FANNING THE FLAMES OF HATE: SOCIAL MEDIA AND HATE CRIME

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Muller, Karsten; Schwarz, Carlo
• 署名单位: Princeton University; Bocconi University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvaa045
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 2131-2167
• 关键词: political polarization; VIOLENCE; news; internet; radio

摘要

This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that antirefugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in the timing of major Facebook and internet outages. Consistent with a role for echo chambers, we find that right-wing social media posts contain narrower and more loaded content than news reports. Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism for violent crimes by enabling the spread of extreme viewpoints.