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  1. Healthy news consumption requires limited exposure to unreliable content and ideological diversity in the sources consumed. There are two challenges to this normative expectation: the prevalence of unreliable content online; and the prominence of misinformation within individual news diets. Here, we assess these challenges using an observational panel tracking the browsing behavior of N ≈ 140,000 individuals in the United States for 12 months (January–December 2018). Our results show that panelists who are exposed to misinformation consume more reliable news and from a more ideologically diverse range of sources. In other words, exposure to unreliable content is higher among the better informed. This association persists after we control for partisan leaning and consider inter- and intra-person variation. These findings highlight the tension between the positive and negative consequences of increased exposure to news content online. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available September 26, 2024
  2. Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 1, 2024
  3. Abstract

    We define a relative version of the Turaev–Viro invariants for an ideally triangulated compact 3‐manifold with nonempty boundary and a coloring on the edges, generalizing the Turaev–Viro invariants [36] of the manifold. We also propose the volume conjecture for these invariants whose asymptotic behavior is related to the volume of the manifold in the hyperbolic polyhedral metric [22, 23] with singular locus of the edges and cone angles determined by the coloring, and prove the conjecture in the case that the cone angles are sufficiently small. This suggests an approach of solving the volume conjecture for the Turaev–Viro invariants proposed by Chen–Yang [8] for hyperbolic 3‐manifolds with totally geodesic boundary.

     
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  4. Abstract Previous studies generally assume that barriers to internet access are largely passive. That is, exclusion from the Internet is a consequence of poorly resourced individuals, communities, and institutions. This study complicates that assumption by focusing on the active policing and gatekeeping of internet access. Specifically, we estimate the causal effect of free Wi-Fi at chain restaurants on quality-of-life crime reporting by leveraging a staggered difference-in-differences design which compares geo-located crime reports near chain restaurants in Chicago before and after those restaurants introduced free Wi-Fi. We find that free Wi-Fi led to a substantive and significant increase in quality-of-life policing when restaurants were located in wealthier and Whiter areas, but not in other areas. Our findings suggest that internet access itself may be actively policed by social institutions, in our case, national chain restaurants and the police, to protect access for some at the expense of others. 
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  5. null (Ed.)
  6. The abundance of media options is a central feature of today’s information environment. Many accounts, often based on analysis of desktop-only news use, suggest that this increased choice leads to audience fragmentation, ideological segregation, and echo chambers with no cross-cutting exposure. Contrary to many of those claims, this paper uses observational multiplatform data capturing both desktop and mobile use to demonstrate that coexposure to diverse news is on the rise, and that ideological self-selection does not explain most of that coexposure. We show that mainstream media outlets offer the common ground where ideologically diverse audiences converge online, though our analysis also reveals that more than half of the US online population consumes no online news, underlining the risk of increased information inequality driven by self-selection along lines of interest. For this study, we use an unprecedented combination of observed data from the United States comprising a 5-y time window and involving tens of thousands of panelists. Our dataset traces news consumption across different devices and unveils important differences in news diets when multiplatform or desktop-only access is used. We discuss the implications of our findings for how we think about the current communication environment, exposure to news, and ongoing attempts to limit the effects of misinformation. 
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