Despite the increasing popularity of podcasts as a source of news for many Americans, little is known about their precise impact. We conduct a mobile field experiment that examines how consumption of trustworthy news via daily podcasts affects …
Recent studies have found promising evidence that lightweight, scalable tips promoting digital media literacy can improve the overall accuracy of social media users’ sharing intentions and improve their ability to determine the accuracy of true …
The shift of public discourse to online platforms has intensified the debate over content moderation by platforms and the regulation of online speech. Designing rules that are met with wide acceptance requires learning about public preferences. We …
An enormous body of literature argues that recommendation algorithms drive political polarization by creating “filter bubbles” and “rabbit holes.” Using four experiments with nearly 9,000 participants, we show that manipulating algorithmic …
The use of individual-level browsing data, i.e., the records of a person's visits to online content through a desktop or mobile browsers and apps, is an increasingly important resource for social scientists. Browsing data have characteristics that …
Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the challenges of conducting large-scale field experiments have …
Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that users …
We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of …
We studied the effects of exposure to reshared content on Facebook during the 2020 US election by assigning a random set of consenting, US-based users to feeds that did not contain any reshares over a 3-month period. We find that removing reshared …
In this note, we provide direct evidence of cheating in online assessments of political knowledge. We combine survey responses with web tracking data of a German and a US online panel to assess whether people turn to external sources for answers. We …