Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SocialMedia (Social Media, Political Participation, and Accountability)

Teaser

The project examines how advances in information technologies affect public policies. The political consequences of the advent of social media (SM) are now a hotly contested topic. An optimistic view has been that SM would empower ordinary citizens and serve as a “Liberation...

Summary

The project examines how advances in information technologies affect public policies. The political consequences of the advent of social media (SM) are now a hotly contested topic. An optimistic view has been that SM would empower ordinary citizens and serve as a “Liberation Technology” which would lead to faster democratization in authoritarian countries and make politicians more accountable. The results for the effect of the spread of mobile phones in Africa seem to support the idea that new communication technologies can help mass political mobilization. A pessimistic view considers autocratic governments exploit SM to their own advantage. In democracies, SM is blamed for the exacerbated political polarization, spread of xenophobic ideas, proliferation of fake news and manipulation of elections.
Regulatory measures have recently been adopted by a number of countries to regulate the content of SM and many more policy proposals are being discussed. There may indeed be a need for regulation as the measures adopted by private owners of SM platforms do not seem to put enough limits on manipulation of information, propagation of hate speech and false news. However, such regulation is not always backed up by sound evidence, especially with respect to the effect of SM on offline political behavior of people.
We will provide credible empirical evidence on the effect of internet and SM on political behavior, with specific focus on studying the mechanisms behind these effects. We focus on the causal effect of SM penetration on participation in political protests. In the analysis we distinguish between two channels – the information channel and the coordination channel. The informational channel reflects low barriers to entry make it much more difficult to limit the spread of potentially harmful information that would lead to more anti-government sentiments in the population. The coordination channel reflects SM relies on user-generated content facilitates horizontal information flows, which could lower the costs of coordination and, thus, alleviate the collective action problem. We also study how the structure of network connections affect the information proliferation and ability of people to coordinate. In addition, we examine the role of social motivation in the decision to participate in protests.

Work performed

Most of the work was devoted to identifying the causal effect of SM penetration on political outcomes. We do so in the context of Russia in 2011-2012, when Russia saw a large wave of anti-government protests with a substantial geographic variation: out of 625 cities in our sample, protests were held in more than 100. Most importantly, particularities of the development of the most popular online social network in Russia –VKontakte (or VK)- allow us to exploit quasi-random variation in the penetration of this platform across cities and identify the causal effect of SM penetration on protests.
VK was created by a student of the St Petersburg State University (SPbSU), Pavel Durov. Initially, users could only join the platform by invitation through a student forum of the University. As a result, the vast majority of early users of VK were Durov’s fellow students and friends and relatives of these students. Using the fluctuations in the student flow from Russian cities to SPbSU as an instrument in an instrumental variable framework we find that a 10% increase in VK penetration leads to a 4% higher chance of a protest taking place and a 19% larger protest. Non-parametrically, we document that there exists a threshold of VK penetration below which there is no relation between VK penetration and protests.
We highlight two channels through which SM could lead to protest participation in a non-democracy. On the one hand, low barriers to entry make it much more difficult for the regime to limit the spread of potentially harmful information that would lead to more anti-government sentiments in the population. We call this the information channel. On the other hand, SM relies on user-generated content facilitates horizontal information flows, which could lower the costs of coordination and, thus, alleviate the collective action problem. We call this the coordination channel.
We find no evidence that supports the information channel being at work in our context. In particular, we show that, consistently across all elections after the creation of the social network, VK led to the higher, not lower, pro-government vote. We do not find any evidence for increased political polarization since there was no jump in negative attitudes toward the regime or in the opposition vote.
However, we do find evidence in favor of coordination. The impact of SM on protests was stronger in larger cities. In addition, protests tend to be smaller in cities where, conditional on the total number of SM users, the user base was more fractionalized between Facebook and VK. These findings may also be consistent with the importance of peer pressure and social image.

Final results

The project makes a significant contribution to the literature by providing the first reliable evidence on the causal effect of SM on political outcomes. Our results indicate that SM penetration facilitates participation in political protests, and the reduction in the costs of collective action is the primary mechanism behind this effect. The positive impact of SM penetration on collective action has been predicted by the theoretical literature and widely discussed in the popular press but so far there has been no systematic empirical evidence to support this prediction. Our results imply that the availability of SM may have important consequences as political protests can affect within-regime power-sharing agreements, as well as related economic and political outcomes
We believe that our methodology can be used for studying the impact of SM penetration on other forms of collective action. For example, consumers who would like to lower tariffs or discipline companies’ misbehavior through boycotts, also face the same collective action problem. Similarly, collective action is important for the fundraising campaigns of charitable or educational institutions, for environmental activism, or hate crime. We expect SM to reduce the costs of collective action in all of these circumstances; at least as long as social norms imply that participation in collective action is desirable. More generally, our identification approach, which relies on social distance from the inventor to instrument for the spread of the new technology, is likely to be applicable to studying the impact of technology adoption in other settings, and can complement identification strategies based on physical distance.
Our work is one the first in studying how SM can change societies. More research is needed to understand whether similar results hold for other outcomes and other contexts. One important step in this direction is a more detailed analysis of the particular mechanisms behind these effects. Two additional parts of the project are aimed at providing such evidence. One direction of research is a detailed examination of the role of social image concerns in the decision to participation in political process and the way online SM mediates this motivation. Another direction of research is examining the association between the structure of online social networks and the occurrence of political protests. This relationship is likely to go in both directions.

Website & more info

More info: https://sites.google.com/site/rubenenikolopov/home.