More from @sinanaral

Sinan Aral

@sinanaral

15 Sep 20

[🚨New Book🚨] Today is the BIG DAY! With the help of so many amazing people, I'm SO excited to launch my first book, THE HYPE MACHINE, today!

sinanaral.io/books

For those of you who like to sample before you buy, here is a sneak peak at the book in 12 acts 1/

[Chapter 1] opens with the annexation of Crimea as a leading example of the geopolitical impact of the New Social Age. It provides new evidence on the role of social media in the Crimean annexation - the first forceful redrawing of European borders since WWII. 2/

[Chapter 2] traces the Rise of Fake News all the way to the End of Reality, covering its impact on elections & democracy, business & markets and our public health like #Covid_19. It covers the science of fake news and the implications of the rise cheap, ubiquitous #deepfakes 3/

Read 14 tweets

Sinan Aral

@sinanaral

9 Sep 20

https://twitter.com/BrendanNyhan/status/1303720284810342403

I think this is one of the main entry points into the debate: Regardless of levels there's a debate about the marginal effect of technology which is largely on the side of narrowing consumption deeply (within) and broadly (across) choice areas 1/t

https://twitter.com/BrendanNyhan/status/1303720284810342403

Then there's the question about the impact of a marginal change: levels data suggests narrow consumption is not the norm, but what do marginal changes in consumption do to beliefs and behaviors (that's largely unknown) 2/

I think the argument that there are large swaths of society that only consume narrowly and don't overlap and that technology caused that is wrong but is also a straw man 3/

Read 13 tweets

Sinan Aral

@sinanaral

14 Aug 20

@INFORMS

[🚨New Paper🚨] Published today in Management Science @INFORMS with @dhillon_p on "Digital Paywall Design."

We collaborated with the @nytimes to analyze a natural experiment on how "digital paywall design" impacts publishers' subscription rates and revenues. 1/

The study tracked the browsing behavior of 177M unique visitors who accumulated over 777M page views, from which we constructed a 30M person quasi-experimental panel over the 7-month study. 2/

@nytimes

We used a quasi-experiment to track how changes to the @nytimes paywall design affected content consumption, subscriptions and revenues. 3/

Read 9 tweets

Sinan Aral

@sinanaral

21 May 20

[🚨NEW WORKING PAPER🚨] As local governments reopen, we study how policies in one region affect mobility & social distancing in other regions & the consequences of uncoordinated policy responses to #Covid_19. 1/

bit.ly/2XgLV55

The key takeaway is a state or county's policies significantly affect mobility in other states & counties -- not just in geographically proximate states but often a great distance through long distance travel & influence over social media and other communication technology. 2/

We combined daily, county-level policy data w/ movement from over 27M mobile devices, social networks among 220M FB users, daily weather from 62K weather stations & county-level census data to estimate geographic & social network spillovers in regional policies across the US. 3/

Read 22 tweets

Sinan Aral

@sinanaral

29 Mar 20

[The Threat to Florida] There are good reasons to suspect Florida will be the next #coronavirus hotspot in the U.S. and that it will eventually be one of the hardest hit regions. Several unfortunate facts point to this possibility... 1/

Kinsa Health, a smart thermometer company using thermometer readings across the US to predict where COVID-19 might strike next, is reporting "the level of illness in Florida is 2X what we would expect," & is experiencing the most abnormal spikes in temperature (see the map) 2/

Although correlation is not causation and many things could be associated with elevated temperatures, large numbers of simultaneous temperature *increases* during a pandemic are certainly worth investigating. 3/

Read 5 tweets