| Title: |
The impact of engagement and partisan influence campaigns in an isolated social media environment |
| Authors: |
Alister, Manikya; Ransom, Keith James; Lua, Anthony; Perfors, Andrew |
| Source: |
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol 47, iss 0 |
| Publisher Information: |
eScholarship, University of California |
| Publication Year: |
2025 |
| Collection: |
University of California: eScholarship |
| Subject Terms: |
Psychology; Social cognition; Social media analysis |
| Description: |
Despite growing concerns about the effect of social media en- gagement on people's beliefs and behavior, estimating the ac- tual impact is difficult. Here we present preliminary results from our own isolated social media platform named Magpie Social. In it, participants could interact with each other like typical social media, but we had control over the platform and measured people's beliefs and behavior before and after us- ing it. This allowed us to more closely approximate the eco- logical validity of naturally occurring social-media data, while retaining the ability to measure variables and infer causation. Our week-long task had three between-subject conditions (to- tal N = 311): a CONTROL in which people engaged on Mag- pie with no external influence, and two (LEFT and RIGHT) in which a small number of posts were secretly made by us, shar- ing typical talking points from one political side. We found small but statistically reliable effects suggesting that, relative to the CONTROL, the presence of right-wing trolls resulted in a higher level of right-wing belief and a greater perception of po- litical division in the US. Conversely, the left-wing troll cam- paign did not appear to have any statistically reliable effect on these measures. We also found considerably more overall en- gagement in both troll conditions, probably because content with a clear political stance tended to receive more activity. However, participants (especially those on the left) disliked the RIGHT condition more than the others. |
| Document Type: |
article in journal/newspaper |
| File Description: |
application/pdf |
| Language: |
unknown |
| Relation: |
qt8c99k40r; https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8c99k40r; https://escholarship.org/content/qt8c99k40r/qt8c99k40r.pdf |
| Availability: |
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8c99k40r; https://escholarship.org/content/qt8c99k40r/qt8c99k40r.pdf |
| Rights: |
CC-BY |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.EFCCEF6C |
| Database: |
BASE |