Political Polarization
As the U.S. becomes increasingly politically polarized, many blame social media platforms for incentivizing outrage and escalating division. Our experts explore ways to quantify polarization and examine its impact on society.
Academic Research
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Book
Online Data and the Insurrection
Media and January 6th, 2024
Online data is key to understanding the leadup to the January 6 insurrection, including how and why election fraud conspiracies spread online, how conspiracy groups organized online to participate in the insurrection, and other factors of online life that led to the insurrection. However, there are significant challenges in accessing data for this research. First, platforms restrict which researchers get access to data, as well as what researchers can do with the data they access. Second, this data is ephemeral; that is, once users or the platform remove the data, researchers can no longer access it. These factors affect what research questions can ever be asked and answered.
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Journal Article
Replicating the Effects of Facebook Deactivation in an Ethnically Polarized Setting
Research & Politics, 2023
The question of how social media usage impacts societal polarization continues to generate great interest among both the research community and broader public. Nevertheless, there are still very few rigorous empirical studies of the causal impact of social media usage on polarization. To explore this question, we replicate the only published study to date that tests the effects of social media cessation on interethnic attitudes (Asimovic et al., 2021). In a study situated in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the authors found that deactivating from Facebook for a week around genocide commemoration in Bosnia and Herzegovina had a negative effect on users’ attitudes toward ethnic outgroups, with the negative effect driven by users with more ethnically homogenous offline networks. Does this finding extend to other settings? In a pre-registered replication study, we implement the same research design in a different ethnically polarized setting: Cyprus. We are not able to replicate the main effect found in Asimovic et al. (2021): in Cyprus, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no effect. We do, however, find a significant interaction between the heterogeneity of users’ offline networks and the deactivation treatment within our 2021 subsample, consistent with the pattern from Bosnia and Herzegovina. We also find support for recent findings (Allcott et al., 2020; Asimovic et al., 2021) that Facebook deactivation leads to a reduction in anxiety levels and suggestive evidence of a reduction in knowledge of current news, though the latter is again limited to our 2021 subsample.
Reports & Analysis
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Analysis
Which Republicans Are Most Likely to Think the Election Was Stolen?
Those who dislike Democrats and don’t mind white nationalists. That includes plenty of Republicans with college educations.
January 19, 2021
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Analysis
What’s the Strategy of Russia’s Internet Trolls? We Analyzed Their Tweets to Find Out.
We find that IRA-operated Twitter accounts shared less junk news than one might have expected — relying instead on local news sources.
November 19, 2018
News & Commentary
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News
2023 Year in Review: Our Research & Impact
A look at our top articles, events, and more from the past year.
December 18, 2023
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Policy
CSMaP Files Amicus Brief in Supreme Court Social Media Cases
When the Supreme Court considers the Florida and Texas laws, it should craft rulings that leave ample room for legislative and regulatory efforts to mandate transparency and access to data.
December 7, 2023