Sexual harassment claims considered more credible if made by 'prototypical' women
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A new UW-led study reveals people's perceptions that sexual harassment primarily affects young, feminine and conventionally attractive women. Women who fall outside that prototype not only are perceived as unharmed by harassment, but also have a harder time convincing others that they have been harassed.
A dramatic decline in pollinating insects threatens the global food supply, yet it's getting "vanishingly low levels of attention" in mainstream news, even compared to coverage of climate change. That's the conclusion of a study titled "No buzz for bees," published this week in a special issue of PNAS. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers analyzed nearly 25 million news items from six prominent U.S. and global news sources using the university's massive Global News Index.
The model will enhance the robustness of networks to adversarial attacks and will benefit both practitioners and organizations.
Could the merging of humor and news actually help inform the public? New research from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania and the School of Communication at Ohio State University found that young people were more likely to remember information about politics and government policy when it was conveyed in a humorous rather than non-humorous manner. They were also more willing to share the information online.
Why do people fiddle with their smartphones when they're with other people? Researchers have identified three main reasons.
A new SFU-led study finds that about half of media stories in early 2020 featuring COVID-19 "preprint" research--research that has not yet been peer-reviewed--accurately framed the studies as being preprints or unverified research.
Social media has a history of being a popular place for sexual health discussions, and the HPV vaccine is one of the most discussed vaccines on the internet. Monique Luisi, an assistant professor in the University of Missouri School of Journalism, suggests some HPV vaccine-related Facebook posts can help facilitate beliefs that the HPV vaccine is dangerous to one's health. She believes it could inform officials for the ongoing COVID-19 vaccine roll out and distribution.
The first known study to describe physician experiences with online harassment found one in four physicians report being personally attacked on social media, including being barraged by negative reviews, receiving coordinated harassment and threats at work, and having their personal information shared publicly. Some attacks were particularly disturbing, such as threats of rape and death. Although the data were collected before the COVID-19 outbreak, the findings highlight the intensity of online harassment before the pandemic, which has only intensified since the spring.
The rapid spread of scientific misinformation on social media platforms throughout the COVID-19 pandemic is discussed in this Viewpoint, which also proposes strategies to counteract its adverse effects including surveillance of digital data and partnering with trusted messengers to engage the public and advance scientifically sound public health measures.
Denmark was one of the first countries to enforce lockdown to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and subsequent gradual reopening, whereas Sweden has had few restrictions, largely limited to public recommendations. Researchers assessed public mobility and social media attention associated with COVID-19 spread and societal interventions from February to June in Denmark and Sweden.