Social Media: Measuring Effects and Mitigating Downsides

Introduction

Social media was initially expected to generate widespread improvements in individual well-being and to have positive externalities in the political domain. Such optimistic expectations soon gave way to a host of concerns about possible negative effects of social media.

Societal Concerns

At the societal level, many started worrying that social media might exacerbate political polarization and propagate misinformation.

Individual User Concerns

At the level of individual users, many became concerned that social media might have detrimental effects on mental health, especially among the youth.

Research Goals

This research proposal has two major goals:

1. To fill critical gaps in our knowledge of the causal effects of social media on users and society.
2. To evaluate the effectiveness of interventions aimed at mitigating the downsides of social media.

Political Engagement

On the political front, I will deploy a novel empirical strategy to investigate the impact of social media on political engagement and conduct a large-scale field experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention aimed at increasing the quality and reducing the partisanship of the news consumed on social media.

User Interventions

On the users’ front, I will conduct two large-scale field experiments:

1. One aimed at evaluating the impact of an intervention encouraging parents to delay the acquisition of a smartphone for their children on outcomes related to child development.
2. The other aimed at evaluating whether tweaks to the social media environment can mitigate the negative effects of social media on mental health.

Overarching Goal

The overarching goal of this research project is to generate new scientific knowledge on the use and impact of social media, to highlight potential areas of policy intervention, and to evaluate ecologically valid and scalable remedies to the downsides of social media.

Methodology

The unique blend of cutting-edge causal inference techniques from observational data and large-scale field experiments will generate insights that can benefit researchers, users, and policymakers alike.