John Wihbey

“The attorney general herself made comments about limiting hate speech online that have actually drawn a backlash from other conservatives, but other conservatives are fighting with each other about this,” John Wihbey, director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab at Northeastern University, told Al Jazeera.

According to Northeastern University professor John Wihbey, these trends “will accelerate, and pretty soon we will have an entirely different web.” The dominance of tech giants like Google and Meta had already slashed online media advertising revenue, forcing publishers to pivot toward paid subscriptions.

“Then you dry up advertising for the whole ecosystem,” said John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation at Northeastern University. “Advertising boycotts and pressure on advertisers by civic groups — whether that be researchers, watchdogs, advocates, trade associations, whoever — are just completely constitutionally protected speech that are core to what the country stands […]

“This move by Meta is definitely part of a larger trend, with fact-checking undergoing some headwinds globally,” John P Wihbey, associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, told Al Jazeera.

“Russia tried to create chaos, as we expected, and the efforts intensified at the end of the election cycle. We don’t know how successful these attempts were until a more thorough analysis of the phenomenon,” John P. Wihbey told DW , associate professor at Northeastern University.

We won’t know how successful it was until more forensic work is done,” John P. Wihbey, associate professor at Northeastern University in Boston and a founder of Northeastern’s Internet Democracy Initiative, told DW. 

The effect is profound. A new study by Northeastern University researcher John Wihbey shows that Democratic voters consumed more news media than Republicans, but Republicans often turned to “friends and family” for facts instead.