Social Media

WhatsApp Increases Exposure to False Rumors but has Limited Effects on Beliefs and Polarization: Evidence from a Multimedia-Constrained Deactivation.

For years WhatsApp has been the primary social media application in many countries of the Global South. Numerous journalistic and scholarly accounts suggest that the platform has become a fertile ground for spreading misinformation and partisan …

WhatsApp Increases Exposure to False Rumors but has Limited Effects on Beliefs and Polarization: Evidence from a Multimedia-Constrained Deactivation.

For years WhatsApp has been the primary social media application in many countries of the Global South. Numerous journalistic and scholarly accounts suggest that the platform has become a fertile ground for spreading misinformation and partisan …

Network Activated Frames: Content Sharing and Perceived Polarization in Social Media

Our paper describes how the sharing behavior of interconnected users alters the frequencies of content observed by social media peers. Changes in the frequency of distinct frame elements, in different regions of a social network, shape how …

The Effect of Streaming Chat on Perceptions of Debates

We investigate how streaming chatboxes may shape perceptions of political events. We conducted a field experiment during the September 2019 Democratic Primary Debate where subjects were assigned to view the debate with or without streaming chatboxes. …

News by popular demand: Ideology, Reputation, and Issue Attention in Social Media News Sharing

Social media news sharing has become a central subject of scholarly research in communication studies. To test current theories, it is of the utmost importance to estimate meaningful parameters of news sharing behavior from observational data. In …

Partisan Cues and Perceived Risks: The effect of partisan social media frames during the Covid-19 crisis in Mexico

We present the results of a survey experiment designed to evaluate the effects of social media exposure on perceptions of personal health and job risks during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. Our framing experiment treats respondents to positive and …

Connective Effervescence and Streaming Chat During Political Debates

Recent advancements in online streaming technologies have re-centered the audience as an important part of live broadcasts, including live political events. In fall 2020, each of the U.S. presidential and vice presidential debates were streamed on a …

Trustful Voters, Trustworthy Politicians: A Survey Experiment on the Influence of Social Mediain Politics

Recent increases in uncivil dialogue, political polarization, and fake news in social media raise questions about the relationship between negative online messages and the decline in political trust. We implement atrust game in a survey experiment …

Trustful Voters, Trustworthy Politicians: A Survey Experiment on the Influence of Social Mediain Politics

Recent increases in political polarization in social media raise questions about the relationship between negative online messages and the decline in political trust around the world. To evaluate this claim causally, we implement a variant of the …

Will I Get Covid? Partisanship, Social Media Frames, and Perceptions of Health Risk in Brazil

In these polarized and challenging times, not even perceptions of personal risk are immune to partisanship. This paper introduces results from a new survey with an embedded social media experiment conducted during the first months of the COVID-19 …