The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential social benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. Yet we still have little rigorous evidence about its true causal effects. This lecture will summarize new evidence from the largest ever randomized study of Facebook's effects and discuss implications for the future of social media.
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Matthew Gentzkow is Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He received the 2014 John Bates Clark Medal. His research focuses on empirical industrial organization and political economy, with an emphasis on media industries. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a former co-editor of American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. He was educated at Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1997, a master's degree in 2002, and a PhD in 2004.
Other awards include the 2016 Calvó-Armengol International Prize, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, several National Science Foundation grants for research on media, and a Faculty Excellence Award for teaching.