Op-Eds2020-05-07T15:09:07+00:00

Op-eds

Washington Post

Jan Zilinsky, Jonathan Nagler and Joshua Tucker

January 19, 2021

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Which Republicans are most likely to think the election was stolen? Those who dislike Democrats and don’t mind white nationalists.

It’s not uncommon for a defeated party to find a narrative to explain a loss, but what is unusual is for a candidate to claim they didn’t lose at all. Following the 2020 presidential election, CSMaP researchers fielded a study, which found that over 70 percent of Republicans agreed with former President Trump’s claim that he won more votes than President Biden. The researchers explain the study and the different predictors of belief.

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trump supporters wearing mask and carrying flags protesting at DC after the presidential election was called
2021|Categories: Op-ed|Tags: |

Washington Post

Andrew Hamilton Joshua Tucker, Yannis TheoCharis, Maragret E. Roberts, and Pablo Barberá

January 7, 2021

This explains how social media can both weaken — and strengthen — democracy

Social media itself is neither inherently democratic, nor nondemocratic. Instead, it lives in another space where political actors content for power. This explains how social media can bolster and weaken our democracy. CSMaP researchers discuss how social media in the hands of people opposed to liberal tenets can lead to events like the Capital Riot of January 6.

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2021|Categories: Op-ed|Tags: , |

Washington Post

Megan A. Brown, Zeve Sanderson, Jonathan Nagler, Richard Bonneau and Joshua Tucker

December 9, 2020

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Twitter put warning labels on hundreds of thousands of tweets. Our research examined which worked best.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate about misinformation during the election. Dorsey was questioned about Twitter’s decision to label Trump’s tweets as “false or misleading”, which some accused as a bias against conservatives and others argued allowed the misinformation to spread. At CSMaP, we investigated these efforts to stop misinformation and found that even labeled tweets continued to spread and tweets from Trump actually spread more.

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Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg during their Senate hearing
2020|Categories: Op-ed|Tags: , , , |

Lawfare

Joshua A. Tucker

October 27, 2020

The Limited Room for Russian Troll Influence in 2016

In this essay for Lawfare, our co-director, Joshua Tucker, argues that the impact of foreign electoral interference on social media is overblown.

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2020|Categories: Op-ed|Tags: , , , |

Brookings

Megan Brown and Zeve Sanderson

October 22, 2020

How Trump impacts harmful Twitter speech: A case study in three tweets

The use of offensive speech on the internet leading to the rise of political events on the ground is a dynamic that is familiar to researchers of online speech. But what about Trump’s online speech? At CSMaP, we examined three tweets from Trump and tracked whether they had an impact on the quality of other online speech and whether the effect was negative. Our findings highlight the challenges that platforms face leading up to, and in the aftermath of the election.

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Trump speaking at a rally on a cloudy day
2020|Categories: Op-ed|Tags: , |

Washington Post 

Meysam Alizadeh, Cody Buntain, Jacob N. Shapiro and Joshua Tucker

October 13, 2020

Are influence campaigns trolling your social media feeds?

Influence campaigns have long been infiltrating social media and new research is helping citizens know in real time if disinformation campaigns are trolling their social media feed.

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various cables coming out of a computer mainframe
2020|Categories: Op-ed|Tags: , |

Washington Post

Zeve Sanderson, Kevin Aslett, Will Godel, Nathaniel Persily, Jonathan Nagler, Richard Bonneau and Joshua Tucker 

April 7, 2020

It’s not easy for ordinary citizens to identify fake news

How good are people at sifting out fake news? In a collaboration between the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics and the Stanford Cyber Policy Center (supported by the Hewlett Foundation), we’ve been investigating whether ordinary individuals…

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2020|Categories: Media, Op-ed|

Washington Post

Joshua Tucker

April 23, 2019

Shut down social media if you don’t like terrorism?

In the aftermath of Sunday’s violent terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka, the Sri Lankan government shut down access to social media sites as the investigation into the bombings proceeded. News reports listed Facebook — including its WhatsApp and Instagram platforms — YouTube, Snapchat and Viber…

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2019|Categories: Op-ed|Tags: , |