Political Persuasion in the Information Age: Results from a Field Experiment

We study the effectiveness of online persuasion via a lab-in-the-field experiment that exposes respondents to short videos on the proposed Public Security Law in China. Exposure to “nationalist” videos supporting the law reduced willingness to provide oppositional feedback to the government by 4.8 percentage points (a 42% reduction relative to the control), while critical videos increased oppositional feedback by 6.6 percentage points (58% relative increase); for both nationalist and critical videos, the effect on providing supportive feedback was the opposite. In a follow-up experiment, we informed subjects of the extent to which others had a negative view of those criticizing the law, which completely erased any effect of the video on willingness to provide feedback. Overall, our findings indicate the potency of online content in its short-run impact on political dissent, and that these effects may operate in large part through their impact on second-order beliefs.