News and Impact
Directions from June 2026
GEIS closed out the semester with new preprints, new courses, and a successful community event. New Preprints on Persuasion and Polarization Do Won Kim and Giovanni Ciampaglia posted a new preprint, “Challenging Partisan Expectations Reduces Political Polarization,” finding that political conversations reduce polarization most when they challenge what people expect about partisan boundaries. Krystal Gong,…
VIOLETS Chatbot Sparks Conversations at Maryland Day 2026
GEIS brought its VIOLETS: Voter Information from Official Local Election Trusted Sources AI chatbot to Maryland Day on April 25, inviting visitors to ask an AI chatbot about Maryland elections. The demo, led by Giovanni Ciampaglia, Cody Buntain, and PhD student Do Won Kim, drew a strong turnout and sparked conversations about how conversational AI…
Directions from May 2026
May kept GEIS in full conference-prep mode while the group also took its research public at Maryland Day. Conference Season Ramps Up Members are heading into a busy stretch of abstract deadlines and presentations. The group submitted several abstracts to IC2S2: Cody Buntain and a team of students and a postdoc have two accepted abstracts,…
New Findings on Stated vs Revealed Preferences in Social Media
Do Won Kim, a PhD student under GEIS researchers Giovanni Ciampaglia and Cody Buntain, have a new paper accepted: “Understanding the Gap Between Stated and Revealed Preferences in Social Media News Feeds”. Social media algorithms learn from users’ past behavior, but what people engage with often doesn’t match what they actually value. This study demonstrates…
GEIS Affiliate Named Non-Resident Fellow at Cornell’s Center on Global Democracy
Nejla Asimovic, Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science, at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University, has been named a non-resident fellow at Cornell University’s Center on Global Democracy!
GEIS Affiliates Awarded Best Paper in Political Behavior at MPSA
GEIS-affiliated professors Rajeshwari Majumdar and Tiago Ventura, along with co-authors Shelley Liu, Carolina A. Torreblanca, and Joshua A. Tucker, received the Best Paper in Political Behavior Award at the Midwest Political Science Association for their study, Reducing Social Media Usage During Elections: Evidence from a Multi-Country WhatsApp Deactivation Experiment. OSF Link: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/zrsqw_v1 This paper studies…
Directions from March 2026
GEIS’s last meeting highlighted several key directions: New Work on Platform Governance Ongoing research, including a new preprint on the partisan effects of social media bans led by Tiago Ventura, continues to explore how platform-level interventions influence political attitudes and polarization. Narratives Around AI Disinformation Members emphasized a growing priority, going beyond identifying AI-generated misinformation…
GEIS Prepares Annual Impact Report Reviewing a Highly Productive First Year
GEIS is compiling its first annual impact report, documenting research, collaborations, community partnerships, and metrics.
The ZeitGEIS of Election and Information Security: Insight, Trust, and Resilience from 2025 to 2026
Join members of the GEIS research group as we reflect on an impactful first year advancing the integrity and security of election and online information systems. This two-hour event will highlight key 2025 achievements—from research breakthroughs to community collaborations—and unveil GEIS’s 2026 initiatives aimed at supporting local and state partners in preparation for the midterm…
GEIS Members Featured Across National Media Discussing AI, Elections, and Content Moderation
GEIS continues to inform international conversations on AI governance and democratic resilience.
