Remote work arrangements and increased virtual communication are commonplace. Particularly in organizations, virtual communication has become an essential tool for collaboration and exchanging information. Virtual communication channels, such as text or video messages, provide different levels...

We study the Gilets jaunes movement, which blocked most of France off in November 2018. We first analyze the complementarity/substitutability between the different forms of mobilization and find that blockades were planned online and later reinforced online activism. Second, we do textual...

I study demand for social media services by conducting an experiment where I monitor how participants spend time on digital services and shut off access to Instagram or YouTube on their mobile phones. I characterize how participants substitute their time during and after the restrictions, which...

Does online fundraising increase charitable giving? Using the Facebook advertising tool, we implemented a natural field experiment across Germany, randomly assigning almost 8,000 postal codes to Save the Children fundraising videos or to a pure control. We studied changes in the donation revenue...

We examine the long-run effect of homophily in online social networks on interpersonal interactions in local communities. We measure online homophily across counties in the US using Facebook data. For identification, we exploit a conflict between Facebook and Google over data sharing of user...

We use a novel dataset of online advertiser performance and product sales to quantify the medium-term economic effects of Apple's App Tracking Transparency Policy (ATT). We find that ATT significantly degraded the ability by Facebook advertisers to target advertisements based on its off-platform...

We review the burgeoning literature on the economics of social media, which has become ubiquitous in the modern economy and fundamentally changed how people interact. We first define social media platforms and isolate the features that distinguish them from traditional media and other digital...

We quantify the prevalence of undisclosed influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts. We develop a novel method to detect undisclosed influencer posts and find that 96% of influencer posts are not disclosed as such. Despite...

Most social media users have encountered harassment online, but there is scarce evidence of how this type of toxic content impacts engagement. In a pre-registered browser extension field experiment, we randomly hid toxic content for six weeks on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Lowering exposure...

We provide a practical guide to designing, conducting, and analyzing experiments using social media platforms. First, we discuss the benefits and challenges of using the targeting capabilities of advertisements on social media to recruit participants for a large class of experiments. Next, we...