Post-January 6th deplatforming reduced the reach of misinformation on Twitter.

The social media platforms of the twenty-first century have an enormous role in regulating speech in the USA and worldwide1. However, there has been little research on platform-wide interventions on speech2,3. Here we evaluate the effect of the decision by Twitter to suddenly deplatform 70,000 misinformation traffickers in response to the violence at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 (a series of events commonly known as and referred to here as 'January 6th'). Using a panel of more than 500,000 active Twitter users4,5 and natural experimental designs6,7, we evaluate the effects of this intervention on the circulation of misinformation on Twitter. We show that the intervention reduced circulation of misinformation by the deplatformed users as well as by those who followed the deplatformed users, though we cannot identify the magnitude of the causal estimates owing to the co-occurrence of the deplatforming intervention with the events surrounding January 6th. We also find that many of the misinformation traffickers who were not deplatformed left Twitter following the intervention. The results inform the historical record surrounding the insurrection, a momentous event in US history, and indicate the capacity of social media platforms to control the circulation of misinformation, and more generally to regulate public discourse.

A randomized trial of a lab-embedded discourse intervention to improve research ethics.

We report a randomized trial of a research ethics training intervention designed to enhance ethics communication in university science and engineering laboratories, focusing specifically on authorship and data management. The intervention is a project-based research ethics curriculum that was designed to enhance the ability of science and engineering research laboratory members to engage in reason giving and interpersonal communication necessary for ethical practice. The randomized trial was fielded in active faculty-led laboratories at two US research-intensive institutions. Here, we show that laboratory members perceived improvements in the quality of discourse on research ethics within their laboratories and enhanced awareness of the relevance and reasons for that discourse for their work as measured by a survey administered over 4 mo after the intervention. This training represents a paradigm shift compared with more typical module-based or classroom ethics instruction that is divorced from the everyday workflow and practices within laboratories and is designed to cultivate a campus culture of ethical science and engineering research in the very work settings where laboratory members interact.

Field experiment evidence of substantive, attributional, and behavioral persuasion by members of Congress in online town halls.

Do leaders persuade? Social scientists have long studied the relationship between elite behavior and mass opinion. However, there is surprisingly little evidence regarding direct persuasion by leaders. Here we show that political leaders can persuade their constituents directly on three dimensions: substantive attitudes regarding policy issues, attributions regarding the leaders' qualities, and subsequent voting behavior. We ran two randomized controlled field experiments testing the causal effects of directly interacting with a sitting politician. Our experiments consist of 20 online town hall meetings with members of Congress conducted in 2006 and 2008. Study 1 examined 19 small meetings with members of the House of Representatives (average 20 participants per town hall). Study 2 examined a large (175 participants) town hall with a senator. In both experiments we find that participating has significant and substantively important causal effects on all three dimensions of persuasion but no such effects on issues that were not discussed extensively in the sessions. Further, persuasion was not driven solely by changes in copartisans' attitudes; the effects were consistent across groups.

Pharmaceutical drugs chatter on Online Social Networks.

The ubiquity of Online Social Networks (OSNs) is creating new sources for healthcare information, particularly in the context of pharmaceutical drugs. We aimed to examine the impact of a given OSN's characteristics on the content of pharmaceutical drug discussions from that OSN. We compared the effect of four distinguishing characteristics from ten different OSNs on the content of their pharmaceutical drug discussions: (1) General versus Health OSN; (2) OSN moderation; (3) OSN registration requirements; and (4) OSNs with a question and answer format. The effects of these characteristics were measured both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our results show that an OSN's characteristics indeed affect the content of its discussions. Based on their information needs, healthcare providers may use our findings to pick the right OSNs or to advise patients regarding their needs. Our results may also guide the creation of new and more effective domain-specific health OSNs. Further, future researchers of online healthcare content in OSNs may find our results informative while choosing OSNs as data sources. We reported several findings about the impact of OSN characteristics on the content of pharmaceutical drug discussion, and synthesized these findings into actionable items for both healthcare providers and future researchers of healthcare discussions on OSNs. Future research on the impact of OSN characteristics could include user demographics, quality and safety of information, and efficacy of OSN usage.

Initial evidence of research quality of registered reports compared with the standard publishing model.

In registered reports (RRs), initial peer review and in-principle acceptance occur before knowing the research outcomes. This combats publication bias and distinguishes planned from unplanned research. How RRs could improve the credibility of research findings is straightforward, but there is little empirical evidence. Also, there could be unintended costs such as reducing novelty. Here, 353 researchers peer reviewed a pair of papers from 29 published RRs from psychology and neuroscience and 57 non-RR comparison papers. RRs numerically outperformed comparison papers on all 19 criteria (mean difference 0.46, scale range -4 to +4) with effects ranging from RRs being statistically indistinguishable from comparison papers in novelty (0.13, 95% credible interval [-0.24, 0.49]) and creativity (0.22, [-0.14, 0.58]) to sizeable improvements in rigour of methodology (0.99, [0.62, 1.35]) and analysis (0.97, [0.60, 1.34]) and overall paper quality (0.66, [0.30, 1.02]). RRs could improve research quality while reducing publication bias and ultimately improve the credibility of the published literature.