“Stop Blaming Social Media for Everything: The Minimal Effects of Facebook,” Kevin Arceneaux, Sciences Po

AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP

Abstract: Popular discourse about social media presumes that social media platforms play an outsized role in shaping public opinion and political behavior. The social nature of these platforms allow people to learn about politics from a tailored set of trusted sources, making them a potentially powerful influence, while also making them notoriously difficult to study. Deactivation experiments, which incentivize users to forgo using social media, offer a blunt instrument for estimating the overall impact of social media platforms. This talk will consider what we have learned about the effects of Facebook from several deactivation experiments conducted in the US and France. Despite its potential to shape public opinion and political behavior, these experiments suggest that it has relatively modest effects.

Kevin Arceneaux is Director of the  Center for Political Research at Sciences Po (CEVIPOF) and Professor of Political Science. He studies how people form beliefs and attitudes about politics and, ultimately, make political decisions.

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