What Impact did Facebook Have on the 2020 Elections?
How much influence do social media platforms have on American politics and society? It\u2019s a tough question for researchers to answer\u2014not just because it\u2019s so big, but also because platforms rarely if ever provide all the data that would be needed to address the problem.
A new batch of papers released in the journals Science and Nature marks the latest attempt to tackle this question, with access to data provided by Facebook\u2019s parent company Meta. The 2020 Facebook & Instagram Research Election Study, a partnership between Meta researchers and outside academics, studied the platforms\u2019 impact on the 2020 election\u2014and uncovered some nuanced findings, suggesting that these impacts might be less than you\u2019d expect.
Today on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editors Alan Rozenshtein and Quinta Jurecic are joined by the project\u2019s co-leaders, Talia Stroud of the University of Texas at Austin and Joshua A. Tucker of NYU. They discussed their findings, what it was like to work with Meta, and whether or not this is a model for independent academic research on platforms going forward.
(If you\u2019re interested in more on the project, you can find links to the papers and an overview of the findings here, and an FAQ, provided by Tucker and Stroud, here.)
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