Political effects of the internet and social media...general, and social media, in particular: 1 play a key role in amplifying existing economic, political, and cultural grievances

Introduction

Political effects of the internet and social media

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

Paris School of Economics (EHESS) and CEPR

October 2019

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya Political effects of the internet and social media 1

Introduction

ICT revolution in the last two decades

(ITU)

• Broadband internet spreads in developing and developed countries

• Mobile internet (3G and higher) accounts for much this growth


Introduction

ICT revolution in the last two decades• Internet use per 100 residents, globally (1999:5%; 2019:>50%)

(Source: ITU)


Introduction

Social media revolution in the last decade


Introduction

At the same time... (1) On the one hand:

• The wave of political protests throughout the world:• starting the the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, but then,

spreading to many parts of the world, as different as Ukraine,Venezuela, Hong Kong, Chile, France (just to name a few) ...

(Al Jazeera)


Introduction

At the same time... (2) On the other hand:Political landscape in many democracies undergoes a drastic change withpopulists gaining political weight—notably, in Europe:

(Gardian)

• The number of Europeans living in a country with a populist incabinet has increased 13-fold from 12.5M in 1998 to 170.3M in 2018


Introduction

Are these trends related?

• Many observers have suggested that the internet, ingeneral, and social media, in particular:

1 play a key role in amplifying existing economic, political, andcultural grievances

2 and have their own independent effect on politics

• Arab Spring ⇒ Internet was branded the “LiberationTechnology” (Diamond and Plattner 2010)—a popularview in the developing world

• In contrast, in the developed world, social media is oftenblamed for the proliferation of false news, for increasingpolitical polarization by means of “echo chambers,” and forthe rise of populism (e.g., Tufekci, 2018; Pomerantsev,2019)


Introduction

Theory: features of the internet & social media

These are reasonable hypotheses as ICTs have changed the way weconsume and disseminate information and how we connect with others

• What is special about internet & social media?

1 Low barriers to entry

• give a platform for opposition and whistleblowers to reachout to voters, particularly when traditional media arecontrolled (+)

• make political gatekeeping ineffective, allowing newentrants into politics (+/−)

• undermine the traditional media model based on long-termreputation and fact checking (−)

2 Reliance on user-generated content and 2-way information flows

• facilitate coordination during collective action, making iteasier to organize protests (+)

• allow collecting information about users that potentiallycould be used for manipulation or surveillance (−)


Introduction

Evidence: ICTs do facilitate political protests• Across Africa, even before 3G (1998-2012), mobile network availability

led to protests during downturns (Manacorda and Tesei 2019):

• Enikolopov et al. 2019: in Russia, idiosyncratic differences in social mediapenetration were associated with different intensity of protests in 2011 dueto a decrease in costs of coordination (Enikolopov et al. 2019)

• Internet could even lead to a regime change, but evidence is scarce—Miner(2015) shows it for Malaysia.


Introduction

Alternative approach is to look at government approval

• Gullup World Poll asks the same set of questions about confidence in

government in a large set of countries throughout the world

• These data allow comparisons both across different sets ofcountries and over time

• Guriev, Melnikov and Zhuravskaya (2019) link these data with theinformation on the availability of 3G mobile networks annuallybetween 2008 and 2017


Introduction

3G networks in 2007Only 4% of the world’s population had mobile internet in 2007.

Sample: Countries with 3G (from Collins Bartholomew)and Gullup World Poll data.


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3G networks in 201869.3% of the world’s population had mobile internet in 2018.

Sample: Countries with 3G (from Collins Bartholomew)and Gullup World Poll data.


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Result 1: The expansion of 3G reduces governmentapproval, but only if internet is not censored


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Yet, 3G increases internet use in both groups ofcountries


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Result 2: When internet is free, the effect is stronger incountries where traditional media is controlled


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Result 3: 3G internet exposes actual corruption• Furceri et al. (2019) present data on incidents of actual corruption

throughout the world• We look at how perceptions of corruption are related to actual corruption

incidents and show that perceptions of corruption go up more withcorruption incidents in regions with access to 3G (within the same countries)

• Confirming that internet exposes corruption and is a source of independentpolitical information


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Result 4: Populists benefit politically from the internetexpansion, at least in Europe

30 countries in 2007-2018: 87 elections, 409 subnational regions. ChapelHill Expert Survey classification of populists.


Introduction

Evidence from individual countries: the reversal

Before social media:• A number of studies: in the first decade of the ICT revolution,

Europeans with internet connection were diverted from politics

• In Germany, UK, and Italy, broadband was associated with lower

electoral turnout with no visible gains for any political party• (e.g., Falck et al 2014; Campante et al. 2018; Gavazza et al 2019)

After social media:• In contrast, the situation has changed at around 2008, turnout and

populist vote increased with internet

• E.g., the electoral performance of Five Star Movement in Italy and

AfD in Germany was stronger in localities with access to broadband• (Campante et al. 2018; Schaub and Morisi 2019; consistent with our

results for 30 European democracies)

• New populist politicians managed to mobilize voters by connecting tothem directly through social media


Introduction

Channels?

• In part, the effect of internet on populist vote must be explained bythe disillusionment with the ruling elites (that we see in the overallfall of government approval with the spread of internet)

• It may also have been partly driven by the better ability of

anti-establishment politicians to reach out to frustrated voters

• So far, this is a conjecture that needs to be tested in futureresearch

• To the extent that “populist” is a synonym of irresponsible policy

proposals (a definition, which is shared only by a subset of scholars

who study populism), misinformation and false promises are a part of

populists’ image

• There is no systematic study, which shows whether populists usefalse facts more than non-populists in their political discourseand advertising. It is sure that many populists do use false facts.

• So, how misinformation spreads online and whether it is effectivecould be related to reasons for the populists’ electoral gains


Introduction

False news dissiminationThere is also no systematic study of whether false news are more or lessprevalent today than in the past

• Rumors and deliberate propaganda based on false facts circulatedwidely before the age of internet

A number of studies look at the spread of false news on social media:

• False news do circulate widely: e.g., during the US 2016 presidentialcampaign, pro-Trump false stories were shared 30M times andpro-Clinton—8M on Facebook (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017)

• False stories diffuse faster, more broadly (larger audience), and deeper(more re-shares) than true stories, particularly political topics(Vosoughi et al. 2018)

• Browsing histories of false news consumers are peculiar: Facebook is4-times as likely to be among the websites visited within 30 secondsbefore a visit of a false news website than before a visit of a true newswebsite (Guess et al. 2018)

• Exposure to false news on social media is concentrated amongright-wing and older users (Grinberg et al. 2019)


Introduction

Who shares false news and why?Vosoughi et al. (2018); Guess et al. (2019); Guriev, Henry, Zhuravskaya (2019)

• Overall, sharing false news is a rare activity, even among users who

are very active on Facebook and Twitter

• there is a cluster of active sharers, but it is rather small: about0.1% of all Twitter users are responsible for 80% of the retweetsof fake political stories

• Bots share true and false stories at the same rate, humans sharefalsehoods more than truths

• The degree of novelty and the extent to which the news is emotionally

charged (both higher for false news) may be responsible for why

humans share fakes more

• reactions to fakes expressed fear, disgust, and surprise; to truestories—sadness, joy, and trust

• Characteristics of sharers:

• Partisan supporters of politicians, whose message the false newsfavor; People over 65 years old; Men; Those who claim that theyuse Facebook in order to influence others, share falsehoods more


Introduction

The role of fact checking in sharing false news

Experiment during the 2019 European Parliament election campaign(Guriev, Henry, Zhuravskaya 2019):

• Subjected random sub-sets of Facebook users to:

• pro-MLP false news (actual quotes of MLP, containing falsefacts)

• pro-MLP false news + fact checking from traditional media

• Studied sharing activity:

• About 15% of respondents in false facts treatment shared falsefacts

• About 10% of respondents in false facts + fact checkingtreatment shared false facts (30% significant reduction)

• Almost nobody shared fact checking information


Introduction

The role of fact checking in political persuasionExperiment during the 2017 French Presidential election campaign (Barreira, Guriev,Henry, Zhuravskaya 2019):

Subjected random sub-sets of French voters to:• pro-MLP false facts (quotes of MLP with false facts)• pro-MLP false facts + fact checking• true facts

Studied voting intensions and found that false facts are highly persuasiveand fact checking does nothing to undo it:

• Intention to vote for MLP increased by 5 percentage points comparedto the control group (with 37% mean intention) in both false facts andfact checking treatments

• But not because people do not trust fact checking:• Respondents learn true facts when exposed (knowledge of facts is

closer to the truth in fact checking group and farther from thetruth in false facts group compared to the control)

• Thus, fact checking corrects factual knowledge but does not undo theeffect of false news on voting intentions


Introduction

Interpretation

• We do not know how long lasting these effects are

• Emotions are at the core of the effectiveness of fake news and

ineffectiveness of fact checking in undoing the effect of false facts on

political persuasion

• fear, anxiety, surprise

• Fact checking do not usually address emotions, so when people hearthe truth, they register it, but the mechanism that got them worriedor scared in the first place is not undone: people always could findreasons to worry and fact checking may actually increase the salienceof the sensitive issue

What can be done?• Psychological education, education about fake news

• Building emotional counter-narrative


Introduction

Take-aways

There is convincing evidence that internet and social media:

1 Help inform the public, when traditional media is controlled andinternet is free

2 And this leads to a decrease in confidence in the incumbentgovernments

3 Help coordinate collective action, such as political process, which

could lead to a regime change

• In developing countries, these effects are consistent with the viewthat social media is the “Liberation Technology”

4 In developed liberal democracies, populists (at least, fo far) benefit

politically from the internet

• Channel is not clear so far. Most probably, a combination of theeffect of legitimate criticism of the ruling elites andmisinformation online

Overall, the results suggest that internet is a tool that can beused both to inform and to misinform the public


Appendix

• Supplementary slides:


3G networks in Europe 2007

Sample: Countries with 3G and GWP data.


3G networks in Europe in 2018

Sample: Countries with 3G and GWP data.


Countries w/ censorship of internet and of traditionalpressfor at least some years over the sample period

Internet censored:• Bahrain, Belarus, China, Ethiopia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia,

Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, United ArabEmirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam

Traditional press censored (top quartile), internet is free:• Angola, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burundi, Cambodia, Central African

Republic, Egypt, Honduras, Iraq, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Libya,Morocco, Myanmar, Russia, Rwanda, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Sudan,Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela, Zimbabwe


Documents

Political effects of the internet and social media...general, and social media, in particular: 1 play a key role in amplifying existing economic, political, and cultural grievances