Shelby Grossman

Can large language models, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), generate persuasive propaganda? We conducted a preregistered survey experiment of US respondents to investigate the persuasiveness of news articles written by foreign propagandists compared to content generated by GPT-3 davinci (a large language model). We found that GPT-3 can create highly persuasive text as measured by participants' agreement with propaganda theses. We further investigated whether a person fluent in English could improve propaganda persuasiveness. Editing the prompt fed to GPT-3 and/or curating GPT-3's output made GPT-3 even more persuasive, and, under certain conditions, as persuasive as the original propaganda.

Research suggests that partisanship and social media usage correlate with belief in COVID-19 misinformation and that misinformation shapes citizens' willingness to get vaccinated. However, this evidence comes overwhelmingly from frequent internet users in rich, Western countries. We run a panel survey early in the pandemic leveraging a prepandemic sample of urban middle-class Nigerians, many of whom do not use the internet. We find that opposition party support and social media usage are correlated with belief in antigovernment misinformation but not other types of COVID-19 misinformation. Surprisingly, we find no relationship between overall belief in misinformation and willingness to be vaccinated several weeks later.

When governments run influence operations they may leverage in-house capabilities, outsource to digital mercenaries, or use a combination of these strategies. We theorize that governments outsource because it provides plausible deniability if the operation is uncovered, and offers access to cutting-edge influence tactics beyond those common to established government institutions. Using data from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we test implications of this theory via two covert online influence campaign case studies, each focused on Syria, executed by Russia's military intelligence agency (the GRU) and by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a privately owned company.

In fragile contexts such as Libya where social media penetration is high, foreign social media outlets with political interests can use social media platforms to influence the country's politics. We assess how social media content varies by the country of the information producer, using a dataset of Facebook posts (N=16,662). We find that more than half of the posts originated from outside Libya and that posts from countries aligned with the Tripoli-based government are biased in that direction, while posts from countries aligned with the eastern-based strongman are biased toward his forces.

The suicide contagion effect posits that exposure to suicide-related content increases the likelihood of an individual engaging in suicidal behavior. Internet suicide-related queries correlate with suicide prevalence. However, suicide-related searches also lead people to access help resources. This article systematically evaluates the results returned from both general suicide terms and terms related to specific suicide means across three popular search engines—Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo—in both English and Spanish.

Informal actors often compete with formal or regulated ones. Regulated actors therefore should be natural allies in government attempts to enforce laws and regulations. Surprisingly, they often are not. We argue that the lack of cooperation stems from a collusion dilemma: collectively, formal actors are better off if informal actors are removed, but individually, they can benefit from their presence. We demonstrate these dynamics in the context of Lagos, Nigeria, where millions of informal street vendors compete with traders in licensed markets.

Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members. Under what circumstances do private associations provide a stable environment for economic activity? Using survey data collected from 1,179 randomly sampled traders across 199 markets in Lagos, I find that markets maintain institutions to support trade not in the absence of government, but rather in response to active government interference. Associations develop pro-trade institutions when threatened by politicians they perceive to be predatory, and when the organization can respond with threats of its own.

Conflicting preferences between the state and society underpin most accountability mechanisms by providing a credible way for society to impose costs on the state. We argue that policies both the state and society value can also enhance society's negotiating power, provided society has a lower valuation and is more patient than the state. By threatening to sabotage their own interests but hurt the impatient state even more, citizens can compel the state to deliver broader policy benefits. We illustrate this logic with the case of polio vaccination in northern Nigeria.

Diversified business groups play a major role in the economies of many developing countries. Business group members, often from the same communal, ethnic, or tribal group, have or develop interpersonal relations that make it easier to obtain information and monitor compliance related to transactions that require a strong measure of trust. This in-group cohesion facilitates profitable and productive economic activity, but it can create resentment among other members of society who are barred from membership in a group that is, of necessity, exclusive.

This paper investigates the determinants of price discrimination in the rice market in one neighborhood of Lagos, Nigeria, through one of the first audit experiments in Africa. We experimentally manipulate class, with confederates presenting as different socioeconomic groups, and vary coethnicity by greeting sellers in the language of one of two large ethnic groups. We find little evidence that sharing an ethnicity influences market treatment. Class, however, has substantial effects on the prices and quantities received.