A New Era of Measurable Effects? Essays on Political Communication in the New Media Age

In this dissertation, I explore the ways in which traditional processes of opinion formation, media exposure, and mobilization operate in a networked, fragmented, and high-choice environment. From a methodological standpoint, one of the advantages of this shift toward Internet-mediated activity is the potential for enhanced measurement. In my dissertation, I take advantage of the data trail left by individuals in order to learn about political behavior and media effects online. Combining this measurement strategy with field experiments conducted in naturalistic online environments, I am able to shed light on how longstanding concerns in political science manifest themselves in the present-day media landscape. The overarching theme is that, thanks to advances in both research design and technology, many well-articulated concerns about the impact of the Internet on politics and public life can now be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. As I show here, the most dire predictions -- about people's tendency to cocoon themselves into ideological echo chambers or opt for low-cost "slacktivism" over more meaningful contributions to collective action -- appear to lack strong support. But it is also clear that results clearly depend on the structural features of a particular medium: Twitter enables peer effects and the mutual reinforcement of viewpoints, while the high-choice environment of the Web may inherently lead to moderation

Can the Government Deter Discrimination? Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in New York City

Racial discrimination persists despite established antidiscrimination laws. A common government strategy to deter discrimination is to publicize the law and communicate potential penalties for violations. We study this strategy by coupling an audit experiment with a randomized intervention involving nearly 700 landlords in New York City and report the first causal estimates of the effect on rental discrimination against blacks and Hispanics of a targeted government messaging campaign. We uncover discrimination levels higher than prior estimates indicate, especially against Hispanics, who are approximately 6 percentage points less likely to receive callbacks and offers than whites. We find suggestive evidence that government messaging can reduce discrimination against Hispanics but not against blacks. The findings confirm discrimination’s persistence and suggest that government messaging can address it in some settings, but more work is needed to understand the conditions under which such appeals are most effective

Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature

The following report is intended to provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political “disinformation,” a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online, including “fake news,” rumors, deliberately factually incorrect information, inadvertently factually incorrect information, politically slanted information, and “hyperpartisan” news. The review of the literature is provided in six separate sections, each of which can be read individually but that cumulatively are intended to provide an overview of what is known — and unknown — about the relationship between social media, political polarization, and disinformation. The report concludes by identifying key gaps in our understanding of these phenomena and the data that are needed to address them

Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature

The following report is intended to provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political “disinformation,” a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online, including “fake news,” rumors, deliberately factually incorrect information, inadvertently factually incorrect information, politically slanted information, and “hyperpartisan” news. The review of the literature is provided in six separate sections, each of which can be read individually but that cumulatively are intended to provide an overview of what is known — and unknown — about the relationship between social media, political polarization, and disinformation. The report concludes by identifying key gaps in our understanding of these phenomena and the data that are needed to address them

The ephemeral effects of fact-checks on COVID-19 misperceptions in the United States, Great Britain and Canada

Widespread misperceptions about COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus threaten to exacerbate the severity of the pandemic. We conducted preregistered survey experiments in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada examining the effectiveness of fact-checks that seek to correct these false or unsupported misperceptions. Across three countries with differing levels of political conflict over the COVID-19 response, we demonstrate that fact-checks reduce targeted misperceptions, especially among the groups who are most vulnerable to these claims, and have minimal spillover effects on the accuracy of other beliefs about COVID-19. However, the positive effects of fact-checks on the accuracy of respondents’ beliefs fail to persist over time in panel data even after repeated exposure. These results suggest that fact-checks can successfully change the beliefs of the people who would benefit from them most but that their effects are disappointingly ephemeral

Mobile Phone Data for Children on the Move: Challenges and Opportunities

Today, 95% of the global population has 2G mobile phone coverage and the number of individuals who own a mobile phone is at an all time high. Mobile phones generate rich data on billions of people across different societal contexts and have in the last decade helped redefine how we do research and build tools to understand society. As such, mobile phone data has the potential to revolutionize how we tackle humanitarian problems, such as the many suffered by refugees all over the world. While promising, mobile phone data and the new computational approaches bring both opportunities and challenges. Mobile phone traces contain detailed information regarding people's whereabouts, social life, and even financial standing. Therefore, developing and adopting strategies that open data up to the wider humanitarian and international development community for analysis and research while simultaneously protecting the privacy of individuals is of paramount importance. Here we outline the challenging situation of children on the move and actions UNICEF is pushing in helping displaced children and youth globally, and discuss opportunities where mobile phone data can be used. We identify three key challenges: data access, data and algorithmic bias, and operationalization of research, which need to be addressed if mobile phone data is to be successfully applied in humanitarian contexts.Comment: 13 pages, book chapte

Replication data for: Measure for Measure: An Experimental Test of Online Political Media Exposure

Self-reported measures of media exposure are plagued with error and questions about validity. Since they are essential to studying media effects, a substantial literature has explored the shortcomings of these measures, tested proxies, and proposed refinements. But lacking an objective baseline, such investigations can only make relative comparisons. By focusing specifically on recent Internet activity stored by web browsers, this paper's methodology captures individuals' actual consumption of political media. Using experiments embedded within an online survey, I test three different measures of media exposure and compare them to the actual exposure. I find that open-ended survey prompts reduce overreporting and generate an accurate picture of the overall audience for online news. I also show that they predict news recall at least as well as general knowledge. Together, these results demonstrate that some ways of asking questions about media use are better than others. I conclude with a discussion of survey-based exposure measures for online political information and the applicability of this paper's direct method of exposure measurement for future studies

Replication Data for: Does Counter-Attitudinal Information Cause Backlash? Results from Three Large Survey Experiments

Several theoretical perspectives suggest that when individuals are exposed to counter-attitudinal evidence or arguments, their preexisting opinions and beliefs are reinforced, resulting in a phenomenon sometimes known as "backlash." We formalize the concept of backlash and specify how it can be measured. We then present results from three survey experiments -- two on Mechanical Turk and one on a nationally representative sample -- in which we find no evidence of backlash, even under theoretically favorable conditions. While a casual reading of the literature on information processing suggests that backlash is rampant, we conclude that it is much rarer than commonly supposed