Associate professor @UofUComm. Associate member @huntsmancancer. Associate editor @MisinfoReview. Just generally an associate.

Joined May 2020
236 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
Honored to be among this 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
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: carnegie.org/news/articles/2… #Polarization #Research
1
5
585
Ben Lyons retweeted
we have a new paper in the April issue of Political Psychology. in this (admittedly lovely) new paper, Steve Vaisey, Pablo Bello and I make a simple point: using panel data to understand belief change is very hard. we highlight an empirical intractability in the process:
2
19
94
6,205
Me to my seat mate when @delta cancels my flight on the runway for the third time this week
2
44
Ben Lyons retweeted
Does affective polarization itself actually threaten democracy? Recent experiments from the US suggest maybe not. In our new @EJPRjournal paper, we revisit this question comparatively with a survey experiment in 9 democracies (18,000 respondents). cup.org/4v72pej
1
28
75
7,052
Ben Lyons retweeted
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 academic.oup.com/hcr/pages/s…
5
4
645
🚨 Special Issue @HCR_Journal cfp: Who Are We Studying in Communication Research? Revisiting Audience in a Transforming Media Environment Guest eds @YeSun_comm, Adrian Meier & me Extended abstracts due Aug. 31 More info: academic.oup.com/hcr/pages/s…
2
5
691
Ben Lyons retweeted

1
2
490
Ben Lyons retweeted
Economics is about the same as political science in the "reproducibility" paper, which looked at whether data and code was available and could reproduce results in a sample of articles. Again, read the paper for details: nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
1
7
22
3,716
Ben Lyons retweeted
Economics doesn't look better in the "robustness" paper. Honestly, econ looks worse than PS and psych but the difference is tiny and not worth obsessing over. Experimental work looks better than observational. Read the paper for details: nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
2
14
39
3,344
Ben Lyons retweeted
Not all news clicks teach us something. In POQ, Cardenal et al., using digital trace data, find that only article-level exposure to Ukraine stories—not general news browsing—predicted who learned about the Russian invasion. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfaf068
1
2
1
254
Ben Lyons retweeted
Nearly half of Americans (46%) report using AI to get news at least occasionally--but most are light users. Only ~14% use it 3 times a week. Some people use AI as their primary interface to society, even if the models are not really up to the task.
1
11
19
2,356
Ben Lyons retweeted
What happens when a polarized democracy bans a social media platform? New working paper with Christopher Barrie, @mollyeroberts, Chris Schwarz, and @j_a_tucker. We study Brazil's 2024 ban on X and find it created what we define as a "partisan sorting ratchet ." 🧵 ⬇️ 1/
7
44
176
32,597
Ben Lyons retweeted
Conditionally accepted at the APSR (w/ @scottclifford & @patrickpliu): Why does political information so often change beliefs but NOT attitudes? We highlight the role of belief relevance, or the extent to which beliefs bear on attitudes.
5
35
142
8,611
Ben Lyons retweeted
The results differ substantially across platforms. @Prolific and @CloudResearch’s Connect panel have relatively low failure rates, while Mturk (even via @CloudResearch) has a high failure rate.
1
5
35
24,680
Ben Lyons retweeted
The effects of political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election dlvr.it/TRFjvC
4
10
12,202
Ben Lyons retweeted
We just executed 2.8 million search queries in 243 countries in 2024 and 2025, generating both AI and traditional search results to understand the implications of the Rise of AI Search....
3
6
16
3,304
Ben Lyons retweeted
Research finds that people overestimate how many social media users post harmful content--which makes us think the world is worse than it really is. On average, they believed that 43% of all Reddit users have posted severely toxic comments and that 47% of all Facebook users have shared false news online. In reality, platform-level data shows that most of these forms of harmful content are produced by small but highly active groups of users (3–7%). Overestimating the proportion of social media users who post harmful content makes people feel more negative emotion, perceive the United States to be in greater moral decline, and cultivate distorted perceptions of what others want to see on social media. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/a…
9
57
178
61,203
Our paper "Exposure to low-credibility online health content is limited and is concentrated among older adults", out now in @NatureAging
Health misinformation among older adults nature.com/articles/s43587-0…
1
2
481
shoutout to Jacksonville, Illinois
America's population density in 1840
1
186