The Economic Journal · 2024 · Daniel Ershov、Juan S. Morales
中文摘要
2020年10月20日，在美国总统选举之前，推特修改了其分享社交媒体帖子的用户界面。为了减少平台上错误信息的传播，新界面助推用户对他们分享的内容深思熟虑。利用美国新闻媒体机构超过160,000条推文的数据，我们表明该政策显著减少了新闻分享，但减少幅度因政治倾向而存在异质性：相对于右翼机构，左翼机构内容的分享下降显著更多。考察新闻分享用户的推特活动数据，我们发现保守派对推特的干预反应较弱。最后，利用网络流量数据，我们记录到该政策显著减少了对新闻媒体机构网站的访问量。
Abstract
Abstract On 20 October 2020, prior to the US presidential election, Twitter modified its user interface for sharing social media posts. In an effort to reduce the spread of misinformation on the platform, the new interface nudged users to be thoughtful about the content they were sharing. Using data on over 160,000 tweets by US news media outlets, we show that this policy significantly reduced news sharing, but that the reductions varied heterogeneously by political slant: sharing of content fell significantly more for left-wing outlets relative to right-wing outlets. Examining Twitter activity data for news-sharing users, we find that conservatives were less responsive to Twitter’s intervention. Lastly, using web traffic data, we document that the policy significantly reduced visits to news media outlets’ websites.