Facebook

Academic Research

  • Working Paper

    Reaching Across the Political Aisle: Overcoming Challenges in Using Social Media for Recruiting Politically Diverse Respondents

    Working Paper, August 2024

    View Article View abstract

    A challenge for public opinion surveys is achieving representativeness of respondents across demographic groups. We test the extent to which ideological alignment with a survey’s sponsor shapes differential partisan response and users’ choice of whether to participate in a research study on Facebook. While the use of Facebook advertisements for recruitment has increased in recent years and offers potential benefits, it can yield difficulties in recruiting politically representative samples. We recruit respondents for a short survey through two otherwise identical advertisements associated with either New York University (from a liberal state) or the University of Mississippi (from a conservative state). Contrary to our expectations, we don’t find an asymmetry in completion rates between self-reported Democrats and Republicans based on the survey sponsor. Nor do we find statistically significant differences in attitudes of respondents across the two survey sponsors when we control for observables.

    Date Posted

    Aug 13, 2024

  • Journal Article

    The Effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 Election: A Deactivation Experiment

    • Hunt Alcott, 
    • Matthew Gentzkow, 
    • Winter Mason, 
    • Arjun Wilkins, 
    • Pablo Barberá
    • Taylor Brown, 
    • Juan Carlos Cisneros, 
    • Adriana Crespo-Tenorio, 
    • Drew Dimmery, 
    • Deen Freelon, 
    • Sandra González-Bailón
    • Andrew M. Guess
    • Young Mie Kim, 
    • David Lazer, 
    • Neil Malhotra, 
    • Devra Moehler, 
    • Sameer Nair-Desai, 
    • Houda Nait El Barj, 
    • Brendan Nyhan, 
    • Ana Carolina Paixao de Queiroz, 
    • Jennifer Pan, 
    • Jaime Settle, 
    • Emily Thorson, 
    • Rebekah Tromble, 
    • Carlos Velasco Rivera, 
    • Benjamin Wittenbrink, 
    • Magdalena Wojcieszak
    • Saam Zahedian, 
    • Annie Franco, 
    • Chad Kiewiet De Jong, 
    • Natalie Jomini Stroud, 
    • Joshua A. Tucker

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024

    View Article View abstract

    We study the effect of Facebook and Instagram access on political beliefs, attitudes, and behavior by randomizing a subset of 19,857 Facebook users and 15,585 Instagram users to deactivate their accounts for 6 wk before the 2020 U.S. election. We report four key findings. First, both Facebook and Instagram deactivation reduced an index of political participation (driven mainly by reduced participation online). Second, Facebook deactivation had no significant effect on an index of knowledge, but secondary analyses suggest that it reduced knowledge of general news while possibly also decreasing belief in misinformation circulating online. Third, Facebook deactivation may have reduced self-reported net votes for Trump, though this effect does not meet our preregistered significance threshold. Finally, the effects of both Facebook and Instagram deactivation on affective and issue polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, candidate favorability, and voter turnout were all precisely estimated and close to zero.

View All Related Research

Reports & Analysis

View All Related Reports & Analysis

News & Commentary

View All Related News