- Recruit social media users as participants to survey them and study their profiles
- Participants know they are being studied
- Can obtain information about users’ demographics and activities on social media 

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Researchers reviewed studies done on social media to study user interactions and discussed considerations and advantages of each kind of experiment. 

Field experiments on social media

Mosleh, M., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. (2021). Field experiments on social media. https://psyarxiv.com/dgmc2/

Field experiments on social media - hybrid studies linking traditional surveys with social media data

- Directly run field experiments on a chosen social media platform
- Participants do not know they have been selected to take part in the study 
- Include a larger variety of participants because they do not need to opt-in 
- Able to block participants into different treatments to increase precision and power 
- Studies comparing the effects before and after a specific treatment 
- Need to be careful of potential suspension from platforms due to sending too many private messages a day for example 
- May not be able to administer treatment to every participant simultaneously

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