2024 Year in Review: Our Research & Impact

The online environment has shifted radically over the past few years, reshaping the way Americans consume political information. These changes largely defined how the 2024 election played out on our social feeds, with three clear trends emerging.

First, the media landscape continued to fragment. In this election, Americans could get their news in more places than ever before, from TikTok to podcasts to traditional media, often served via individualized algorithms. Second, while social media platforms improved their automated systems, they also cut funding for trust and safety teams, making it easier for rumors and false information to spread. Third, while generative AI didn’t disrupt the election as many feared, its rise may have contributed to a broader mistrust in the information environment.

These changes pose significant challenges for researchers. Many mainstream platforms have restricted or eliminated access to key data sources, while the rapid spread of video, audio, and other content makes it increasingly difficult to understand online dynamics.

At CSMaP, we’re adapting to these shifts by developing innovative ways to study the fractured information environment. In the past year, we published several new papers exploring new areas of the online ecosystem, launched new projects focused on generative AI, and expanded our data collection and research to explore burgeoning platforms.

At the heart of this work lies a powerful combination: cutting-edge data infrastructure and the multi-faceted expertise of our scholars. Our team of 18 full-time researchers and operations staff, along with numerous research assistants, affiliated faculty, and graduate students, continues to push the boundaries of academic study while training the next generation of scholars and experts. 

We are deeply grateful for their dedication and collaboration, and to our community of funders and partners whose support makes our work possible.

See below for an overview of our research and impact in 2024, and read our full annual report for the 2023-24 academic year here.

With gratitude,
Zeve Sanderson, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua A. Tucker

Our Research

CSMaP’s primary focus is the production of rigorous academic research and advancing scientific knowledge in public discourse. In 2024, we published 11 peer-reviewed publications, posted four public working papers, pushed forward on ongoing research, and launched a number of new initiatives. 

Here’s a selection of research from the past year:

• Online Searches to Evaluate Misinformation Can Increase its Perceived Veracity (Nature): Significant attention has been paid to understanding the spread of and belief in misinformation on social media. But much less is known about the impact of search engines, even though searching is a primary way people find information online and is a central component of many recommended media literacy interventions. Surprisingly, in this paper we found that searching online to evaluate the veracity of misinformation can increase the probability of believing it by approximately 20 percent. In addition, this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower quality information. The findings highlight the need for media literacy programs to ground recommendations in empirically tested interventions and search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified by this research. Read coverage of the study in Scientific American, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Nieman Lab, and Tech Policy Press. Read our op-ed about the study at Columbia Journalism Review.

• Understanding Latino Political Engagement and Activity on Social Media: While there’s a growing body of research examining Americans’ online media consumption, much less is known about how Latinos seek out information online and how this affects their political beliefs. Two CSMaP studies help fill this gap, finding that while Latino online political activity is largely similar to whites, variations based on language can play an important role in shaping beliefs. Latinos who rely on Spanish-language social media for news, for example, were 11-20 percentage points more likely to believe false political narratives than those who consume English-language content. The papers, one published in November at PNAS Nexus and the other forthcoming at Political Research Quarterly, are part of CSMaP’s Bilingual Election Monitor project. Read coverage of the research in The Washington Post and the International Journalists’ Network. 

• Digital Town Square? Nextdoor’s Offline Contexts and Online Discourse (Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media): Research and reporting on social media tends to focus on national political discussions happening on large platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But this limits our understanding of the digital media ecosystem as a whole, and its relationship with local communities and civic life in particular. In this paper examining Nextdoor — a popular hyper-local platform with users covering an estimated one-third of U.S. households — we help fill this gap, providing new data illustrating the offline demographics of communities in which Nextdoor neighborhoods exist, the presence of public agencies in those communities, and what topics are most popular.

In addition to our published articles, we also have 45 ongoing research projects. Below, we’ve highlighted a few focus areas:

• Generative AI: We’re currently exploring multiple lines of research related to new generative AI technologies. First, we’re analyzing how real people use AI and to what effect. We launched a new archive project to track how political operatives up and down the ballot use AI in campaigns, are running experiments to understand the effects of labeling images as AI generated, and are studying the impact of using AI chatbots for fact-checking political news. Second, we’re exploring how political biases are embedded in language models themselves — contributing to a relatively underexplored area in the important field of inquiry examining how biases impact model outputs. 

• Emerging Platforms & Beyond the United States: For years, social media was dominated by network-based platforms (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram). But this landscape is rapidly evolving, as users turn to algorithmically driven feeds and private messaging apps. CSMaP is setting up new research infrastructure to explore these online environments, including projects collecting data to understand how politics is talked about on YouTube, WhatsApp, and niche platforms such as Gab, Gettr, and Rumble. At the same time, since most research focuses on social media in the United States, we’re expanding our focus to explore more global contexts. We’re currently collaborating on a 20-country study analyzing how deactivating social media impacts polarization and belief in misinformation, and are running a series of WhatsApp experiments in India, Brazil, and South Africa.

• Propaganda: Studying foreign influence campaigns has been a key part of our research agenda for more than a decade. We have several ongoing projects looking specifically at the role of propaganda online. First, we’re examining how propaganda from authoritarian regimes shows up in LLM training data, which in turn can shape the output for these models, making it more favorable to their cause. Second, we’re developing automated tools to detect and analyze “narrative diffusion” — where content produced by malign actors is reused by other online news sources. Third, plenty of research focuses on algorithmic ranking on U.S.-based social media platforms. We’re studying whether authoritarian regimes, specifically China, use algorithmic ranking to their own advantage, specifically by upranking state sources.

Public Impact

Beyond academia, our team also focused on increasing the public impact of the Center’s work, through policy engagement, events, and more.

Advancing Public Policy & Discourse

Leveraging our research, CSMaP experts added scientific rigor to media coverage and debate on several important topics about digital media, politics, and the 2024 election.

• Campaigning in a Splintering Online Landscape. The 2024 election highlighted the rapid shifts in the online media ecosystem, with both presidential campaigns increasingly moving beyond traditional media and using TikTok, podcasts, and influencers to connect with voters. “It’s not enough to just go to Twitter [now X],” Joshua Tucker told The Economist. “You have to figure out who are the types of voters you’re trying to attract, and where are they in the information ecosystem.” There was also a marked gender divide among young people in 2024, which was amplified by the fragmented and algorithmic nature of online media. While young women were seeing content targeting them on TikTok, for example, young men might see something completely different, or they could be on another platform altogether, Zeve Sanderson told The Christian Science Monitor. Read more commentary in Bloomberg, Newsday, U.S News, and The Wall Street Journal, and watch Tucker on NY1.
  
  

• Generative AI and the Liar’s Dividend. Much of the conversation for the past year centered on how generative AI could lead to a deluge of disinformation and disrupt the 2024 election. In January, CSMaP argued in Brookings that these fears were largely overblown, but that the very existence of AI could further erode trust in the information environment. This is more or less how the election played out. “As people begin to accept the ubiquity of generative AI, it becomes easier to convince yourself that things you don’t want to be true aren’t,” Tucker told AFP. “Politicians know this, so they now have the option to try to disavow true things as having been produced by AI.” Read more commentary in NBC News, The Atlantic, Nature, and the Associated Press, and watch Sanderson on C-SPAN.

• Elon Musk’s Election Influence. As the election made clear, Elon Musk’s control of Twitter has fundamentally reshaped the information landscape. Not only have other platforms followed his lead and cut the trust and safety teams that help maintain a healthy online ecosystem. But Musk also used his massive platform to promote election conspiracies and Donald Trump’s candidacy. This type of influence, which has no real parallel in American history, is “potentially troubling,” Jonathan Nagler told The Hill. “He can change the algorithm on a whim. He can decide to suppress any content that is critical of Trump; he can decide to suppress any content that praises Harris.” Read more commentary at ABC News and AFP.

Academic and Public Events

In 2024, CSMaP directors and experts presented at 75 external events, ranging from academic conferences and workshops to public-facing lectures. At CSMaP, we also ran five events for public audiences, including a half-day convening in Washington, DC focusing on foreign influence campaigns, mis/disinformation, and generative AI, as well virtual discussions on restoring trust in the media environment, the future of search engines, and understanding media habits of Latino communities. Finally, we hosted two academic conferences, which brought together dozens of scholars from a diverse set of disciplines to present research, discuss future opportunities for collaboration, and network.

Data Engineering

Studying the online information landscape is more urgent than ever, but requires social and digital media data that is increasingly harder to come by. CSMaP is working to address these challenges in three main ways:

1. Collecting Data from Platforms. As social networks eliminate or cut back on data access, CSMaP has spun up new data collections to explore how politics is talked about on video-based platforms, podcasts, and messaging apps. 

2. Collecting Data from People. We’ve created new tools to collect donated digital trace data. We’ve collected social media data from survey respondents, created a browser extension to collect web browsing data, and developed an Android-based mobile app, which measures users’ individual app usage and collects granular data about the content they see on social media.

3. Pushing for Data Access. We also continue to advocate for more access to social media data. We filed an amicus brief in two Supreme Court social media cases, joined a letter urging Meta to maintain its CrowdTangle data tool, wrote a white paper exploring how data portability can support data access, and spoke about data access policy at several events.

Our People

By training students and postdocs, CSMaP develops a new generation of scholars and experts to explore some of the biggest questions at the intersection of social media and democracy. In the 2023-24 academic year, our faculty co-directors taught both undergraduate and graduate courses, mentoring more than two dozen undergraduate, masters, and PhD students. 

In 2024, we also welcomed several new team members:

• Lama Mohammed joined as a Tech Policy Fellow. In this role, Lama works to insert the Center’s rigorous research into the policy conversation around social media, technology, and democracy.

• Melina Much joined as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Melina specializes in the intersection of political psychology, survey methodologies, and social media in the American context. In addition, she works on questions of identity politics and statistical methodologies to study intersectionality.

• Kylan Rutherford joined as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Kylan’s research centers on the complex relationship between social media content creators, platform consumers, and the platforms themselves. He is currently working on a project investigating AI’s impact on search.

• Christopher Schwarz joined as a Research Data Scientist. Christopher’s current research interests include the measurement of ideology from text and speech, the spread of information and propaganda on social networks, and statistical learning theory.  

• We also helped recruit two new core faculty members — Jennifer Allen and Christopher Barrie — to NYU to join the Center. Barrie started this fall in the NYU Department of Sociology, and Allen will join the NYU Stern School of Business in Fall 2025.

Finally, we continued to support and collaborate with our alumni network, which now includes more than 40 researchers across academia and industry. We said goodbye to several postdocs, researchers, and PhD students who transitioned to new roles.

• Rajeshwari Majumdar joined Yale University’s Identity & Conflict Lab as a Postdoctoral Associate.

• Aaron Pope began his PhD at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Social Data Science.

• Robert Vidigal started as a Senior Statistician at the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University.

• Hannah Waight joined the University of Oregon Department of Sociology as an Assistant Professor.

• Patrick Y. Wu joined American University’s Department of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor.

In the News

Here’s a selection of additional stories citing our work and researchers in 2024:

• Brookings: The case for open data access to aid tech regulation

• Pluribus News: Lawmakers passed 200+ tech laws in ’24, report finds

• Newsweek: Donald Trump's Big Election Win Is Part of a Major Global Trend

• Good Authority: Who has a policy that would benefit you? More voters say Trump.

• Tech Policy Press: New Studies Shed Light on Misinformation, News Consumption, and Content Moderation

• Associated Press: Meta kills off misinformation tracking tool CrowdTangle despite pleas from researchers, journalists

• The Washington Post: As Meta flees politics, campaigns rely on new tricks to reach voters

• Brave New World podcast: Josh Tucker on the Complex Truth About Social Media

• CNBC: 47% of Americans support a TikTok ban or sale

• CNN: Truth Social made Trump richer and gave him a new megaphone. But it’s struggling as a social media site

• CBC: Warnings of disinformation campaigns as AI-made videos improve

• The Economist: As Facebook turns 20, politics is out; impersonal video feeds are in

• The New York Times: TikTok Quietly Curtails Data Tool Used by Critics

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