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{
    "pk": 49549,
    "title": "The impact of engagement and partisan influence campaigns in an isolated social media environment",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Despite growing concerns about the effect of social media en-\ngagement on people's beliefs and behavior, estimating the ac-\ntual impact is difficult. Here we present preliminary results\nfrom our own isolated social media platform named Magpie\nSocial. In it, participants could interact with each other like\ntypical social media, but we had control over the platform and\nmeasured people's beliefs and behavior before and after us-\ning it. This allowed us to more closely approximate the eco-\nlogical validity of naturally occurring social-media data, while\nretaining the ability to measure variables and infer causation.\nOur week-long task had three between-subject conditions (to-\ntal N = 311): a CONTROL in which people engaged on Mag-\npie with no external influence, and two (LEFT and RIGHT) in\nwhich a small number of posts were secretly made by us, shar-\ning typical talking points from one political side. We found\nsmall but statistically reliable effects suggesting that, relative\nto the CONTROL, the presence of right-wing trolls resulted in a\nhigher level of right-wing belief and a greater perception of po-\nlitical division in the US. Conversely, the left-wing troll cam-\npaign did not appear to have any statistically reliable effect on\nthese measures. We also found considerably more overall en-\ngagement in both troll conditions, probably because content\nwith a clear political stance tended to receive more activity.\nHowever, participants (especially those on the left) disliked the\nRIGHT condition more than the others.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Psychology; Social cognition; Social media analysis"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Poster Presentation",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8c99k40r",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Manikya",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Alister",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "The University of Melbourne",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Keith",
            "middle_name": "James",
            "last_name": "Ransom",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of Adelaide",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Anthony",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Lua",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "The University of Melbourne",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Andrew",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Perfors",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of Melbourne",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-01-01T13:00:00-05:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49549/galley/37511/download/"
        }
    ]
}