Luca Braghieri has been awarded a €1.5 million Starting Grant by the European Research Council. His project, titled SOME (Social Media: Measuring Effects and Mitigating Downsides), aims to investigate the causal effects of social media in areas where our understanding is still incomplete, such as political engagement. Additionally, it seeks to devise interventions that can alleviate the known negative repercussions.

The SOME project will employ a unique combination of state-of-the-art causal inference techniques applied to observational data and extensive field experiments. These methods will yield valuable insights beneficial to researchers, users, and policymakers alike.

One focal point of the project involves quantifying the influence of Facebook usage on voter turnout, party vote shares, and political contributions spanning from 2008 to 2020. This comprehensive analysis intends to provide a detailed understanding of Facebook's evolving political impact over time.