Research
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Journal Article
What’s Not to Like? Facebook Page Likes Reveal Limited Polarization in Lifestyle Preferences
Political Communication, 2021
Increasing levels of political animosity in the United States invite speculation about whether polarization extends to aspects of daily life. However, empirical study about the relationship between political ideologies and lifestyle choices is limited by a lack of comprehensive data. In this research, we combine survey and Facebook Page “likes” data from more than 1,200 respondents to investigate the extent of polarization in lifestyle domains. Our results indicate that polarization is present in page categories that are somewhat related to politics – such as opinion leaders, partisan news sources, and topics related to identity and religion – but, perhaps surprisingly, it is mostly not evident in other domains, including sports, food, and music. On the individual level, we find that people who are higher in political news interest and have stronger ideological predispositions have a greater tendency to “like” ideologically homogeneous pages across categories. Our evidence, drawn from rare digital trace data covering more than 5,000 pages, adds nuance to the narrative of widespread polarization across lifestyle sectors and it suggests domains in which cross-cutting preferences are still observed in American life.
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Journal Article
Twitter Flagged Donald Trump’s Tweets with Election Misinformation: They Continued to Spread Both On and Off the Platform
Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review, 2021
We analyze the spread of Donald Trump’s tweets that were flagged by Twitter using two intervention strategies—attaching a warning label and blocking engagement with the tweet entirely. We find that while blocking engagement on certain tweets limited their diffusion, messages we examined with warning labels spread further on Twitter than those without labels. Additionally, the messages that had been blocked on Twitter remained popular on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, being posted more often and garnering more visibility than messages that had either been labeled by Twitter or received no intervention at all. Taken together, our results emphasize the importance of considering content moderation at the ecosystem level.
News & Views
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Commentary
The Social Media Data We Need to Answer Key Research Questions
Ahead of a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on platform transparency, we submitted a letter outlining the type of research questions we want to answer — and the social media data we need to answer them.
May 4, 2022
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Commentary
Twitter Banned Marjorie Taylor Greene. That May Not Hurt Her Much.
She’s gaining followers and ‘likes’ on other social media platforms, our research finds.
January 14, 2022