Digital literacy is receiving increased scholarly attention as a potential explanatory factor in the spread of misinformation and other online pathologies. As a concept, however, it remains surprisingly elusive, with little consensus on definitions or measures. We provide a digital literacy framework for political scientists and test survey items to measure it with an application to online information retrieval tasks. There exists substantial variation in levels of digital literacy in the population, which we show is correlated with age and could confound observed relationships. However, this is obscured by researchers’ reliance on online convenience samples that select for people with computer and internet skills. We discuss the implications of these measurement and sample selection considerations for effect heterogeneity in studies of online political behavior. We argue that there is no universally applicable formula for selecting a given non-probability sample or operationalization of the concept of digital literacy; instead, we conclude, researchers should make theoretically informed arguments about how they select both sample and measure.

“Clickbait” media has long been espoused as an unfortunate consequence of the rise of digital journalism. But little is known about why readers choose to read clickbait stories. Is it merely curiosity, or might voters think such stories are more likely to provide useful information? We conduct a survey experiment in Italy, where a major political party enthusiastically embraced the esthetics of new media and encouraged their supporters to distrust legacy outlets in favor of online news. We offer respondents a monetary incentive for correct answers to manipulate the relative salience of the motivation for accurate information. This incentive increases differences in the preference for clickbait; older and less educated subjects become even more likely to opt to read a story with a clickbait headline when the incentive to produce a factually correct answer is higher. Our model suggests that a politically relevant subset of the population prefers Clickbait Media because they trust it more.

Knowledge creation is a social enterprise, especially in political science. Sharing new findings widely and quickly is essential for progress. Scholars can now use Twitter to rapidly disseminate ideas, and many do. What are the implications of this new tool? Who uses it, how do they use it, and what are the implications for exacerbating or ameliorating existing inequalities in terms of research dissemination and attention? We construct a novel dataset of all 1,236 political science professors at PhD-granting institutions in the United States who have a Twitter account to answer these questions. We find that female scholars and those on the tenure track are more likely to use Twitter, especially for the dissemination of research. However, we consistently find that research by men shared on Twitter is more likely to be passed along further by men than research by women.

Does social media educate voters, or mislead them? This study measures changes in political knowledge among a panel of voters surveyed during the 2015 UK general election campaign while monitoring the political information to which they were exposed on the Twitter social media platform. The study's panel design permits identification of the effect of information exposure on changes in political knowledge. Twitter use led to higher levels of knowledge about politics and public affairs, as information from news media improved knowledge of politically relevant facts, and messages sent by political parties increased knowledge of party platforms. But in a troubling demonstration of campaigns' ability to manipulate knowledge, messages from the parties also shifted voters' assessments of the economy and immigration in directions favorable to the parties' platforms, leaving some voters with beliefs further from the truth at the end of the campaign than they were at its beginning.

I conduct an experiment which examines the impact of moral suasion on partisans engaged in uncivil arguments. Partisans often respond in vitriolic ways to politicians they disagree with, and this can engender hateful responses from partisans from the other side. This phenomenon was especially common during the contentious 2016 US Presidential Election. Using Twitter accounts that I controlled, I sanctioned people engaged partisan incivility in October 2016. I found that messages containing moral suasion were more effective at reducing incivility than were messages with no moral content in the first week post-treatment. There were no significant treatment effects in the first day post-treatment, emphasizing the need for research designs that measure effect duration. The type of moral suasion employed, however, did not have the expected differential effect on either Republicans or Democrats. These effects were significantly moderated by the anonymity of the subjects.

As non-democratic regimes have adapted to the proliferation of social media, they have began actively engaging with Twitter to enhance regime resilience. Using data taken from the Twitter accounts of Venezuelan legislators during the 2014 anti-Maduro protests in Venezuela, we fit a topic model on the text of the tweets and analyze patterns in hashtag use by the two coalitions. We argue that the regime’s best strategy in the face of an existential threat like the narrative developed by La Salida and promoted on Twitter was to advance many competing narratives that addressed issues unrelated to the opposition’s criticism. Our results show that the two coalitions pursued different rhetorical strategies in keeping with our predictions about managing the conflict advanced by the protesters. This article extends the literature on social media use during protests by focusing on active engagement with social media on the part of the regime. This approach corroborates and expands on recent research on inferring regime strategies from propaganda and censorship.