thesis statement on why social media is harmful

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Thesis Statements about Social Media: 21 Examples and Tips

• by Judy Jeni
• January 27, 2024

A thesis statement is a sentence in the introduction paragraph of an essay that captures the purpose of the essay. Using thesis statements about social media as an example, I will guide you on how to write them well.

It can appear anywhere in the first paragraph of the essay but it is mostly preferred when it ends the introduction paragraph. learning how to write a thesis statement for your essay will keep you focused.

A thesis statement can be more than one sentence only when the essay is on complex topics and there is a need to break the statement into two. This means, a good thesis statement structures an essay and tells the reader what an essay is all about.

A good social media thesis statement should be about a specific aspect of social media and not just a broad view of the topic.

The statement should be on the last sentence of the first paragraph and should tell the reader about your stand on the social media issue you are presenting or arguing in the essay.

Reading an essay without a thesis statement is like solving a puzzle. Readers will have to read the conclusion to at least grasp what the essay is all about. It is therefore advisable to craft a thesis immediately after researching an essay.

Throughout your entire writing, every point in every paragraph should connect to the thesis.  In case it doesn’t then probably you have diverged from the main issue of the essay.

How to Write a Thesis Statement?

Writing a thesis statement is important when writing an essay on any topic, not just about social media. It is the key to holding your ideas and arguments together into just one sentence.

The following are tips on how to write a good thesis statement:

Start With a Question and Develop an Answer

If the question is not provided, come up with your own. Start by deciding the topic and what you would like to find out about it.

Secondly, after doing some initial research on the topic find the answers to the topic that will help and guide the process of researching and writing.

Consequently, if you write a thesis statement that does not provide information about your research topic, you need to construct it again.

Be Specific

The main idea of your essay should be specific. Therefore, the thesis statement of your essay should not be vague. When your thesis statement is too general, the essay will try to incorporate a lot of ideas that can contribute to the loss of focus on the main ideas.

Similarly, specific and narrow thesis statements help concentrate your focus on evidence that supports your essay. In like manner, a specific thesis statement tells the reader directly what to expect in the essay.

Make the Argument Clear

Usually, essays with less than one thousand words require the statement to be clearer. Remember, the length of a thesis statement should be a single sentence, which calls for clarity.

In these short essays, you do not have the freedom to write long paragraphs that provide more information on the topic of the essay.

Likewise, multiple arguments are not accommodated. This is why the thesis statement needs to be clear to inform the reader of what your essay is all about.

If you proofread your essay and notice that the thesis statement is contrary to the points you have focused on, then revise it and make sure that it incorporates the main idea of the essay. Alternatively, when the thesis statement is okay, you will have to rewrite the body of your essay.

Question your Assumptions

Before formulating a thesis statement, ask yourself the basis of the arguments presented in the thesis statement.

Assumptions are what your reader assumes to be true before accepting an argument. Before you start, it is important to be aware of the target audience of your essay.

Thinking about the ways your argument may not hold up to the people who do not subscribe to your viewpoint is crucial.

Alongside, revise the arguments that may not hold up with the people who do not subscribe to your viewpoint.

Take a Strong Stand

A thesis statement should put forward a unique perspective on what your essay is about. Avoid using observations as thesis statements.

In addition, true common facts should be avoided. Make sure that the stance you take can be supported with credible facts and valid reasons.

Equally, don’t provide a summary, make a valid argument. If the first response of the reader is “how” and “why” the thesis statement is too open-ended and not strong enough.

Make Your Thesis Statement Seen

The thesis statement should be what the reader reads at the end of the first paragraph before proceeding to the body of the essay. understanding how to write a thesis statement, leaves your objective summarized.

Positioning may sometimes vary depending on the length of the introduction that the essay requires. However, do not overthink the thesis statement. In addition, do not write it with a lot of clever twists.

Do not exaggerate the stage setting of your argument. Clever and exaggerated thesis statements are weak. Consequently, they are not clear and concise.

Good thesis statements should concentrate on one main idea. Mixing up ideas in a thesis statement makes it vague. Read on how to write an essay thesis as part of the steps to write good essays.

A reader may easily get confused about what the essay is all about if it focuses on a lot of ideas. When your ideas are related, the relation should come out more clearly.

21 Examples of Thesis Statements about Social Media

• Recently, social media is growing rapidly. Ironically, its use in remote areas has remained relatively low.
• Social media has revolutionized communication but it is evenly killing it by limiting face-to-face communication.
• Identically, social media has helped make work easier. However,at the same time it is promoting laziness and irresponsibility in society today.
• The widespread use of social media and its influence has increased desperation, anxiety, and pressure among young youths.
• Social media has made learning easier but its addiction can lead to bad grades among university students.
• As a matter of fact, social media is contributing to the downfall of mainstream media. Many advertisements and news are accessed on social media platforms today.
• Social media is a major promoter of immorality in society today with many platforms allowing sharing of inappropriate content.
• Significantly, social media promotes copycat syndrome that positively and negatively impacts the behavior adapted by different users.
• In this affluent era, social media has made life easy but consequently affects productivity and physical strength.
• The growth of social media and its ability to reach more people increases growth in today’s business world.
• The freedom on social media platforms is working against society with the recent increase in hate speech and racism.
• Lack of proper verification when signing up on social media platforms has increased the number of minors using social media exposing them to cyberbullying and inappropriate content.
• The freedom of posting anything on social media has landed many in trouble making the need to be cautious before posting anything important.
• The widespread use of social media has contributed to the rise of insecurity in urban centers
• Magazines and journals have spearheaded the appreciation of all body types but social media has increased the rate of body shaming in America.
• To stop abuse on Facebook and Twitter the owners of these social media platforms must track any abusive post and upload and ban the users from accessing the apps.
• Social media benefits marketing by creating brand recognition, increasing sales, and measuring success with analytics by tracking data.
• Social media connects people around the globe and fosters new relationships and the sharing of ideas that did not exist before its inception.
• The increased use of social media has led to the creation of business opportunities for people through social networking, particularly as social media influencers.
• Learning is convenient through social media as students can connect with education systems and learning groups that make learning convenient.
• With most people spending most of their free time glued to social media, quality time with family reduces leading to distance relationships and reduced love and closeness.

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Social Media: Thesis Statement

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

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Positive effects, negative effects, positive social change.

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Science News

Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

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By Sujata Gupta

February 20, 2024 at 7:30 am

In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being or mood disorders, chiefly depression and anxiety.

Ironically, one of the most cited studies into this link focused on Facebook.

Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes , says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review . “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”

The concern, and the studies, come from statistics showing that social media use in teens ages 13 to 17 is now almost ubiquitous. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, and some 60 percent of teens report using Instagram or Snapchat, a 2022 survey found. (Only 30 percent said they used Facebook.) Another survey showed that girls, on average, allot roughly 3.4 hours per day to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, compared with roughly 2.1 hours among boys. At the same time, more teens are showing signs of depression than ever, especially girls ( SN: 6/30/23 ).

As more studies show a strong link between these phenomena, some researchers are starting to shift their attention to possible mechanisms. Why does social media use seem to trigger mental health problems? Why are those effects unevenly distributed among different groups, such as girls or young adults? And can the positives of social media be teased out from the negatives to provide more targeted guidance to teens, their caregivers and policymakers?

“You can’t design good public policy if you don’t know why things are happening,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders. 

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.” 

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on. 

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

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Just How Harmful Is Social Media? Our Experts Weigh-In.

A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook was aware of mental health risks linked to the use of its Instagram app but kept those findings secret. Internal research by the social media giant found that Instagram worsened body image issues for one in three teenage girls, and all teenage users of the app linked it to experiences of anxiety and depression. It isn’t the first evidence of social media’s harms. Watchdog groups have identified Facebook and Instagram as avenues for cyberbullying , and reports have linked TikTok to dangerous and antisocial behavior, including a recent spate of school vandalism .

As social media has proliferated worldwide—Facebook has 2.85 billion users—so too have concerns over how the platforms are affecting individual and collective wellbeing. Social media is criticized for being addictive by design and for its role in the spread of misinformation on critical issues from vaccine safety to election integrity, as well as the rise of right-wing extremism. Social media companies, and many users, defend the platforms as avenues for promoting creativity and community-building. And some research has pushed back against the idea that social media raises the risk for depression in teens . So just how healthy or unhealthy is social media?

Two experts from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia Psychiatry share their insights into one crucial aspect of social media’s influence—its effect on the mental health of young people and adults. Deborah Glasofer , associate professor of psychology in psychiatry, conducts psychotherapy development research for adults with eating disorders and teaches about cognitive behavioral therapy. She is the co-author of the book Eating Disorders: What Everyone Needs to Know. Claude Mellins , Professor of medical psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Sociomedical Sciences, studies wellbeing among college and graduate students, among other topics, and serves as program director of CopeColumbia, a peer support program for Columbia faculty and staff whose mental health has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. She co-led the SHIFT research study to reduce sexual violence among undergraduates. Both use social media.

What do we know about the mental health risks of social media use?

Mellins : Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms are important sources of socialization and relationship-building for many young people. Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. Girls and young people who identify as sexual and gender minorities can be especially vulnerable as targets. Young people’s brains are still developing, and as individuals, young people are developing their own identities. What they see on social media can define what is expected in ways that is not accurate and that can be destructive to identity development and self-image. Adolescence is a time of risk-taking, which is both a strength and a vulnerability. Social media can exacerbate risks, as we have seen played out in the news. 

Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. – Claude Mellins

Glasofer : For those vulnerable to developing an eating disorder, social media may be especially unhelpful because it allows people to easily compare their appearance to their friends, to celebrities, even older images of themselves. Research tells us that how much someone engages with photo-related activities like posting and sharing photos on Facebook or Instagram is associated with less body acceptance and more obsessing about appearance. For adolescent girls in particular, the more time they spend on social media directly relates to how much they absorb the idea that being thin is ideal, are driven to try to become thin, and/or overly scrutinize their own bodies. Also, if someone is vulnerable to an eating disorder, they may be especially attracted to seeking out unhelpful information—which is all too easy to find on social media.

Are there any upsides to social media?

Mellins : For young people, social media provides a platform to help them figure out who they are. For very shy or introverted young people, it can be a way to meet others with similar interests. During the pandemic, social media made it possible for people to connect in ways when in-person socialization was not possible.  Social support and socializing are critical influences on coping and resilience. Friends we couldn’t see in person were available online and allowed us important points of connection. On the other hand, fewer opportunities for in-person interactions with friends and family meant less of a real-world check on some of the negative influences of social media.

Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. – Deborah Glasofer

Glasofer : Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. In fact, a good peer group online may be protective against negative in-person influences. For those with a history of eating disorders, there are body-positive and recovery groups on social media. Some people find these groups to be supportive; for others, it’s more beneficial to move on and pursue other interests.

Is there a healthy way to be on social media?

Mellins : If you feel social media is a negative experience, you might need a break. Disengaging with social media permanently is more difficult­—especially for young people. These platforms are powerful tools for connecting and staying up-to-date with friends and family. Social events, too. If you’re not on social media then you’re reliant on your friends to reach out to you personally, which doesn’t always happen. It’s complicated.

Glasofer : When you find yourself feeling badly about yourself in relation to what other people are posting about themselves, then social media is not doing you any favors. If there is anything on social media that is negatively affecting your actions or your choices­—for example, if you’re starting to eat restrictively or exercise excessively—then it’s time to reassess. Parents should check-in with their kids about their lives on social media. In general, I recommend limiting social media— creating boundaries that are reasonable and work for you—so you can be present with people in your life. I also recommend social media vacations. It’s good to take the time to notice the difference between the virtual world and the real world.

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How Harmful Is Social Media?

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism ,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, “What I said to him was, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t we see?’ ”

Bail emphasized that he is not a “platform-basher.” He added, “In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do—how much they could change things no matter who’s at the helm at these companies—and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users.” He found Haidt’s idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between scholarship and public writing.” Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “I decided that if I was going to be writing about this—what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere—once again, I’d better be confident I’m right,” he said. “I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don’t share your own.”

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, “When you first approach a question, you don’t even know what it is. ‘Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?’ That’s not a good question. You can’t answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?” As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged—Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.”

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article relied on the same three studies they’ve been reciting for years. “This is something you see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that a cereal company “might say, ‘Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?’ They’ll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy.”

After Haidt’s piece was published, the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public . Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt’s interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt’s article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project’s introduction, the authors warn, “We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers’ partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences,” but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, “Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization.” If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, “Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences.”

Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter,” which seems convincing—except that, as another team has it, “We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of ‘echo chambers’ in which the majority of people’s sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles.” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody’s pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one’s hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation—with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad—and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren’t as widespread a problem as he’d once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. “Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme,” Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it’s difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail’s point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, “The second story is foreign misinformation.” It’s not that misinformation doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news—“probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn’t change their opinions,” Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. “In fact,” he said, “echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation.”

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the “proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization,” by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels—a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification—or encountered via links from external sites. It’s easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, “Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm”—or, presumably, the reverse—“and it’s just not going to happen.”

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: “The most credible research is way out of line with the takes.” He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that “measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it’s almost all correlational. “Many of these studies will find polarization on social media,” he said. “But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!” He hastened to add, “Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area.” He told me, “It’s hard to weigh in on the side of ‘We don’t know, the evidence is weak,’ because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain.”

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” Haidt writes, “The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, “If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences—it’s very mixed.”

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts—one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation “(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.” But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: “From other kinds of evidence, I think there’s reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States.”

In the book “ Why We’re Polarized ,” for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. “Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: “Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way” with minimal attention to potential externalities. “That might’ve been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now.” He added, “There’s some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds”—streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation—“people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it’s another case where a very simple notion of ‘algorithms are bad’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t mean they’re good, it’s just that we don’t know.”

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. “Maybe there’s a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it’s doing some good in the rest of the world.” But, he noted, “Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can’t keep up with the need in the real world—that even if we don’t have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there’s still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that’s a fair point.” He paused. “It can’t all be randomized control trials.”

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt’s critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. “This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s absolutely up to the prosecution—people like me—to argue that, no, this time it’s different. But it’s a civil case! The evidential standard is not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as in a criminal case. It’s just a preponderance of the evidence.”

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can’t even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. “The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there’s an epidemic—when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, ‘No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything’? We have to think about what’s actually happening, what’s likeliest to pay off.” He continued, “We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation,” he said. “It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, ‘Nah, you haven’t proven it’?”

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. “In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification,” he said. “Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn’t matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn’t have contact with a lot of people.” Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Haidt could be accused of question-begging—of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there’s no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn’t mean they’re entirely irrelevant. “There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person,” Gentzkow told me. “There’s a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change—questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act.” He added, “That’s where many of the things I’d be most concerned about lie.”

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. “It’s another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don’t need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big.” He added, “Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about it—because we might be missing those extremes.” Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book “ Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America ,” noted that Haidt is “farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for.” But she understood his impulse: “We do have serious problems, and I’m glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this—there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse.”

It’s tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt’s essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy—whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy—but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn’t be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers—proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. “But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,” he said. “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” Nyhan had a similar reaction. “There are genuine questions that are really important, but there’s a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better.” He added, “We’re years into this, and we’re still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It’s totally wild.”

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How to Write a Thesis Statement About Social Media

Writing a thesis statement requires good research and creating a concise yet very informative point. Writing one about social media is no different. Due to the scope of the study, the information to gather and discuss is even more expansive.

• What is a Social Media Thesis Statement?

Social Media Essay Outline

Social media essay titles, thesis on social media, argumentative essay on social media, social networking thesis statement, summing up the thesis statement.

Social media uses mobile technologies that are Internet-based to run communication across different parts of the world. It gives  people  worldwide the opportunity to communicate and socialize, unlike past means of communication which were only one-way.

The evolution of technology has made social media more efficient and prevalent than any other form of communication today. With technology’s continued evolution, social media will continue to evolve, and so will topics and thesis statements about it. A good  thesis statement about social media  must meet some requirements, and we will look through most of them.

What is a Social Media Thesis Statement Supposed to Look Like?

Before understanding how a  thesis statement on social media  should look like, we should familiarize ourselves with what thesis statements properly entail. A thesis statement is typically written in the introductory portion of a paper.

It provides an apt and rapid summary of the main point or aim of the research paper or thesis. As the name implies, it is a statement, mainly written in just one sentence.

A thesis statement briefly combines the topic and the main ideas of the paper. Usually, there are two types of thesis statements: indirect and direct. The indirect thesis statements do not mention the core areas or reason of the thesis like the direct statement does.

A direct statement mentions the main topic and discusses the reasons for the paper, while an indirect statement mentions the statement and points out three reasons for it.

For instance, an indirect  social media thesis  statement could go like this; “Effects of social media on youth and the reasons for its abuse.” Here the topic is clearly stated, along with the central claim of the thesis paper.

Thesis statements are created, backed up, and expatiated in the remaining parts of the paper by citing examples and bringing up other related topics that support their claim. Through this, the thesis statement then goes to help structure and develop the entire body of the writing piece.

A  thesis about social media  should contain a good thesis statement that would  impact  and organize the body of the thesis work. Thesis statements do not necessarily control the entire essay but complement it in numerous aspects.

In writing a social media essay, there is a wide variety of topics to talk about. The points are nearly endless, from information collection to technology, its impacts, and adverse effects to its evolution. Nevertheless, there is always a basic outline for an essay, and it will be structured to follow the same format.

Here is an outline for a social media essay;

• Introduction 

Here, you begin with the topic, state its objective, provide reasons to support its claims and finalize with a precise and accurate thesis statement.

• Thesis statement

This statement should support and complement your main topic of discussion. It should provide a concise and cut-out message of the essay.

This section systematically lays out the arguments to support your topic while splitting them into paragraphs. This will gradually develop your points in a structured manner.

Each paragraph in this section must start with the topic sentence which relates directly to the thesis statement. Naturally, a paragraph should focus on one idea and be connected to the essay’s central argument.

Students must also conduct research and provide evidence to support the claims presented in the topic sentence. They can achieve this by using proper explanation methods to merge all their findings carefully.

In the conclusion  of the social media essay ,   you restate your statement in a way that completely complements and brings all your previous arguments together. It must have a concluding paragraph that reiterates the main point discussed in the body of the content. It should also add a call to action to bring the essay into a logical closure that effortlessly lays bare all the ideas previously presented.

The social media field is continuously expanding, and there are various variations to how it can be operated and observed. Choosing a topic is easy, but choosing the right one may not be as unchallenging.

Before you begin writing an essay, the correct approach will be to review as many samples as you can. This way, you can easily understand the general concept and the adequate writing flow required to outline or develop your arguments carefully.

Picking the wrong titles can go on to make your  thesis for a social media essay  unnecessarily tricky to write. This can occur when you pick a topic too complex or choose one too vaguely and undervalued. This could make you get stuck when writing, so you should always pick titles that are easy to research, analyze and expand upon.

With all these in view, here are some social media essay titles;

• Impact of social media on general education
• Effects of using social media on businesses
• Adverse effects of social media on personal relationships
• The effect of government on social media and their potential restrictions
• How a  thesis about the effects of social media can  positively impact society.

A thesis on social media should easily resemble other academic papers and concentrate on various topics in various subjects. Papers like this should take social media as their primary focus.

Keeping that in mind, a compelling social media thesis should contain specific parts like an introduction, thesis statement, body, and conclusion. Each part is essential and has its contribution and functions to the entire content of the thesis. Some students may find writing a thesis statement about social media difficult, so you can always ask our professional writers to “ write my thesis ” and we will be happy to help you.

The introduction usually contains a hook, a summary of the core points, and a concise thesis statement. The body section must carefully develop each argument and idea in a paragraph, while the conclusion should completely close all the arguments.

The tone, style, and approach to each argument should be precise and well laid out to quickly understand the general idea the thesis is trying to build upon. Depending on the level of education you are writing your thesis, you may need to conduct specific direct research on some points and be required to portray them in an encompassing manner.

Generally, thesis writing on any topic requires hard work, extensive research periods, and a good understanding of writing methods. Hence it should be approached with determination and passion. As a student in higher education, you should learn how to improve your writing skills.

An argumentative essay on social media is typically more engaging with active points of discussion and analysis. Communication is an integral aspect of human life when connecting and moving society as a whole forward. Now technology has upgraded communication to a social media age, which has become an advantage and disadvantage in many aspects of life.

An argumentative social media essay generally possesses a strong argument. The essay’s topic must be designed to prompt a person to pick a side or a discussion and provide the necessary support to back up their decision. This type of essay also requires one to research accurate facts for proper argumentative purposes.

Social media   argumentative essays  target the harmful effects of this brilliant innovation in communication and its uses worldwide. It is only natural as negative discussions might elicit a sense of debate and argumentation. Some examples of argumentative essay topics on social media include;

• The negative effects of social media on education in different nations
• Effects of social media and its impacts on the older and younger generation
• How social media has taken over people
• The adverse effects of social media and the digital space on our  mental health
• The pros and cons of social media in this society.

Social networking is an integral aspect of social media. It uses Internet-based social media sites to create connections and stay connected with friends, customers, family, and even business partners.

Social networking usually performs a primary purpose in communication with actual avenues like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These sites and applications enable people to connect to develop relationships and share messages, ideas, and information.

Most social networking forms entail developing and maintaining relationships using communication technology, whether it is the relationship between clients, business partners, or even students.

For example, with the development of the Internet, most students can easily find services to help write dissertations on media space, or social media marketing. All you have to do is invite me to write my dissertation and they will immediately find the best service to solve their problem.

Writing is  a social networking thesis statement  similar to that of a social media thesis statement. They essentially involve rational discussion, and they can be approached in the same manner. The only slight difference will be the particular attention to social media relationships. How they are developed, what it takes to maintain them, and the various merits they could provide. These would typically form the structure of a  social networking thesis statement.

Writing a good thesis statement on social media involves a good understanding of the topic chosen and an accurate idea of the reasons, factors, and discussions that impact the main idea of the thesis. With all these discussed, you should be well on your way to writing good thesis statements on social media.

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How to Write An Informative Essay

How to cite scientific papers, quetext vs grammarly, quillbot vs turnitin, native american weapons, social media & society thesis statement examples.

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Social Media & Society is a captivating and relevant research area, encompassing various aspects from interpersonal relations to global communication dynamics. A well-defined thesis statement is pivotal for delineating your research parameters and objectives in this expansive field. Below, you’ll find insightful examples of both good and bad thesis statements on Social Media & Society, accompanied by comprehensive explanations.

Good Thesis Statement Examples

Good: “This thesis evaluates the correlation between prolonged social media usage and increased levels of anxiety and depression among teenagers in the United States.” Bad: “Social media affects teenagers’ mental health.”

The good statement presents a specific correlation, target demographic (teenagers in the U.S.), and identified outcomes (anxiety and depression levels). The bad example, while correct, is vague and lacks defined variables and demographic focus.

Good: “The proliferation of fake news on social media platforms has discernibly influenced political elections, swaying public opinion and voter behavior.” Bad: “Fake news on social media impacts elections.”

The good statement provides a clear, arguable claim regarding fake news, public opinion, and voter behavior on social media. Conversely, the bad example states a general fact without depth or a specific area of impact.

Good: “Implementing educational programs that promote critical digital literacy can mitigate the negative effects of cyberbullying among middle school students.” Bad: “Education can help reduce cyberbullying.”

The good example is researchable and offers specific solutions (critical digital literacy programs), target demographic (middle school students), and defined problem (cyberbullying). The bad statement lacks detail, specific solutions, and target groups.

Bad Thesis Statement Examples

Overly Broad: “Social media has changed the way people communicate.”

Although true, this statement is excessively general and does not specify which aspect of communication or which demographic is being explored.

Lack of Clear Argument: “Social media is popular among young people.”

While factual, this statement lacks a clear argument or specific research focus, rendering it ineffective as a research guide.

Unmeasurable and Unresearchable: “Life is unimaginable without social media today.”

Although many might agree, this statement is not easily measurable or researchable and does not provide clear directions for academic exploration.

Crafting a compelling thesis statement for research in social media and society is crucial for delineating your investigation and elucidating your academic endeavor’s aims and scope. A good thesis statement should be specific, debatable, and researchable, acting as a sturdy foundation for scholarly inquiry. In contrast, a bad thesis statement is often too general, lacks a clear argument, and is not conducive to empirical exploration. The examples and analyses provided in this guide furnish students with valuable insights for developing thesis statements that are academically rigorous and insightful for exploring the intricate relationship between social media and society.

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Thesis Statements

What this handout is about.

This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft.

Introduction

Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion—convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy. In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing. After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence. This sentence is the thesis statement, and it serves as a summary of the argument you’ll make in the rest of your paper.

What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement:

• tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
• is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
• directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself. The subject, or topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis must then offer a way to understand the war or the novel.
• makes a claim that others might dispute.
• is usually a single sentence near the beginning of your paper (most often, at the end of the first paragraph) that presents your argument to the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the logic of your interpretation.

If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.)

How do I create a thesis?

A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a “working thesis” that presents a basic or main idea and an argument that you think you can support with evidence. Both the argument and your thesis are likely to need adjustment along the way.

Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on brainstorming .

How do I know if my thesis is strong?

If there’s time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following :

• Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the question. If the prompt isn’t phrased as a question, try to rephrase it. For example, “Discuss the effect of X on Y” can be rephrased as “What is the effect of X on Y?”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it’s possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like “good” or “successful,” see if you could be more specific: why is something “good”; what specifically makes something “successful”?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? If a reader’s first response is likely to  be “So what?” then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
• Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It’s okay to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? If a reader’s first response is “how?” or “why?” your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position right from the beginning.

Suppose you are taking a course on contemporary communication, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: “Discuss the impact of social media on public awareness.” Looking back at your notes, you might start with this working thesis:

Social media impacts public awareness in both positive and negative ways.

You can use the questions above to help you revise this general statement into a stronger thesis.

• Do I answer the question? You can analyze this if you rephrase “discuss the impact” as “what is the impact?” This way, you can see that you’ve answered the question only very generally with the vague “positive and negative ways.”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not likely. Only people who maintain that social media has a solely positive or solely negative impact could disagree.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? No. What are the positive effects? What are the negative effects?
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? No. Why are they positive? How are they positive? What are their causes? Why are they negative? How are they negative? What are their causes?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? No. Why should anyone care about the positive and/or negative impact of social media?

After thinking about your answers to these questions, you decide to focus on the one impact you feel strongly about and have strong evidence for:

Because not every voice on social media is reliable, people have become much more critical consumers of information, and thus, more informed voters.

This version is a much stronger thesis! It answers the question, takes a specific position that others can challenge, and it gives a sense of why it matters.

Let’s try another. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. “This will be easy,” you think. “I loved Huckleberry Finn!” You grab a pad of paper and write:

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.

You begin to analyze your thesis:

• Do I answer the question? No. The prompt asks you to analyze some aspect of the novel. Your working thesis is a statement of general appreciation for the entire novel.

Think about aspects of the novel that are important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Now you write:

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.

• Do I answer the question? Yes!
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not really. This contrast is well-known and accepted.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? It’s getting there–you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation. However, it’s still not clear what your analysis will reveal.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? Not yet. Compare scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck’s actions and reactions and anything else that seems interesting.
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? What’s the point of this contrast? What does it signify?”

After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write:

Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave “civilized” society and go back to nature.

This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 2018. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing , 8th ed. New York: Pearson.

Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Does Social Media Do More Harm Than Good for Society?

Social media has both positive and negative effects on society. But is it doing more harm than good?

Media has always had the power to influence our society, but it wasn't until the social media boom that we saw it on this scale and magnitude. While it has the potential for good, social media has been also been harmful to society because of how we use it.

Here's how social media is harming our mental health, self-image, communication skills, and society at large—potentially causing more harm than good overall.

Social Media Can Lead to Depression, Anxiety, and Loneliness

The uncontrollable urge to share everyday life with others on social media is starting to have long-term effects. Studies have shown that increased use of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok is leading to depression, anxiety, and loneliness.

The COVID-19 pandemic not only pushed more people to the platforms but also caused people to spend unusual amounts of time cruising their feeds. According to Statista , as of 2022, people spend an average of 147 minutes on social media daily. That's more than two hours.

More importantly, science has found that social media can make you sad . Social media platforms have become aware of how to manipulate your brain's reward response to increase engagement and time spent on apps. When you receive positive feedback on a post you made or a picture you uploaded, it releases endorphins. This is what keeps people on the platforms for hours. But it can also lead to increased feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

Casinos use the same types of tactics to get people to spend more time, and money, on their business. Giving out small wins to keep people coming back but never being able to fulfill their needs. If everyone had a full understanding of this concept, it could lead to healthier social media habits. Problem is, not very many people know how to create a healthy balance.

Communication on Social Media Has a Dark Side

While not everyone on the internet has a hard time communicating in real life, there is still a good portion of introverts who have an easier time talking online. Social media makes it easier for those people to connect with others and learn social cues that could have been missed. This can be especially helpful for people who live in smaller towns and have a deep desire to broaden their horizons.

While you can't exactly remain anonymous on social media without creating a fake profile, you can create a whole new persona. This can help people who have a hard time socializing to break out of their shells.

Where social media has gotten into trouble is when these personas get pulled to the dark side. According to Help Guide , about 10 percent of teens report being bullied on social media, and even more claim they have been the recipient of offensive remarks. Being on the receiving end can lead to lower self-esteem and self-image.

It's also hard to express clear and concise communication when only using a keyboard. Language gets lost in translation without more communication clues to give context, like body language. What could have been intended as an innocent remark could be taken personally. This could lead to an argument that could have been avoided if it had been made in person.

Communication on social media still has some maturing to do before it becomes a force for good.

Social Media's Divisive Effect

At no other time in the history of the world has it been easier to connect with someone from around the world as it is today. Social media has had a large part in getting more people in contact with each other. These connections have fostered a whole world of communities that wouldn't have existed without the invention of the internet and social media. To be fair, social media has some positive effects on society .

But at the same time, the ease of finding like-minded people through social media has shown to be just as dangerous as it has been positive. Since its inception, the public has become increasingly aware of just what types of groups were forming in the dark corners of social media. Groups that would threaten the well-being of others were allowed to assemble online.

The 2016 election was controversial for the use of foreign interference through Facebook ads to swing the opinions of the public. The continued disparity between political opinions is a big reason why Americans feel social media is doing more harm than good these days.

The power of social media to influence entire nations has come under the microscope with recent events and other forms of media, like movies. Documentaries like The Social Dilemma have shown exactly what kind of manipulation social media is capable of.

Our dependence on social media is causing large consequences on how we live our lives. Although, the same could potentially be said about any form of media. The only difference is the scale that social media operates on and the instantaneous effect of that power. As a result, we face a dilemma of disinformation, social division spurred by bad-faith actors, and massive influence campaigns driven by social media.

Self-Image Suffers Due to Social Media

We have all gone through periods of comparing ourselves to others, whether it be in school or work. Social media has taken that concept to a whole other level by putting the haves and the have-nots front and center. What started as an honest way to connect with like-minded communities and friends has become a way to sell and buy happiness. Social media has, essentially, turned into a marketing platform.

Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn have all drastically reduced the organic reach of posts with algorithmic timelines. This means fewer and fewer people get to see what you post unless you want to pay for advertising. Only a handful of people, known as influencers, have a massive audience.

And many of them have financial reasons for their posts. They sell products by filling their social feeds with good experiences and amazing places. This leads to a majority of people on the platform trying to make their lives seem just as good. That, in turn, can lead to severe loneliness and pressure from always comparing your life to others without knowing the context behind the pictures.

The Future of Social Media in Society

Social media, in and of itself, is not bad or harmful to society. What makes it harmful is how we use it and how we feel about ourselves while using it.

Right now, that pendulum is swinging in the wrong direction, but all it takes is enough people choosing to use it for the right reasons.

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• 12 May 2024

Is the Internet bad for you? Huge study reveals surprise effect on well-being

• Carissa Wong

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People who had access to the Internet scored higher on measures of life satisfaction in a global survey. Credit: Ute Grabowsky/Photothek via Getty

A global, 16-year study 1 of 2.4 million people has found that Internet use might boost measures of well-being, such as life satisfaction and sense of purpose — challenging the commonly held idea that Internet use has negative effects on people’s welfare.

US TikTok ban: how the looming restriction is affecting scientists on the app

“It’s an important piece of the puzzle on digital-media use and mental health,” says psychologist Markus Appel at the University of Würzburg in Germany. “If social media and Internet and mobile-phone use is really such a devastating force in our society, we should see it on this bird’s-eye view [study] — but we don’t.” Such concerns are typically related to behaviours linked to social-media use, such as cyberbullying, social-media addiction and body-image issues. But the best studies have so far shown small negative effects, if any 2 , 3 , of Internet use on well-being, says Appel.

The authors of the latest study, published on 13 May in Technology, Mind and Behaviour , sought to capture a more global picture of the Internet’s effects than did previous research. “While the Internet is global, the study of it is not,” said Andrew Przybylski, a researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, who studies how technology affects well-being, in a press briefing on 9 May. “More than 90% of data sets come from a handful of English-speaking countries” that are mostly in the global north, he said. Previous studies have also focused on young people, he added.

To address this research gap, Pryzbylski and his colleagues analysed data on how Internet access was related to eight measures of well-being from the Gallup World Poll , conducted by analytics company Gallup, based in Washington DC. The data were collected annually from 2006 to 2021 from 1,000 people, aged 15 and above, in 168 countries, through phone or in-person interviews. The researchers controlled for factors that might affect Internet use and welfare, including income level, employment status, education level and health problems.

Like a walk in nature

The team found that, on average, people who had access to the Internet scored 8% higher on measures of life satisfaction, positive experiences and contentment with their social life, compared with people who lacked web access. Online activities can help people to learn new things and make friends, and this could contribute to the beneficial effects, suggests Appel.

The positive effect is similar to the well-being benefit associated with taking a walk in nature, says Przybylski.

However, women aged 15–24 who reported having used the Internet in the past week were, on average, less happy with the place they live, compared with people who didn’t use the web. This could be because people who do not feel welcome in their community spend more time online, said Przybylski. Further studies are needed to determine whether links between Internet use and well-being are causal or merely associations, he added.

The study comes at a time of discussion around the regulation of Internet and social-media use , especially among young people. “The study cannot contribute to the recent debate on whether or not social-media use is harmful, or whether or not smartphones should be banned at schools,” because the study was not designed to answer these questions, says Tobias Dienlin, who studies how social media affects well-being at the University of Vienna. “Different channels and uses of the Internet have vastly different effects on well-being outcomes,” he says.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01410-z

Vuorre, M. & Przybylski, A. K. Technol. Mind Behav . https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000127 (2024).

Article   Google Scholar  

Heffer, T. et al. Clin. Psychol. Sci. 7 , 462–470 (2018).

Coyne, S. M., Rogers, A. A., Zurcher, J. D., Stockdale, L. & Booth, M. Comput. Hum. Behav . 104 , 106160 (2020).

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Social Media: Beneficial or Harmful? Essay

It is important to note that social media is a core element of the internet, and it reshaped how a modern human perceives information, communicates, socializes, and learns about the outside world. It became a primary lens through which one interacts with others, and thus, it is critical to properly evaluate whether or not such a state of affairs is beneficial or harmful to human wellbeing. The given assessment argues that social media, not the internet, is harmful to society and humanity in general because it reshapes the social fabric, causes loss of reason, logic, attentiveness, and memory, violates individual rights of all people as well as proliferates misinformation, which means that social media’s harms heavily outweigh its benefits.

Firstly, in order to fairly and properly assess the benefits or harms of social media, the latter should be distinguished from the internet. For example, it is stated that “the notion that the Internet is bad for you seems premised on the idea that the Internet is one thing—a monolith” (Goldsmith 597). In other words, the internet is not one thing but rather a collection of vastly different forms of communication, presentation, information exchange, entertainment, interactions, and other functions. Therefore, the internet is a source of many positive aspects of modernity because it not only brings more informational democracy but also prevents restriction and control of the free exchange of knowledge. However, the question is not about the internet as a whole but rather social media. Unlike the internet, which brings a number of benefits, which far outweigh the harms, social media does not bring a similar imbalance in favor of good. Social media was designed to simplify socialization and communication online, but the outcome is unchecked control of the flow of conversation in favor of a specific agenda, profit, and violation of individual rights.

Secondly, not all internet elements utilize artificial intelligence as extensively as social media platforms. The use of AI allows such companies to fine-tune one typology of information consumed, which means that it is social media that makes decisions for its users. While the internet is a library of knowledge, where a person makes a clear choice on what to read, watch, listen to, or interact with, social media uses AI and complex algorithms to influence its user. The underlying business model of all social media platforms is to learn about its user as much as possible and profit from them in a targeted manner. Such a design is not an inherent feature of the internet, which is not constrained to be profitable in this manner since many websites operate through subscriptions, direct sales, or other means. When it comes to such dangers, AI itself can also be a problem. It is stated that “there are indeed concerns about the near-term future of AI —algorithmic traders crashing the economy, or sensitive power grids overreacting to fluctuations and shutting down electricity for large swaths of the population” (Littman 314). In other words, social media’s extensive use of AI in combination with its problematic business model creates a host of issues that are not attributable to the internet.

Thirdly, in addition to social media-specific problems, they are also linked to harms associated with both devices and the internet in general. As stated before, the internet has its harms and benefits, but the latter usually outweighs the former. Similarly, devices come with harms as well as benefits, where the balance is tilted towards the positive aspects. However, not only social media has its inherent design flaws, but it also has problems with devices and the internet in general, which makes their harms far more abundant than benefits. For example, it is stated that “while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety” (Carr 582). In addition, “as the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens,” and “the division of attention impedes reasoning and performance” (Carr 583). Therefore, these device-related problems are multiplied a hundredfold by the fact that social media amplifies distraction and attention division through notifications. Social media is not a highly intellect-strengthening medium either, which further complicates the dependence factor.

Fourthly, social media companies are not properly regulated, and the nature of the business heavily favors oligopoly rather than a proper competitive environment because people want to have a unified platform for communication and audience-building. Therefore, the industry generates highly powerful companies with unchecked capabilities, where the national and even international discourse takes place exclusively on such mediums. For example, one cannot deny the influence of Twitter or Facebook as drivers of political or social discourse. Therefore, there is a conflict of interest among such big tech companies in regards to providing an open and fair platform versus making a profit, and the decision is clearly made in favor of the latter. The very structure of the business model of social media is to influence users to buy the advertisers’ products or services, and thus, it cannot be a just and fair place for discussion on important subjects by definition. Such a state of affairs threatens the fabric of society whether or not these companies intend to do so.

Fifthly, the conflict of interest described in the previous section brings its biggest harm when it comes to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, where private enterprises are not obliged to protect the freedom of speech and expression. Since the national and international discourse and communication are taking the place of social media, where the First Amendment is mandatory to have, these platforms are unable, unwilling, and not obliged to provide it. One can easily observe how such companies can become politically tilted towards one agenda over the other, where accounts of even the most influential individuals can be banned because they violated the terms of service of the company. In other words, a company’s rules override the Constitutional rules. It is important to note that only a better speech can be an answer to a bad speech and not a removal of that voice.

Sixthly, social media platforms are heavily engaged in data collection and privacy violations, which was demonstrated by well-known scandals and criticisms. Once again, the business model of social media companies is structured in such a manner that their primary customers are not users but advertisers. A former group is a form of product or service being sold to advertisers, which means that social media advances surveillance capitalism at its core. In a century where the right to privacy is constantly becoming a problem due to governmental antiterrorism interests, social media further threatens these fundamental rights. The problem is even more dangerous when one considers the ever-increasing cyber threat proliferation, which means a breach of security in a social media company endangers all of its users.

Seventhly, social media does not have a well-structured method of combatting misinformation since its primary incentive is to promote engagement and grab attention. Social media companies are conflicted between ensuring the accuracy of the information on their platform and boosting the interactivity with their users. Such companies want to have interesting pieces of information, which are better provided by misinformation since the truth is always more complex and intricate. Therefore, one can see how social media can become a breeding ground for people with agenda of public deception. In addition, these platforms would not have the capability to ensure the accuracy of information even if they were incentivized somehow. Public panic and political polarization are other phenomena that accompany social networks, and the catalyst for these occurrences is information received both directly by the subject and disseminated using modern social communication technologies.

In conclusion, social media is not the internet, and its harms are far more extensive than the latter because it affects memory, attention, and reason and violates individual rights for privacy, free expression, and fairness in discourse, as well as proliferates misinformation. In addition, social media inherits inherent problems associated with modern devices and the internet in general, which further compounds its harm. Therefore, the effects of social media hurt the social fabric by pretending that it serves its users while its actual customers are advertisers. It also pretends to provide an open and free platform for communication while its very business model implies targeted influence on the user’s preferences. The use of AI also adds to all of the concerns related to artificial intelligence safety.

Works Cited

Carr, Nicholas. “How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds.” They Say/I Say , edited by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, W.W. Norton & Norton Company, 2021, pp. 582-596.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Go Ahead: Waste Time on the Internet.” They Say/I Say , edited by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, W.W. Norton & Norton Company, 2021, pp. 597-602.

Littman, Michael. “Rise of the Machines” Is Not a Likely Future.” They Say/I Say , edited by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, W.W. Norton & Norton Company, 2021, pp. 311-314.

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IvyPanda. (2022, July 2). Social Media: Beneficial or Harmful? https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-beneficial-or-harmful/

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1. IvyPanda . "Social Media: Beneficial or Harmful?" July 2, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/social-media-beneficial-or-harmful/.

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Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy

Despite what Meta has to say.

W ithin the past 15 years, social media has insinuated itself into American life more deeply than food-delivery apps into our diets and microplastics into our bloodstreams. Look at stories about conflict, and it’s often lurking in the background. Recent articles on the rising dysfunction within progressive organizations point to the role of Twitter, Slack, and other platforms in prompting “endless and sprawling internal microbattles,” as The Intercept ’s Ryan Grim put it, referring to the ACLU. At a far higher level of conflict, the congressional hearings about the January 6 insurrection show us how Donald Trump’s tweets summoned the mob to Washington and aimed it at the vice president. Far-right groups then used a variety of platforms to coordinate and carry out the attack.

Social media has changed life in America in a thousand ways, and nearly two out of three Americans now believe that these changes are for the worse. But academic researchers have not yet reached a consensus that social media is harmful. That’s been a boon to social-media companies such as Meta, which argues, as did tobacco companies, that the science is not “ settled .”

The lack of consensus leaves open the possibility that social media may not be very harmful. Perhaps we’ve fallen prey to yet another moral panic about a new technology and, as with television, we’ll worry about it less after a few decades of conflicting studies. A different possibility is that social media is quite harmful but is changing too quickly for social scientists to capture its effects. The research community is built on a quasi-moral norm of skepticism: We begin by assuming the null hypothesis (in this case, that social media is not harmful), and we require researchers to show strong, statistically significant evidence in order to publish their findings. This takes time—a couple of years, typically, to conduct and publish a study; five or more years before review papers and meta-analyses come out; sometimes decades before scholars reach agreement. Social-media platforms, meanwhile, can change dramatically in just a few years .

So even if social media really did begin to undermine democracy (and institutional trust and teen mental health ) in the early 2010s, we should not expect social science to “settle” the matter until the 2030s. By then, the effects of social media will be radically different, and the harms done in earlier decades may be irreversible.

Let me back up. This spring, The Atlantic published my essay “ Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid ,” in which I argued that the best way to understand the chaos and fragmentation of American society is to see ourselves as citizens of Babel in the days after God rendered them unable to understand one another.

I showed how a few small changes to the architecture of social-media platforms, implemented from 2009 to 2012, increased the virality of posts on those platforms, which then changed the nature of social relationships. People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogenous tribes. Even more important, in my view, was that social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook could now be used more easily by anyone to attack anyone. It was as if the platforms had passed out a billion little dart guns, and although most users didn’t want to shoot anyone, three kinds of people began darting others with abandon: the far right, the far left, and trolls.

Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell: The dark psychology of social networks

All of these groups were suddenly given the power to dominate conversations and intimidate dissenters into silence. A fourth group—Russian agents––also got a boost, though they didn’t need to attack people directly. Their long-running project, which ramped up online in 2013, was to fabricate, exaggerate, or simply promote stories that would increase Americans’ hatred of one another and distrust of their institutions.

The essay proved to be surprisingly uncontroversial—or, at least, hardly anyone attacked me on social media. But a few responses were published, including one from Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed to studies it said contradicted my argument. There was also an essay in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who interviewed me and other scholars who study politics and social media. He argued that social media might well be harmful to democracies, but the research literature is too muddy and contradictory to support firm conclusions.

So was my diagnosis correct, or are concerns about social media overblown? It’s a crucial question for the future of our society. As I argued in my essay, critics make us smarter. I’m grateful, therefore, to Meta and the researchers interviewed by Lewis-Kraus for helping me sharpen and extend my argument in three ways.

Are Democracies Becoming More Polarized and Less Healthy?

My essay laid out a wide array of harms that social media has inflicted on society. Political polarization is just one of them, but it is central to the story of rising democratic dysfunction.

Meta questioned whether social media should be blamed for increased polarization. In response to my essay, Meta’s head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury, pointed to a study by Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro that looked at trends in 12 countries and found, she said, “that in some countries polarization was on the rise before Facebook even existed, and in others it has been decreasing while internet and Facebook use increased.” In a recent interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman , Mark Zuckerberg cited this same study in support of a more audacious claim: “Most of the academic studies that I’ve seen actually show that social-media use is correlated with lower polarization.”

Does that study really let social media off the hook? It plotted political polarization based on survey responses in 12 countries, most with data stretching back to the 1970s, and then drew straight lines that best fit the data points over several decades. It’s true that, while some lines sloped upward (meaning that polarization increased across the period as a whole), others sloped downward. But my argument wasn’t about the past 50 years. It was about a phase change that happened in the early 2010s , after Facebook and Twitter changed their architecture to enable hyper-virality.

I emailed Gentzkow to ask whether he could put a “hinge” in the graphs in the early 2010s, to see if the trends in polarization changed direction or accelerated in the past decade. He replied that there was not enough data after 2010 to make such an analysis reliable. He also noted that Meta’s response essay had failed to cite a 2020 article in which he and three colleagues found that randomly assigning participants to deactivate Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections reduced polarization.

Adrienne LaFrance: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

Meta’s response motivated me to look for additional publications to evaluate what had happened to democracies in the 2010s. I discovered four. One of them found no overall trend in polarization, but like the study by Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro, it had few data points after 2015. The other three had data through 2020, and all three reported substantial increases in polarization and/or declines in the number or quality of democracies around the world.

One of them, a 2022 report from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, found that “liberal democracies peaked in 2012 with 42 countries and are now down to the lowest levels in over 25 years.” It summarized the transformations of global democracy over the past 10 years in stark terms:

Just ten years ago the world looked very different from today. In 2011, there were more countries improving than declining on every aspect of democracy. By 2021 the world has been turned on its head: there are more countries declining than advancing on nearly all democratic aspects captured by V-Dem measures.

The report also notes that “toxic polarization”—signaled by declining “respect for counter-arguments and associated aspects of the deliberative component of democracy”—grew more severe in at least 32 countries.

A paper published one week after my Atlantic essay, by Yunus E. Orhan, found a global spike in democratic “backsliding” since 2008, and linked it to affective polarization, or animosity toward the other side. When affective polarization is high, partisans tolerate antidemocratic behavior by politicians on their own side––such as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

And finally, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported a global decline in various democratic measures starting after 2015, according to its Democracy Index.

These three studies cannot prove that social media caused the global decline, but—contra Meta and Zuckerberg—they show a global trend toward polarization in the previous decade, the one in which the world embraced social media.

Has Social Media Created Harmful Echo Chambers?

So why did democracies weaken in the 2010s? How might social media have made them more fragmented and less stable? One popular argument contends that social media sorts users into echo chambers––closed communities of like-minded people. Lack of contact with people who hold different viewpoints allows a sort of tribal groupthink to take hold, reducing the quality of everyone’s thinking and the prospects for compromise that are essential in a democratic system.

According to Meta, however, “More and more research discredits the idea that social media algorithms create an echo chamber.” It points to two sources to back up that claim, but many studies show evidence that social media does in fact create echo chambers. Because conflicting studies are common in social-science research, I created a “ collaborative review ” document last year with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke University who studies social media. It’s a public Google doc in which we organize the abstracts of all the studies we can find about social media’s impact on democracy, and then we invite other experts to add studies, comments, and criticisms. We cover research on seven different questions, including whether social media promotes echo chambers. After spending time in the document, Lewis-Kraus wrote in The New Yorker : “The upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear.”

He is certainly right that nothing is unambiguous. But as I have learned from curating three such documents , researchers often reach opposing conclusions because they have “operationalized” the question differently. That is, they have chosen different ways to turn an abstract question (about the prevalence of echo chambers, say) into something concrete and measurable. For example, researchers who choose to measure echo chambers by looking at the diversity of people’s news consumption typically find little evidence that they exist at all. Even partisans end up being exposed to news stories and videos from the other side. Both of the sources that Raychoudhury cited in her defense of Meta mention this idea.

Derek Thompson: Social media is attention alcohol

But researchers who measure echo chambers by looking at social relationships and networks usually find evidence of “homophily”—that is, people tend to engage with others who are similar to themselves. One study of politically engaged Twitter users, for example, found that they “are disproportionately exposed to like-minded information and that information reaches like-minded users more quickly.” So should we throw up our hands and say that the findings are irreconcilable? No, we should integrate them, as the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci did in a 2018 essay . Coming across contrary viewpoints on social media, she wrote, is “not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone.” Rather, she said, “it’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium … We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.” Mere exposure to different sources of news doesn’t automatically break open echo chambers; in fact, it can reinforce them.

These closely bonded groupings can have profound political ramifications, as a couple of my critics in the New Yorker article acknowledged. A major feature of the post-Babel world is that the extremes are now far louder and more influential than before. They may also become more violent. Recent research by Morteza Dehghani and his colleagues at the University of Southern California shows that people are more willing to commit violence when they are immersed in a community they perceive to be morally homogeneous.

This finding seems to be borne out by a statement from the 18-year-old man who recently killed 10 Black Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo. In the Q&A portion of the manifesto attributed to him, he wrote:

Where did you get your current beliefs? Mostly from the internet. There was little to no influence on my personal beliefs by people I met in person.

The killer goes on to claim that he had read information “from all ideologies,” but I find it unlikely that he consumed a balanced informational diet, or, more important, that he hung out online with ideologically diverse users. The fact that he livestreamed his shooting tells us he assumed that his community shared his warped worldview. He could not have found such an extreme yet homogeneous group in his small town 200 miles from Buffalo. But thanks to social media, he found an international fellowship of extreme racists who jointly worshipped past mass murderers and from whom he copied sections of his manifesto.

Is Social Media the Primary Villain in This Story?

In her response to my essay, Raychoudhury did not deny that Meta bore any blame. Rather, her defense was two-pronged, arguing that the research is not yet definitive, and that, in any case, we should be focusing on mainstream media as the primary cause of harm.

Raychoudhury pointed to a study on the role of cable TV and mainstream media as major drivers of partisanship. She is correct to do so: The American culture war has roots going back to the turmoil of the 1960s, which activated evangelicals and other conservatives in the ’70s. Social media (which arrived around 2004 and became truly pernicious, I argue, only after 2009) is indeed a more recent player in this phenomenon.

In my essay, I included a paragraph on this backstory, noting the role of Fox News and the radicalizing Republican Party of the ’90s, but I should have said more. The story of polarization is complex, and political scientists cite a variety of contributing factors , including the growing politicization of the urban-rural divide; rising immigration; the increasing power of big and very partisan donors; the loss of a common enemy when the Soviet Union collapsed; and the loss of the “Greatest Generation,” which had an ethos of service forged in the crisis of the Second World War. And although polarization rose rapidly in the 2010s, the rise began in the ’90s, so I cannot pin the majority of the rise on social media.

But my essay wasn’t primarily about ordinary polarization. I was trying to explain a new dynamic that emerged in the 2010s: the fear of one another , even—and perhaps especially––within groups that share political or cultural affinities. This fear has created a whole new set of social and political problems.

The loss of a common enemy and those other trends with roots in the 20th century can help explain America’s ever nastier cross-party relationships, but they can’t explain why so many college students and professors suddenly began to express more fear, and engage in more self-censorship, around 2015. These mostly left-leaning people weren’t worried about the “other side”; they were afraid of a small number of students who were further to the left, and who enthusiastically hunted for verbal transgressions and used social media to publicly shame offenders.

A few years later, that same fearful dynamic spread to newsrooms , companies , nonprofit organizations , and many other parts of society . The culture war had been running for two or three decades by then, but it changed in the mid-2010s when ordinary people with little to no public profile suddenly became the targets of social-media mobs. Consider the famous 2013 case of Justine Sacco , who tweeted an insensitive joke about her trip to South Africa just before boarding her flight in London and became an international villain by the time she landed in Cape Town. She was fired the next day. Or consider the the far right’s penchant for using social media to publicize the names and photographs of largely unknown local election officials, health officials, and school-board members who refuse to bow to political pressure, and who are then subjected to waves of vitriol, including threats of violence to themselves and their children, simply for doing their jobs. These phenomena, now common to the culture, could not have happened before the advent of hyper-viral social media in 2009.

Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin, and Trevor Davis: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem

This fear of getting shamed, reported, doxxed, fired, or physically attacked is responsible for the self-censorship and silencing of dissent that were the main focus of my essay. When dissent within any group or institution is stifled, the group will become less perceptive, nimble, and effective over time.

Social media may not be the primary cause of polarization, but it is an important cause, and one we can do something about. I believe it is also the primary cause of the epidemic of structural stupidity, as I called it, that has recently afflicted many of America’s key institutions.

What Can We Do to Make Things Better?

My essay presented a series of structural solutions that would allow us to repair some of the damage that social media has caused to our key democratic and epistemic institutions. I proposed three imperatives: (1) harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, (2) reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and (3) better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

I believe that we should begin implementing these reforms now, even if the science is not yet “settled.” Beyond a reasonable doubt is the appropriate standard of evidence for reviewers guarding admission to a scientific journal, or for jurors establishing guilt in a criminal trial. It is too high a bar for questions about public health or threats to the body politic. A more appropriate standard is the one used in civil trials: the preponderance of evidence. Is social media probably damaging American democracy via at least one of the seven pathways analyzed in our collaborative-review document , or probably not ? I urge readers to examine the document themselves. I also urge the social-science community to find quicker ways to study potential threats such as social media, where platforms and their effects change rapidly. Our motto should be “Move fast and test things.” Collaborative-review documents are one way to speed up the process by which scholars find and respond to one another’s work.

Beyond these structural solutions, I considered adding a short section to the article on what each of us can do as individuals, but it sounded a bit too preachy, so I cut it. I now regret that decision. I should have noted that all of us, as individuals, can be part of the solution by choosing to act with courage, moderation, and compassion. It takes a great deal of resolve to speak publicly or stand your ground when a barrage of snide, disparaging, and otherwise hostile comments is coming at you and nobody rises to your defense (out of fear of getting attacked themselves).

Read: How to fix Twitter—and all of social media

Fortunately, social media does not usually reflect real life, something that more people are beginning to understand. A few years ago, I heard an insight from an older business executive. He noted that before social media, if he received a dozen angry letters or emails from customers, they spurred him to action because he assumed that there must be a thousand other disgruntled customers who didn’t bother to write. But now, if a thousand people like an angry tweet or Facebook post about his company, he assumes that there must be a dozen people who are really upset.

Seeing that social-media outrage is transient and performative should make it easier to withstand, whether you are the president of a university or a parent speaking at a school-board meeting. We can all do more to offer honest dissent and support the dissenters within institutions that have become structurally stupid. We can all get better at listening with an open mind and speaking in order to engage another human being rather than impress an audience. Teaching these skills to our children and our students is crucial, because they are the generation who will have to reinvent deliberative democracy and Tocqueville’s “art of association” for the digital age.

We must act with compassion too. The fear and cruelty of the post-Babel era are a result of its tendency to reward public displays of aggression. Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood. But once we realize that we are the gladiators—tricked into combat so that we might generate “content,” “engagement,” and revenue—we can refuse to fight. We can be more understanding toward our fellow citizens, seeing that we are all being driven mad by companies that use largely the same set of psychological tricks. We can forswear public conflict and use social media to serve our own purposes, which for most people will mean more private communication and fewer public performances.

The post-Babel world will not be rebuilt by today’s technology companies. That work will be left to citizens who understand the forces that brought us to the verge of self-destruction, and who develop the new habits, virtues, technologies, and shared narratives that will allow us to reap the benefits of living and working together in peace.

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The disaster of misinformation: a review of research in social media

Sadiq muhammed t.

Department of Management Studies (DoMS), Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600036 India

Saji K. Mathew

The spread of misinformation in social media has become a severe threat to public interests. For example, several incidents of public health concerns arose out of social media misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Against the backdrop of the emerging IS research focus on social media and the impact of misinformation during recent events such as the COVID-19, Australian Bushfire, and the USA elections, we identified disaster, health, and politics as specific domains for a research review on social media misinformation. Following a systematic review process, we chose 28 articles, relevant to the three themes, for synthesis. We discuss the characteristics of misinformation in the three domains, the methodologies that have been used by researchers, and the theories used to study misinformation. We adapt an Antecedents-Misinformation-Outcomes (AMIO) framework for integrating key concepts from prior studies. Based on the AMIO framework, we further discuss the inter-relationships of concepts and the strategies to control the spread of misinformation on social media. Ours is one of the early reviews focusing on social media misinformation research, particularly on three socially sensitive domains; disaster, health, and politics. This review contributes to the emerging body of knowledge in Data Science and social media and informs strategies to combat social media misinformation.

Introduction

Information disorder in social media.

Rumors, misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information are common challenges confronting media of all types. It is, however, worse in the case of digital media, especially on social media platforms. Ease of access and use, speed of information diffusion, and difficulty in correcting false information make control of undesirable information a horrid task [ 1 ]. Alongside these challenges, social media has also been highly influential in spreading timely and useful information. For example, the recent #BlackLivesMatter movement was enabled by social media, which united concurring people's solidarity across the world when George Floyd was killed due to police brutality, and so are 2011 Arab spring in the Middle East and the 2017 #MeToo movement against sexual harassments and abuse [ 2 , 3 ]. Although, scholars have addressed information disorder in social media, a synthesis of the insights from these studies are rare.

The information which is fake or misleading and spreads unintentionally is known as misinformation [ 4 ]. Prior research on misinformation in social media has highlighted various characteristics of misinformation and interventions thereof in different contexts. The issue of misinformation has become dominant with the rise of social media, attracting scholarly attention, particularly after the 2016 USA Presidential election, when misinformation apparently influenced the election results [ 5 ]. The word 'misinformation' was listed as one of the global risks by the World Economic Forum [ 6 ]. A similar term that is popular and confusing along with misinformation is 'disinformation'. It is defined as the information that is fake or misleading, and unlike misinformation, spreads intentionally. Disinformation campaigns are often seen in a political context where state actors create them for political gains. In India, during the initial stage of COVID-19, there was reportedly a surge in fake news linking the virus outbreak to a particular religious group. This disinformation spread gained media attention as it was widely shared on social media platforms. As a result of the targeting, it eventually translated into physical violence and discriminatory treatment against members of the community in some of the Indian states [ 7 ]. 'Rumors' and 'fake news' are similar terms related to misinformation. 'Rumors' are unverified information or statements circulated with uncertainty, and 'fake news' is the misinformation that is distributed in an official news format. Source ambiguity, personal involvement, confirmation bias, and social ties are some of the rumor-causing factors. Yet another related term, mal-information, is accurate information that is used in different contexts to spread hatred or abuse of a person or a particular group. Our review focuses on misinformation that is spread through social media platforms. The words 'rumor', and 'misinformation' are used interchangeably in this paper. Further, we identify factors that cause misinformation based on a systematic review of prior studies.

Ours is one of the early attempts to review social media research on misinformation. This review focuses on three sensitive domains of disaster, health, and politics, setting three objectives: (a) to analyze previous studies to understand the impact of misinformation on the three domains (b) to identify theoretical perspectives used to examine the spread of misinformation on social media and (c) to develop a framework to study key concepts and their inter-relationships emerging from prior studies. We identified these specific areas as the impact of misinformation with regards to both speed of spread and scale of influence are high and detrimental to the public and governments. To the best of our knowledge, the review of the literature on social media misinformation themes are relatively scanty. This review contributes to an emerging body of knowledge in Data Science and informs the efforts to combat social media misinformation. Data Science is an interdisciplinary area which incorporates different areas like statistics, management, and sociology to study the data and create knowledge out of data [ 8 ]. This review will also inform future studies that aim to evaluate and compare patterns of misinformation on sensitive themes of social relevance, such as disaster, health, and politics.

The paper is structured as follows. The first section introduces misinformation in social media context. In Sect.  2 , we provide a brief overview of prior research works on misinformation and social media. Section  3 describes the research methodology, which includes details of the literature search and selection process. Section  4 discusses the analysis of spread of misinformation on social media based on three themes- disaster, health, and politics and the review findings. This includes current state of research, theoretical foundations, determinants of misinformation in social media platforms, and strategies to control the spread of misinformation. Section  5 concludes with the implications and limitations of the paper.

Social media and spread of misinformation

Misinformation arises in uncertain contexts when people are confronted with a scarcity of information they need. During unforeseen circumstances, the affected individual or community experiences nervousness or anxiety. Anxiety is one of the primary reasons behind the spread of misinformation. To overcome this tension, people tend to gather information from sources such as mainstream media and official government social media handles to verify the information they have received. When they fail to receive information from official sources, they collect related information from their peer circles or other informal sources, which would help them to control social tension [ 9 ]. Furthermore, in an emergency context, misinformation helps community members to reach a common understanding of the uncertain situation.

The echo chamber of social media

Social media has increasingly grown in power and influence and has acted as a medium to accelerate sociopolitical movements. Network effects enhance participation in social media platforms which in turn spread information (good or bad) at a faster pace compared to traditional media. Furthermore, due to a massive surge in online content consumption primarily through social media both business organizations and political parties have begun to share content that are ambiguous or fake to influence online users and their decisions for financial and political gains [ 9 , 10 ]. On the other hand, people often approach social media with a hedonic mindset, which reduces their tendency to verify the information they receive [ 9 ]. Repetitive exposure to contents that coincides with their pre-existing beliefs, increases believability and shareability of content. This process known as the echo-chamber effect [ 11 ] is fueled by confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency of the person to support information that reinforces pre-existing beliefs and neglect opposing perspectives and viewpoints other than their own.

Platforms’ structure and algorithms also have an essential role in spreading misinformation. Tiwana et al. [ 12 ] have defined platform architecture as ‘a conceptual blueprint that describes how the ecosystem is partitioned into a relatively stable platform and a complementary set of modules that are encouraged to vary, and the design rules binding on both’. Business models of these platforms are based upon maximizing user engagement. For example, in the case of Facebook or Twitter, user feed is based on their existing belief or preferences. User feeds provide users with similar content that matches their existing beliefs, thus contributing to the echo chamber effect.

Platform architecture makes the transmission and retransmission of misinformation easier [ 12 , 13 ]. For instance, WhatsApp has a one-touch forward option that enables users to forward messages simultaneously to multiple users. Earlier, a WhatsApp user could forward a message to 250 groups or users at a time, which as a measure for controlling the spread of misinformation was limited to five members in 2019. WhatsApp claimed that globally this restriction reduced message forwarding by 25% [ 14 ]. Apart from platform politics, users also have an essential role in creating or distributing misinformation. In a disaster context, people tend to share misinformation based on their subjective feeling [ 15 ].

Misinformation has the power to influence the decisions of its audience. It can change a citizen's approach toward a topic or a subject. The anti-vaccine movement on Twitter during the 2015 measles (highly communicable disease) outbreak in Disneyland, California, serves as a good example. The movement created conspiracy theories and mistrust on the State, which increased vaccine refusal rate [ 16 ]. Misinformation could even influence election of governments by manipulating citizens’ political attitudes as seen in the 2016 USA and 2017 French elections [ 17 ]. Of late, people rely heavily on Twitter and Facebook to collect the latest happenings from mainstream media [ 18 ].

Combating misinformation in social media has been a challenging task for governments in several countries. When social media influences elections [ 17 ] and health campaigns (like vaccination), governments and international agencies demand social media owners to take necessary actions to combat misinformation [ 13 , 15 ]. Platforms began to regulate bots that were used to spread misinformation. Facebook announced the filtering of their algorithms to combat misinformation, down-ranking the post flagged by their fact-checkers which will reduce the popularity of the post or page. [ 17 ]. However, misinformation has become a complicated issue due to the growth of new users and the emergence of new social media platforms. Jang et al. [ 19 ] have suggested two approaches other than governmental regulation to control misinformation literary and corrective. The literary approach proposes educating users to increase their cognitive ability to differentiate misinformation from the information. The corrective approach provides more fact-checking facilities for users. Warnings would be provided against potentially fabricated content based on crowdsourcing. Both approaches have limitations; the literary approach attracted criticism as it transfers responsibility for the spread of misinformation to citizens. The corrective approach will only have a limited impact as the volume of fabricated content escalates [ 19 – 21 ].

An overview of the literature on misinformation reveals that most investigations focus on examining the methods to combat misinformation. Social media platforms are still discovering new tools and techniques to mitigate misinformation from their platforms, this calls for a research to understand their strategies.

Review method

This research followed a systematic literature review process. The study employed a structured approach based on Webster’s Guidelines [ 22 ] to identify relevant literature on the spread of misinformation. These guidelines helped in maintaining a quality standard while selecting the literature for review. The initial stage of the study involved exploring research papers from relevant databases to understand the volumes and availability of research articles. We extended the literature search to interdisciplinary databases too. We gathered articles from Web of Science, ACM digital library, AIS electronic library, EBSCO host business source premier, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Springer link. Apart from this, a manual search was performed in Information Systems (IS) scholars' basket of journals [ 23 ] to ensure we did not miss any articles from these journals. We have also preferred articles that have Data Science and Information Systems background. The systematic review process began with keyword search using predefined keywords (Fig.  2 ). We identified related synonyms such as 'misinformation', 'rumors', 'spread', and 'social media' along with their combinations for the search process. The keyword search was on the title, abstract, and on the list of keywords. The literature search was conducted in the month of April 2020. Later, we revisited the literature in December 2021 to include latest publications from 2020 to 2021.

Systematic literature review process

It was observed that scholarly discussion about ‘misinformation and social media’ began to appear in research after 2008. Later in 2010, the topic gained more attention when Twitter bots were used or spreading fake news on the replacement of a USA Senator [ 24 ]. Hate campaigns and fake follower activities were simultaneously growing during that period. As evident from Fig.  1 , showing number of articles published between 2005 and 2021 on misinformation in three databases: Scopus, S pringer, and EBSCO, academic engagement on misinformation seems to have gained more impetus after the 2016 US Presidential election, when social media platforms had apparently influenced the election [ 20 ].

Articles published on misinformation during 2005–2021 (Databases; Scopus, Springer, and EBSCO)

As Data Science is an interdisciplinary field, the focus of our literature review goes beyond disciplinary boundaries. In particular, we focused on the three domains of disaster, health, and politics. This thematic focus of our review has two underlying reasons (a) the impact of misinformation through social media is sporadic and has the most damaging effects in these three domains and (b) our selection criteria in systematic review finally resulted in research papers that related to these three domains. This review has excluded platforms that are designed for professional and business users such as LinkedIn and Behance. A rational for the choice of these themes are discussed in the next section.

Inclusion–exclusion criteria

Figure  2 depicts the systematic review process followed in this study. In our preliminary search, 2148 records were retrieved from databases—all those articles were gathered onto a spreadsheet, which was manually cross-checked with the journals linked to the articles. Studies published during 2005–2021, studies published in English language, articles published from peer-reviewed journals, journals rating and papers relevant to misinformation were used as the inclusion criteria. We have excluded reviews, thesis, dissertations, and editorials; and articles on misinformation that are not akin to social media. To fetch the best from these articles, we selected articles that were from top journals, rated above three according to ABS rating and A*, A, and B according to ABDC rating. This process, while ensuring the quality of papers, also effectively shortened purview of study to 643 articles of acceptable quality. We have not performed track-back and track-forward on references. During this process, duplicate records were also identified and removed. Further screening of articles based on the title, abstract, and full text (wherever necessary)—brought down the number to 207 articles.

Further screening based on the three themes reduced the focus to 89 articles. We conducted a full-text analysis of these 89 articles. We further excluded articles that had not considered misinformation as a central theme and finally arrived at 28 articles for detailed review (Table ​ (Table1 1 ).

Reviewed articles

The selected studies used a variety of research methods to examine the misinformation on social media. Experimentation and text mining of tweets emerged as the most frequent research methods; there were 11 studies that used experimental methods, and eight used Twitter data analyses. Apart from these, there were three survey methods, two mixed methods, and case study methods each, and one opportunistic sampling and exploratory study each. The selected literature for review includes nine articles on disaster, eight on healthcare, and eleven from politics. We preferred papers for review based on three major social media platforms; Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp. These are the three social media owners with the highest transmission rates and most active users [ 25 ] and most likely platforms for misinformation propagation.

Coding procedure

Initially both the authors have manually coded the articles individually by reading full text of each article and then identified the three themes; disaster, health, and politics. We used an inductive coding approach to derive codes from the data. The intercoder reliability rate between the authors were 82.1%. Disagreement among authors related to deciding in which theme few papers fall under were discussed and a resolution was arrived at. Later we used NVIVO, a qualitative data analysis software, to analyze unstructured data to encode and categorize the themes from the articles. The codes emerged from the articles were categorized into sub-themes and later attached to the main themes; disaster, health, and politics. NVIVO produced a rank list of codes based on frequency of occurrence (“ Appendix ”). An intercoder reliability check was completed for the data by an external research scholar having a different areas of expertise to ensure reliability. The coder agreed upon 26 articles out of 28 (92.8%), which indicated a high level intercoder reliability [ 49 ]. The independent researcher’s disagreement about the code for two authors was discussed between the authors and the research scholar and a consensus was arrived at.

We initially reviewed articles separately from the categories of disaster, health, and politics. We first provide emergent issues that cut across these themes.

Social media misinformation research

Disaster, health, and politics emerged as the three domains (“ Appendix ”) where misinformation can cause severe harm, often leading to casualties or even irreversible effects. The mitigation of these effects can also demand substantial financial or human resources burden considering the scale of effect and risk of spreading negative information to the public altogether. All these areas are sensitive in nature. Further, disaster, health, and politics have gained the attention of researchers and governments as the challenges of misinformation confronting these domains are rampant. Besides sensitivity, misinformation in these areas has higher potential to exacerbate the existing crisis in society. During the 2020 Munich security conference, WHO’s Director-General noted: “We are not just fighting an epidemic; we are fighting an infodemic”, referring to the faster spread of COVID-19 misinformation than the virus [ 50 ].

More than 6000 people were hospitalized due to COVID-19 related misinformation in the first three months of 2020 [ 51 ]. As COVID-19 vaccination began, one of the popular myths was that Bill Gates wanted to use vaccines to embed microchips in people to track them and this created vaccine hesitancy among the citizens [ 52 ]. These reports show the severity of the spread of misinformation and how misinformation can aggravate a public health crisis.

Misinformation during disaster

In the context of emergency situations (unforeseen circumstances), the credibility of social media information has often been questioned [ 11 ]. When a crisis occurs, affected communities often experience a lack of localized information needed for them to make emergency decisions. This accelerates the spread of misinformation as people tend to fill this information gap with misinformation or 'improvised news' [ 9 , 24 , 25 ]. The broadcasting power of social media and re-sharing of misinformation could weaken and slow down rescue operations [ 24 , 25 ]. As the local people have more access to the disaster area, they become immediate reporters of a crisis through social media. Mainstream media comes into picture only later. However, recent incidents reveals that voluntary reporting of this kind has begun to affect rescue operations negatively as it often acts as a collective rumor mill [ 9 ], which propagates misinformation. During the 2018 floods in the South-Indian state of Kerala a fake video on Mullaperiyar Dam leakage created unnecessary panic among the citizens, thus negatively impacting the rescue operations [ 53 ]. Information from mainstream media is relatively more reliable as they have traditional gatekeepers such as peer reviewers and editors who cross-check the information source before publication. Chua et al. [ 28 ] found that a major chunk of corrective tweets were retweeted from mainstream news media, thus mainstream media is considered as a preferred rumor correction channel, where they attempt to correct misinformation with the right information.

Characterizing disaster misinformation

Oh et al. [ 9 ] studied citizen-driven information processing based on three social crises using rumor theory. The main characteristic of a crisis is the complexity of information processing and sharing [ 9 , 24 ]. A task is considered complex when characterized by increase in information load, information diversity or rate of information change [ 54 ]. Information overload and information dearth are the two grave concerns that interrupt the communication between the affected community and a rescue team. Information overload, where too many enquiries and fake news distract a response team, slows them down to recognize valid information [ 9 , 27 ]. According to Balan and Mathew [ 55 ] information overload occurs when volume of information such as complexity of words and multiple languages that exceeds and cannot be processed by a human being. Here information dearth in our context is the lack of localized information that is supposed to help the affected community to make emergency decisions. When the official government communication channels or mainstream media cannot fulfill citizen's needs, they resort to information from their social media peers [ 9 , 27 , 29 ].

In a social crisis context, Tamotsu Shibutani [ 56 ] defines rumoring as collective sharing and exchange of information, which helps the community members to reach a common understanding about the crisis situation [ 30 ]. This mechanism works in social media, which creates information dearth and information overload. Anxiety, information ambiguity (source ambiguity and content ambiguity), personal involvement, and social ties are the rumor-causing variables in a crisis context [ 9 , 27 ]. In general, anxiety is a negative feeling caused by distress or stressful situation, which fabricates or produces adverse outcomes [ 57 ]. In the context of a crisis or emergency, a community may experience anxiety in the absence of reliable information or in other cases when confronted with overload of information, making it difficult to take appropriate decisions. Under such circumstances, people may tend to rely on rumors as a primary source of information. The influence level of anxiety is higher during a community crisis than during a business crisis [ 9 ]. However, anxiety, as an attribute, varies based on the nature of platforms. For example, Oh et al. [ 9 ] found that the Twitter community do not fall into social pressure as like WhatsApp community [ 30 ]. Simon et al. [ 30 ] developed a model of rumor retransmission on social media and identified information ambiguity, anxiety and personal involvement as motives for rumormongering. Attractiveness is another rumor-causing variable. It occurs when aesthetically appealing visual aids or designs capture a receiver’s attention. Here believability matters more than the content’s reliability or the truth of the information received.

The second stage of the spread of misinformation is misinformation retransmission. Apart from the rumor-causing variables that are reported in Oh et al. [ 9 ], Liu et al. [ 13 ] found senders credibility and attractiveness as significant variables related to misinformation retransmission. Personal involvement and content ambiguity can also affect misinformation transmission [ 13 ]. Abdullah et al. [ 25 ] explored retweeter's motive on the Twitter platform to spread disaster information. Content relevance, early information [ 27 , 31 ], trustworthiness of the content, emotional influence [ 30 ], retweet count, pro-social behavior (altruistic behavior among the citizens during the crisis), and the need to inform their circle are the factors that drive users’ retweet [ 25 ]. Lee et al. [ 26 ] have also examined the impact of Twitter features on message diffusion based on the 2013 Boston marathon tragedy. The study reported that during crisis events (especially during disasters), a tweet that has less reaction time (time between the crisis and initial tweet) and had higher impact than other tweets. This shows that to an extent, misinformation can be controlled if officials could communicate at the early stage of a crisis [ 27 ]. Liu et al. [ 13 ] showed that tweets with hashtags influence spread of misinformation. Further, Lee et al. [ 26 ] found that tweets with no hashtags had more influence due to contextual differences. For instance, usage of hashtags for marketing or advertising has a positive impact, while in the case of disaster or emergency situations, usage of hashtags (as in case of Twitter) has a negative impact. Messages with no hashtag get widely diffused when compared to messages with the hashtag [ 26 ].

Oh et al. [ 15 ] explored the behavioral aspects of social media participants that led to retransmission and spread of misinformation. They found that when people believe a threatening piece of misinformation they received, they are more likely to spread it, and they take necessary safety measures (sometimes even extreme actions). Repetition of the same misinformation from different sources also makes it more believable [ 28 ]. However, when they realize the received information was false they were less likely to share it with others [ 13 , 26 ]. The characteristics of the platform used to deliver the misinformation also matters. For instance, numbers of likes and shares of the information increases the believability of the social media post [ 47 ].

In summary, we found that platform architecture also has an essential role in spreading and believability of misinformation. While conducting this systematic literature review, we observed that more studies on disaster and misinformation are based on the Twitter platform. The six papers out of nine that we reviewed on disaster area were based on the Twitter platform. When a message was delivered in video format, it had a higher impact compared to audio or text messages. If the message had a religious or cultural narrative, it led to behavioral action (danger control response) [ 15 ]. Users were more likely to spread misinformation through WhatsApp than Twitter. It was difficult to find the source of shared information on WhatsApp [ 30 ].

Misinformation related to healthcare

From our review, we found two systematic literature reviews that discusses health-related misinformation on social media. Yang et al. [ 58 ] explores the characteristics, impact and influences of health misinformation on social media. Wang et al. [ 59 ] addresses health misinformation related to vaccines and infectious diseases. This review shows that health-related misinformation, especially on M.M.R. vaccine and autism are largely spreading on social media and the government is unable to control it.

The spread of health misinformation is an emerging issue facing public health authorities. Health misinformation could delay proper treatment to patients, which could further add more casualties to the public health domain [ 28 , 59 , 60 ]. Often people tend to believe health-related information that is shared by their peers. Some of them tend to share their treatment experience or traditional remedies online. This information could be in a different context and may not be even accurate [ 33 , 34 ]. Compared to health-related websites, the language used to detail the health information shared on social media will be simple and may not include essential details [ 35 , 37 ]. Some studies reported that conspiracy theories and pseudoscience have escalated casualties [ 33 ]. Pseudoscience is the term referred to as the false claim, which pretends as if the shared misinformation has scientific evidence. The anti-vaccination movement on Twitter is one of the examples of pseudoscience [ 61 ]. Here the user might have shared the information due to the lack of scientific knowledge [ 35 ].

Characterizing healthcare misinformation

The attributes that characterize healthcare misinformation are distinctly different from other domains. Chua and Banerjee, [ 37 ] identified the characteristics of health misinformation as dread and wish. Dread is the rumor which creates more panic and unpleasant consequences. For example, in the wake of COVID-19, misinformation was widely shared on social media, which claimed that children 'died on the spot' after the mass COVID-19 vaccination program in Senegal, West Africa [ 61 ]. This message created panic among the citizens, as the misinformation was shared more than 7000 times on Facebook [ 61 ]. Wish is the type of rumor that gives hope to the receiver (e.g.,: rumor on free medicine distribution) [ 62 ]. Dread rumor looks more trustworthy and more likely to get viral. Dread rumor was the cause of violence against a minority group in India during COVID-19 [ 7 ]. Chua and Banerjee, [ 32 ] added pictorial and textual representations as the characteristics of health misinformation. The rumor that contains only text is textual rumor. Pictorial rumor on the other hand contains both text and images. However, Chua and Banerjee, [ 32 ] found that users prefer textual rumor than pictorial. Unlike rumors that are circulated during a natural disaster, health misinformation will be long-lasting, and it can spread cutting across boundaries. Personal involvement (the importance of information for both sender and receiver), rumor type and presence of counter rumor are some of the variables that can escalate users’ trusting and sharing behavior related to rumor [ 37 ]. The study of Madraki et al. [ 46 ] study on COVID-19 misinformation /disinformation reported that COVID-19 misinformation on social media differs significantly based on the languages, countries and their culture and beliefs. Acceptance of social media platforms as well as Governmental censorship also play an important role here.

Widespread misinformation could also change collective opinion [ 29 ]. Online users’ epistemic beliefs could control their sharing decisions. Chua and Banerjee, [ 32 ] argued that epistemologically naïve users (users who think knowledge can be acquired easily) are the type of users who accelerate the spread of misinformation on platforms. Those who read or share the misinformation are not likely to follow it [ 37 ]. Gu and Hong [ 34 ] examined health misinformation on mobile social media context. Mobile internet users are different from large screen users. The mobile phone user might have a more emotional attachment toward the gadget. It also motivates them to believe received misinformation. The corrective effort focused on large screen users may not work with mobile phone users or small screen users. Chua and Banerjee [ 32 ] suggested that simplified sharing options of platforms also motivate users to share the received misinformation before validating it. Shahi et al. [ 47 ] found that misinformation is also propagated or shared even by the verified Twitter handles. They become a part of misinformation transmission either by creating it or endorsing it by liking or sharing the information.

The focus of existing studies is heavily based on data from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, although other platforms too escalate the spread of misinformation. Such a phenomenon was evident in the wake of COVID-19 as an intense trend of misinformation spread was reported on WhatsApp, TikTok, and Instagram.

Social media misinformation and politics

There have been several studies on the influence of misinformation on politics across the world [ 43 , 44 ]. Political misinformation has been predominantly used to influence the voters. The USA Presidential election of 2016, French election of 2017 and Indian elections in 2019 have been reported as examples where misinformation has influenced election process [ 15 , 17 , 45 ]. During the 2016 USA election, the partisan effect was a key challenge, where false information was presented as if it was from an authorized source [ 39 ]. Based on a user's prior behavior on the platform, algorithms can manipulate the user's feed [ 40 ]. In a political context, fake news can create more harm as it can influence the voters and the public. Although, fake news has less ‘life’, it's consequences may not be short living. Verification of fake news takes time and by the time verification results are shared, fake news could achieve its goal [ 43 , 48 , 63 ].

Characterizing misinformation in politics

Confirmation bias has a dominant role in social media misinformation related to politics. Readers are more likely to read and engage with the information that confirms their preexisting beliefs and political affiliations and reject information that challenges it [ 46 , 48 ]. For example, in the 2016 USA election, Pro-Trump fake news was accepted by Republicans [ 19 ]. Misinformation spreads quickly among people who have similar ideologies [ 19 ]. The nature of interface also could escalate the spread of misinformation. Kim and Dennis [ 36 ] investigated the influence of platforms' information presentation format and reported that social media platforms indirectly force users to accept certain information; they present information such that little importance is given to the source of information. This presentation is manipulative as people tend to believe information from a reputed source and are more likely to reject information that is from a less-known source [ 42 ].

Pennycook et al. [ 39 ], and Garrett and Poulsen [ 40 ] argued that warning tags (or flagging) on the headline can reduce the spread of misinformation. However, it is not practical to assign warning tags to all misinformation as it gets generated faster than valid information. The fact-checking process in social media also takes time. Hence, people tend to believe that the headlines which do not have warning tags are true and the idea of warning tags will thus not serve any purpose [ 39 ]. Furthermore, it could increase the reader's belief in warning tags and lead to misperception [ 39 ]. Readers tend to believe that all information is verified and consider untagged false information as more accurate. This phenomenon is known as the implied truth effect [ 39 ]. In this case, source reputation rating will influence the credibility of the information. The reader gives less importance to the source that has a low rating [ 17 , 50 ].

Theoretical perspectives of social media misinformation

We identified six theories among the articles we reviewed in relation to social media misinformation. We found rumor theory was used most frequently among all the studies chosen for our review; the theory was used in four articles as a theoretical foundation [ 9 , 11 , 13 , 37 , 43 ]. Oh et al. [ 9 ], studied citizen-driven information processing on Twitter using rumor theory in three social crises. This paper identified four key variables (source ambiguity, personal involvement, and anxiety) that spread misinformation. The authors further examined the acceptance of hate rumors and the aftermath of community crisis based on the Bangalore mass exodus of 2012. Liu et al. [ 13 ], examined the reason behind the retransmission of messages using rumor theory in disasters. Hazel Kwon and Raghav Rao [ 43 ] investigated how internet surveillance by the government impacts citizens’ involvement with cyber-rumors during a homeland security threat. Diffusion theory has also been used in IS research to discern the adoption of technological innovation. Researchers have used diffusion theory to study the retweeting behavior among Twitter users (tweet diffusion) during extreme events [ 26 ]. This research investigated information diffusion during extreme events based on four major elements of diffusion: innovation, time, communication channels and social systems. Kim et al. [ 36 ] examined the effect of rating news sources on users’ belief in social media articles based on three different rating mechanisms expert rating, user article rating and user source rating. Reputation theory was used to show how users would discern cognitive biases in expert ratings.

Murungi et al. [ 38 ] used rhetorical theory to argue that fact-checkers have less effectiveness on fake news that spreads on social media platforms. The study proposed a different approaches by focusing on underlying belief structure that accepts misinformation. The theory was used to identify fake news and socially constructed beliefs in the context of Alabama’s senatorial election in 2017. Using third person effect as the theoretical ground, the characteristics of rumor corrections on Twitter platform have also been examined in the context of death hoax of Singapore’s first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew [ 28 ]. This paper explored the motives behind collective rumor and identified the key characteristics of collective rumor correction. Using situational crisis communication theory (SCCT), Paek and Hove [ 44 ] examined how government could effectively respond to risk-related rumors during national-level crises in the context of food safety rumor. Refuting rumor, denying it and attacking the source of rumor are the three rumor response strategies suggested by the authors to counter rumor-mongering (Table ​ (Table2 2 ).

Theories used in social media misinformation research

Determinants of misinformation in social media platforms

Figure  3 depicts the concepts that emerged from our review using a framework of Antecedents-Misinformation-Outcomes (AMIO) framework, an approach we adapt from Smith HJ et al. [ 66 ]. Originally developed to study information privacy, the Antecedent-Privacy-Concerns-Outcomes (APCO) framework provided a nomological canvas to present determinants, mediators and outcome variables pertaining to information privacy. Following this canvas, we discuss the antecedents of misinformation, mediators of misinformation and misinformation outcomes, as they emerged from prior studies (Fig.  3 ).

Determinants of misinformation

Anxiety, source ambiguity, trustworthiness, content ambiguity, personal involvement, social ties, confirmation bias, attractiveness, illiteracy, ease of sharing options and device attachment emerged as the variables determining misinformation in social media.

Anxiety is the emotional feeling of the person who sends or receives the information. If the person is anxious about the information received, he or she is more likely to share or spread misinformation [ 9 ]. Source ambiguity deals with the origin of the message. When the person is convinced of the source of information, it increases his trustworthiness and the person shares it. Content ambiguity addresses the content clarity of the information [ 9 , 13 ]. Personal involvement denotes how much the information is important for both the sender and receiver [ 9 ]. Social ties, information shared by a family member or social peers will influence the person to share the information [ 9 , 13 ]. From prior literature, it is understood that confirmation bias is one of the root causes of political misinformation. Research on attractiveness of the received information reveals that users tend to believe and share the information that is received on her or his personal device [ 34 ]. After receiving the misinformation from various sources, users accept it based on their existing beliefs, and social, cognitive factors and political factors. Oh et al. [ 15 ] observed that during crises, people by default have a tendency to believe unverified information especially when it helps them to make sense of the situation. Misinformation has significant effects on individuals and society. Loss of lives [ 9 , 15 , 28 , 30 ], economic loss [ 9 , 44 ], loss of health [ 32 , 35 ] and loss of reputation [ 38 , 43 ] are the major outcome of misinformation emerged from our review.

Strategies for controlling the spread of misinformation

Discourse on social media misinformation mitigation has resulted in prioritization of strategies such as early communication from the officials and use of scientific evidence [ 9 , 35 ]. When people realize that the received information or message is false, they are less likely to share that information with others [ 15 ]. Other strategies are 'rumor refutation—reducing citizens' intention to spread misinformation by real information which reduces their uncertainty and serves to control misinformation [ 44 ]. Rumor correction models for social media platforms also employ algorithms and crowdsourcing [ 28 ]. Majority of the papers that we have reviewed suggested fact-checking by experts, source rating of the received information, attaching warning tags to the headlines or entire news [ 36 ], and flagging content by the platform owners [ 40 ] as the strategies to control the spread of misinformation. Studies on controlling misinformation in the public health context showed that the government could also seek the help of public health professionals to mitigate misinformation [ 31 ].

However, the aforementioned strategies have been criticized for several limitations. Most papers mentioned confirmation bias as having a significant impact on the misinformation mitigation strategies, especially in the political context where people tend to believe the information that matches their prior belief. Garrett and Poulsen [ 40 ] argued that during an emergency situation, misinformation recipient may not be able to characterize the misinformation as true or false. Thus, providing alternative explanation or the real information to the users have more effect than providing fact-checking report. Studies by Garrett and Poulsen [ 40 ], and Pennycook et al. [ 39 ] reveal a drawback of attaching warning tags to news headlines. Once the flagging or tagging of the information is introduced, the information with the absence of tags will be considered as true or reliable information. This creates an implied truth effect. Further, it is also not always practical to evaluate all social media posts. Similarly, Kim and Dennis [ 36 ] studied fake news flagging and found that fake news flags did not influence users’ belief. However, they created cognitive dissonance and users were in search of the truthfulness of the headline. Later in 2017 Facebook discontinued the fake news flagging service owing to its limitations [ 45 ]

Key research gaps and future directions

Although, misinformation is a multi-sectoral issue, our systematic review observed that interdisciplinary research on social media misinformation is relatively scarce. ‘Confirmation bias’ is one of the most significant behavioral problem that motivates the spread of misinformation. However, lack of research on it reveals the scope for future interdisciplinary research across the fields of Data Science, Information Systems and Psychology in domains such as politics and health care. In the disaster context, there is a scope for study on the behavior of a first respondent and an emergency manager to understand their information exchange pattern with the public. Similarly, future researchers could analyze communication patterns between citizens and frontline workers in the public health context, which may be useful to design counter-misinformation campaigns and awareness interventions. Since information disorder is a multi-sectoral issue, researchers need to understand misinformation patterns among multiple government departments for coordinated counter-misinformation intervention.

There is a further dearth of studies on institutional responses to control misinformation. To fill the gap, future studies could concentrate on the analysis of governmental and organizational interventions to control misinformation at the level of policies, regulatory mechanisms, and communication strategies. For example, in India there is no specific law against misinformation but there are some provisions in the Information Technology Act (IT Act) and Disaster Management Act which can control misinformation and disinformation. An example of awareness intervention is an initiative named ‘Satyameva Jayate’ launched in Kannur district of Kerala, India which focused on sensitizing children at school to spot misinformation [ 67 ]. As noted earlier, within the research on Misinformation in the political context, there is a lack of research on strategies adopted by the state to counter misinformation. Therefore, building on cases like 'Satyameva Jayate' would further contribute to knowledge in this area.

Technology-based strategies adopted by social media to control the spread of misinformation emphasize the corrective algorithms, keywords and hashtags as a solution [ 32 , 37 , 43 ]. However, these corrective measures have their own limitations. Misinformation corrective algorithms are ineffective if not used immediately after the misinformation has been created. Related hashtags and keywords are used by researchers to find content shared on social media platforms to retrieve data. However, it may not be possible for researchers to cover all the keywords or hashtags employed by users. Further, algorithms may not decipher content shared in regional languages. Another limitation of algorithms employed by platforms is that they recommend and often display content based on user activities and interests which limits the users access to information from multiple perspectives, thus reinforcing their existing belief [ 29 ]. A reparative measure is to display corrective information as 'related stories' for misinformation. However, Facebook’s related stories algorithm only activates when an individual clicks on an outside link, which limits the number of people who will see the corrective information through the algorithm which turns out to be a challenge. Future research could investigate the impact of related stories as a corrective measure by analyzing the relation between misinformation and frequency of related stories posted vis a vis real information.

Our review also found a scarcity of research on the spread of misinformation on certain social media platforms while studies being skewed toward a few others. Of the studies reviewed, 15 articles were concentrated on misinformation spread on Twitter and Facebook. Although, from recent news reports it is evident that largely misinformation and disinformation are spread through popular messaging platforms like the 'WhatsApp', ‘Telegram’, ‘WeChat’, and ‘Line’, research using data from these platforms are, however, scanty. Especially in the Indian context, the magnitude of problems arising from misinformation through WhatsApp are overwhelming [ 68 ]. To address the lacunae of research on messaging platforms, we suggest future researchers to concentrate on investigating the patterns of misinformation spreading on platforms like WhatsApp. Moreover, message diffusion patterns are unique to each social media platform; therefore, it is useful to study the misinformation diffusion patterns on different social media platforms. Future studies could also address the differential roles, patterns and intensity of the spread of misinformation on various messaging and photo/ video-sharing social networking services.

Evident from our review, most research on misinformation is based on Euro-American context and the dominant models proposed for controlling misinformation may have limited applicability to other regions. Moreover, the popularity of social media platforms and usage patterns are diverse across the globe consequent to cultural differences and political regimes of the region, therefore necessitating researchers of social media to take cognizance of empirical experiences of ' left-over' regions.

To understand the spread of misinformation on social media platforms, we conducted a systematic literature review in three important domains where misinformation is rampant: disaster, health, and politics. We reviewed 28 articles relevant to the themes chosen for the study. This is one of the earliest reviews focusing on social media misinformation research, especially based on three sensitive domains. We have discussed how misinformation spreads in the three sectors, the methodologies that have been used by researchers, theoretical perspectives, Antecedents-Misinformation-Outcomes (AMIO) framework for understanding key concepts and their inter-relationships, and strategies to control the spread of misinformation.

Our review also identified major gaps in IS research on misinformation in social media. This includes the need for methodological innovations in addition to experimental methods which have been widely used. This study has some limitations that we acknowledge. We might not have identified all relevant papers on spread of misinformation on social media from existing literature as some authors might have used different keywords and also due to our strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. There might also have been relevant publications in languages other than English which were not covered in this review. Our focus on three domains also restricted the number of papers we reviewed.

Author contributions

TMS: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing—Original Draft, SKM: Writing—Review & Editing, Supervision.

This research did not receive any specific Grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Declarations

On behalf of two authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest in this research paper.

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Contributor Information

Sadiq Muhammed T, Email: [email protected] .

Saji K. Mathew, Email: ni.ca.mtii@ijas .