The course description:
This course will look at the impact of social media on politics, broadly speaking. We will be examining both how social media can be used to answer existing questions about political behavior of masses and elites, and look at how social media impacts politics. Several aspects of social media generally stand out: it facilitates information flow, it eliminates gate-keepers of information (traditional media), and it can facilitate coordination. Social media also provides amazingly rich data with which to test theories of politics. We will be covering existing research on the impact of social media and politics, with a focus on how existing empirical work relates to long-standing political science research questions, and we will be dealing with issues of how future empirical work can test for causal inference with what must very often be observational data. Each week’s class will generally be a mix of: 1) critically reading the existing literature on social media, and related political science work informing the topic being discussed; and 2) discussing current empirical work being carried out on social media. Students enrolled in the course will have the opportunity to work with data collected by the SMaPP lab.
Write a 15-page literature review on “the role of anonymity and social media”. It needs to deal with social media and political science (so things like echo-chamber effect, hate speech, online protest, etc).
the literature review must include a research question – in my case, how does anonymity play a role in social media and politics) – and suggestion for future research.
