A new study is getting a bit of attention for its startling claim that Facebook use is associated with more votes for Donald Trump. Maybe so, but take a look at the key chart:
This chart shows the results of deactivating Facebook and Instagram six weeks before the 2020 election for several thousand users. Note two things. First, Trump's favorability is entirely unaffected by social media use. Second, Facebook deactivation reduces the Trump vote but Instagram deactivation increases the Trump vote.
The combination of these two things makes it unlikely that the Facebook effect is real. I would be very skeptical of this result unless it's replicated multiple times in future elections.
Political social media is radicalizing. Mr. Drum's blog is too!
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Kevin, I love your blog and have been a reader for years, so this comment is written in a spirit of affection. But Kevin, your all time worst take is that social media doesn't have much of an impact on politics. You also simultaneously hold that Fox News has a massive impact, which may well be true, but also seems incongruous with the bad take in some ways.
I'm also a young gen X/elder millennial, so I suspect that could help explain our difference in perspective on this.
I'm a Never Trumper and left FB in spring of 2016 because seeing people I thought I knew embrace him really effected my mental health. Haven't missed it at all....
I have no confidence this is a good way to get sample sets: (from the paper)
We recruited 19,857 Facebook users and 15,585 Instagram users who used the platform for more than 15 min per day at baseline. We randomly assigned 27% to a treatment group that was paid to deactivate their Facebook or Instagram accounts for the 6 wk before election day, and the remainder to a control group that was paid to deactivate for just 1 wk.
Also, FYI:
... participants were randomized into two groups: Deactivation (27%) and Control (73%). The Control group was informed that they would receive $25 if they did not log in to their focal platform for the next week, while the Deactivation group was informed that they would receive $150 if they did not log in to their focal platform for the next 6 wk. Since the Deactivation condition was more expensive than Control, we allocated fewer participants to the former to increase statistical power per dollar of cost.
Facebook users are almost exclusively middle-aged and older white people, so no surprise there that it tends to lean right/trumpy. My college-age kid yesterday said that some of his classmates are actually going back on Facebook because it's so "retro."
The Christian Nationalists seem to think Facebook is useful; otherwise the Council for National Policy wouldn't use a microtargeting platform for data mining of church directories that they then cross-reference to voter lists and people who self-report mental health issues so that they know who to target for their Facebook advertising.
Trump’s favorability and vote both went down when users stayed off of Facebook for 6 weeks. They both went up when users stayed off Instagram for six weeks. However, only one of the four changes (Trump vote/Facebook) is statistically significant. The sample sizes are large (19,857 Facebook, 15,585 Instagram), so it wouldn’t take a very large effect to generate statistically significant results on all four variables. My guess is that these number reflect a real but very small effect.