RESEARCH
Network Echo: How Networks Shape the Evolution of Linguistic Culture in Alt-Right Echo Chambers
Inducing cultural change in online communities is a key problem for platforms and in digitization policy as concerns mount about echo chambers that foment toxic cultures. Yet the evidence on the role that echo chambers play in producing and reinforcing extreme online communities is mixed. While the prior literature has prioritized understanding the role of the infrastructure of social media, this study prioritizes understanding the role of social network structure through the construct of network echo: reflective, within-group communication that structurally insulates a subgroup of a community from the broader community’s culture. I hypothesize that reducing the network echo of a community reduces the linguistic culture expressed by those in the echo chamber. I test this hypothesis in the setting of online communities by leveraging a large-scale natural experiment on the platform Reddit. The natural experiment shocked the networks of an Alt-Right community, transforming it from a high-echo, insular network to a low-echo, integrated network. Across several ways of measuring language use, including measures derived from natural language processing embedding techniques, I find that this shock causes a decrease in Alt-Right language imported to other communities by Alt-Right members (including a decrease in hate speech). This result overturns the conventional wisdom that breaking up echo chambers will simply displace problematic conversations.


CULTURAL STORAGE: THE ORGANIZATIONAL SHIP OF THESEUS
We investigate the ways that culture, and especially language, can encode organizational priorities and enable organizational memory. Culture's ability to encode priorities creates differences between organizations in which types of knowledge can be efficiently communicated. Like an organizational Ship of Theseus, we ask how much of the language of the original members remains when they have all been replaced. We find that by iteratively replacing every member of the organization, a substantial percentage of the updated language reflects the founding members’ priorities. Common language is a type of limited codifiability that makes certain (possibly tacit) routines and situations more efficient to describe within an organization. We test the model using data from a popular online strategic communication cooperation game. By exploiting a panel of partially overlapping teams, we find that players bring communicative routines with them when they join a new team, and are able to transfer this knowledge to the new team.
True Believers and New Believers: The Impact of Tactic Efficacy Beliefs on Social Movement Diffusion
When does exposure to social movement activity in one domain catalyze acts of protest elsewhere? Prior research on the diffusion of protest has overlooked how the collective beliefs of dormant populations—those not yet engaged in activism—may influence their participation. We show that the susceptibility of a region to the spread of social movements depends on the region's tactic efficacy beliefs---shared attitudes about the efficacy of social movement tactics. Using 1.6 million posts from 29,000 users on the largest online forum for ride-sharing drivers, we show that counterintuitively, regions with strong tactic efficacy beliefs witness lower levels of ride-share mobilization when exposed to other movements. By contrast, efforts to organize in regions with weaker tactic efficacy beliefs are more likely to result in protest activity growth. We employ a shift-share instrument (SSIV) to estimate the causal impact of social movement mobilization exposure on real-world labor movement mobilization activity based on 2.6 million news stories across 14 social movements. Our conceptualization of tactic efficacy beliefs contributes by developing a novel explanation for the spread of social movements.


PEERING INTO CAREER CHOICE: PEER EFFECTS, ETHICAL HOMOPHILY AND SOCIAL PERSUASION
We seek to unpack the mechanisms by which social learning operates, focusing specifically on ethical homophily. Using the random assignment of MBA students into learning teams, we evaluate the impact of prior industry composition of learning teams on students’ industry choices following the MBA program and find that peer effects are in general negligible, except in the case of ethical homophily (measured as LDA-based topical similarity on an ethical dilemma essay) where peer effects on industry choice become large and significant. The proposed mechanism is that ethical homophily makes communication either more efficient by means of a common language around ethics and values, or more persuasive because those values are shared.
FAKE NEWS VIA INTENTIONAL DISTRACTION
I develop a formal model of fake news as bias of the relative precision of signals rather than bias of the signal means. Under this type of bias, Bayesian synthesis of signals can be biased (compared to the true model) even though none of the individual signal means are biased. This model can help explain the "white noise" Twitter strategy of Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto and his PRI party during the 2010 presidential election. The PRI hired a small army of Twitter trolls to manage the impression of the candidate on social media. But while they were not actively hostile to the candidacy, neither did they promote the candidacy directly. Instead, they used a "white noise" strategy that magnified the noise during times of particularly bad news about Peña Nieto (e.g. claiming Justin Bieber had died). This type of fake news is realistically possible only in the wild west of digital information diffusion.


POSITIONING, STATUS, AND QUALITY IN A DYNAMIC INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT
I explore how firms should position themselves when the market cannot readily discern the desirability of their offerings. While there are some industries where the marketplace may have perfect information about product desirability, for others the marketplace may have at best a hazy or biased belief about desirability. Firms differ in status and in customer beliefs about desirability, and differences in status or beliefs may also drive positioning choices if these positioning choices have the power to affect beliefs. We begin by modeling this problem as an incomplete information game. Our formal results reveal how information quality and costs impact firm positioning choices and industry-level positioning heterogeneity, and how these change over time in reaction to changes in consumer access to information about desirability. In ongoing work, we test our predictions by leveraging shocks to the cost of information stemming from the staggered UK broadband rollout.
CLASHING FASHIONS AND INSTITUTIONS: MID-LIFE UNCERTAINTY IN INNOVATION DIFFUSION
We use theories of fashions and institutions to examine whether, why, and when over five-hundred organizational techniques persisted relatively permanently or disappeared relatively transiently. In Neoinstitutional theory, the theory of fashions in organizational techniques tends to explain the causes of these techniques’ relative transience. By contrast, the theory of institutions in organizational techniques tends to explain the causes of these techniques’ relative persistence. By using natural language processing techniques, we examine how writings about the techniques during their upswing can predict whether that technique will persist or fade during their precarious mid-life period. Moreover, by examining the different ways that each type of proccess is written about, we gain insight into the processes of fashions and institutionalization.
