Foreign Influence Campaigns

Deceptive online networks are coordinated efforts that use identity deception to pursue strategic political or financial goals. During the US 2020 elections, these networks reached at least 37 million Facebook and 3 million Instagram users, representing 15% and 2% of the platforms’ active US adult users, respectively. Only 3 networks out of 49—1 network with explicitly political aims and 2 that appeared to use politics as a lure for profit—were responsible for over 70% of users reached. Notably, accounts unaffiliated with the networks played an important role in facilitating this reach by resharing content the three networks produced. Deceptive networks, regardless of whether their goals were political or financial, reached users who were older, more conservative, more frequently exposed to content from untrustworthy sources, and spent more time on Facebook.

What happens to information environments when democracies ban social media platforms? While a large literature examines information control under authoritarianism, democratic governments have increasingly intervened in major online platforms. We study a prominent case: Brazil’s 2024 national ban on the social media platform X. Using an event-study design, we estimate the causal effects of the ban and examine how partisan identity shaped responses. Drawing on a large sample of politically engaged users and ideal-point estimates of ideology, we find strong partisan asymmetries. Conservative users not aligned with the government were more likely to circumvent the ban, and right-leaning news domains became markedly more prevalent on the platform. We describe this dynamic as a “sorting ratchet”: the ban segmented the digital public sphere along partisan lines, with effects that persisted even after restrictions were lifted. Platform bans in democratic settings may therefore deepen polarization and durably reshape information environments