I conduct an experiment which examines the impact of group norm promotion and social sanctioning on racist online harassment. Racist online harassment de-mobilizes the minorities it targets, and the ...open, unopposed expression of racism in a public forum can legitimize racist viewpoints and prime ethnocentrism. I employ an intervention designed to reduce the use of anti-black racist slurs by white men on Twitter. I collect a sample of Twitter users who have harassed other users and use accounts I control (“bots”) to sanction the harassers. By varying the identity of the bots between in-group (white man) and out-group (black man) and by varying the number of Twitter followers each bot has, I find that subjects who were sanctioned by a high-follower white male significantly reduced their use of a racist slur. This paper extends findings from lab experiments to a naturalistic setting using an objective, behavioral outcome measure and a continuous 2-month data collection period. This represents an advance in the study of prejudiced behavior.
The academic agenda for studying social media and politics has been somewhat haphazard. Thanks to rapid technological change, a cascade of policy-relevant crises, and sheer scale, we do not have a ...coherent framework for deciding what questions to ask. This Element articulates such a framework by taking existing literature from media economics and sociology and applying it reflexively, to both the academic agenda and to the specific case of politics on YouTube: the Supply and Demand Framework. The key mechanism, traced over the past century, is the technology of audience measurement. The YouTube audience comes pre-rationalized in the form of Likes, Views and Comments, and is thus unavoidable for all actors involved. The phenomenon of 'radicalization' is best understood as a consequence of accelerated feedback between audiences and creators, radicalizing each other. I use fifteen years of supply and demand data from YouTube to demonstrate how different types of producers respond more or less to this feedback, which in turn structures the ideological distribution of content consumed on the platform. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
My first publication as a grad student was a field experiment using Twitter “bots” to socially sanction users engaged in racist harassment. The ascendant paradigm in quantitative social science ...emphasizes the need for research to be “internally valid,” with a preference for randomized control trials like the one I conducted. That research project was well received, both by the political science discipline and the public, but I no longer believe that one-off field experiments are as valuable a tool for studying online behavior as I once did. The problem is that the knowledge they generate decays too rapidly (alternatively, that the realms in which it can be applied are too few) because the object of study changes too rapidly. I have been developing the concept of “temporal validity” as form of “external validity” that is particularly relevant to the study of social media. I suggest two avenues for producing more temporally valid research: (1) faster, more transparent publication (adapting the CS model of conference proceedings); (2) a “hollowing out” of empirical research, replacing medium-scale experimentation like my own work with either purely descriptive work (ethnographic or large-scale) or with massive, collaborative, replicable experimentation.
The Baby Boomers are the largest and most powerful generation in
American history-and they aren't going away any time soon. They
are, on average, whiter, wealthier, and more conservative than
younger ...generations. They dominate cultural and political
institutions and make up the largest slice of the electorate.
Generational conflict, with Millennials and Generation Z pitted
against the aging Boomer cohort, has become a media staple. Older
and younger voters are increasingly at odds: Republicans as a whole
skew gray-haired, and within the Democratic Party, the left-leaning
youth vote propels primary challengers. The generation gap is
widening into a political fault line. Kevin Munger marshals novel
data and survey evidence to argue that generational conflict will
define the politics of the next decade. He examines the historical
trends that made the Baby Boomers so consequential and traces the
emergence of age-based political and cultural divisions. Boomers
continue to prefer the media culture of their youth, but
Millennials and Gen Z are using the internet to render legacy
institutions irrelevant. These divergent media habits have led more
people than ever to identify with their generation. Munger shows
that a common "cohort consciousness" binds aging Boomer voters into
a bloc-but a shared identity and purpose among Millennials and Gen
Z could topple Boomer power. Bringing together expertise in data
analysis and digital culture with keen insight into contemporary
politics, Generation Gap explains why the Baby Boomers
remain so dominant and how quickly that might change.
The “credibility revolution” has forced quantitative social scientists to confront the limits of our methods for creating general knowledge. As a result, many practitioners aim to generate valid but ...local knowledge and then synthesize and apply that knowledge to predict what will happen in a target context. Positivist social science has until recently been hamstrung with other, more immediate threats to validity and inference, but I argue that recent advances in statistical approaches to the problem of external validity reveal limits of the current paradigm. This article and the term “temporal validity” illustrate the intrinsic limits of agnostic (i.e., assumption-free) external validity when the target setting is in the future. These limits, I argue, suggest a re-orientation of social science methodology. We should acknowledge that no research design, no empirical knowledge, is perfectible; instead, we should explicitly aim to increase the amount and quality of knowledge we produce. I believe it is useful to characterize this perspective as part of “Meta-Science,” an emerging paradigm within the social sciences. “Temporal validity” and the implied “knowledge decay” thus represent a meta-scientific intervention aimed at increasing the usefulness of the knowledge we produce. Among other structural reforms, I argue that the binary reality of academic scholarship (a paper is published or not) reifies the perfectibility of empirical knowledge and is thus an impediment to recognizing the continuous nature of all forms of scientific validity.
The news media industry has changed as the internet and social media have matured and become integral to modern life. I describe these changes through a theoretical analysis of the economic structure ...of the industry and explore the implications for scholars of online media and politics. The crux of my argument is that social media simultaneously serves as a distribution platform and reputation builder, as social recommendations take the place of expensive investments in high-quality journalism. This development rendered crucial portions of previous models of the market for news inaccurate due to the declining importance of firm reputation. This mechanism interacts with the massive heterogeneity in digital literacy and growing animosity toward the news media among conservatives to create "credibility cascades," which I argue are a necessary condition for Fake News to flourish.
YouTube is the most used social network in the United States and the only major platform that is more popular among right-leaning users. We propose the “Supply and Demand” framework for analyzing ...politics on YouTube, with an eye toward understanding dynamics among right-wing video producers and consumers. We discuss a number of novel technological affordances of YouTube as a platform and as a collection of videos, and how each might drive supply of or demand for extreme content. We then provide large-scale longitudinal descriptive information about the supply of and demand for conservative political content on YouTube. We demonstrate that viewership of far-right videos peaked in 2017.
The pursuit of audience attention online has led organizations to conduct thousands of behavioral experiments each year in media, politics, activism, and digital technology. One pioneer of A/B tests ...was Upworthy.com, a U.S. media publisher that conducted a randomized trial for every article they published. Each experiment tested variations in a headline and image "package," recording how many randomly-assigned viewers selected each variation. While none of these tests were designed to answer scientific questions, scientists can advance knowledge by meta-analyzing and data-mining the tens of thousands of experiments Upworthy conducted. This archive records the stimuli and outcome for every A/B test fielded by Upworthy between January 24, 2013 and April 30, 2015. In total, the archive includes 32,487 experiments, 150,817 experiment arms, and 538,272,878 participant assignments. The open access dataset is organized to support exploratory and confirmatory research, as well as meta-scientific research on ways that scientists make use of the archive.
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