Seminar: Jennifer Allen on the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical Content on Facebook

The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT is honored to welcome Dr. Jennifer Allen for a seminar on the impact of misleading headlines and vaccine hesitancy.

The talk will focus on recent work published in Science quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook. In the paper, Allen and her co-auther find that vaccine-skeptical headlines – mainly from mainstream, reputable outlets — had nearly 50X the impact on vaccine hesitancy as outright false claims. While outright false stories gained relatively little traction, coverage of rare deaths following vaccination were among the most viewed headlines on Facebook. Their work emphasizes the need to scrutinize factually accurate but potentially misleading content in addition to outright falsehoods.

Jennifer Allen is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She will start as an Assistant Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics at NYU Stern School of Business in Fall 2025.

Please contact Learning and Events Coordinator Claire Sadar if you are interested in attending.