The Center for Social Media and Politics – We are committed to the scientific research of how social media impacts politics.

Social media has changed the way politics is practiced and the way it is studied by social scientists and journalists, introducing a number of technical obstacles as well as scientific opportunities. At CSMaP, we support lab-based, interdisciplinary research that examines a broad range of questions at the intersection of social media and politics.

New York University | New York City, NY

WHAT WE STUDY

The Center for Social Media and Politics is home to faculty, post-docs, students, and staff committed to understanding the relationship between social media and politics in our new digital age. The Center houses the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab, which fosters research in three core areas: (i) how social media impacts politics, with particular emphasis on the flow of information (and misinformation) on social media; (ii) innovative ways to use social media data to study politics; and (iii) developing open-source tools that facilitate the use of social media data for the study of politics.

Media Exposure and Impact

Information Flow Across Platforms

Disinformation and Digital Literacy

Bot Identification and Analysis

Sentiment and Stance Analysis

The 2020 U.S. Elections

Measuring Public Opinion

The Spread of Information

FEATURED WORK

Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook

Journal Article

We examine the individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. To do so, we uniquely link an original survey with respondents’ sharing activity as recorded in Facebook profile data. First and foremost, we find that sharing this content was a relatively rare activity. Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains than liberals or moderates. We also find a strong age effect: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.

The Internet Research Agency’s Use of Local and Fake News in the 2016 US Presidential Campaign

Data Report

We analyzed data shared publicly by Twitter on the activity of the Kremlin-linked “Internet Research Agency” (IRA) to examine whether IRA-operated Twitter accounts spread polarizing or misleading content on social media platforms in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Measuring the prevalence of online hate speech, with an application to the 2016 U.S. election

Working Paper

We offer a new approach to measuring the real-time prevalence of online hate, using both context specific data and data produced by a large random sample of users; employing multiple methods of text classification; and measuring not only the volume, but also the proportion, and number of unique users producing it.

VIEW ALL ACADEMIC ARTICLES

VIEW ALL DATA REPORTS

VIEW ALL OP-EDS / BLOG POSTS

A COMMITMENT TO OPEN SCIENCE

As part of our project to construct comprehensive data sets and to empirically test hypotheses related to social media and politics, we have developed a suite of open-source tools and modeling processes.

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Downloads of our open source software

You can explore and download our data collection and analysis tools here.

OPEN SOURCE TOOLS

smappdragon

smappdragon is a low level data parser designed for parsing twitter data.

pysmap

pysmapp is a high-level JSON-parser that extends smapdragon for non-coders

urlExpander

urlExpander is a Python module to quickly and thoroughly expand shortened urls

youtube-data-api

youtube-data-api is a Python client to download public YouTube data about channels, videos, and searches

streamR package

streamR is a package written by Pablo Barbera and published on CRAN that provides access to Twitter’s Streaming API via the R language. The package allows for easy creation of filter, sample and user streams: this involves tooling for creation of an OAuth token, opening a filter connection with twitter that returns real time public statuses based on given terms or parameters, for a given user or users, or a random sample of these statuses (up to 1% of all tweets at any given time, which is the Twitter limit) and functions for reading and parsing the results into a data frame.

Rfacebook package

The Rfacebook package was written by Pablo Barbera, Michael Piccirilli, Andrew Geisler, and Wouter van Attendeldt and published on CRAN. It allows for easy interaction with the Facebook via R and provides many different functions for interacting with the API to obtain information about users, posts and to collect public status updates the mention specific keywords. Some examples of the tooling provided include: functions to create an OAuth token, get posts, likes, reactions, shares, users, getting page insights for a specific time period, getting an adjacency matrix representing a users mutual friend network, general facebook search, facebook group search. The package is built out and includes unit testing.

instaR

instaR package provides a series of functions that allow R users to access Instagram’s API to search for media that mention specific hashtags or were sent from a certain location, to download recent pictures from a given users, and to capture lists of followers.

Local News Dataset

A directory of local news outlets by state and medium. Includes social media accounts for local news outlets.

mediascores

R-package to estimate media scores from url sharing data

WHO WE ARE

Drawing from politics, data science, biology, and psychology, CSMaP is a diverse community of scholars studying the intersection of social media and politics.

Meet our full team

RICHARD BONNEAU

Faculty Director

MEGAN BROWN

Data/Software Engineer

JENNIFER LARSON

Research Associate

ZEVE SANDERSON

Executive Director

IN THE NEWS

CSMaP scholars offer expert commentary on today’s most important issues related to social media and politics.

Bringing Science to Bear on Social Media

Knight Foundation

Andrew Hamilton

On July 22, 2019, Knight made a $50 million investment to develop a new field of research around technology’s impact on democracy, including a $5 million investment in New York University (NYU) to create the Center for Social Media and Politics…

People Over 65 Share More Fake News Stories on Facebook than Any Other Group, Study Says

CNN

Eric Levenson

First the good news: The vast majority of Facebook users did not share any fake news stories during the 2016 election. But some people did…

Older People Shared Fake News on Facebook More Than Others in 2016 Race, Study Says

The New York Times

Niraj Chokshi

When it came to sharing fake news on Facebook during the 2016 election, no age group was quite as active as those aged 65 and older, according to a new study…

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