ABSTRACT To what extent do news frames influence public opinion? While a large body of experimental research suggests sizable effects, it is unclear how these findings translate to authentically complex information environments. I exploit a rare change in the immigration framing of the largest German tabloid, Bild, to estimate the precise impact of this shift on immigration attitudes using large-scale panel data. Despite a 42% increase in the emphasis on crime in Bild’s immigration coverage, I find a robust and precise null effect on immigration attitudes and several related variables. These findings highlight that framing effects materialize under specific scope conditions that need to be considered when generalizing from experimental results.

ABSTRACT What did we learn from the Meta2020 research studies? Despite the ambition of this project, tensions emerge between producing precise statistical estimates and generating broadly applicable knowledge about social media’s societal impacts. There are crucial challenges in translating theoretical concepts into measurable interventions on social media platforms exacerbated by the difficulties in conducting big, consensus-based science. While the Meta2020 studies represent the pinnacle of social science research on social media, they also expose the limitations of empirical social science in understanding and regulating rapidly evolving digital platforms. I argue that proactive regulation of social media is necessary, given the demonstrated lack of understanding of these platforms’ effects, even by the platforms themselves. This analysis contributes to ongoing discussions about the role of academic-industry partnerships in studying and governing social media platforms.

ABSTRACT Social media companies wield considerable power over what people can say and do online, with consequences for freedom of expression and participation in digital culture. Yet we still know little about the factors that shape these companies’ policy decisions. Drawing on data collected from mainstream English-language news sources between 2005-2021 and on a novel dataset of policy documents from the Platform Governance Archive (PGA), we investigate the extent to which policy change at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is responsive to negative news coverage. We find that sustained negative coverage significantly predicts changes to platforms’ user policies, highlighting the role of public pressure in shaping the governance of online platforms.

ABSTRACT Research about the epistemic crisis has largely treated epistemic threats in isolation, overlooking what they collectively say about the health of news environments. This study integrates the literature on epistemic problems and proposes a broadly encompassing framework that departs from the traditional focus on falsehoods: epistemic vulnerability. This framework is an attempt to more fully capture the erosion of authority and value conferred to political information, which has put stress on the public spheres of many democracies. The study develops the EV index to quantify this phenomenon at the system level in a comparative manner. Using OLS regression, I test the relationships between the EV index and various structural characteristics of political and media systems. Findings are remarkably consistent with established typologies of media systems. Northern European countries exhibit greater epistemic resilience, while the US, Spain, and Eastern Europe are more vulnerable. The study also offers strong evidence that populism, ideological polarization, and political parallelism contribute to higher levels of epistemic vulnerability. Conversely, public media viewership and larger party systems are associated with more epistemically resilient societies.

ABSTRACT Are social media users in developing and conflict-affected countries more intolerant than non-users? As platforms like Facebook become increasingly viewed as drivers of polarization and violence, this question is critical to understanding social media’s potential role in stoking and perpetuating intergroup conflict. We explore this question using unique survey data that istinguishes between Facebook users and non-users in a conflict-affected, yet understudied context. Myanmar has been cited as a cautionary example of social media’s toxic environment and deleterious effects. But arguments that highlight Facebook’s connections to malicious actors or instances of localized violence often implicitly assume a disproportionately toxic online community with the capacity to negatively influence intergroup attitudes. Challenging this assumption, we find that Facebook users are significantly more tolerant of other religions and ethnicities on average than non-users, even controlling for relevant demographic covariates. We suggest that these findings are largely the product of selection and that Facebook’s power to dramatically reshape public attitudes may be relatively limited. We argue that the findings should influence how we evaluate claims about Facebook’s contribution to high levels of ethnic and religious intolerance in Myanmar and other diverse societies.

ABSTRACT Studies addressing the normative questions of whether social media use positively or negatively affects citizens’ levels of democratic engagement and satisfaction with democracy have produced mixed findings. This study tests the proposition that political polarization plays an important contingent role in explaining these relationships. Combining Varieties of Democracy (VDEM) and World Values Survey (WVS) data, this study examines how issue polarization and affective polarization at the country level shape the relationships between social media use for political information and democratic outcomes in 27 developed democracies. The findings show divergent consequences of social media use contingent on affective polarization. In the countries with high affective polarization, social media use increased democratic engagement (i.e. participation and voting) and decreased satisfaction with democracy (i.e. political satisfaction and perceived quality of democracy), which may have implications for democratic erosion and backsliding. In the countries with low affective polarization, social media use increased the perceived quality of democracy but had no effect on political satisfaction. Issue polarization had a limited contingent influence. The findings contribute to the literature by explicating the dynamics of country-level affective polarization that can shape and contextualize the relationship between social media use and democratic engagement in democracies across the world.

ABSTRACT How do far-right actors and issues structure public debates and become mainstream over time? Previous research has shown that far-right actors are central actors in political conflicts in Western Europe, partly due to their dominance in struggles on cultural issues. The entrenchment of the far right substantially depends on their networks and public visibility. However, we still lack a long-term understanding of public debates about far-right actors and their discursive interconnections across issues. In this paper, we deliver the first longitudinal analysis of the evolution and structure of far-right discourse networks and the diffusion of far-right ideas in public debates since the 1990s. Methodologically, this paper innovates by combining discourse network analysis with automated text analysis to investigate how the relations between far-right actors and issues are represented in mass media. We analyze more than 500,000 newspaper articles in six different mass media outlets in Germany. The results show that far-right actors have gained more public visibility since the 1990s. The study demonstrates that the mass media debates have introduced and amplified cultural issues “owned” by the far right. Far-right discourse networks in mass media have grown, discursive interactions have intensified and discourse networks have become more centralized. Our results indicate that the discursive mainstreaming of the far right evolved in the context of the “refugee crisis” in 2015, and was linked to the AfD’s institutional access. Overall, the study aids in developing a better understanding of the success of the far right and the crucial role of public debates.

ABSTRACT Social media companies increasingly play a role in regulating freedom of speech. Debates over ideological motivations behind suspension policies of major platforms are on the rise. This study contributes to this ongoing debate by looking at content moderation from a geopolitical perspective. The starting premise is that US-based social media companies may be inclined to moderate content on their platforms in compliance with US sanctions laws, especially those concerned with the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. Despite the release of transparency reports by social media companies, we know little about the scope of the problem and the impact of suspensions on political conversations. I tracked 600,000 users who follow Iranian elites on Twitter. After accounting for alternative explanations, the results show that Principlist (conservative) users and those supportive of the Iranian government are significantly more likely to be suspended. Further analyses uncover the types of discussions that are being suppressed as a result of these suspensions. Although the exact mechanism at hand cannot be decisively isolated, this paper contributes to building a better understanding of how governments can influence conversations of geopolitical relevance, and how social media suspensions shape political conversations online.

ABSTRACT In response to foreign meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign through social media – and subsequent congressional threats to tightly regulate online political advertising – major digital platforms in the U.S. established databases that allow users to look up online political ads, their sponsors and how much they spend on advertising. What has been the impact of this new transparency? This research examines media coverage of digital political advertising in three news outlets both before and after the release of the Facebook, Google and Twitter political ads libraries in May 2018. We find that media coverage of digital advertising increased after the libraries’ introduction, that the libraries are sometimes referenced in coverage, that discussion of ad costs has increased as has fact-checking and discussion of misinformation.