How Facebook Stymies Social Science

What exactly was the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 election campaign? How widespread was its infiltration of social media? And how much influence did its propaganda have on public opinion and voter behavior?

Scholars are only now starting to tackle those questions. But to answer them, academics need data — and getting that data has been a problem.

Take a recent example: Jonathan Albright, a researcher at Columbia University, looked into a number of Russia-bought pages that Facebook had taken down. He concluded that they had amassed potentially hundreds of millions of views. David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, wasn’t convinced, arguing that most of the “people” who had liked these pages were very likely Russian bots. (Full disclosure: I commissioned and edited Karpf’s post on The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.)

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Other Writing:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Cognitive Democracy,” in Youth, New Media and Political Participation – with Cosma Shalizi – eds. Danielle Allen and Jennifer Light

In Parts I through III, we extended the definition of the political, acquired a richer view of participation, explored how to model and analyze partic-ipation broadly defined, and ascertained what sort of mechanisms to look for to understand public spheres in this context. As those chapters explored the specific experiences of individuals partic-ipating in hip ...
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Academic Article

Brexit, Voice and Loyalty: Rethinking Electoral Politics in an Age of Interdependence – with Abraham Newman

In the wake of the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, known as Brexit, scholars of international affairs have a chance to reflect on what this unanticipated event means for global politics. Many scholars have started applying standard political economy models based on the distributional consequences of trade or the sociotropic sources of ...
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