Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform

Nathaniel Persily — a Stanford law professor and election law scholar — and Joshua Tucker — a NYU political scientist who co-directs the Center for Social Media and Politics — convened a group of the world's leading researchers on social media and democracy to assess the state of the field: what do we actually know, with what degree of confidence, about the effects of social media on democratic processes? The volume is the most comprehensive and rigorous synthesis of the empirical research available at the time of its publication, covering misinformation, political advertising, polarisation, and the specific challenges of election integrity.

What makes this volume particularly valuable is its epistemic honesty: the contributors consistently distinguish between what the evidence supports, what remains uncertain, and what the field still needs to know. In a field where confident assertions often outrun the evidence, this commitment to calibrated uncertainty is important. For practitioners advising clients on the effects of social media on their information environments, the book provides the most reliable available summary of what the research actually shows — which is both more and less alarming than most popular accounts suggest. Available as open access from Cambridge University Press.