Galen Stocking is a Senior Computational Social Scientist on the Journalism team at the Pew Research Center, where he uses large datasets and advanced statistical and computational techniques to understand the public’s news consumption. Prior to that, Galen was a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Political Science, with his dissertation addressing the media’s agenda setting power in the digital environment.
In recent years, several new options have emerged in the social media universe, many of which explicitly present themselves as alternatives to more established social media platforms. Free speech ideals and heated political themes prevail on these sites, which draw praise from their users and skepticism from other Americans.
A new study of posts on popular public Facebook pages about the early days of the Biden administration finds that the focus of these posts, as well as the assessments of the new president, differed widely by the ideological orientation of the pages.
