Social Media’s Electoral Power: More Hype Than Reality?

It's been almost an article of faith among many (especially since 2016) that social media has been a leading cause of our collective dumbening and the resulting situation in which a bunch of fascist-adjacent wannabe dictators getting elected all over the place.

But, we've always found that argument to feel massively, if not totally overblown. And, the data we've seen has highlighted how little impact social media has actually had on elections (cable news might be a bit different).

Now there's a new study out of NYU's Center for Social Media & Politics, which has been working through a ton of fascinating social media data over the past few years. This latest study suggests that the impact of social media on the 2020 election appears to have been minimal.

This is based on looking at the behavior of people who deactivated their Facebook and Instagram accounts in the runup to the election, and how that changed (or didn't change) their behavior.

We use a randomized experiment to measure the effects of access to Facebook and Instagram on individual-level political outcomes during the 2020 election. We recruited 19,857 Facebook users and 15,585 Instagram users who used the platform for more than 15 min per day at baseline. We randomly assigned 27% to a treatment group that was paid to deactivate their Facebook or Instagram accounts for the 6 wk before election day, and the remainder to a control group that was paid to deactivate for just 1 wk. We estimate effects of deactivation on consumption of other apps and news sources, factual knowledge, political polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, political participation, and candidate preferences.

There were a few interesting findings, though I'm not sure any are particularly surprising. They found that users without social media lessened their knowledge of news events, but increased their ability to recognize disinformation.

The study also found that the deactivation had effectively no impact on issue polarization." This result is different than when a similar study was done in 2018, which the authors chalk up, potentially, to the differences between a mid-term election and a general election.

The issue polarization variable is an index of eight political opinions (on immigration, repeal of Obamacare, unemployment benefits, mask requirements, foreign policy, policing, racial justice, and gender relations), with the signs of the variables adjusted so that the difference between the own-party and other-party averages is positive. These questions were chosen to focus on issues that were prominent during the study period. Neither Facebook nor Instagram deactivation significantly affected issue polarization, and the 95% CI bounds rule out effects of 0.04 SD.

As a point of comparison for these magnitudes, ref. 5 find that Facebook deactivation reduced an overall index of political polarization prior to the 2018 midterm elections. This includes a statistically insignificant reduction of 0.06 SD in a measure of affective polarization, and a significant reduction of 0.10 SD in a measure of issue polarization. One possible explanation for the difference in effects on issue polarization is that our study took place during a presidential election, where the environment was saturated with political information and opinion from many sources outside of social media. Another possible explanation is that the set of specific issues on which we focus here may have produced different responses. As another comparison point, ref. 26 estimate that affective polarization has grown by an average of 0.021 SD per year since 1978.

They also found no change in the perceived legitimacy of the election" which is interesting given how prevalent that issue has been (especially among the Trumpist contingent). If you thought people only falsely believed the election was stolen because of Facebook, the data just doesn't support that:

The perceived legitimacy variable is an index of agreement with six statements: i) Elections are free from foreign influence, ii) all adult citizens have equal opportunity to vote, iii) elections are conducted without fraud, iv) government does not interfere with journalists, v) government protects individuals' right to engage in unpopular speech, and vi) voters are knowledgeable about candidates and issues. Neither Facebook nor Instagram deactivation had a significant effect, and the 95% CI bounds rule out effects of 0.04 SD.

There's more in the study as well, but it's good to see more actual data and research along these lines. As a first pass, it again looks like the rush to blame social media for all the ills in the world might just be a bit overblown.