iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 03/09/2026

Did podcasts really swing young men to Trump in 2024? We assembled the data to find out, and we are presenting it at APSA this Saturday, Sept 5, 2 to 3:30pm. Long awaited working paper link also attached below! If you have seen this before, we have new data, come check it out.

111

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 01/12/2025

This enabled comparisons across both true and false political visuals. 🔍

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 01/12/2025

As generative AI becomes more accessible, synthetic political images are reshaping how people see and interpret events. One question remains: Do AI labels help the public navigate this environment? Our new preprint, It Works When It Works, tests exactly that. 🔗 osf.io/preprints/so...

2123

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 14/11/2025

We also tested a popular media literacy intervention — “tips to spot false news” — that has been used by platforms like Facebook. While the intervention reduced belief in stories overall, it lowered belief in both true and false stories equally, producing no net gain in discernment. 👇👇

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 14/11/2025

The results were striking. Ukrainian-preferring respondents were less likely to believe both true and false stories when written in Russian. By contrast, Russian-preferring respondents sometimes showed greater belief in false stories when those same stories appeared in Ukrainian. 👇👇

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 14/11/2025

Participants were randomly assigned to read stories in their preferred language or their less-preferred language, within days of publication. 👇👇

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 17/07/2025

These findings have a key nuance: heavy WhatsApp users—those who frequently receive political content—did improve in spotting falsehoods, while others did not. This suggests that information interventions may have unequal impacts across subgroups, depending on baseline exposure.

Marginal Treatment Effects of WhatsApp Multimedia Deactivation on Belief Accuracy conditional on using WhatsApp to receive and share information about politics

110

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 17/07/2025

These findings are consistent with the “minimal effects” theory: the misinformation reduction did not translate to user belief accuracy and polarization changes. Although users saw less false content, their attitudes stayed the same.

Treatment effects of WhatsApp Multimedia Deactivation on False Rumors Accuracy and True News Accuracy Judgments

Treatment Effects of WhatsApp Multimedia Deactivation on Polarization and Subjective Well-Being

141

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 17/07/2025

Overall, the recall of misinformation dropped sharply. Participants were 40% less likely to remember false headlines, a significantly larger reduction than the decline in recall of true news.

Treatment effects of WhatsApp Multimedia Deactivation on self-reported exposure to false rumors and true news stories.

120

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 17/07/2025

Our design recruited 773 WhatsApp users before the 2022 election. The treatment group (N≈400) turned off all auto-downloads (videos, images, audio, & docs) for 3 weeks, while the control group kept their usual settings. We also verified compliance weekly via storage screenshots.

Overview of the WhatsApp Multimedia Deactivation Experiment

110

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 17/07/2025

In the Global South, WhatsApp is more popular than X or Facebook. New in @The_JOP, we ran a WhatsApp deactivation experiment during Brazil’s 2022 election to explore how the app facilitates the spread of misinformation and affects voters’ attitudes. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

Abstract: In most advanced democracies, concerns about the spread of misinformation are typically associated with feed-based social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These platforms also account for the vast majority of research on the topic. However, in most of the world, particularly in Global South countries, misinformation often reaches citizens through social media messaging apps, particularly WhatsApp. To fill the resulting gap in the literature, we conducted a multimedia deactivation experiment to test the impact of reducing exposure to potential sources of misinformation on WhatsApp during the weeks leading up to the 2022 Presidential election in Brazil. We find that this intervention significantly reduced participants’ recall of false rumors circulating widely during the election. However, consistent with theories of mass media minimal effects, a short-term change in the information environment did not lead to significant changes in belief accuracy, political polarization, or well-being.

13013

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 21/04/2025

Overall, our findings challenge the narrative that state politics has become entirely nationalized. While national influence is certainly present, local voices still significantly shape state policy agendas. Here's a summary of our four main findings:

1) State lawmakers listen to their constituents. Legislators consistently respond to the policy concerns of the general public in their state, particularly partisan constituents who are deeply engaged in state politics.

2) Congressional influence is also strong. Members of Congress exert top-down influence on state legislators, who frequently shift their attention to issues being discussed at the national level.

3) State media matters. While its influence is more moderate, local media outlets help shape state lawmakers’ attention to policy issues.

4) But presidents and national media don’t necessarily. Interestingly, we did not find that either Presidents Donald Trump or Joe Biden, nor national media outlets such as CNN and Fox News, have a substantial impact on state legislators’ policy focus.

121

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 21/04/2025

Amid growing DC gridlock, state legislatures play a vital role in shaping policy. But how do state lawmakers decide which issues deserve their attention? Our new @thejop.bsky.social paper is the first large-scale multi-state analysis exploring this question www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Title: Bottom Up? Top Down? Determinants ofIssue-Attention in State Politics

Abstract: Who shapes the issue-attention cycle of state legislators? Although state governments make critical policy decisions, data and methodological constraints have limited re-searchers’ ability to study state-level agenda setting. For this paper, we collect more than 122 million Twitter messages sent by state and national actors in 2018 and 2021.We then employ supervised machine learning and time series techniques to study how the issue-attention of state lawmakers evolves vis-`a-vis various local- and national-level actors. Our findings suggest that state legislators operate at the confluence of national and local influences. In line with arguments highlighting the nationalization of state politics, we find that state legislators are consistently responsive to policy debates among members of Congress. However, despite growing nationalization concerns, we also find strong evidence of issue responsiveness by legislators to members of the public in their states and moderate responsiveness to regional media sources.

2144

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 07/04/2025

🚨 Job Alert! 🚨 Come join our team studying the impact of digital media on democracy! We're hiring a Technical Lead - Research Engineering to help us build and maintain the robust data infrastructure and custom tools that power our research. More info + apply: apply.interfolio.com/165833

0138

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 17/03/2025

2) Those safe-seat incumbents of both parties who moved toward the extreme in the pre-primary period became more moderate after the primary than did those candidates who showed no such ideological movement.

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 17/03/2025

The results yielded two main findings: 1) When confronted w/well-funded primary challenger, both D & R incumbents in safe seats moved toward the ideological extremes before their primaries. Competitive seat incumbents, and those without a well-funded challenger, did not.

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 17/03/2025

It's well known that politicians take more extreme positions during primaries. In @electoralstudies.bsky.social, we find this shift is much more likely when incumbents in safe seats face a well-funded primary challenger. 🧵👇 authors.elsevier.com/a/1kn5KxRaZn...

176

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 19/02/2025

As journalists increase their use of AI, how will that impact trust in news? This study finds labeling news with AI-written content decreased trust among readers, and the effect was most pronounced among those with higher pre-existing trust in news. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

2114

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 04/02/2025

3) Latinos who rely on Spanish-language news on social media (relative to those who use English news) are more likely to believe in election fraud narratives about the 2020 presidential election.

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 04/02/2025

2) Latinos were more likely than whites (53 percent to 32 percent) to turn to social media for information about Covid-19.

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 04/02/2025

The research yielded three main findings: 1) Latino online political activity, such as sharing news and discussing politics, is on par with white Americans, with one notable exception: Latinos were much more likely to use WhatsApp than whites (57% to 15%).

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 04/02/2025

New at Political Research Quarterly: Our latest study analyzing Latino political engagement & activity on social media, from Marisa Abrajano & Marianna Garcia from @ucsandiego.bsky.social, and Aaron Pope, @robertvidigal.bsky.social, Edwin Kamau, @jatucker.bsky.social, & Jonathan Nagler of CSMaP.

284

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 12/12/2024

This legislative surge was powered by increasing single-party control of state governments (called "trifectas"), which helps them enact new laws more quickly. In 2024, 40 states had trifectas, the most in at least three decades, accounting for 89 percent of tech laws passed. 3/

110

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 12/12/2024

The report is the third in a series first launched by CTP in 2022. This year, we tracked eight policy areas: AI, child online safety, privacy, crypto, data centers, antitrust, content moderation, & taxation. Overall, 238 bills passed in 46 states (and the remaining 4 didn't meet this year) 2/

121

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 02/12/2024

Social networks, search engines, & streaming platforms are all deprioritizing news. Amid this fragmented online landscape, politicians will need to work harder to reach voters where they are in the information ecosystem, @jatucker.bsky.social tells @economist.com www.economist.com/united-state...

082

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 19/11/2024

2) Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were 11-20 % points more likely to believe false political narratives than those who consume English-language content. Results statistically significant for 6/7 false narratives & held when controlling for primary language spoken at home 8/

110

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 19/11/2024

Key findings from the two-part study: 1) Latino online political activity, such as sharing news and discussing politics, is on par with white Americans, with one notable exception: Latinos were much more likely to use WhatsApp than whites (57% to 15%). 7/

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 19/11/2024

The second, published today at PNAS Nexus, about belief in false narratives was done w/smaller sub-sample of 1,116 Latinos. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the largest and most comprehensive survey of Latinos' online political activity and information seeking preferences to date. 6/

120

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 19/11/2024

We have two new papers from this project: The first, forthcoming at PRQ, is based on a large online survey examining social media political activity of 2,326 Latinos & 769 non-Hispanic whites. We augmented the survey w/digital trace data from a subset of respondents. osf.io/vck9f?view_o... 5/

110

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 19/11/2024

📢 New CSMaP & @ucsandiego.bsky.social paper published in PNAS Nexus! Main finding: Latinos who rely on Spanish-language social media for news were significantly more likely to believe false political narratives than those who consume English-language content 🧵 1/ academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

76523

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 18/11/2024

New report on America's news influencers from @pewresearch.org & @knightfdn.bsky.social offers some interesting insights: - 21% of adults get news from influencers (more for young ppl) - More influencers lean to the right (27 to 21%) - More are men (63 to 30%) www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2...

02111

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 12/11/2024

5) @taylorlorenz.bsky.social further analyzes the right-wing content creator ecosystem -- and why the left struggles to compete. www.usermag.co/p/why-democr...

5185

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 12/11/2024

4) @cqzakrz.bsky.social, @drewharwell.com, & @naominix.bsky.social dive into how the Trump campaign went all in on the "manosphere" www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

101

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 12/11/2024

3) A WSJ analysis about how the splintering of the online media landscape accelerated in 2024 -- with traditional media losing its influence to podcasts, TikTok, and other forms of new media. www.wsj.com/business/med...

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 12/11/2024

2) @maxtani.bsky.social & @daveweigel.bsky.social on the old media grappling with its decreasing influence and resonance www.semafor.com/article/11/1...

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 12/11/2024

1) @cwarzel.bsky.social on how legacy media must compete against a choose-your-own-adventure reality www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 08/11/2024

This has been the case for awhile now, but the splintering of the online & social media landscape accelerated in 2024. It's not only by type of outlet (TikTok/Twitter/WhatsApp) but also by type of content (audio/video/text/images). Big trend to watch going forward. www.wsj.com/business/med...

021

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 04/11/2024

In 2024, 34% say that a Trump policy would make their lives better, compared to 28% for Harris. Harris's numbers are better than Clinton's but trail Biden. D: 28% in '16 -> 54% in '20 -> 45% in '24 R: 5% -> 14% -> 9% I: 16% -> 36% -> 27% 6/

120

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 04/11/2024

After getting a fresh wave of data we were able to compare responses to this question across 2024, 2020, and 2016. Note that we used a different method for the 2016 paper, so we re-ran the 2016 analysis using the new method and got similar results. Full details here. 4/

110

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 04/11/2024

Being able to identify something a candidate would do that would improve your life is strongly related to vote choice. We see this in 2016. Clinton won 98.8% of votes from Ds who named a policy of hers. But 62% of Ds who named a Trump but not Clinton policy voted for Trump. 3/

110

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 30/10/2024

Pro-Trump groups have spent years building election denial networks that, combined with Big Tech’s hands-off approach and continued foreign interference, have created a toxic information ecosystem. How did we get here? A terrific summary by @wiczipedia.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/electi...

0188

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 30/10/2024

The story also features our recent research on this topic, which you can find here: csmapnyu.org/assets/event...

010

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 30/10/2024

A deep dive from the @washingtonpost.com about how misinformation is more likely to spread in Spanish-language media and communities. Why? Less resources to correct lies in Spanish, different cultural histories, and different media diets. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

152

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 17/10/2024

Thank you to everyone who joined yesterday's event in DC! Across two panels, experts discussed how the research & policy communities can work together, and learn from each other, on work regarding foreign influence campaigns, disinformation, and generative AI.

141

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 08/10/2024

Foreign influence campaigns appear to have little direct effects (they don't change people's vote choices). But the indirect effect -- of reducing trust in the electoral process -- can be pernicious and impactful. www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/u...

020

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 30/09/2024

We found these interventions are only modestly effective: - The earlier interventions were applied, the more likely they were to be effective - Visibility reductions (ie, down-ranking) appeared more likely to reduce misinfo reach to susceptible users than other interventions 7/

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 30/09/2024

2) Users who are more receptive to misinformation tend to encounter it early in its spread through Twitter. This means that current social media interventions may struggle to curb its impact, as they are typically too slow to prevent exposure among those most receptive to it. 5/

100

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @csmapnyu.org · 30/09/2024

The research yielded two main findings: 1) While false news reached users across the political spectrum, those with more extreme ideologies (both conservative and liberal) were far more likely to both see and believe it. 4/

100