Social Media, Contact and Conflict: Evidence from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Cyprus

• In Event: Experiments in Inter-Group Relations

Abstract

Despite the belief that social media is altering intergroup dynamics -- bringing people closer or further alienating them from one another -- the impact of social media on interethnic attitudes has yet to be rigorously evaluated, especially within areas with tenuous interethnic relations. We report results from two randomized controlled trials, conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Cyprus, in which we explore the effects of exposure to social media, during the countries' respective weeks of conflict remembrance, on a set of interethnic attitudes of Facebook users. We find diverging results, and show that the effect of deactivation is highly conditional on the composition of users' networks. We also extend the analysis to include measures of subjective well-being and knowledge of the news. We find that Facebook deactivation leads to an increase in subjective well-being and a decrease in the knowledge of the news, replicating results from recent research in the United States in very different contexts, thus increasing our confidence in the generalizability of these effects.

Authors

• Nejla Asimovic, NYU

• Jonathan Nagler, New York University

• Richard Bonneau, NYU

• Joshua A. Tucker, New York University