BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:icalendar-ruby
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:Quantifying the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical
  Content on Facebook
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Pacific Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260907T084912Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_48614660717460
DTSTART:20250121T210000Z
DTEND:20250121T220000Z
DESCRIPTION:Join the Cyber Policy Center on January 21 from 1PM–2PM Pacif
 ic for a seminar with Jennifer Allen\, moderated by Jeff Hancock. Stanford
  affiliates are invited to join us at 12:40 PM for lunch\, prior to the se
 minar.\n\nLow uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in the US has been widely att
 ributed to social media misinformation. To evaluate this claim\, we introd
 uce a framework combining lab experiments (total N = 18\,725)\, crowdsourc
 ing\, and machine learning to estimate the causal effect of 13\,206 vaccin
 e-related URLs on the vaccination intentions of US Facebook users (N ≈ 2
 33 million). We estimate that the impact of unflagged content that nonethe
 less encouraged vaccine skepticism was 46-fold greater than that of misinf
 ormation flagged by fact-checkers. Although misinformation reduced predict
 ed vaccination intentions significantly more than unflagged vaccine conten
 t when viewed\, Facebook users’ exposure to flagged content was limited.
  In contrast\, mainstream media stories highlighting rare deaths after vac
 cination were not flagged by fact-checkers\, but were among Facebook’s m
 ost-viewed stories. Our work emphasizes the need to scrutinize factually a
 ccurate but potentially misleading content in addition to outright falseho
 ods. Additionally\, we show that fact-checking has only limited efficacy i
 n preventing misinformed decision-making and introduce a novel methodology
  incorporating crowdsourcing and machine learning to better identify misin
 forming content at scale. \n\nAbout the Speaker\n\nJenny is a postdoctoral
  researcher in the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of P
 ennsylvania. In Fall 2025\, she will join NYU Stern as an Assistant Profes
 sor of Technology\, Operations\, and Statistics and a core faculty member 
 of the Center for Social Media and Politics. She received her PhD in Manag
 ement Science from MIT in 2025 and previously worked at Meta and Microsoft
  Research. Her research interests include misinformation\, political persu
 asion\, and the wisdom of crowds.
GEO:37.423877;-122.167441
LOCATION:Law School\, 270
SUMMARY:Quantifying the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical Cont
 ent on Facebook
URL;VALUE=URI:https://events.stanford.edu/event/quantifying-the-impact-of-m
 isinformation-and-vaccine-skeptical-content-on-facebook
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR