Working papers

Raise your voice! Activism and peer effects in online social networks

New draft coming soon! (RedNIE Working Paper)

Abstract: Do peers influence individuals’ involvement in political activism? Are peers like or opposite-minded? Does this distinction matter for understanding peer influence in activism? To provide a quantitative answer to these questions, I study Argentina’s abortion rights debate through Twitter. Pro-choice and pro-life activists coexisted online, and the evidence suggests peer groups were not fully polarized. I propose a model of heterogeneous peer effects in a network and empirically test whether online activism exhibits strategic substitutability or complementarity, distinguishing between like and opposite-minded peers. To achieve this, I construct a novel panel dataset by combining tweets’ and users’ information and provide a reduced-form analysis by proposing a network-based instrumental variable. The results indicate strategic complementarity in online activism from both like and opposite-minded peers. Notably, the evidence suggests strong homophily in the formation of Twitter’s network, but it does not support the hypothesis of an echo-chamber effect. While some individuals are segregated in online chambers, others are not; moreover, the peer estimates do not vary across these groups, highlighting the absence of an echo effect.

Media: uc3nomics (English); Nada es Gratis (Spanish).

Work in progress

Hate in the Tropics: Bolsonaro’s Triumph and the Surge of Online Hate Speech in Brazil

with D. Marino Fages. Draft in progress.

Abstract: How does the advent of political information influence social norms and individual behavior? This paper examines the impact of Bolsonaro’s victory in the 2018 Brazilian presidential election on the prevalence of hate speech. We leverage Twitter data from 2017 to 2019 and employ Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to detect hate speech in tweets. Relying on the election result as an information shock, we propose a difference-in-differences approach to identify the effect of Bolsonaro’s triumph in hate speech. Our findings reveal a significant increase in online hate speech after the election, especially in municipalities where Bolsonaro had lower support. Next, we classify tweets based on the targets of hate speech into five categories and find that the surge in hate speech is mainly driven by homophobia, sexism, and racism - areas in which Bolsonaro’s rhetoric was highly controversial. Overall, we interpret these results through a belief-updating mechanism, emphasizing the process of revising social norms that determine (un)acceptable public discourse.

Silence in social networks

Draft in progress.

In short: How do social interactions affect what we publicly say and what we do not? I study a model of social norms, assuming interactions are structured through a network. Individuals choose whether to conform to a social norm – have a speech – or not – stay silent. Social norms may be controversial, and their compliance is observable. Then, individuals may remain silent (i) if no norm aligns with their preferences or (ii) if they do not want to conform to a social norm different from their friends, i.e., by social pressure. I investigate how the network structure and distribution of preferences regarding social norms affect the equilibrium outcome and under which circumstances the social pressure mechanism arises.

The long memory of poverty: the Historical Unsatisfied Basic Needs in Argentina

with E. Nicolini. Pre-doctoral work.