Studying Human Attention On The Internet

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” is the caption of a famous cartoon from the early years of the Internet. In the 1990s, this was meant as a light-hearted poke at the emerging medium. Today, this cartoon seems a prescient glimpse of a dystopian future, of an Internet of misleading Amazon reviews, fake news, and Russian trolls. “Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter,” proclaimed The Atlantic , summarizing a major study in Science (1, 2). Yet, there has been relatively little science on the impact of inauthentic Internet content on what people believe and do. This gap reflects a major deficit in our collective capacity to conduct open science on the dynamics of human attention to content on the Internet (more below on this). Bail et al. (3) offer a critical evaluation of the potential impact of Russian troll content, finding little evidence that engagement with content in 2017 from (since revealed) Russian Twitter accounts is associated with increased polarization among US voters, one of the (inferred) objectives of Russian intervention in US political discourse. The paper uses panel data of Twitter users coupled with 2 survey waves from 2017, collected for other purposes (4), with the following question: Is exposure to Russian troll content associated with political polarization (captured by an array of attitudinal and behavioral measures)? The answer—within these data—is robustly no. This paper should therefore be reassuring that the effects of Russian social media interventions on polarization are minimal; however, readers should not sleep too easily at night. The paper, as with all … [↵][1]1Email: d.lazer{at}northeastern.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1