Henry Farrell

Facebook and Falsehood

After the election, many people blamed Facebook for spreading partisan — and largely pro-Trump — “fake news,” like Pope Francis’s endorsement of Trump, or Hillary Clinton’s secret life-threatening illness. The company was assailed for prioritizing user “engagement,” meaning that its algorithms probably favored juicy fake news over other kinds of stories. Those algorithms had taken on greater prominence since August, when Facebook fired its small team of human beings who curated its “trending” news section, following conservative complaints that it was biased against the right.

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Other Writing:

Academic Article

The Consequences of the Internet for Politics

March 8, 2012 Annual Review of Political Science 15:35-52.
Political scientists are only now beginning to come to terms with the importance of the Internet to politics. The most promising way to study the Internet is to look at the role that causal mechanisms such as the lowering of transaction costs, homophilous sorting, and preference falsification play in intermediating between specific aspects of the ...
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Academic Article

Piecing Together the Democratic Peace: The CSCE, Norms and the ‘Construction’ of Security in Post-Cold War Europe – With Gregory Flynn

January 9, 1999 International Organization with Gregory Flynn
The end of the Cold War has profoundly transformed Europe’s security situation. Although traditional security issues remain important, the most immediate threats to security since 1989 have originated not from relations between states, but from instability and conflict within states that has threatened to spill over into the interstate arena. States’ efforts to shape and ...
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