Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 102854 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon |
| NOMBRES | Sandra |
| APELLIDO | Gonzalez-Bailon |
| FIRMA | GONZALEZ-BAILON S |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8372-798X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 49 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 150 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 8 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2004 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The Hardest Part Is Always People
Technological innovation has a dual nature: it is propelled by visionary inventors but its ultimate trajectory is shaped by human behavior, which is messy, unpredictable, and resistant to neat explanations. Information infrastructures reflect this same tension: their design alone cannot guarantee purpose or alignment with collective goals. Only by asserting authority over how priorities are defined can we ensure that information architectures ser…
More platforms, less attention to news? A multi-platform analysis of news exposure across TV, web, and YouTube in the United States
We gain exposure to news across a range of platforms and, within each platform, across a range of sources. How does a multi-platform media environment shape the news choices we make and the gaps that result from those choices? We address this question tracking news exposure across TV, the web, and YouTube for approximately 55,000 unique US panelists over a period of 39 months. We find important variations in the demographic profiles of those who …
The Diffusion and Reach of (Mis)Information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 Election
Social media creates the possibility for rapid, viral spread of content, but how many posts actually reach millions? And is misinformation special in how it propagates? We answer these questions by analyzing the virality of and exposure to information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 presidential election. We examine the diffusion trees of the approximately 1 B posts that were re-shared at least once by U.S.-based adults from July 1, 2020, to Feb…
Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing
Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the challenges of conducting large-scale field experiments have made it difficult to assess the scope of the problem 1,2 . Here we present data from 2020 for the entire population of active adult Facebook users in the USA showing that content from ‘like-minded’ s…
Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook
Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that users could have seen in their feeds with the information that they saw (after algorithmic curation) and the information with which they engaged. We show that (i) ideological segregation is high and increase…
How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?
We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content the…
The blind spots of measuring online news exposure
Measures of news exposure are common in research that tries to explain political knowledge, political engagement, opinion formation and, more generally, media effects. Much of that research employs self-reported measures obtained with surveys, known to suffer from accuracy problems. Observational measures, however, also suffer from limitations derived from data collection and instrumentation. Here we offer new comparative evidence on the nature o…
Do social media undermine social cohesion? A critical review
We evaluate the empirical evidence interrogating the question of whether social media erodes social cohesion. We look at how networks, information exchange, and norms operate on these platforms. We also evaluate the conditions under which social media can be conducive to forming social capital and encouraging prosocial behavior. We discuss the psychological mechanisms that operate at the individual level and assess whether social media can create…
Programmed differently? Testing for gender differences in Python programming style and quality on GitHub
The underrepresentation of women in open-source software is frequently attributed to women’s lack of innate aptitude compared to men: natural gender differences in technical ability (Trinkenreich et al., 2021). Approaching code as a form of communication, I conduct a novel empirical study of gender differences in Python programming on GitHub. Based on 1,728 open-source projects, I ask if there is a gender difference in the quality and style of Py…
The gendered lens of AI
This study investigates gender representation in artificial intelligence (AI)-related images across various digital spaces to understand potential biases and visual narratives in the AI domain. We analyzed a dataset of 28,199 images from news media, technology news websites, social media, knowledge-sharing platforms, and other digital spaces. Our findings revealed the prevalence of male faces and the consistent underrepresentation of women across…
Smiling women pitching down
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models like DALL·E 2 can interpret prompts and generate high-quality images that exhibit human creativity. Though public enthusiasm is booming, systematic auditing of potential gender biases in AI-generated images remains scarce. We addressed this gap by examining the prevalence of two occupational gender biases (representational and presentational biases) in 15,300 DALL·E 2 images spanning 153 occupations.…
Surviving or thriving political defeat on social media
Extensive research reveals gender gaps in social media expression, particularly women’s reduced propensity for sharing political information and opinions. We examine the impact of political defeat on the gender gap in political expression on social media by pairing Twitter data from candidate supporters with a voter file. Our results indicate that Trump’s 2020 defeat reduced tweet volumes only among his female supporters, while his male supporter…
Uncovering gender stereotypes in controversial science discourse
This study examines how gender stereotypes are reflected in discourses around controversial science issues across two platforms, YouTube and TikTok. Utilizing the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects, we developed hypotheses and research questions about how content creators might use gender-related stereotypes to engage audiences. Our analyses of climate change and vaccination videos, considering various modalities such as captions an…
Can social media combat gender inequalities in academia? Measuring the prevalence of the Matilda effect in communication
This study sought to investigate whether scholarly impact and academic influence differ between men and women in the field of communication and the extent to which the gender gap has persisted on social media platforms, an arena increasingly used for research dissemination. Data were collected from 10,736 articles, published in prominent communication journals between 2012 and 2022, using a combination of three sources: OpenAlex, Altmetric, and T…
The puzzle of misinformation
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 (Ja…
The Gender Divide in Wikipedia
Wikipedia has a well-known gender divide affecting its biographical content. This bias not only shapes social perceptions of knowledge, but it can also propagate beyond the platform as its contents are leveraged to correct misinformation, train machine-learning tools, and enhance search engine results. What happens when feminist movements intervene to try to close existing gaps? Through a quantitative analysis of over 11,000 Wikipedia articles, w…
What counts as a weak tie? A comparison of filtering techniques to analyze co-exposure networks
The Internet and public policy
In January 2021, the editorial team of Policy & Internet changed from the Oxford Internet Institute to the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. This article invites all the past and current editors to contribute to the future directions and discussion of internet and public policy. It is collection of six contributions covering the trajectory of the internet policy research agenda, platform power in the digital econ…
Worlds of Agents
Agent-based computational models create virtual laboratories in which to formalize and simulate dynamic, multi-level theories of communication. They allow the systematic development of thought experiments, and they improve our understanding of the generative mechanisms that underlie patterns observed in empirical data. Simulation models help explore hypothetical and unprecedented scenarios, serving as powerful hypothesis generators for future the…
The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication
Communication technologies, including the Internet, social media, and countless online applications, create the infrastructure and interface through which many of our interactions take place today. This form of networked communication creates new questions about how we establish relationships, engage in public, build a sense of identity, and delimit the private domain. Digital technologies have also enabled new ways of observing the world; many o…
Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication
Bit by bit
Bit by bit: social research in the digital age." The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 44(4), pp. 267–268
The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks
Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people's media diets and the similarity of news outlets in terms of the audiences they share. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this article, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyze to extract the backbone—that is, the overlapping ties that are statistically…
Response to Webster and Taneja’s Response to “Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News”
We appreciate the chance to respond to Webster and Taneja’s comments to our article (Mukerjee, Majó-Vázquez, & González-Bailón, 2018). We take this as a welcome opportunity to engage in the always-pertinent discussion on why measurement and methods are so important to reach meaningful theoretical conclusions from empirical work. For the sake of transparency, we would like to begin by stating that we sent the manuscript of our article to Webster a…
Rebooting Mass Communication
One of the most important tasks facing media scholars in the twenty-first century is re-examining the relevance of classic mass communication theories in a new information environment. Technological and social transformations have changed the practices of media production, dissemination, and consumption. Recent developments have called into question existing theoretical and methodological approaches to media research. At the same time, these deve…
Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News
How do people consume news online? Here, we propose a novel way to answer this question using the browsing behavior of web users and the networks they form while navigating news content. In these networks, two news outlets are connected if they share a fraction of their audiences. We propose two crucial improvements to the methodology employed in previous research: a statistical test to filter out non-significant overlap between sites; and a thre…
Broadcasters and Hidden Influentials in Online Protest Diffusion
This article explores the growth of online mobilizations using data from the indignados (outraged) movement in Spain, which emerged under the influence of the revolution in Egypt and as a precursor to the global Occupy mobilizations. The data track Twitter activity around the protests that took place in May 2011, which led to the formation of camp sites in dozens of cities all over the country and massive daily demonstrations during the week prio…
The effects of social interactions on fertility decline in nineteenth-century France
We built an agent-based simulation, incorporating geographic and demographic data from nineteenth-century France, to study the role of social interactions in fertility decisions. The simulation made experimentation possible in a context where other empirical strategies were precluded by a lack of data. We evaluated how different decision rules, with and without interdependent decision-making, caused variations in population growth and fertility l…
Politics in the Boardroom
This article explores an important aspect of post-career earnings in public life in Britain: membership of corporate boards by former parliamentarians, ministers and civil servants. It attempts to determine whether this group represents a distinct group within the wider network of interlocking corporate directorships in the UK. Further, it investigates the characteristics of those individuals who obtain appointments as non-executive directors to …
The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks
Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people's media diets and the similarity of news outlets in terms of the audiences they share. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this article, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyze to extract the backbone—that is, the overlapping ties that are statistically…
Signals of Public Opinion in Online Communication
This study offers a systematic comparison of automated content analysis tools. The ability of different lexicons to correctly identify affective tone (e.g., positive vs. negative) is assessed in different social media environments. Our comparisons examine the reliability and validity of publicly available, off-the-shelf classifiers. We use datasets from a range of online sources that vary in the diversity and formality of the language used, and w…
Smiling women pitching down
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models like DALL·E 2 can interpret prompts and generate high-quality images that exhibit human creativity. Though public enthusiasm is booming, systematic auditing of potential gender biases in AI-generated images remains scarce. We addressed this gap by examining the prevalence of two occupational gender biases (representational and presentational biases) in 15,300 DALL·E 2 images spanning 153 occupations.…
Digital News Consumption and Copyright Intervention
We analyze patterns of digital news consumption before and after a "link tax" was introduced in Spain. This new legislation imposed a copyright fee for showing snippets of content created by newspapers and resulted in the shutdown of Google News Spain. The Spanish
Surviving or thriving political defeat on social media
Extensive research reveals gender gaps in social media expression, particularly women’s reduced propensity for sharing political information and opinions. We examine the impact of political defeat on the gender gap in political expression on social media by pairing Twitter data from candidate supporters with a voter file. Our results indicate that Trump’s 2020 defeat reduced tweet volumes only among his female supporters, while his male supporter…
The gendered lens of AI
This study investigates gender representation in artificial intelligence (AI)-related images across various digital spaces to understand potential biases and visual narratives in the AI domain. We analyzed a dataset of 28,199 images from news media, technology news websites, social media, knowledge-sharing platforms, and other digital spaces. Our findings revealed the prevalence of male faces and the consistent underrepresentation of women across…
Big data and the fabric of human geography
Digital data tracking what we do, the time and place of our actions, and the chains of interdependence that link those actions together, help us draw a richer picture of human geography as it unfolds in its multiple layers. This commentary briefly illustrates the type of maps and models we can build with that data as well as some important challenges that arise from their complexity and unsolved validity concerns
The Role of Dynamic Networks in Social Capital
L’objectiu d’aquest article és doble: d’una banda, entendre per què importen les xarxes en la creació i manteniment de capital social i, d’una altra, explorar moltes de les assumpcions (no provades) que sorgeixen quan el concepte de capital social s’aplica al camp de la participació política. Tots dos objectius es duen a terme amb l’ajuda d’un experiment de simulació. L’article comença exposant els termes del problema teòric. Segueix amb un resum…
Sociedades artificiales? Una introducción a la simulación social
Estas líneas tienen un doble objetivo: introducir la simulación social como técnica de análisis y ofrecer una panorámica de sus usos y posibilidades. El artículo comienza con un par de ejemplos que ilustran la práctica de la simulación. Sigue con una exposición de los aspectos metodológicos que la definen para, después, señalar las ventajas (e inconvenientes) asociadas al uso de esta técnica de análisis. El propósito de la simulación social, como…
Uncovering gender stereotypes in controversial science discourse
This study examines how gender stereotypes are reflected in discourses around controversial science issues across two platforms, YouTube and TikTok. Utilizing the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects, we developed hypotheses and research questions about how content creators might use gender-related stereotypes to engage audiences. Our analyses of climate change and vaccination videos, considering various modalities such as captions an…
The puzzle of misinformation
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 (Ja…
What counts as a weak tie? A comparison of filtering techniques to analyze co-exposure networks
Worlds of Agents
Agent-based computational models create virtual laboratories in which to formalize and simulate dynamic, multi-level theories of communication. They allow the systematic development of thought experiments, and they improve our understanding of the generative mechanisms that underlie patterns observed in empirical data. Simulation models help explore hypothetical and unprecedented scenarios, serving as powerful hypothesis generators for future the…
Bit by bit
Bit by bit: social research in the digital age." The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 44(4), pp. 267–268
Sociedades artificiales? Una introducción a la simulación social
Estas líneas tienen un doble objetivo: introducir la simulación social como técnica de análisis y ofrecer una panorámica de sus usos y posibilidades. El artículo comienza con un par de ejemplos que ilustran la práctica de la simulación. Sigue con una exposición de los aspectos metodológicos que la definen para, después, señalar las ventajas (e inconvenientes) asociadas al uso de esta técnica de análisis. El propósito de la simulación social, como…
Goldthorpe, J. H. (2000). On Sociology
Ressenya de l'obra de J. H. Goldthorpe apareguda el 2000, On Sociology: Numbers, narratives, and the integration of research and theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Ressenya de l'obra de P. Hedström i R. Swedberg apareguda el 1998, Social Mechanisms: An analytical approach to social theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Role of Dynamic Networks in Social Capital
L’objectiu d’aquest article és doble: d’una banda, entendre per què importen les xarxes en la creació i manteniment de capital social i, d’una altra, explorar moltes de les assumpcions (no provades) que sorgeixen quan el concepte de capital social s’aplica al camp de la participació política. Tots dos objectius es duen a terme amb l’ajuda d’un experiment de simulació. L’article comença exposant els termes del problema teòric. Segueix amb un resum…
Traps on the Web
This paper sheds light on the empirical factors that influence the online competition for an audience. Statistical analyses are used to show that the number of times Websites appear mentioned in traditional news media has a positive and significant impact on the number of users that access those sites. The level of economic resources managed by the organizations publishing the sites also has a positive impact on the size of audience they get. The…
Opening the black box of link formation
Redes y mecanismos de interdependencia. Desarrollos teóricos más allá de los modelos de acción racional
Existe interdependencia cuando las acciones de unos individuos influyen en las decisiones (y posteriores acciones) de otros individuos. Este artículo sostiene que las redes sociales definen la estructura de ese espacio de influencia y desatan una serie de mecanismos de los que la teoría de la elección racional no puede dar cuenta. Las redes sociales abren acceso a las ideas y acciones de otros individuos, y esta exposición determina la satisfacci…
The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment through an Online Network
The recent wave of mobilizations in the Arab world and across Western countries has generated much discussion on how digital media is connected to the diffusion of protests. We examine that connection using data from the surge of mobilizations that took place in Spain in May 2011. We study recruitment patterns in the Twitter network and find evidence of social influence and complex contagion. We identify the network position of early participants…
Emotions, Public Opinion, and U.S. Presidential Approval Rates
This article examines how emotional reactions to political events shape public opinion. We analyze political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online to approximate the public agenda: Online discussions offer a natural approach to the salience of political issues and the means to analyze emotional reactions as political events take place in real time. We measure shifts in emotions of the public over a period that includes 2 U.S. pres…
Assessing the Bias in Communication Networks Sampled from Twitter
The Bridges and Brokers of Global Campaigns in the Context of Social Media
Big data and the fabric of human geography
Digital data tracking what we do, the time and place of our actions, and the chains of interdependence that link those actions together, help us draw a richer picture of human geography as it unfolds in its multiple layers. This commentary briefly illustrates the type of maps and models we can build with that data as well as some important challenges that arise from their complexity and unsolved validity concerns
Politics in the Boardroom
This article explores an important aspect of post-career earnings in public life in Britain: membership of corporate boards by former parliamentarians, ministers and civil servants. It attempts to determine whether this group represents a distinct group within the wider network of interlocking corporate directorships in the UK. Further, it investigates the characteristics of those individuals who obtain appointments as non-executive directors to …
The effects of social interactions on fertility decline in nineteenth-century France
We built an agent-based simulation, incorporating geographic and demographic data from nineteenth-century France, to study the role of social interactions in fertility decisions. The simulation made experimentation possible in a context where other empirical strategies were precluded by a lack of data. We evaluated how different decision rules, with and without interdependent decision-making, caused variations in population growth and fertility l…
Broadcasters and Hidden Influentials in Online Protest Diffusion
This article explores the growth of online mobilizations using data from the indignados (outraged) movement in Spain, which emerged under the influence of the revolution in Egypt and as a precursor to the global Occupy mobilizations. The data track Twitter activity around the protests that took place in May 2011, which led to the formation of camp sites in dozens of cities all over the country and massive daily demonstrations during the week prio…
Assessing the bias in samples of large online networks
Social Protest and New Media
Networked. The new social operating system
Network Effects in the Academic Market
We analyze hiring and placement dynamics across communication PhD programs using data collected in 2014. We assess changes compared to data collected in 2007, and identify factors that underlie the formation of recruitment ties. Our findings challenge prior conclusions that faculty-hiring patterns offer a proxy to the quality of doctoral education. Instead, we find evidence that the recruitment network results from interorganizational dynamics li…
Networked discontent
We analyze the communication network that emerged in social media around an international protest campaign launched in May 2012. Applying insights from network science and the theory of brokerage, we examine the cohesion of the network with community detection methods, and identify the users that spanned structural holes, creating bridges for potential information diffusion. We also analyze actual message exchange to assess how the network was us…
Signals of Public Opinion in Online Communication
This study offers a systematic comparison of automated content analysis tools. The ability of different lexicons to correctly identify affective tone (e.g., positive vs. negative) is assessed in different social media environments. Our comparisons examine the reliability and validity of publicly available, off-the-shelf classifiers. We use datasets from a range of online sources that vary in the diversity and formality of the language used, and w…
Decoding the Social World
How data science and the analysis of networks help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences. Social life is full of paradoxes. Our intentional actions often trigger outcomes that we did not intend or even envision. How do we explain those unintended effects and what can we do to regulate them? In Decoding the Social World, Sandra González-Bailón explains how data science and digital traces help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences…
Digital News Consumption and Copyright Intervention
We analyze patterns of digital news consumption before and after a "link tax" was introduced in Spain. This new legislation imposed a copyright fee for showing snippets of content created by newspapers and resulted in the shutdown of Google News Spain. The Spanish
Response to Webster and Taneja’s Response to “Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News”
We appreciate the chance to respond to Webster and Taneja’s comments to our article (Mukerjee, Majó-Vázquez, & González-Bailón, 2018). We take this as a welcome opportunity to engage in the always-pertinent discussion on why measurement and methods are so important to reach meaningful theoretical conclusions from empirical work. For the sake of transparency, we would like to begin by stating that we sent the manuscript of our article to Webster a…
Rebooting Mass Communication
One of the most important tasks facing media scholars in the twenty-first century is re-examining the relevance of classic mass communication theories in a new information environment. Technological and social transformations have changed the practices of media production, dissemination, and consumption. Recent developments have called into question existing theoretical and methodological approaches to media research. At the same time, these deve…
The contagion effects of repeated activation in social networks
Demonstrations, protests, riots, and shifts in public opinion respond to the coordinating potential of communication networks. Digital technologies have turned interpersonal networks into massive, pervasive structures that constantly pulsate with information. Here, we propose a model that aims to analyze the contagion dynamics that emerge in networks when repeated activation is allowed, that is, when actors can engage recurrently in a collective …
Computer Science (34 obras) · Social Media and Politics (30 obras) · Sociology (28 obras) · Political science (25 obras) · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence (16 obras) · World Wide Web (16 obras) · Business (14 obras) · Complex Network Analysis Techniques (14 obras) · Psychology (14 obras) · Social media (14 obras)