Online Information Environment

Starting in January 2023, Louisiana and more than 20 other states passed laws requiring age verification for websites with substantial adult content. Using Google Trends data and a synthetic control design, we examine how these laws affect the public’s digital behavior across four dimensions: searches for compliant websites, non-compliant websites, VPNs, and adult content. Three months after the laws were passed, results show a 51% decrease in searches for the main compliant platform, while searches increased for both non-compliant platform (48.1%) and VPN services (23.6%). Through multiverse analyses, we demonstrate the robustness of these findings to numerous model specifications. Our findings reveal that while regulations reduce traffic to compliant sites and likely decrease overall consumption, users adapt by shifting to providers without verification requirements. This approach provides valuable insights for policymakers around the world considering similar legislative measures of digital content regulation. Our methodology also offers a framework for real-time policy evaluation in contexts with staggered implementation.

More than half of the world’s population uses social media. There is widespread debate among the public, politicians, and academics about social media’s impact on important outcomes, such as intergroup conflict and well-being. However, most prior research on the impact of social media relies on samples from the United States and Western Europe, despite emerging evidence suggesting that the impact of social media is likely to differ across the globe. Building on the results of pilot experiments from three countries (n = 894), we plan to conduct a global field experiment to measure the causal impact of reducing social media usage for two weeks across 23 countries (projected n > 8,000). We will then test how social media reduction influences four main outcomes: news knowledge, exposure to online hostility, intergroup attitudes, and well-being. We will also explore how the effects of social media reduction vary across world regions, focusing on three theoretically-informed country-level moderators: levels of income, inequality, and democracy. This large-scale, high-powered field experiment, and the global dataset resulting from it, will offer rare causal evidence to inform ongoing debates about the impact of social media and how it varies around the world.