Resident Fellow: Tom Cunningham
Tom Cunningham worked as economist and data scientist at Facebook and Twitter, working on content moderation and company strategy. His work has been extensively quoted in many publications, in the House report on Competition in Digital Markets, and the House report on January 6. Since resigning from Twitter in November 2022 he has been writing about content moderation.
Tom is a Founding Fellow of the Integrity Institute and, since June 2023, a Resident Fellow as well. As Resident Fellow, Tom will conduct various original research projects on social platforms and social media.
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How Much Has Social Media Affected Polarization?
Following the first published research from the 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (FIES), Tom shows that social media has probably not made a huge contribution to US polarization and how we can extrapolate estimates from the FIES to other effects of interest, specifically the aggregate impact of social media on the US over the last 20 years.
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Ranking by Engagement
Tom shares his six observations on ranking by engagement on social media platforms, especially how to understand and measure engagement as negatively related to content quality.