Stanford University

Social Media and Democracy: Assessing the State of the Field and Identifying Unexplored Questions

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Organized by the Media & Democracy program at the Social Science Research Council, in collaboration with the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. 

The 2016 American elections intensified popular as well as scholarly interest in the relationship between media and democracy. The role of social media has featured particularly prominently in debates over fake news, information bubbles, and algorithmic propaganda. Increased scholarly interest is manifested in the numerous conferences that have been held over the last year or so, jointly exploring technological changes in the media, social interactions online, and their relationship to the quality of our democracy.  
 
Social Media and Democracy: Assessing the State of the Field and Identifying Unexplored Questions will convene researchers to take stock and look ahead. In a format of brief remarks and panel discussions, we seek to assess the current literature on social media and democracy together, and to set a research agenda for the field moving forward.  
 
Format: Each panelist will be asked to speak for up to ten minutes. In lieu of preparing traditional research presentations, we encourage attendees to reflect on the field as a whole, and ask themselves where they would like to see scholars go next. After hearing prepared remarks from panelists, each panel will have allotted time for a discussion with audience participation.
 
Panel-specific prompts are included below, geared toward key connecting themes: What gaps exist in current research? What studies would we like to see that do not exist right now? What do we not yet know about the impact of social media on democracy? What partnerships are needed to pursue research that can answer these questions?
 
 

Thursday, April 19   8:30-9:00am             Registration and Breakfast


 
9:00-9:30am             Opening Remarks: Diana Mutz and Nate Persily  Overview of the Literature on Misinformation: Josh Tucker     
 
9:30-11:00am           Inflammatory Speech and Incivility Online
 
Panelists: Susan Benesch Bryan Gervais Diana Mutz Monica Stephens
 
Is social media a medium on which inflammatory speech and uncivil discourse are particularly prevalent? Online incivility may take a range of expressions, from unusually aggressive statements of individual political views to coordinated campaigns of harassment and intimidation. The targets may include out-partisans, professionals such as journalists, politicians, or government employees, and minority or underrepresented groups such as women and ethnic/religious minorities.
 
What, if anything, is different about inflammatory speech in the social media environment? What do we not yet understand about the origins, spread, and consequences of inflammatory speech online? Should we distinguish between different forms of incivility (e.g. direct threats vs. slurs, individual vs. coordinated harassment)? To what extent is online incivility related to real world actions (including, but not limited to, real world violence)?  
 
11:00-11:30am      Coffee Break   
11:30am-1:00pm  Distribution and Effects of Fake News
 
Panelists: Renee DiResta Kelly Garrett David Rand Josh Tucker
 
The distribution of false information - intentional and unintentional - through social media has  become a significant source of anxiety in the media, politics, and public discourse. Exposure to false information can lead to mistaken impressions about the world, and may also deepen partisan divisions.  
 
What do we need to learn about how misinformation spreads online? We already have some research that quantifies exposure to misinformation online; what do we need to learn next about the effects of such exposure (on the individual level and in the aggregate)? Has the spread of social media raised new, unanswered questions about how people process information and classify it as true or false?  
 
1:00-2:00pm       Lunch   2:00-3:30pm            Correcting Disinformation
 
Panelists: Jonathan Albright Matthew Baum Adam J. Berinsky Matthew Gentzkow Emily Thorson
 
Once a person has been exposed to, and accepted as true, an inaccurate piece of information, how can the information be successfully corrected? What do we need to understand next about the possibilities and pitfalls for correcting misinformation?  
 
Do we have reason to suspect that social media changes the difficulty of correcting misperceptions? What do we not yet know about how corrections of factual information lead to changes in political attitudes or behavior? If we want to correct false beliefs, what do we need to learn about who should go about making corrections, and how?   
 
 
 
Friday, April 20th   8:30-9:00am  Breakfast
 
9:00am-10:30am Homophily in the Social Media Sphere
 
Panelists: Damon Centola Annie Franco Shanto Iyengar Jaime Settle
 
Concern about online political discourse taking place in self-selected or algorithmically supported “information bubbles” is common, though there are differing views on how serious this problem is.  
 
Do we know whether social media is exceptional in enabling or limiting exposure to politically heterogeneous information? How do algorithms affect how much political content users see and/or the kind of political content to which they are exposed? What do we not yet understand about the frequency and consequences of political homophily on social media, as distinct from other types of media? What study would you like to see next on the prevalence and consequences of homogeneous political information? 

10:30-10:45am         Coffee Break   10:45am-12:15pm Globalization of the Marketplace of Ideas
 
Panelists: Nina Jankowicz Linda Kinstler Jennifer Pan


The use of social media for political ends is not limited to the United States, nor to traditional state actors. Narratives about politics are circulated online to influence domestic audiences, to drive political perceptions abroad, and to organize as well as suppress citizen unrest.
 
What do we need to learn next about the effectiveness of using social media to push the political interests of state- or non-state actors? What do we not yet understand about the dynamics at play when nation-states get involved in one another’s media ecosystems? How is this any different from when they previously did so using other media? What can we learn from studying the intersection of media and democracy in comparative perspective?
 
12:15-1:30pm Concluding Discussion Over Lunch (to-go available per request

Fisher Conference Center Frances C. Arillaga Alumni Center  Stanford University

Nate Persily James B. McClatchy, Professor of Law
Diane Mutz Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Conferences

Learning Lessons? A Comparison of Planning for the Occupations of Japan and Iraq

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Abstract:

In 2002 and 2003, Americans pointed to Japan after the Second World War as a model which proved that enemy countries could be remade into stable democratic allies through short military occupation. Planners and politicians drew on their understanding of events in Japan to learn "lessons" for a post-Saddam Iraq. In the years since, it has become common to blame the failures of intervention in Iraq on American ignorance and insufficient planning. But is that popular characterization correct? This talk discusses whether and how the planning phases for Japan and Iraq differed, and with what implications for the occupied countries.

 

Speaker Bio:

dbarnes1
Dr. Dayna Barnes is a specialist in 20th century international history, American foreign policy, and East Asia. She is a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and assistant professor of history at City, University of London. Her book, Architects of Occupation: American Experts and the Planning for Postwar Japan, was published in Cornell University Press in March 2017.

Visiting Scholar at CDDRL
Seminars

South Africa: Expanding circle of democratization

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Abstract:

The South African democratic process has crossed two significant milestones. One is political legitimacy in the sense that there is no significant threat to the constitution or political systems that the country adopted in 1996. Secondly, the systemic instability threat arising from the counter-revolutionary apartheid forces is now something of the past. There is simply no imminent threat of a retreat to the country’s authoritarian and racist past. The elusive goals remain in the economic arena – namely inclusive growth, widening inequality and slow development. How is the country shaping up to these challenges?

 

Speaker Bio:

maphai
Professor Vincent Maphai an unusual and distinguished career in academia, private sector and public service. He is currently a visiting Professor at Williams College, Massachusetts, Center for Global Studies. In an academic career spanning two decades, he studied and taught at various universities both locally. He was professor extraordinaire in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Africa (UNISA).. who held fellowships at Harvard (1988), Princeton (1989) and Stanford (1995). From 1991 to 1994 he was associate professor and head of the political science department at the University of the Western Cape. He also served as a Research Executive Director of social dynamics at the HSRC for three years..

Vincent Maphai Visiting Professor at Williams College
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Torture as a method of criminal investigation: the case of criminal justice reform in Mexico

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Speaker Bio:

Beatriz Magaloni Beatriz Magaloni
Beatriz Magaloni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Woods Institute of the Environment (2011-2013) and a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations. Her second book, Strategies of Vote Buying: Democracy, Clientelism, and Poverty Relief in Mexico (co-authored with Alberto Diaz Cayeros and Federico Estévez), studies the politics of poverty relief. Why clientelism is such a prevalent form of electoral exchange, how it distorts policies aimed at aiding the poor, and when it can be superseded by more democratic and accountable forms of electoral exchange are some of the central questions that the book addresses.

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University
Seminars

Valuing Peace: The Effects of Financial Market Exposure on Votes and Political Attitudes

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Abstract:

Financial markets expose individuals to the broader economy. Does participation in fi nancial markets also lead individuals to re-evaluate the costs of conflict, their views on politics and even their votes? Prior to the 2015 Israeli elections, we randomly assigned fi nancial assets from Israeli and Palestinian companies to likely voters and gave them incentives to actively trade for up to seven weeks. Opportunities to trade in fi nancial markets systematically shifted vote choices and increased support for peace initiatives. These effects persist a year after the experiment, and appear consistent with fi nancial market exposure leading to increased awareness of the economic risks of conflict.

 

Speaker Bio:

saumitra jha
Along with being a Senior Fellow at FSI, Saumitra Jha is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow at SIEPR. Saum holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to returning to Stanford, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. Saum has been a Fellow of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University and received the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 for his research on ethnic tolerance. Saumitra has consulted on economic and political risk issues for the United Nations/ WTO, the World Bank and other organizations. Having grown up in England, Scotland and the Indian Himalaya, Saum's research interests now take him to Israel, Japan, Mexico and elsewhere.

Saumitra Jha Associate Professor of Political Economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business
Seminars

A Brief History of Security

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Speaker(s) Bio:

Dr. Stephen J. Stedman
Stephen Stedman is a Freeman Spogli senior fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and FSI, an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.

 

 

algee hewitt
Mark Algee-Hewitt is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Literary Lab at Stanford, where he currently holds an Annenberg Faculty Fellowship. His research, which has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany and seeks to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. Professor Algee-Hewitt directs the Literary Text Mining cluster of the Digital Humanities Minor.

 

 

whitney
Whitney McIntosh is a Research Assistant for the Stanford Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, within the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She is a recent graduate from Stanford University, where she studied both International Relations and English, and received interdisciplinary honors through CDDRL. Her honors thesis explored the evolution and internationalization of the concept of security during the interwar period in France, from 1919-1933. Her research interests currently include global populism, post-truth democracy, and the conceptual evolution of security.

Stephen J. Stedman

CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-2705 (650) 724-2996
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Stedman_Steve.jpg PhD

Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.

In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.

In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.

In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.

His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).

Director, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law
Director, Program in International Relations
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Deputy Director, Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law
Mark Algee-Hewitt Assistant Professor, Department of English
Research Assistant for the Stanford Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective
Seminars

Is Trump Giving Authoritarianism a Bad Name?

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"Mr. Trump is almost certainly giving authoritarianism a bad name. Support for authoritarian rule declined most among Democrats and young people, while significantly increasing among Republicans. So when it comes to American authoritarianism, perhaps the problem isn’t so much Mr. Trump as it is hyper-partisanship," writes Larry Diamond in The New York Times. Read the full article here.

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Media Literacy and Civic Confusion: Why What We're Teaching Adds to the Problem

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Abstract:

In the face of information pollution, legislators in seven states have drafted bills to mandate courses in "media literacy" and “digital citizenship.” But what if the problem is not the lack of media literacy--but that the media literacy we do teach is the wrong kind? Drawing on a survey of 7804 middle, high school and college students, along with a focused study of Stanford undergraduates, academics from universities in California and Washington, and professional fact checkers at the nation’s most esteemed publications, I’ll argue that our approaches to information pollution may not only be ineffectual but may exacerbate the problem. Based on promising pilot data, I’ll suggest more comprehensive and effective solutions, and how we might address this issue here on our own Stanford campus.

 

Speaker Bio:

sam wineburg
Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History & American Studies. Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he holds a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford and an honorary doctorate from Sweden’s Umeå University. In 2004, Wineburg founded the Stanford History Education Group (sheg.stanford.edu), whose curriculum and assessments have been downloaded five million times. His latest work focuses on how people judge the credibility of digital content, research that has been reported in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, BBC, Die Zeit and translated into dozens of languages.

Wineburg’s scholarship sits at the crossroads of three fields: the psychology of learning, history, and education, and his articles have appeared in such diverse outlets as Cognitive Science, Journal of American History, Smithsonian Magazine, Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. In 2002 his book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for work that makes the most important contribution to the “improvement of Liberal Education and understanding the Liberal Arts.” In 2013, he was named the Obama-Nehru Distinguished Chair by the US-India Fulbright Commission and spent four months crisscrossing India giving lectures about his work. His new book, Why Learn History When It’s Already on Your Phone (Chicago), will be available in September.

Sam Wineburg The Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History & American Studies
Seminars
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