Reports & Analysis

National survey data from the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections shed light on how candidates' campaign strategies impact voter policy recall.

Deactivating multimedia on WhatsApp in Brazil consistently reduced exposure to online misinformation during the pre-election weeks in 2022, but did not impact whether false news was believed, or reduce polarization.

Results from the American Institutional Confidence poll's second wave show that the public's confidence in technology, and tech companies, has markedly decreased over the past five years.

That could affect their votes — and their safety from covid-19.

We find that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm does not lead the vast majority of users down extremist rabbit holes, although it does push users into increasingly narrow ideological ranges of content in what we might call evidence of a (very) mild ideological echo chamber.

Republican candidates have dramatically increased how much they share from unreliable sources in just two years.

Our research finds that after a prominent male media personality targets a female journalist, the prevalence of hateful speech targeting those journalists increases in the immediate aftermath, often taking days to decrease. 

She’s gaining followers and ‘likes’ on other social media platforms, our research finds.

Twitter’s decision to deactivate trending topics in Ethiopia did not reduce the volume or toxicity of tweets about the civil war.

Our research suggests conservative politicians are ‘ratioed’ more often, which may explain why they’re in your timeline.

Those who dislike Democrats and don’t mind white nationalists. That includes plenty of Republicans with college educations.

This explains how social media can both weaken — and strengthen — democracy. Groups opposed to fundamental tenets of liberal democracy also have found their megaphone.

Twitter put warning labels on hundreds of thousands of tweets. Without a hard block, tweets continue to spread — especially tweets by President Trump.

We examined three recent tweets from the president and found that harmful speech on Twitter spiked in their immediate aftermath, but soon returned to baseline.

Now, there are ways to find out. New data shows that machine learning can identify content created by online political influence operations.

A new study shows how states are adapting classic propaganda tactics to social media, and why policymakers must consider how information spreads across platforms to protect voters from these covert campaigns.

In 2020, even small amounts of fake news about the coronavirus can have dire consequences. Unfortunately, it seems quite difficult for people to identify false or misleading news.

In the aftermath of a violent terrorist attack in Sri Lanka, the government shut down access to social media sites, with widespread implications.

In general, people don't tend to share a lot of links to fake news websites, but those that do are more likely to be older and more politically conservative.

We find that IRA-operated Twitter accounts shared less junk news than one might have expected — relying instead on local news sources.

Last week, Taylor Swift endorsed two candidates on Instagram, speaking to a group that could use encouragement: young people, who often fail to vote in midterm elections.

Our research suggests it might be because Trump is delivering the traditional conservative policies that large shares of his voters wanted all along.

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union caused a dramatic surge in Brexit-related tweets. Our analysis of millions of them provides key insights into the success of the “leave” campaign, the surprising dominance of economic issues in the online debate, and the referendum’s increasingly global audience.

The meager voter turnout at Egypt's first parliamentary elections since 2012 has been chalked up to apathy and frustration among Egyptian citizens, but an analysis of 500,000 tweets indicates that citizens’ distrust, exclusion and alienation from Egyptian politics is to blame.

Did John Kasich’s “grown up” strategy work? Could moderate Republicans be warming to Rand Paul? To answer these questions and more, we analyze 426,717 tweets from the fourth Republican debate.