About

Homero Gil de Zúñiga is a Distinguished Research Professor in Political Science at the University of Salamanca. He is also a Distinguished Professor of Media Effects & AI in Media Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Additionally, he holds the position of Senior Research Fellow at the Facultad de Comunicación y Letras at Universidad Diego Portales. His research focuses on media effects, political communication, and the influence of artificial intelligence in media studies. Homero Gil de Zúñiga has established a notable academic career with contributions to understanding the impact of media on society and the role of emerging technologies in communication.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Cognitive psychology
• Law
• Epistemology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Efficacy constructs in media use and effects: organizing and appraising the literature

  Annals of the International Communication Association · 2022 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Psychology

  Efficacy constructs play central roles in health, political, computer-mediated, environmental, and mass communication research. In this review, we sought to organize and evaluate the efficacy concepts that have accumulated in media effects scholarship. First, we characterize how media effects researchers have studied efficacy constructs, both as perceptions and as message features. We discuss key conceptual and methodological issues for each efficacy construct. Second, we offer a conceptual matrix that puts prominent efficacy constructs in conversation with one another. We conclude with recommendations for media scholars studying efficacy. Ultimately, our review underscores the need for greater clarity and consistency in the study of efficacy as a predictor, outcome, mechanism, and moderator of media use and exposure.

  PublisherDOI

• The unedited public sphere

  New Media & Society · 2020 · 140 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Epistemology

  The health of democratic public spheres is challenged by the circulation of falsehoods. These epistemic problems are connected to social media and they raise a classic problem of how to understand the role of technology in political developments. We discuss three sets of technological affordances of social media that facilitate the spread of false beliefs: obscuring the provenance of information, facilitating deception about authorship, and providing for manipulation of social signals. We argue that these do not make social media a “cause” of problems with falsehoods, but explanations of epistemic problems should account for social media to understand the timing and widespread occurrence of epistemic problems. We argue that “the marketplace of ideas” cannot be adequate as a remedy for these problems, which require epistemic editing by the press.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Manuel Goyanes

  Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

  72 shared

• Alberto Ardèvol‐Abreu

  51 shared

• Bruce Bimber

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  47 shared

• James H. Liu

  38 shared

• Patrick Emmenegger

  University of St. Gallen

  36 shared

• Jozef Bátora

  Comenius University Bratislava

  36 shared

• Arthur Benz

  36 shared

• Feifei Bu

  Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

  36 shared