Is Social Media Manipulation Altering What We Think and Comment? An Instagram Field Experiment in Indonesia.

​Campaign Lab’s Academic Series continues with a session from Moses Siregar, political scientist and experiment advisor at Campaign Lab, exploring how coordinated social media manipulation shapes political behaviour online.

​Drawing on a large-scale pre-registered field experiment with 912 Instagram users in Indonesia, Moses will present new causal evidence on how manipulated comment environments influence political expression, perceptions of public opinion, and conformity online. Participants were exposed to identical anti-corruption content, but with different forms of coordinated engagement in the comments, allowing researchers to isolate the effects of manufactured consensus in digital spaces.

​The findings suggest that social media manipulation may work less by directly changing private beliefs and more by altering what people think others believe encouraging shifts in tone, language, and public expression through social conformity.

​Moses is a PHD candidate at LSE focused on emerging forms of political persuasion in digital environments. His research on technology, persuasion, and democracy has received international recognition, including the award for best MSc dissertation at LSE.

​This session should be particularly valuable for campaigners, researchers, technologists, and anyone interested in the relationship between social media platforms and democratic politics.