Guy Aridor, @rafaeljjd.bsky.social‬, Ro'ee Levy, & Lena Song suggest practical ways that academic researchers can run experiments that use #socialmedia platforms, how to harness platform features, and limitations to consider when conducting such experiments. cepr.org/voxeu/column... #EconSky

🧵 Does toxic content drive social media engagement? ☢️ YES. But proving it isn’t straightforward. A new field experiment by @rafaeljjd.bsky.social et al. provides causal evidence that reducing exposure to toxicity lowers engagement across major platforms. Here’s what they found 👇 1/8

Today's cool young researcher #econtwitter #econsky is @juliaseither @juliaseither.bsky.social at Universidad del Rosario who works on topics related to experimental + behavioral economics www.juliaseither.org/

Deadline approaching: The CEPR Workshop on Media, Technology, Politics, and Society is hosted by Bocconi University in June 2025! Submission deadline is January 31, 2025. We accept extended abstracts but priority will be given to full papers. More details: t.co/xwoWXLEBVH #econsky

What is the best evidence that fact checking works *at scale*? And evidence on whether it outperforms Community Notes?

Has anyone made the point that LLMs help you, not only with the info they give, but also because they sharpen your thinking by forcing you to articulate your thoughts in prompts?

Out now in @aeajournals.bsky.social: a guide to research on the economics of social media platforms, by SSRC Digital Platforms Initiative participants @rafaeljjd.bsky.social, Roee Levy, Guy Aridor, and Lena Song. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Very happy to see our review article finally in print!

Thrilled to share that my work on feed-ranking algorithms, based on a large-scale experiment I conducted with 5 million people in India, was recently featured on the Economics that really matters blog! So excited for feedback from folks in this lovely space 🦚 www.econthatmatters.com/2024/11/can-...

Network effects are powerful…

This new paper by Guy Aridor, Rafael Jiménez-Durán (@rafaeljjd.bsky.social), Ro’ee Levy, and Lena Song provides a precious practical guide for designing, conducting, and analyzing experiments using social media platforms #EconSky 1/4 www.cesifo.org/en/publicati...

A quick keyword search in here shows that this site is not really ready for the moderation challenges that come with scale. Maybe it feels safe for now because early migrators are homogeneous. But that changes fast w scale. Plus, no clear monetization -> hard to scale up a moderation team.

Working in media economics? Don’t miss the CEPR Workshop on Media, Technology, and Politics, hosted at Bocconi in June 2025! #econsky mailchi.mp/cepr/call-fo...

The academic literature on social media has *exploded* recently In this new paper, we synthesize the empirical literature on the economics of social media, covering e.g. content moderation, segregation, political ads, & effects on political outcomes. Link: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... #Econsky