Political Effects of the Internet and Social Media
By E. Zhuravskaya, Maria Petrova, R. Enikolopov. Annual Review of Economics, 2020
457 citations recorded by the source corpus.
How do the Internet and social media affect political outcomes? We review empirical evidence from the recent political economy literature, focusing primarily on work that considers traits that distinguish the Internet and social media from traditional off-line media, such as low barriers to entry and reliance on user-generated content. We discuss the main results about the effects of the Internet in general, and social media in particular, on voting, street protests, attitudes toward government, political polarization, xenophobia, and politicians’ behavior. We also review evidence on the role of social media in the dissemination of fake news, and we summarize results about the strategies employed by autocratic regimes to censor the Internet and to use social media for surveillance and propaganda. We conclude by highlighting open questions about how the Internet and social media shape politics in democracies and autocracies.
Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8438d22396043ccec92d46fc46cf99d4f604da51
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Citations in the corpus
- Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2020, background): “See Zhuravskaya, Petrova, and Enikolopov (2020) for a recent review.”
- From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Models (2023, background): “The volume of online discourse surrounding polarizing issues—climate change, gun control, abortion, wage gaps, death penalty, taxes, same-sex marriage, and more—has been drastically growing in the past decade (Valenzuela et al., 2012; Rainie et al., 2012; Enikolopov et al., 2019).”
- Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users’ Views (2023, background): “A related topic, the political repercussions of social media and recommender systems [108], has received extensive research attention, however.”