Yochai Benkler’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places
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Many field public goods are provided by a small number of contributors: the ‘superstars’ of their respective communities. This paper focuses on Wikipedia, one of the largest online volunteering platforms. Over nine consecutive years, we study the relationship between social preferences—reciprocity, altruism and social image—and field cooperation. Wikipedia editors are quite prosocial on average, and superstars even more so. But while reciprocal and social image preferences strongly relate to contribution quantity among casual editors, only social image concerns continue to predict differences in contribution levels between superstars. In addition, we find that social image–driven editors—both casual and superstars—contribute lower-quality content on average. Evidence points to a perverse social incentive effect, as quantity is more readily observable than quality on Wikipedia.
Fake news emerged as an apparent global problem during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Addressing it requires a multidisciplinary effort to define the nature and extent of the problem, detect fake news in real time, and mitigate its potentially harmful effects. This will require a better understanding of how the Internet spreads content, how people process news, and how the two interact. We review the state of knowledge in these areas and discuss two broad potential mitigation strategies: better enabling individuals to identify fake news, and intervention within the platforms to reduce the attention given to fake news. The cooperation of Internet platforms (especially Facebook, Google, and Twitter) with researchers will be critical to understanding the scale of the issue and the effectiveness of possible interventions.
Organizations are riddled with cooperation problems, that is, instances in which workers need to voluntarily exert effort to achieve efficient collective outcomes. To sustain high levels of cooperation, the experimental literature demonstrates the centrality of reciprocal preferences but has also overlooked some of its negative consequences. In this paper, we ran lab-in-the-field experiments in the context of open-source software development teams to provide the first field evidence that highly reciprocating groups are not necessarily more successful in practice. Instead, the relationship between high reciprocity and performance can be more accurately described as U-shaped. Highly reciprocal teams are generally more likely to fail and only outperform other teams conditional on survival. We use the dynamic structure of our data on field contributions to demonstrate the underlying theoretical mechanism. Reciprocal preferences work as a catalyst at the team level: they reinforce the cooperative equilibrium in good times but also make it harder to recover from a negative signal (the project dies). Our results call into question the idea that strong reciprocity can shield organizations from cooperation breakdowns. Instead, cooperation needs to be dynamically managed through relational contracts.
History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory.
Funding: This research was funded by the consolidator grant agreement [Grant 647870] from the European Research Council, European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Yann Algan).
Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1515 .
We present the first full description of Media Cloud, an open source platform based on crawling hyperlink structure in operation for over 10 years, that for many uses will be the best way to collect data for studying the media ecosystem on the open web. We document the key choices behind what data Media Cloud collects and stores, how it processes and organizes these data, and its open API access as well as user-facing tools. We also highlight the strengths and limitations of the Media Cloud collection strategy compared to relevant alternatives. We give an overview two sample datasets generated using Media Cloud and discuss how researchers can use the platform to create their own datasets.
We present the first full description of Media Cloud, an open source platform based on crawling hyperlink structure in operation for over 10 years, that for many uses will be the best way to collect data for studying the media ecosystem on the open web. We document the key choices behind what data Media Cloud collects and stores, how it processes and organizes these data, and open API access as well as user-facing tools. We also highlight the strengths and limitations of the Media Cloud collection strategy compared to relevant alternatives. We give an overview two sample datasets generated using Media Cloud and discuss how researchers can use the platform to create their own datasets.
The intentional spread of falsehoods – and attendant attacks on minorities, press freedoms, and the rule of law – challenge the basic norms and values upon which institutional legitimacy and political stability depend. How did we get here? The Disinformation Age assembles a remarkable group of historians, political scientists, and communication scholars to examine the historical and political origins of the post-fact information era, focusing on the United States but with lessons for other democracies. Bennett and Livingston frame the book by examining decades-long efforts by political and business interests to undermine authoritative institutions, including parties, elections, public agencies, science, independent journalism, and civil society groups. The other distinguished scholars explore the historical origins and workings of disinformation, along with policy challenges and the role of the legacy press in improving public communication. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Wikipedia's first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the world's most popular reference work.
We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident—a wiki attached to a nascent online encyclopedia—has become the world's most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia's first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal.
The contributors consider Wikipedia's history, the richness of the connections that underpin it, and its founding vision. Their essays look at, among other things, the shift from bewilderment to respect in press coverage of Wikipedia; Wikipedia as “the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history”; and the acknowledgment that “free access” includes not just access to the material but freedom to contribute—that the summation of all human knowledge is biased by who documents it.
Contributors
Phoebe Ayers, Omer Benjakob, Yochai Benkler, William Beutler, Siko Bouterse, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Amy Carleton, Robert Cummings, LiAnna L. Davis, Siân Evans, Heather Ford, Stephen Harrison, Heather Hart, Benjamin Mako Hill, Dariusz Jemielniak, Brian Keegan, Jackie Koerner, Alexandria Lockett, Jacqueline Mabey, Katherine Maher, Michael Mandiberg, Stephane Coillet-Matillon, Cecelia A. Musselman, Eliza Myrie, Jake Orlowitz, Ian A. Ramjohn, Joseph Reagle, Anasuya Sengupta, Aaron Shaw, Melissa Tamani, Jina Valentine, Matthew Vetter, Adele Vrana, Denny Vrandečić
... While the parts weave in historical descriptions of the salience of the class structure this 29 On the structure of legal claims as social relations structured as rights, that is, entitlement-disentitlement relations that govern resources and recognition, see Syed (2023). For a review of how different regimes in capitalism structured power through assigning different entitlement-disentitlement frameworks to resources for subsistence and production, knowledge, and juridical personhood, see Benkler (2023). 30 On the role of the parliamentary enclosures in proletarianizing women and children, and through them all rural households in the Industrial Revolution, see Neeson (1996); Humphries (1990). ...
... When Benkler (2020) highlights the value of CBPP as "another way," it is not just against these market forces on the Internet and within modern capitalist societies but also in the way in which most information and knowledge is held, transmitted, and put to use. All mediums of writing can be used for both capture and enclosure, as well as transmission of information. ...
... Although think tanks are not usually affiliated directly with political parties, they can be categorized according to their political leaning-conservative, center right, centrist, libertarian, center left, or progressive (McGann 2005). polarization of the political system that has occurred in recent years (PEW Research Center 2014;Teles et al. 2014;Benkler et al. 2018;Abramowitz and McCoy 2019), which is already very responsive to elite interests (Bartels 2008;Gilens and Page 2014). These new patterns of political engagement need to be considered and studied more thoroughly in the context of the current critical state of the social, political, and constitutional order in the United States (see the introduction to this special issue). ...
... This has led to arguments that populist far-right leaders are not only passive receivers who channel grievances, fantasies and longings embedded in the political sphere. Rather, they are active agents in the shaping and propagation of failed or successful narratives concerning other political bodies (people, parties, states), often by asserting 'ownership' of contentious issues, such as migration, borders and national identity (Agius, Rosamond & Kinnvall, 2020;Benkler, Faris, & Roberts, 2018;Kinnvall & Svensson, 2022;Wodak et al., 2021). Along these lines, emotional governance in the hybrid media system can be addressed from the analytical lenses of ontological (in)security and Lacanian fantasy (Areni, 2019;Kinnvall, 2018;Kinnvall & Mitzen, 2017) 5 . ...
... Yochai Benkler, however, has argued that such large-scale public support doesn't make sense and that the networked public sphere needs more time to develop -that a more open and diverse industrial media system will eventually rise, one that could conceivably receive public support further down the road (McChesney & Pickard, 2011: 225-237). But, more recently, Benkler has shown increased skepticism over the effectiveness of the ecosystem that has developed to this point (see Roberts et al., 2018). Can we afford to wait to see what comes next? ...
... These nontraditional sources typically reached salience in terms of website sharing when a story they published became viral. For instance, Raw Story, a digital tabloid [109], featured the most-tweeted website in its story of Republicans blocking a bill in order to protect pharmaceutical companies from limitations on vaccine-related profits. The salience of nontraditional sources demonstrates an intermedia agenda-setting process that provides a platform for individuals who were previously blocked from entering the elite spaces to disseminate their messages [15,110]. ...
... It appears sources such as Breitbart and Ben Shapiro which contained a number of Islamophobic comments on their stories, have made considerable money and notoriety by posting content designed to inflame passions against Muslims. Breitbart has a considerable history of negative framing of immigration, with a particular framing of Muslims as radicals (Benkler et al., 2018). Our research suggests that articles on Islam were not posted that often, but when they were, they received considerable reactions with multiple responses to each occurrence. ...
... However, the scale and complexity of the problem have increased due to the evolution of the information environment and ensuing changes to incentives, transmission speeds, and the structure of online and offline media and communication networks, as well as emergence of the "post-truth" phenomenon (e.g., Capilla, 2021;Lasser et al., 2023;Terren & Borge-Bravo, 2021;Vosoughi et al., 2018). In this vein, a historical lens is useful; it can help prevent alarmism but also permit us to be alarmed when appropriate (Benkler et al., 2018;Bennett & Livingston, 2018;Oreskes & Conway, 2023). ...
... In the months leading up to the 2024 US presidential election, anyone paying attention to contemporary public discourse expects to be flooded by false accusations, abrasive rhetoric, thinly veiled manipulation, and disinformation (much of it generated by AI; see Robins-Early, 2023). Both political parties, arguably one with more reason than the other (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018), will accuse their opponents of ideological tactics, pundits will decry the 'post-truth' state of the world, and voters will lament it too. Everyone involved seems to agree: Ideologues deserve no attention, let alone votes. ...
... Money stands as a cornerstone of the triad shaping modern democracies, wielding structural influence over electoral processes and political legitimacy in ways that defy the egalitarian ideals of democratic theory. As a resource, it fuels campaigns, sustains parties, and molds policy agendas, 15 often tilting power toward elites at the expense of broader representation. In democracies like the United States, India, and Germany, money's role varies by institutional context---unrestrained in some, regulated in others---yet consistently amplifies the voices of those who control it, whether wealthy donors, corporations, or state-aligned actors. ...
