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.
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
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 ...
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 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
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...
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
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...
Social Media Vs Democracy
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.
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
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 reposts which media sources? And why this matters for understanding populist politics
In social media, while documenting what gets said is important, understanding who posts which sources to raise their visibility is also key. Katharina Tittel, William Allen, and Pedro Ramaciotti use immigration in France to show how far-right users of X cite sources strategically to achieve their goals
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…
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
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
