One of the issues that has come up again and again in my reporting on misinformation and social media is the massive influence social media companies have on research in the field. Last night a preprint dropped that tries to get at this with some numbers. My piece in @science.org (and 🧪🧵 coming):
Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry, preprint claims
www.science.orgJan 19, 2026 at 3:26 PM
Do Science <i>Kardashians</i> Get Citation Premium? Self‐Fulfilling Effects of Social Media on Scientific Impact
ABSTRACT We analyze whether the visibility of scientists on social media affects the number of academic citations. We use the global COVID‐19 pandemic as a quasinatural experiment that exogenously increased public attention and the demand for expertise. Using publications on COVID‐related topics by social media stars and their coauthors prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, we find that social media stars' pre‐COVID‐era papers received about – more citations annually per paper after 2019. Quantitatively comparable results are obtained when we use scientists' Kardashian index (K‐index) as a benchmark for stardom, however we find no significant effects when using the intensive margin of scientists' K‐indexes. We provide a brief discussion of policy implications in light of these findings.
Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed
The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve."
Shreya Shankar on Twitter / X
This problem has gotten significantly worse. As Twitter and other social media have become primary channels for sharing research, academics are now expected to make the same ideas legible and appealing to both the general public (to go "viral") and senior scholars (to get the… https://t.co/zPF3tKzbVa— Shreya Shankar (@sh_reya) July 25, 2026
Social media promotion improves job market outcomes
Social media has transformed how academics disseminate research, but its effect on academic job outcomes remains unclear. Previous research has shown correlations between social media exposure and metrics like citation counts, but these relationships may be confounded by unobserved factors such as researcher quality or access to professional networks. We examine whether social media promotion causally affects job market outcomes in economics through a field experiment on Twitter (now X). We first collect tweets about job market papers from 519 candidates and post them from a dedicated account. We then randomize half of the posts to be quote-tweeted by established economists in the candidates’ fields, and measure the effects on both online visibility and hiring outcomes. We find that posts in the treatment group receive 441% more views and 303% more likes than those in the control group. Candidates whose posts were assigned to be quote-tweeted receive one additional flyout invitation compared to the control group average of 5.4 flyouts. Furthermore, women in the treatment group receive 0.9 more job offers than women in the control group, who receive 3 offers on average. Exploring mechanisms, we find that academic reputation drives these results, with stronger effects for quote-tweets from highly cited scholars and for candidates from top institutions. Our findings suggest social media promotion causally increases research visibility and improves academic job market outcomes.
How Social Media Rewards Misinformation
A majority of false stories are spread by a small number of frequent users, suggests a new study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Gizem Ceylan. But they can be taught to change their ways.
Sources on social media: Information context collapse and volume of content as predictors of source blindness - George Pearson, 2021
Although social media has become a primary news platform, the effects of social media features on users’ information processing remains under-explored. This stu...
The Risks of Industry Influence in Tech Research
Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of these impacts to inform evidence-based technology policy that minimizes harm and maximizes benefits. Unlike most other global-scale scientific challenges, however, the data necessary for scientific progress are generated and controlled by the same industry that might be subject to evidence-based regulation. Moreover, technology companies historically have been, and continue to be, a major source of funding for this field. These asymmetries in information and funding raise significant concerns about the potential for undue industry influence on the scientific record. In this Perspective, we explore how technology companies can influence our scientific understanding of their products. We argue that science faces unique challenges in the context of technology research that will require strengthening existing safeguards and constructing wholly new ones.
Following news on social media boosts knowledge, belief accuracy and trust
Many worry that news on social media leaves people uninformed or even misinformed. Here we conducted a preregistered two-wave online field experiment in France and Germany (N = 3,395) to estimate the effect of following the news on Instagram and WhatsApp. Participants were asked to follow two accounts for 2 weeks and activate the notifications. In the treatment condition, the accounts were those of news organizations, while in the control condition they covered cooking, cinema or art. The treatment enhanced current affairs knowledge, participants’ ability to discern true from false news stories and awareness of true news stories, as well as trust in the news. The treatment had no significant effects on feelings of being informed, political efficacy, affective polarization and interest in news or politics. These results suggest that, while some forms of social media use are harmful, others are beneficial and can be leveraged to foster a well-informed society.
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...
Free Our Feeds
Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.
Custodians of the Internet
A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...
I'm excited to finally have a preprint of this paper up, a few years in the making. In it we argue that industry-driven manipulation of social media research is well underway and that norms and institutions in the field are ill-prepared to resist tech's influence. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894
We've written about how social media companies and other technology firms manipulate the scientific record in their favor. In our revisions, we will need to address how they have captured the state department to literally prevent researchers who criticize them FROM EVEN ENTERING THE COUNTRY.
Jameel Jaffer
This wild document is the basis for the State Department's decision to cancel the visas and green cards of tech researchers who study the social media platforms and of tech regulators who enforce privacy and transparency laws. Disclosed to us last night in @thecoalition.bsky.social v. Rubio.
I call this the dark matter theory of science. Blogs, social media, etc - a majority of what actually influences science is invisible to the system (esp in AI) Real systems change in science will only be possible when we recognize these sources of influence and intentionally design for them
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒
Kinda feel weird that a few blog posts I’ve written in a few hours will probably have more educational impact than any amount of teaching I’ll ever do
