NES Center for the Study of Diversity and Social Interactions and HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development are happy to invite you to our joint meeting of the Research Seminar on Diversity and Development and HSE Seminar on Political Economy.

Speaker Ruben Enikolopov (NES Professor and Rector, MAE'2002) will present his paper "Social Media and Xenophobia: Evidence from Russia".

Abstract:

We study the causal effect of social media on hate crimes and xenophobic attitudes in Russia using quasi-exogenous variation in social media penetration across cities. We find that higher penetration of social media led to more hate crimes, but only in cities with a high baseline level of nationalist sentiment prior to the introduction of social media.  Consistent with a mechanism of coordination of crimes, the effects are stronger for crimes with multiple perpetrators. Using a list experiment embedded in a new, national survey, we show that social media penetration also had a persuasive effect on young and low-educated individuals, who became more likely to have xenophobic attitudes. Remarkably, we see no evidence of social media increasing people's willingness to express xenophobic views outside social media, which suggests that social media, if anything, increased the stigma associated with expressing these views. Our results are consistent with a simple model of social learning where penetration of social networks increases individuals' propensity to meet like-minded people.

 Registration: till noon of November 26.