Cutting back on social media during elections stops you from seeing fake news, but it doesn't change your political views at all.
While many assume social media 'echo chambers' or misinformation drive polarization, multi-country experiments found that even when users successfully cut their exposure to toxic content, their underlying political views remained completely unchanged.
Reducing Social Media Usage During Elections: Evidence from a Multi-Country WhatsApp Experiment
SocArXiv · zrsqw_v1
Social media messaging platforms are central to worldwide communication, but are also major hubs of misinformation and toxic content. On these platforms, information spreads through interpersonal and group-based chats rather than feed-based recommendations. We argue that introducing barriers to usage can increase the costs of consuming low-quality content and promote more deliberate engagement, shaping information consumption and downstream attitudes. We evaluate our argument through three coord