Social media and son preference: Evidence from India

Abstract

This research investigates the impact of exposure to the social media platform Twitter on son-biased fertility preferences for women in India, using information from over a million Tweets, combined with Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data on more than a million respondents. We apply an instrumental variables strategy based on a popular national Twitter campaign attributed to the retirement of Indian cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar. We find that exposure to Twitter decreases discriminatory preferences regarding the sex of the child, particularly reducing son preference. These changes in preferences are mainly explained by the fact that social media content helps challenge harmful cultural norms. Specifically, we adopt a qualitative approach supported by a custom fine-tuned sequence classifier based on a pre-trained multilingual transformer encoder (XLM-RoBERTa) to show that Twitter served as a platform where Indian users discussed topics related to children, where most messages about children were neutral or progressive. We further demonstrate that content matters by focussing on an online campaign called #SelfieWithDaughter, and illustrate that social media exposure was particularly effective in shaping preferences in districts where the #SelfieWithDaughter campaign was active. We extend the main analysis to men and find that exposure to Twitter also reduces son preference for this group. Further evidence on the behavioural effects of social media exposure suggests a favourable but less straightforward effect on nutritional outcomes for girls under the age of five. All reported results from the heterogeneity analyses confirm that Twitter reduced discrimination, although it was less impactful for women in North India and those in districts with a higher scheduled caste population.