Abstract. Citizens turn increasingly to social media to get their political information. However, it is currently unclear whether using these platforms act
Why Don’t We Learn from Social Media? Studying Effects of and Mechanisms behind Social Media News Use on General Surveillance Political Knowledge
Does exposure to news affect what people know about politics? This old question attracted new scholarly interest as the political information environment is changing rapidly. In particular, since c...
The limits of social media as a source of political information during routine and crisis times across 17 countries
Recent studies on political knowledge suggest people learn little about political events and societal issues from social media. Potentially, social media are a more effective source of information ...
Does news help us become knowledgeable or think we are knowledgeable? Examining a linkage of traditional and social media use with political knowledge
This study examines traditional and social media news use in relation to political knowledge from the perspective of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Data from a two-wave panel survey show that social me...
Who Participates in Politics on Social Media, and Why?
People really do learn about politcs on social media says a new study from Belgium, but the loudest voices are often not the most objective, writes Tim Bernard.
Improving social media for democratic discourse
Social media have expanded opportunities for communication and political participation, but today's dominant platforms are optimized primarily for engagement and advertising revenue, contributing...
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper describes how U.S. social media use has shifted across platforms, demographics, and politics. Overall platform reach declined, driven by growth in the share of Americans — especially the youngest and oldest cohorts — who report using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on Twitter/X and Facebook have fallen by nearly 50% since 2020, with the decline on Twitter/X driven primarily by reduced participation among Democratic users. While Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X lost ground, TikTok and Reddit grew modestly, consistent with a more fragmented digital public sphere. Platform audiences aged and became slightly more educated and racially diverse. Politically, most platforms shifted toward Republican users while remaining, on balance, Democratic-leaning. Twitter/X experienced the largest change: among posters, the partisan balance swung over 70 percentage points from Democrats to Republicans. Across platforms, political posting remains closely tied to affective polarization, as the most partisan respondents are also the most active. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme.
Do social media threaten democracy?
Facebook, Google and Twitter were supposed to save politics as good information drove out prejudice and falsehood. Something has gone very wrong
People Across the Globe Increasingly Say Social Media Is Harming Democracy
Most think social media leads to manipulation and division, but they also say it informs people and gives them a voice in politics.
The Interplay of Knowledge Overestimation, Social Media Use, and Populist Ideas: Cross-Sectional and Experimental Evidence From Germany and Taiwan - Niels G. Mede, Adrian Rauchfleisch, Julia Metag, Mike S. Schäfer, 2024
Social media expose users to an abundance of information about various issues. But they also make it difficult for users to assess the quality of this informati...
Sharing without clicking on news in social media
Social media have enabled laypersons to disseminate, at scale, links to news and public affairs information. Many individuals share such links without first reading the linked information. Here we analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users. In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs by conservatives (76.94%) than liberals (14.25%), probably because, in our dataset, the vast majority (76–82%) of them originated from conservative news domains. Findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of core content, which has design implications for promoting deliberate discourse in the online public sphere.
The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant
Abstract. Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status compet
The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant
Abstract. Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status compet
Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite
Large language models elevate expert consensus and moderate views, in sharp contrast to social platforms
New study shows just how Facebook's algorithm shapes conservative and liberal bubbles
Research conducted at the height of the 2020 election reveals new details about how Facebook's algorithms handle political content. But it suggests there are no easy fixes to political polarization.
We keep asking what social media does to voters. The wrong end of the pipe. Platforms don't just distribute politics — they teach political actors what kind of speech pays. So I measured the going rate: what X, Bluesky and Mastodon reward in public speech. 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2607.04220
Is social media truly making us more politically polarized, or does it simply over-represent our most extreme opinions? In our new preprint, @small-schulz.bsky.social and I present *punishing evidence* that social media systematically overrepresents users’ most extreme political opinions. 1/n
