Professor Andrew Guess will study online polarization and misinformation through a research project funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and Social Science One.

The Social Media and Democracy Grants provide the first opportunity for systematic scholarly access to privacy-protected Facebook data to study the platform’s impact on democracy worldwide.

The funding was awarded to a team of researchers from New York University, where Guess was a postdoctoral fellow prior to coming to Princeton. Guess is now an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and studies political communication, public opinion, and political behavior.

Under the guidance of Joshua Tucker, principal investigator of the project and professor of politics at New York University (NYU), Guess and his collaborators will study how content spreads through the social media information ecosystem through the context of the 2018 U.S. midterm election. In addition to Guess and Tucker, the team includes Richard Bonneau, Cody Buntain, Jonathan Nagler, and Megan Brown, all of NYU.

The Social Media and Democracy Research Grant grantees were selected from around the world based on their qualifications, research questions and methods, and commitment to accountability, transparency, and excellence. An international body of peer reviewers selected proposals submitted prior to Nov. 9, 2018, and without input from Facebook.

For 96 years, the SSRC has been committed to mobilizing knowledge for the public good. To this end, the Social Media and Democracy Research Grants program is guided by the belief that open, just, and democratic societies need an understanding of their own complex social, cultural, economic, and political processes — many of which are now online.