Communication Faculty Receive 2 Facebook Research Awards

Facebook recently awarded two grants to the Department of Communication researchers in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science to study misinformation and polarization on social media.

The project titles and researchers are:

• “A media literacy intervention to debunk out-of-context visual posts,” by Professor
  Cuihua "Cindy" Shen, Assistant Professor Jingwen Zhang and doctoral student Sijia Qian.
• “Over-time effects of indirect exposure to misinformation,” by Professor Magdalena Wojcieszak who will work with colleagues at American University in Washington, D.C., Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University, the University of Warsaw and the University of Zurich. Wojcieszak previously received a 2019 Facebook grant for a multinational study on online news and polarization.

The UC Davis projects were among 19 winning proposals announced Sept. 14 by Facebook, covering research in 21 countries. UC Davis was the only institution to receive more than one award.

Facebook received 446 proposals from 288 universities and institutes around the world for its third round of Foundational Integrity Research funding totaling $1 million.

“Our goal for these awards is to support the growth of scientific knowledge in these spaces and to contribute to a shared understanding across the broader scientific community and technology industry on how social technology companies can better address social issues on their platforms,” the company said in its request for proposals in June.

— Kathleen Holder, content strategist in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science