Ceren Budak

The role that markets play in the disinformation ecosystem, despite being large, is commonly ignored in academia. Ceren Budak plans to use her time at CASBS focused on this problem. Her past work has quantified the degree to which different retailers and ad firms support misinformation producers through ad placements. During her fellowship, she plans to expand these quantification efforts by tracking other forms of advertisements across multiple channels/platforms and utilize these audit studies to develop effective solutions for curbing disinformation through demonetization. 

Budak is an associate professor at the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She utilizes network science, machine learning, and crowdsourcing methods and draws from scientific knowledge across multiple social science communities to contribute computational methods to the field of political communication. Her recent scholarship is focused on topics related to news production and consumption, election campaigns, and online social movements.