People

@article{nokey,

title = {Deplatforming did not decrease Parler users’ activity on fringe social media},

author = {Ribeiro, Manoel Horta and Hosseinmardi, Homa and West, Robert and Watts, Duncan J.},

url = {https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/3/pgad035/7081430?login=false},

doi = {10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad035},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-03-21},

journal = {PNAS Nexus},

volume = {2},

issue = {3},

abstract = {Online platforms have banned (“deplatformed”) influencers, communities, and even entire websites to reduce content deemed harmful. Deplatformed users often migrate to alternative platforms, which raises concerns about the effectiveness of deplatforming. Here, we study the deplatforming of Parler, a fringe social media platform, between 2020 January 11 and 2021 February 25, in the aftermath of the US Capitol riot. Using two large panels that capture longitudinal user-level activity across mainstream and fringe social media content (N = 112, 705, adjusted to be representative of US desktop and mobile users), we find that other fringe social media, such as Gab and Rumble, prospered after Parler’s deplatforming. Further, the overall activity on fringe social media increased while Parler was offline. Using a difference-in-differences analysis (N = 996), we then identify the causal effect of deplatforming on active Parler users, finding that deplatforming increased the probability of daily activity across other fringe social media in early 2021 by 10.9 percentage points (pp) (95% CI [5.9 pp, 15.9 pp]) on desktop devices, and by 15.9 pp (95% CI [10.2 pp, 21.7 pp]) on mobile devices, without decreasing activity on fringe social media in general (including Parler). Our results indicate that the isolated deplatforming of a major fringe platform was ineffective at reducing overall user activity on fringe social media.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{nokeyb,

title = {Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences },

author = {Almaatouq, Abdullah and Griffiths, Thomas L. and Suchow, Jordan W. and Whiting, Mark E. and Evans, James and Watts, Duncan J. },

url = {https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/beyond-playing-20-questions-with-nature-integrative-experiment-design-in-the-social-and-behavioral-sciences/7E0D34D5AE2EFB9C0902414C23E0C292#article},

doi = {10.1017/S0140525X22002874},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-12-21},

urldate = {2022-12-21},

journal = {Behavioral and Brain Sciences},

abstract = {The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. The researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm—and with far greater efficiency.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{muise2022quantifying,

title = {Quantifying partisan news diets in Web and TV audiences},

author = {Daniel Muise and Homa Hosseinmardi and Baird Howland and Markus Mobius and David Rothschild and Duncan J. Watts},

url = {https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn0083},

doi = {10.1126/sciadv.abn0083},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-07-13},

urldate = {2022-07-13},

journal = {Science Advances},

volume = {8},

issue = {28},

abstract = {Partisan segregation within the news audience buffers many Americans from countervailing political views, posing a risk to democracy. Empirical studies of the online media ecosystem suggest that only a small minority of Americans, driven by a mix of demand and algorithms, are siloed according to their political ideology. However, such research omits the comparatively larger television audience and often ignores temporal dynamics underlying news consumption. By analyzing billions of browsing and viewing events between 2016 and 2019, with a novel framework for measuring partisan audiences, we first estimate that 17% of Americans are partisan-segregated through television versus roughly 4% online. Second, television news consumers are several times more likely to maintain their partisan news diets month-over-month. Third, TV viewers’ news diets are far more concentrated on preferred sources. Last, partisan news channels’ audiences are growing even as the TV news audience is shrinking. Our results suggest that television is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{balietti2021reducing,

title = {Reducing opinion polarization: Effects of exposure to similar people with differing political views},

author = {Balietti, Stefano and Getoor, Lise and Goldstein, Daniel G. and Watts, Duncan J.},

editor = {Jackson, Matthew},

url = {https://www.pnas.org/content/118/52/e2112552118.short},

doi = {10.1073/pnas.2112552118},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-12-28},

journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},

volume = {118},

number = {52},

abstract = {In a large-scale, preregistered experiment on informal political communication, we algorithmically matched participants, varying two dimensions: 1) the degree of incidental similarity on nonpolitical features; and 2) their stance agreement on a contentious political topic. Matched participants were first shown a computer-generated social media profile of their match highlighting all the shared nonpolitical features; then, they read a short, personal, but argumentative, essay written by their match about the reduction of inequality via redistribution of wealth by the government. We show that support for redistribution increased and polarization decreased for participants with both mild and strong views, regardless of their political leaning. We further show that feeling close to the match is associated with an 86% increase in the probability of assimilation of political views. Our analysis also uncovers an asymmetry: Interacting with someone with opposite views greatly reduced feelings of closeness; however, interacting with someone with consistent views only moderately increased them. By extending previous work about the effects of incidental similarity and shared identity on affect into the domain of political opinion change, our results bear real-world implications for the (re)-design of social media platforms. Because many people prefer to keep politics outside of their social networks, encouraging cross-cutting political communication based on nonpolitical commonalities is a potential solution for fostering consensus on potentially divisive and partisan topics.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}