About

Joshua Tucker is the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Music and an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University. His research broadly explores the relationship between sound and society, focusing on how sonic meanings and practices shape human relationships, particularly in relation to racial, ethnic, and national identities, as well as the natural environment. Tucker's work has centered on the Andean region of Peru, where he examined the circulation of Indigenous music and imagery to understand changing formations of class and race in contemporary Peru. His first book, 'Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars,' investigates huayno music from the Peruvian highlands, analyzing how local media and mediators influence the dissemination of music and the construction of social identities through sonic environments. His second book, 'Making Music Indigenous,' studies chimaycha music from Peru’s highland communities, illustrating how this genre reflects and shapes evolving notions of Indigenous identity through themes of nature, mediation, and social politics. More recently, Tucker has expanded his research to the Maritime Provinces of Eastern Canada, exploring music's role in mediating regional identity and ecological debates, especially in the context of the marine environment and local fishing communities. His work consistently emphasizes the dynamic, dialogic nature of Indigeneity and regional identity as constructed through musical practices and mediated representations.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Law
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Business
• World Wide Web
• Internet privacy
• Advertising
• Engineering
• Psychiatry
• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Media studies
• Computer Security
• Political economy
• Mathematics
• Clinical psychology
• Virology
• Algorithm

Selected publications

• How deceptive online networks reached millions in the US 2020 elections

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2026-04-06

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Partisan Effects of Social Media Bans

  SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-03-21

  preprintOpen access

  What happens to information environments when democracies ban social media platforms? While a large literature examines information control under authoritarianism, democratic governments have increasingly intervened in major online platforms. We study a prominent case: Brazil's 2024 national ban on the social media platform X. Using an event-study design, we estimate the causal effects of the ban and examine how partisan identity shaped responses. Drawing on a large sample of politically engaged users and ideal-point estimates of ideology, we find strong partisan asymmetries. Conservative users not aligned with the government were more likely to circumvent the ban, and right-leaning news domains became markedly more prevalent on the platform. We describe this dynamic as a ``sorting ratchet": the ban segmented the digital public sphere along partisan lines, with effects that persisted even after restrictions were lifted. Platform bans in democratic settings may therefore deepen polarization and durably reshape information environments.

  Publisher

• The Partisan Effects of Social Media Bans

  2026-03-21

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  What happens to information environments when democracies ban social media platforms? While a large literature examines information control under authoritarianism, democratic governments have increasingly intervened in major online platforms. We study a prominent case: Brazil's 2024 national ban on the social media platform X. Using an event-study design, we estimate the causal effects of the ban and examine how partisan identity shaped responses. Drawing on a large sample of politically engaged users and ideal-point estimates of ideology, we find strong partisan asymmetries. Conservative users not aligned with the government were more likely to circumvent the ban, and right-leaning news domains became markedly more prevalent on the platform. We describe this dynamic as a ``sorting ratchet": the ban segmented the digital public sphere along partisan lines, with effects that persisted even after restrictions were lifted. Platform bans in democratic settings may therefore deepen polarization and durably reshape information environments.

  PublisherDOI

• Reducing Social Media Usage During Elections: Evidence from a Multi-Country WhatsApp Experiment

  2026-03-23

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Social media messaging platforms are central to worldwide communication, but are also major hubs of misinformation and toxic content. On these platforms, informationspreads through interpersonal and group-based chats rather than feed-based recommendations. We argue that introducing barriers to usage can increase the costs ofconsuming low-quality content and promote more deliberate engagement, shaping information consumption and downstream attitudes. We evaluate our argument throughthree coordinated online field experiments in Brazil, India, and South Africa. We incentivize participants to either avoid multimedia content on WhatsApp or to limit theirusage to 10 minutes per day for four weeks ahead of each country’s elections. Our interventions significantly reduced participants’ exposure to uncivil political discussionsand misinformation—but at the expense of keeping up with political news. However, political attitudes did not shift, although treated participants did report improved wellbeing, particularly when they substituted WhatsApp usage with more offline activities.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for "State Media Control Influences Large Language Models"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2026-02-17

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Replication dataset for "State Media Control Influences Large Language Models," forthcoming in Nature (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10506-7). We show through six studies that government control of the media across the world influences the output of large language models (LLMs) via their training data.

  PublisherDOI

• Reducing Social Media Usage During Elections: Evidence from a Multi-Country WhatsApp Experiment

  SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-03-22

  preprintOpen access

  Social media messaging platforms are central to worldwide communication, but are also major hubs of misinformation and toxic content. On these platforms, information spreads through interpersonal and group-based chats rather than feed-based recommendations. We argue that introducing barriers to usage can increase the costs of consuming low-quality content and promote more deliberate engagement, shaping information consumption and downstream attitudes. We evaluate our argument through three coordinated online field experiments in Brazil, India, and South Africa. We incentivize participants to either avoid multimedia content on WhatsApp or to limit their usage to 10 minutes per day for four weeks ahead of each country’s elections. Our interventions significantly reduced participants’ exposure to uncivil political discussions and misinformation—but at the expense of keeping up with political news. However, political attitudes did not shift, although treated participants did report improved wellbeing, particularly when they substituted WhatsApp usage with more offline activities.

  Publisher

• Code for "The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users’ Emotional State"

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-03-31

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.<br>

  PublisherDOI

• The Prosocial Ranking Challenge: Reducing Polarization on Social Media without Sacrificing Engagement

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-03-20

  preprintOpen access

  We report the first direct comparisons of multiple alternative social media algorithms on multiple platforms on outcomes of societal interest. We used a browser extension to modify which posts were shown to desktop social media users, randomly assigning 9,386 users to a control group or one of five alternative ranking algorithms which simultaneously altered content across three platforms for six months during the US 2024 presidential election. This reduced our preregistered index of affective polarization by an average of 0.03 standard deviations (p &lt; 0.05), including a 1.5 degree decrease in differences between the 100 point inparty and outparty feeling thermometers. We saw reductions in active use time for Facebook (-0.37 min/day) and Reddit (-0.2 min/day), but an increase of 0.32 min/day (p &lt; 0.01) for X/Twitter. We saw an increase in reports of negative social media experiences but found no effects on well-being, news knowledge, outgroup empathy, perceptions of and support for partisan violence. This implies that bridging content can improve some societal outcomes without necessarily conflicting with the engagement-driven business model of social media.

  PublisherDOI

• Code for "The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users’ Emotional State"

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-03-31

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.<br>

  PublisherDOI

• Stage 1 Registered Report: Testing the Causal Impact of Social Media Reduction Around the Globe

  2025-12-03

  articleOpen access

  More than half of the world’s population uses social media. There is widespread debate among the public, politicians, and academics about social media’s impact on important outcomes, such as intergroup conflict and well-being. However, most prior research on the impact of social media relies on samples from the United States and Western Europe, despite emerging evidence suggesting that the impact of social media is likely to differ across the globe. Building on the results of pilot experiments from three countries (n = 894), we plan to conduct a global field experiment to measure the causal impact of reducing social media usage for two weeks across 23 countries (projected n &amp;gt; 8,000). We will then test how social media reduction influences four main outcomes: news knowledge, exposure to online hostility, intergroup attitudes, and well-being. We will also explore how the effects of social media reduction vary across world regions, focusing on three theoretically-informed country-level moderators: income level, inequality, and democratic strength. This large-scale, high-powered field experiment, and the global dataset resulting from it, will offer rare causal evidence to inform ongoing debates about the impact of social media and how it varies around the world.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jonathan Nagler

  New York University

  159 shared

• Richard Bonneau

  69 shared

• Jonathan Ronen

  Max Delbrück Center

  59 shared

• Jennifer Larson

  Vanderbilt University

  57 shared

• Grigore Pop-Elecheș

  Princeton University

  37 shared

• Pablo Barberá

  New York University

  30 shared

• Andrew M. Guess

  Princeton University

  26 shared

• John T. Jost

  New York University

  25 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Ethnomusicology

  Brown University

  2016

• M.A., Ethnomusicology

  Brown University

  2011

• B.A., Music

  Brown University

  2007