Academic Research

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.

In most advanced democracies, concerns about the spread of misinformation are typically associated with feed-based social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These platforms also account for the vast majority of research on the topic. However, in most of the world, particularly in Global South countries, misinformation often reaches citizens through social media messaging apps, particularly WhatsApp. To fill the resulting gap in the literature, we conducted a multimedia deactivation experiment to test the impact of reducing exposure to potential sources of misinformation on WhatsApp during the weeks leading up to the 2022 Presidential election in Brazil. We find that this intervention significantly reduced participants’ recall of false rumors circulating widely during the election. However, consistent with theories of mass media minimal effects, a short-term change in the information environment did not lead to significant changes in belief accuracy, political polarization, or well-being.