NYU | New York City

At the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab, we are forging interdisciplinary collaboration that examines the intersection of social media and politics.

WHO WE ARE

SMaPP is an NYU-based community of scholars studying the effects of social media on politics.

MEET OUR TEAM

WHAT WE DO

At SMaPP, we conduct research in three core areas: (i) the relationship between social media and politics, (ii) innovative methods to use social media data to study politics, and (iii) the development of open-source tools that facilitate the work of others.

Collaborative Research

Featured Work

Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook

Journal Article

We examine the individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. To do so, we uniquely link an original survey with respondents’ sharing activity as recorded in Facebook profile data. First and foremost, we find that sharing this content was a relatively rare activity. Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains than liberals or moderates. We also find a strong age effect: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.

The Internet Research Agency’s Use of Local and Fake News in the 2016 US Presidential Campaign

Data Report

The NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab analyzed data shared publicly by Twitter on the activity of the Kremlin-linked “Internet Research Agency” (IRA) to examine whether IRA-operated Twitter accounts spread polarizing or misleading content on social media platforms in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Measuring the prevalence of online hate speech, with an application to the 2016 U.S. election

Working Paper

We offer a new approach to measuring the real-time prevalence of online hate, using both context specific data and data produced by a large random sample of users; employing multiple methods of text classification; and measuring not only the volume, but also the proportion, and number of unique users producing it.

View all projects

Open Source Innovation

Featured Analysis Tools by SMaPP

pysmap is a high level toolkit for dealing with twitter data it also has a higher level interface for smappdragon. it has functionality from the old toolkit and functionality from our old util library smappPy.
smappdragon is a set of tools for working with twitter data. a more abstract / contextual wrapper for smappdragon can be found in pysmap (work in progress). the old smapp-toolkit can be found on our github repositories page.
urlExpander is a Python package for hyperlinks analysis. It quickly and thoroughly resolves shortened urls (like bit.ly links), and can be used to collect metadata from webpages such as the title and description of news articles.
The youtube-data-api is a Python client to collect and parse publicly available YouTube data.

NYU | New York City

At the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab, we are forging interdisciplinary collaboration that examines the intersection of social media and politics.

WHO WE ARE

SMaPP is an NYU-based community of scholars studying the effects of social media on politics.

WHAT WE DO

At SMaPP, we conduct research in three core areas: (i) the relationship between social media and politics, (ii) innovative methods to use social media data to study politics, and (iii) the development of open-source tools that facilitate the work of others.

Collaborative Research

Featured Work

Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook

Journal Article

The Internet Research Agency’s Use of Local and Fake News in the 2016 US Presidential Campaign

Data Report

Measuring the prevalence of online hate speech, with an application to the 2016 U.S. election

Working Paper

View all projects

Open Source Innovation

Featured Analysis Tools by SMaPP

View all data collection and analysis tools

SMaPP in the Media

Recent Press

The Washington Post

Who was most likely to share fake news in 2016? Seniors.

By Andy Guess, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker

CNN

People over 65 share fake news stories on Facebook more than any other age group, study says

By Eric Levenson

The New York Times

Older People Shared Fake News on Facebook More Than Others in 2016 Race, Study Says

By Niraj Chokshi

View all SMaPP Coverage