The Political Effects of Social Media: Evidence from the US 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday October 10th from Noon to 1 PM Pacific for The Political Effects of Social Media: Evidence from the US 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study, a panel discussion with Jennifer Pan, Neil Malhotra, and Pablo Barberá, moderated by Jeff Hancock, co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a series spanning October through December, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. This session will take place in Encina Commons, Moghadam Conference Room #119, 615 Crothers Way.

About the Seminar

New evidence about the role of social media in American democracy has been gained as a result of collaboration between academics from U.S. colleges and universities, along with researchers from Meta. In July 2023, the first set of four papers from this collaboration were peer-reviewed and published in Science and Nature, focusing primarily on how critical aspects of the algorithms that determine what people see in their feeds affect what people see and believe. In this panel, speakers will discuss the overall project, as well as the results from the first set of published studies.

About the Speakers
 

Jennifer Pan is the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies, Professor of Communication and (by courtesy) Political Science, and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Her research uses experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity to answer questions about the role of digital media in politics, including how political censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation work in the digital age and how preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result. 

Pablo Barberá is a Research Scientist in Meta's Computational Social Science team and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. He received his PhD in Political Science from New York University, where he was affiliated with the Social Media and Political Participation lab and the Center for Data Science. Prior to joining Meta, he was an Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science in the Methodology department at the London School of Economics. His research combines computational methods and the use of social media data to examine the impact of digital technologies on political behavior and public opinion.

Neil Malhotra is the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed articles on topics ranging from political polarization to survey methodology. His research has been published in leading outlets such as Science, Nature, and the American Political Science Review.