Paper by MSU PLS professor cited by President Biden

March 21, 2023 - Karessa Weir

A paper in the Journal of Public Policy by Associate Professor Nazita Lajevardi was cited in President Joe Biden’s 2023 Economic Report.

Dr. Lajevardi co-authored the article "Hate, amplified? Social media news consumption and support for anti-Muslim policies " with Drs. Kassra AR Oskooii (University of Deleware) and Hannah Walker (University of Texas-Austin). They received an email on Tuesday from Cecilia Elena Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Executive Office of the President.

"I am writing as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, a component of the Executive Office of the President in the Biden-Harris Administration. We recently released the 2023 Economic Report of the President, together with the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers.

"Your work is cited in this volume. I am writing to thank you for helping us shape this report. The Report begins with a reflection by President Biden about the Administration’s economic accomplishments, and opportunities and challenges ahead. Nine chapters then follow" said the letter from Rouse.

Dr. Lajevardi is cited on page 217 in a section titled "The Societal Implications of Digital Markets."

"Racism, sexism, and discrimination also exist online, and in some cases, this can escalate to more hateful content and conduct. In an experiment conducted on eBay, Ayres, Banaji, and Jolls (2015) found evidence of racial discrimination, with Black sellers making less than white sellers, despite selling the same product: baseball cards. Similar results were found by Doleac and Stein (2013). Expanded broadband Internet access has also been associated with a rise in hate crimes (Chan, Ghose, and Seamans 2016), as has reliance on social media and support for Islamophobic policies (Lajevardi, Oskooii, and Walker 2022). One particularly salient example involved Microsoft, which launched an artificial-intelligence-powered Twitter bot (automated online social media accounts are known as “bots”) named “Tay” in 2016 that was intended to learn as it interacted with users. The bot lasted one day before it was taken down for tweeting racist, misogynistic, and transphobic content (Victor 2016). A similar fate befell a South Korean chatbot after it began using homophobic slurs (McCurry 2021)."

The full report can be found at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ERP-2023.pdf