The conflict in Syria has killed hundreds of thousands and forced more than half of the country’s population to flee their homes. We constructed and analyzed comparable datasets of public messages and images from three popular social media platforms to study how Syrian users represent the...

Starting in 2011, the Syrian civil war has resulted in the displacement of over 80% of the Syrian population. This paper analyzes how the widespread use of social media has recorded migration considerations for Syrian refugees using social media text and image data from three popular platforms...

Do new media promote accountability in non-democratic countries, where offline media are often suppressed? We show that blog posts, which exposed corruption in Russian state-controlled companies, had a negative causal impact on their market returns. For identification, we exploit the precise...

How do the internet and social media affect political outcomes? We review empirical evidence from the recent political-economy literature, focusing primarily on the work that considers traits that distinguish the internet and social media from traditional offline media, such as low barriers to...

We study the causal effect of social media on ethnic hate crimes and xenophobic attitudes in Russia using quasi-exogenous variation in social media penetration across cities. Higher penetration of social media led to more ethnic hate crimes, but only in cities with a high preexisting level of...

We study the causal effect of social media on ethnic hate crimes and xenophobic attitudes in Russia using quasi-exogenous variation in social media penetration across cities. Higher penetration of social media led to more ethnic hate crimes, but only in cities with a high pre-existing level of...