific concern for which devices (television, computer, tablet, and mobile phone) they employ in consuming news. Using a national survey of parent–child dyads, we explore (1) the role of demographics in creating a home environment supportive of ne...
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 candidat...
Social media allow users some degree of control over the content to which they are exposed, through blocking, unfriending, or hiding feeds from other users. This article considers the extent to which they do so for political reasons. Survey data from Pew Research suggests that political unfriending is relatively rare, with fewer than 10% of respond...
Historically, major gender differences exist in both political engagement and online content creation. Expanding on these literatures, this study considers the extent to which men and women engage in politics specifically in social media. Novel survey data are employed to test for any gendered differences in encountering and responding to political...
Research on social media content overwhelmingly relies on self-reports, which we suggest are meaningfully limited and likely biased. Instead, we apply an under-utilized method—corneal eye tracking—for gauging attention to content in social media. We expose subjects to different types of Facebook content and track their gaze as they browse through p...
While a growing body of literature examines exposure to social, news, and political information via social media, we have little understanding of how users delineate these categories. In this study, we develop over 100 discrete Facebook stimuli varying these topics, and then test to what extent and which users match our definition of those posts. O...
Research on social media and research on correcting misinformation are both growing areas in communication, but for the most part they have not found common ground. This study seeks to bridge these two areas, considering the role that social media may play in correcting misinformation. To do so, we test a new function of Facebook, which provides re...
Although literature about the relationship between social media and political behaviors has expanded in recent years, little is known about the roles of social media as a source of political information. To fill this gap, this article considers the question of whether and to what extent learning political information occurs via Facebook and Twitter...
Twitter provides a direct method for political actors to connect with citizens, and for those citizens to organize into online clusters through their use of hashtags (i.e., a word or phrase marked with # to identify an idea or topic and facilitate a search for it). We examine the political alignments and networking of Twitter users, analyzing 9 mil...
The methods by which politicians and policy makers communicate with the public are constantly adapting to the ever-changing media environment. As part of this changing landscape, this study considers the case of Twitter. Specifically, the authors conduct a survey of political Twitter users, in order to understand their use of the medium and their p...
This study seeks to understand the efficacy of online political campaign communication. We do this by measuring the changes in online influence of political candidates by utilizing Klout, a new, publicly available measure incorporating a variety of behaviors online. We collected daily Klout data of nearly all major congressional and presidential ca...
Recent scholarship in political socialization has moved beyond traditional transmission models of parent-driven socialization to consider alternative pathways, like trickle-up socialization and its predictors. However, these studies have paid less attention to the diverse ways in which parents and children develop discrete political orientations, e...
Shows blending humor and information are on the rise, and many such shows incorporate live studio audiences. Using two separate experimental studies, we test whether audience laughter on humorous political talk shows affects audience perceptions. We find that the effects of audience laughter depend on context, boosting perceptions of host and progr...
Social networking sites (SNS) currently boast more than half a billion active users worldwide, the majority of which are young people. With notable exceptions, few studies have ventured into the growing political realm that exists on these sites. This study expands research on SNS by examining both what encourages people to express themselves polit...
Abstract Social media Web sites such as YouTube offer activists unique opportunities to reach out to new audiences through a variety of diverse appeals. Yet the rules of engagement on social media should depend on the structures, goals, and characteristics of the movements engaging in this outreach. To explore how differences in social movements tr...
Over the past two decades, the Internet has increasingly become part of the everyday life of US citizens. This chapter considers the impact of the growing use of the Internet on media use and political behaviors. Specifically it addresses the theoretical, practical, and empirical consequences of various uses of the Internet for sociability, social...
This article proposes an agenda for research on the relation of structural inequality to the study of politics and consumption in the field of communication. The authors review evidence for increasing inequality in the United States and argue that (1) consumption choices and desires are strongly constrained by structural location; (2) political bel...
As Internet use continues to become integrated into the daily lives of average Americans, it becomes more necessary to understand the implications of each aspect of that use. As the majority of adults now take advantage of social network sites, understanding how they make use of those sites and what that means for American politics is increasingly...
The 2008 presidential election was one of the most watched campaigns in American history, and prominently featured the vice presidential candidates, Governor Sarah Palin and Senator Joseph Biden. This election contest presents an exciting opportunity to expand and test our current understandings of the relationship between gender and media coverage...
Tailored within the increasingly competitive news environment, political talk shows have adopted a range of styles, heralding a rise in "combatant" and "comic" hosts to complement the conventional "correspondent." Using an experimental design to rule out self-selection biases, this study isolates the impact of host style on media judgments. In comp...
Twitter provides a new and important tool for political actors. In the 2010 midterm elections, the vast major-ity of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and virtually all candidates for U.S. Senate and gov-ernorships used Twitter to reach out to potential sup-porters, direct them to particular pieces of information, request campaign co...
This study compares the agenda-setting cues of traditional media alongside those of online media in general and social media in particular. The main line of inquiry concerns (a) whether people posting content to openly accessible social media outlets may be acting in response to mainstream news coverage, possibly as a “corrective” to perceived imba...
Abstract will be provided by author.