Who Makes Money From Social Media?

Investigate platforms' revenue redistribution schemes.

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...

Do people learn about politics on social media? A meta-analysis of 76 studies

Abstract. Citizens turn increasingly to social media to get their political information. However, it is currently unclear whether using these platforms act

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.

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.

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

How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?

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 algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content they saw increased on both platforms, the amount of content classified as uncivil or containing slur words they saw decreased on Facebook, and the amount of content from moderate friends and sources with ideologically mixed audiences they saw increased on Facebook. Despite these substantial changes in users’ on-platform experience, the chronological feed did not significantly alter levels of issue polarization, affective polarization, political knowledge, or other key attitudes during the 3-month study period.

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.

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.

Death by a thousand likes: How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web

Here’s one way to understand the symbiotic relationship between publications and platforms in the digital age. Publications depend on advertising dollars to keep producing content, so they need to hold readers’ attention. Big platforms like Facebook and Twitter already have plenty of attention, but they need vast quantities of content to fill up their newsfeeds. It seems natural, then, that publications have started relying on platforms to drive readership.

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020-2024: Decline,...

Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper traces how the U.S. social media landscape has shifted across platforms,...

What do they put in those things?

68K votes, 906 comments. 719K subscribers in the NonPoliticalTwitter community. Twitter and Bluesky without the politics. Come vibe with us as we…

Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement

Perceived as an equalizing force for disenfranchised individuals without a voice, the importance of social networks as agents of change cannot be ignored. However, in some societies, social networks have evolved into a platform for fake news and propaganda, empowering disruptive voices, ideologies, and messages. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google hold the potential to alter civic engagement, thus essentially hijacking democracy, by influencing individuals toward a particular way of thinking.

Directing the Herd

Social media platforms don’t produce a common public; they produce competing sub-publics, each with its own sense of what everyone knows.

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