Dr. Roee Levy, a senior BMI fellow, just won the prestigious ERC grant.

Dr. Levy is an economist who studies the impact of social media, news consumption, and political outcomes. In the research for which he received the grant, Levy studies the slant of news (its political leading). Previous studies have measured the slant of news outlets (for example, the New York Times site versus Fox News). However, today individuals no longer consume news from one or two outlets but are exposed to many articles from various sources through social media. Levy and his research partners will fine-tune a large language model to estimate the slant of millions of articles and use this data to estimate the extent to which people are exposed to and consume like-minded news. The research will examine whether people reside in online echo chambers and also study what influences those echo chambers: the consumers’ choice to avoid content they disagree with, social media algorithms, or the tendency of outlets to produce more biased content.