Andy Guess Profile picture
Politics, social media, misinfo + occasional cinegeekery. Assistant Professor of @PUPolitics and Public Affairs, @PrincetonSPIA. Founding co-editor, @journalqd.
Jul 27, 2023 17 tweets 4 min read
Today is publication day for the first 4 papers resulting from a unique collaboration between Meta researchers and outside academics to study the political effects of Facebook and Instagram in the 2020 U.S. election! 🧵 1/N In these threads I'm going to focus on two papers in @ScienceMagazine describing experiments designed to understand the role of feed algorithms and virality during the 2020 U.S. election. #SocialMediaAndElections 2/
Dec 1, 2021 13 tweets 6 min read
Now in @polcommjournal (w/ Stiene Praet @j_a_tucker @Jonathan_Nagler @RichBonneauNYU):

We use surveys + Facebook Page likes data to ask: Does polarization in the U.S. extend to ""non-political"" domains such as sports, food, brands, etc.?

Paper: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

🧵⬇️ /1 Image TL;DR We find a clear divide: page categories directly related to politics — opinion leaders, partisan news sources, topics related to identity&religion — are more polarized. Other categories — including sports & food! — are not, though with some exceptions (hello, @ChickfilA) /2
Jul 23, 2021 6 tweets 3 min read
Exciting new research by Sascha Göbel (@goetheuni) now live at @journalqd! In "Voting and Social Media­-Based Political Participation," Göbel puts reinforcement and compensatory theories of online political participation to the test w/ new data.

Link: journalqd.org/article/view/2… /1 Göbel devises an ingenious method of linking Twitter + administrative voting data: Start with the FL voter file — which includes emails — and use "import from contacts" feature to repeatedly upload records to Gmail and match to accounts on Twitter. This avoids selecting on DV /2
Mar 29, 2021 12 tweets 10 min read
📣Out now at @PNASNews! @junghwanyang, @p_barbera, @simonsaysnothin and I study how online news affects people's info consumption, attitudes, and behavior. We demonstrate a long-term effect of partisan news exposure: lowered trust in mainstream news.

pnas.org/content/118/14… /1 TL;DR: Surveying people after a real-world intervention that boosted the amount of partisan news they encounter, we rule out modest effects on issue importance, political opinions, turnout/vote choice, approval & affective polarization -- i.e., the usual outcomes we talk about /2
Jul 16, 2020 7 tweets 7 min read
@Max_Fisher Thanks Max, this is thoughtful. In addition to what @BrendanNyhan said, I want to add a few points:

1. None of what I claim necessarily applies to sharing, which is a distinct behavior with a theoretically stronger link to identity academic.oup.com/joc/article-ab… @Max_Fisher @BrendanNyhan 2. Part of what I’m trying to explain is how generalizing from incoming traffic (even from the NYT!) can lead to a distorted view. You observe when sharing/clicking behavior is most polarized, which as you say covers a small % of articles posted every day
Jul 15, 2020 21 tweets 10 min read
My paper "(Almost) Everything in Moderation: New Evidence on Americans' Online Media Diets" is forthcoming at AJPS🥳. I use surveys and web visit data + a machine classifier to study online news consumption in 2015-2016. Get ready for a THREAD!

Preprint: dropbox.com/s/3rjsnp8k3im7… If you follow me, you might've encountered the headline finding before: contra @CassSunstein and others who argue that we're increasingly siloed into informational cocoons, people mostly rely on centrist media. As a result, news consumption patterns of Dems + Reps overlap a lot.
Sep 7, 2017 9 tweets 1 min read
In light of reporting on Facebook/Russia, worth remembering what we know about causal effect of targeted FB ads 1/ Assumption (among both commentators and Parscale) seems to be that FB ads effectively demobilized key pro-Clinton demographic groups 2/