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Linking survey and social media data to study misinformation and political polarization

The medialab and Civica are welcoming Elisa Omodei to present her work about the determinants of willingness to donate data from social media platforms

Event, Research Seminar

Salle J208, 13 rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris

Abstract

"Social media data donation through data download packages (DDPs) is a promising new way of collecting individual- level digital trace data with informed consent. When linked with survey data, data donation is an even more promising tool that helps answer novel research questions. Nevertheless, given the novelty of this approach, little is known about whether and how people would share their data with researchers, although this could seriously affect selection bias and thus, the outer validity of the results. In this talk, I will first present the results of a preliminary study that allowed us to identify the determinants of willingness to donate data from social media platforms in Hungary and the US. I will then give an overview of how we are currently using the survey and donated data to study misinformation consumption and political polarization in the Hungarian internet-user population."

Biography

Elisa Omodei is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Network and Data Science at the Central European University. She holds a BSc and a MSc in Physics from the University of Padua and Bologna, respectively, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics for the Social Sciences from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) of Paris. She carried out her postdoctoral training at the Rovira and Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain. She then spent over four years at the United Nations, first at UNICEF's Office of Innovation in New York and then at the UN World Food Programme in Rome. In her research, she explores how complexity and data science can help us address the needs of the most vulnerable populations and monitor the UN Sustainable Development Goals. She also served as Vice-President Secretary of the Complex Systems Society from 2018 to 2021.