Jason Shuo Zhang

Upasana Dutta, Rhett Hanscom, Jason Shuo Zhang et al.

Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The goal of this research is to understand whether general Twitter users changed their behavior in the year following first contact from an IRA account. We compare the before and after behavior of contacted users to determine whether there were differences in their mean tweet count, the sentiment of their tweets, and the frequency and sentiment of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump or @HillaryClinton. Our results indicate that users overall exhibited statistically significant changes in behavior across most of these metrics, and that those users that engaged with the IRA generally showed greater changes in behavior.

Jason Shuo Zhang, Chenhao Tan, Qin Lv

Intergroup contact has long been considered as an effective strategy to reduce prejudice between groups. However, recent studies suggest that exposure to opposing groups in online platforms can exacerbate polarization. To further understand the behavior of individuals who actively engage in intergroup contact in practice, we provide a large-scale observational study of intragroup behavioral differences between members with and without intergroup contact. We leverage the existing structure of NBA-related discussion forums on Reddit to study the context of professional sports. We identify fans of each NBA team as members of a group and trace whether they have intergroup contact. Our results show that members with intergroup contact use more negative and abusive language in their affiliated group than those without such contact, after controlling for activity levels. We further quantify different levels of intergroup contact and show that there may exist nonlinear mechanisms regarding how intergroup contact relates to intragroup behavior. Our findings provide complementary evidence to experimental studies in a novel context and also shed light on possible reasons for the different outcomes in prior studies.