Carlos Velasco Rivera presents "On-Platform Experimental Research on Facebook and Instagram in the 2020 Election"

Presentation Date: 

Wednesday, March 22, 2023
We will discuss a groundbreaking collaboration among over two dozen independent (that is, not paid by Meta) academics and a team of Meta researchers. Since early 2020, this group has worked together to evaluate the role of Facebook and Instagram in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The collaboration has, as of now, resulted in over a dozen pre-registered (observational and experimental) designs for academic research papers. In this presentation, we will focus on the experimental interventions that were designed to test the causal impact of Facebook and Instagram on all of the project’s key variables of inquiry: political participation; political polarization; knowledge and misperceptions; and beliefs about democratic norms. The project included multiple experiments, including full deactivation of platform use as well as various changes to the way in which participants encountered information on the platform.
See also: 2022