NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics

@CSMAP_NYU

We work to strengthen democracy by conducting rigorous research, advancing evidence-based public policy, and training the next generation of scholars.

New York, NY csmapnyu.org/links Joined January 2013

1.2K Following 4.6K Followers 4.1K Posts

Latest posts 5

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @CSMAP_NYU Sep 3

Did podcasts really swing young men to Trump in 2024? We assembled the data to find out, and we are presenting it at APSA this Saturday, Sept 5, 2 to 3:30pm. Long awaited working paper link also attached below! If you have seen this before, we have new data, come check it out.

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @CSMAP_NYU Jul 17, 2025

In the Global South, WhatsApp is more popular than X or Facebook.

New in @The_JOP, we ran a WhatsApp deactivation experiment during Brazil’s 2022 election to explore how the app facilitates the spread of misinformation and affects voters’ attitudes.

journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…

In most advanced democracies, concerns about the spread of misinformation are typically associated with feed-based social media platforms like Twitter & Facebook. These platforms also account for the vast majority of research on the topic. However, in most of the world, particularly in Global South countries, misinformation often reaches citizens through social media messaging apps, particularly WhatsApp. To fill the resulting gap in the literature, we conducted a multimedia deactivation experiment to test the impact of reducing exposure to potential sources of misinformation on WhatsApp during the weeks leading up to the 2022 Presidential election in Brazil. We find that this intervention significantly reduced participants’ recall of false rumors circulating widely during the election. However, consistent with theories of mass media minimal effects, a short-term change in the information environment did not lead to significant changes in belief accuracy and political polarization.

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @CSMAP_NYU Apr 21, 2025

Amid growing DC gridlock, state legislatures play a vital role in shaping policy. But how do state lawmakers decide which issues deserve their attention? Our new @The_JOP paper is the first large-scale multi-state analysis exploring this question.

journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/73…

Abstract: Who shapes the issue-attention cycle of state legislators? Although state governments make critical policy decisions, data and methodological constraints have limited researchers’ ability to study state-level agenda setting. For this paper, we collect more than 122 million Twitter messages sent by state and national actors in 2018 and 2021. We then employ supervised machine learning and time series techniques to study how the issue-attention of state lawmakers evolves vis-`a-vis various local- and national-level actors. Our findings suggest that state legislators operate at the confluence of national and local influences. In line with arguments highlighting the nationalization of state politics, we find that state legislators are consistently responsive to policy debates among members of Congress. However, despite growing nationalization concerns, we also find strong evidence of issue responsiveness to regional media sources.

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @CSMAP_NYU Apr 7, 2025

🚨 Job Alert! 🚨

Join our team studying the impact of digital media on democracy!

We're hiring a Technical Lead - Research Engineering to help us build/maintain the robust data infrastructure & custom tools that power our research.

More info: apply.interfolio.com/165833

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics @CSMAP_NYU Mar 17, 2025

It's well known that politicians take more extreme positions during primaries. In @ElectoralStdies, we find this shift is much more likely when incumbents in safe seats face a well-funded primary challenger.

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authors.elsevier.com/a/1kn5KxRaZnrh9