I'm thinking about how to experimentally test potential effects of social media on populations. Has anybody ever made a non-federating mastodon server, invited some volunteers as users and then experimentally tested if their opinions on topics change if you push or suppress corresponding hastags? With control groups and everything. I couldn't find any papers on that so far.
And then the next question would be the ethics of the whole thing lol
@realsimon that's maybe not too hard to do, but very hard to make reproducible. Let's just say that propagandists believe that controlling group behavior through social media has some effect :-)
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