Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review

This Google doc is an open-source working document that contains the citations and abstracts of published articles that shed light on a question that is currently being debated within many democratic nations: Is social media a major contributor to the rise of political dysfunction seen in the USA and some other democracies since the early 2010s? This is too broad a question to be answered, so we break it down into seven more specific questions for which there is a substantial research literature.

This document is curated by Jonathan Haidt (NYU-Stern) and Chris Bail (Duke), with research assistance from Zach Rausch. If you are a researcher or industry insider and have studies or comments to add, please click the “Request Access” button above (while signed in to a Google account), tell us who you are, and Zach will give you commenter status. We especially welcome critical comments: What studies have we missed, or misinterpreted?

You can cite this document as: Haidt, J., & Bail, C. (ongoing). Social media and political dysfunction: A collaborative review. Unpublished manuscript, New York University.

First posted: November 2, 2021. Last updated: August 28, 2023.

You can always find this document at: https://tinyurl.com/PoliticalDysfunctionReview

To see Haidt’s other Collaborative Review docs:

* Adolescent mood disorders since 2010: A collaborative review [with Jean Twenge]

* Social Media and Mental Health: A Collaborative Review [with Jean Twenge]

================================

Clickable Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 1

NOTES AND CAVEATS 4

QUESTION 1: DOES SOCIAL MEDIA MAKE PEOPLE MORE ANGRY OR AFFECTIVELY POLARIZED? 6

1.1 STUDIES INDICATING YES 6

1.2 STUDIES INDICATING NO 15

1.3 MIXED RESULTS OR UNCLASSIFIED 22

1.4 DISCUSSION OF QUESTION #1 27

QUESTION 2: DOES SOCIAL MEDIA CREATE ECHO CHAMBERS? 27

2.1 STUDIES INDICATING YES 27

2.2 STUDIES INDICATING NO 34

2.3 MIXED RESULTS OR UNCLASSIFIED 42

2.4 DISCUSSION OF QUESTION #2 50

QUESTION 3: DOES SOCIAL MEDIA AMPLIFY POSTS THAT ARE MORE EMOTIONAL, INFLAMMATORY, OR FALSE? 55

3.1 STUDIES INDICATING YES 55

3.2 STUDIES INDICATING NO 67

3.3 MIXED RESULTS OR UNCLASSIFIED 74

3.4. DISCUSSION OF QUESTION 3 89

QUESTION 4: DOES SOCIAL MEDIA INCREASE THE PROBABILITY OF VIOLENCE? 89

4.1 STUDIES INDICATING YES 89

4.2 STUDIES INDICATING NO 93

4.3 MIXED RESULTS OR UNCLASSIFIED 93

4.4 DISCUSSION OF QUESTION 4 94

QUESTION 5: DOES SOCIAL MEDIA ENABLE FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS TO INCREASE POLITICAL DYSFUNCTION IN THE UNITED STATES AND OTHER DEMOCRACIES? 94

5.1 STUDIES AND REPORTS INDICATING YES 94

5.2 STUDIES AND REPORTS INDICATING NO, OR MINIMAL EFFECTS 100

5.3 UNCLASSIFIED 102

5.4 DISCUSSION OF QUESTION 5 104

QUESTION 6: DOES SOCIAL MEDIA DECREASE TRUST? 104

6.1 STUDIES INDICATING YES 104

6.2 STUDIES INDICATING NO, OR MINIMAL EFFECTS 108

6.3 MIXED RESULTS OR UNCLASSIFIED 110

6.4 DISCUSSION OF QUESTION 6 110

QUESTION 7: DOES SOCIAL MEDIA STRENGTHEN POPULIST MOVEMENTS? 110

7.1 STUDIES INDICATING YES 110

7.2 STUDIES INDICATING NO, OR MINIMAL EFFECTS 117

7.3 MIXED RESULTS OR UNCLASSIFIED 119

7.4 DISCUSSION OF QUESTION 7 119

8. OTHER STUDIES NOT YET CLASSIFIED 119

9. MAJOR REVIEW ARTICLES, REPORTS, AND DATABASES 125

10. BOOKS BY SCHOLARS 145

11. PROPOSALS FOR IMPROVING SOCIAL MEDIA 154

11.1 On the need for and legitimacy of federal regulation 154

11.2 User Authentication 154

11.3 Age Restrictions and Age Appropriate Design 156

11.4 Platform accountability and transparency 158

11.5 Architectural changes to reduce virality 158

11.6 Changing incentives to reduce trolling and antisocial behavior 158

11.7 Changing parameters to reduce the noise/signal ratio 159

11.8 Miscellaneous additional reforms 159

12. CONCLUSION 159

APPENDICES 159

APPENDIX A: TIMELINE OF PLATFORM CHANGES 159

APPENDIX B: PNAS SPECIAL ISSUE ON POLARIZATION AND COMPLEX SYSTEMS 162

APPENDIX C: CRITIQUES OF HAIDT’S “UNIQUELY STUPID” ATLANTIC ARTICLE 170

APPENDIX D: IS POLITICAL DYSFUNCTION INCREASING IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA? 171

APPENDIX E: EMPIRICAL STUDIES THAT BEAR ON WAYS TO IMPROVE SOCIAL MEDIA 178

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

INTRODUCTION

In the 1990s, it seemed that liberal democracy had triumphed over all other forms of government as the best way to run a modern, prosperous, diverse nation. When the Internet became widespread, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it seemed to be a gift to democracy; what dictator could stand up to the people, empowered? How could any nation keep the internet out? Techno-democratic optimism arguably reached a high point in 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring, followed by mass protests in Israel and Spain, and culminating with the Occupy movement that began in New York City and then spread globally.

The 2010s did not turn out as many of us expected. Democracy is now on the back foot, with more countries becoming less democratic, and the decline begins or accelerates in the 2010s (see Appendix D). The United States in particular has veered into deep political dysfunction, intense affective polarization, and televised political violence. Alternatives to liberal democracy are more numerous— and in some ways more stable—including illiberal democracies such as Hungary, and the one-party authoritarian system developing in China.

What happened? Why is the outlook for democracy so much darker in 2022 than it was in 2011?

Among the most widely discussed causes of recent political dysfunction is social media, which transformed social connections, mass movements, news consumption, and avenues for electoral interference, manipulation, and misinformation. The two unexpected successes of the Brexit referendum and the Trump campaign, both in 2016, turned attention to Facebook in particular, but also to Twitter and YouTube. A number of popular books in recent years have made the case that Facebook, in particular, was a danger to democracy. Reporting by the Wall Street Journal (The Facebook Files), and by the New York Times and Washington Post also pointed to democracy-disrupting effects of Facebook and other platforms.

Is it true? Are Facebook and other social media platforms damaging democracies? Documents brought out by whistleblower Frances Haugen, along with her Congressional testimony, suggest the answer may be “yes.” Facebook denies the charge, and points to several studies published by social scientists in its defense. A systematic review of the literature is therefore needed to communicate the findings of this rapidly evolving literature to the public. Unfortunately, there is now so much research published (or circulating as working papers) that it is impossible for anyone who does not study this question full time to know what is out there, and what it all adds up to. Hence this document.

We (Haidt & Bail) have organized the document into the major questions that extant research has addressed. For each question, we list all the published studies we can find (along with working papers from established researchers), grouped into those that support the proposition that social media is harming democracies, and those that do not support the proposition. After we created the initial framework for this document we invited other researchers to add other studies we had missed, and to critique the relevance or interpretation provided in the text below.

We thank these researchers for offering their ideas and constructive criticisms:

Kevin Munger (Penn State U), David Rand (MIT), Andy Guess (Princeton), Will Blakey (UNC), Richard Fletcher (University of Oxford), Sacha Altay (University of Oxford), Olivia Fischer (University of Zurich), Tim Samples (University of Georgia) [more to come]... And we thank Gideon Lewis-Kraus for exploring this collaborative review, and criticisms of it, in an essay in The New Yorker.

NOTES AND CAVEATS

1. What do we mean by “Political dysfunction”?

A comprehensive overview of the many effects of social media on politics is beyond the scope of this review. We acknowledge that there is evidence that social media has created positive outcomes on issues such as voter registration, mobilization within authoritarian regimes, and others, but this review focuses on evidence of harm (see Lorenz-Spreen et al. 2022 [study 9.1.13] for evidence that the benefits of social media are mostly found in less developed democracies, while the harms are more frequently found in advanced democracies). We review the literature on social media and political dysfunction. Our definition of political dysfunction includes political polarization— including not only increasing disagreement about substantive issues but also the rise in negative feelings and attitudes between partisans (often referred to as “affective polarization”). Our definition of dysfunction also includes a broader set of behavioral and attitudinal outcomes including a) support for the use of violence to achieve political ends; b) alienation from the democratic process (through voter suppression or general apathy about government); c) declining trust in government, politicians, and key institutions; d) decreased willingness to listen to or work with those from other groups/parties, and e) the spread of misinformation and misleading claims about politics within the broader information environment.

2. What do we mean by “Social Media”?

We do not examine the impact of “The Internet” writ large on politics— a topic whi