The Effects of Foreign State Media on Political Preferences in the Maghreb Social media has been intertwined with the process of contentious politics in the Maghreb since 2011. Early reports on the Arab Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt quickly declared the protests to be “Facebook Revolutions.” Over time, this assessment has proven overly simplistic. Subsequent research has found that authoritarian regimes equally used these same media platforms to spread disinformation and counter the narratives presented by opposition groups. Today, social media as a space for political expression is defined more by contestation than revolution. However, attempts to systematically measure the proliferation of false narratives have remained limited and methodologically skewed. Due to Twitter’s public API, scholarship has under-examined Facebook, despite its dramatically higher usage rate in the Maghreb region of North Africa. This sampling bias has the potential to obscure and misrepresent significant trends regarding the scale of Maghrebi interactions with foreign information campaigns. To shed some light on the effects of such interactions, this paper asks whether the spread of foreign state media on Facebook has a statistically significant effect on political preferences in the Maghreb. It also asks whether periods of socio-political tension in the region correlate with periods of increased interactions with foreign state media on Facebook. These questions will be assessed using a two-stage research design. First, the researchers will use Facebook’s URLs Dataset to determine which foreign state outlets receive high levels of interactions in the target countries–namely Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya–and how the level of these interactions varies over time. Second, the researchers will implement a survey experiment through Facebook to quantify the priming effects of prior exposure to foreign state media on susceptibility to political disinformation. This research represents a novel use of data to quantify the effect of foreign state media dissemination on political preferences in the Maghreb, particularly with respect to the region’s most significant social media platform. More broadly, this research will also contribute to the extant literature on contentious politics and soft power projection. Ultimately, it seeks to illuminate the extent to which street politics is implicated by transnational systems of power projection and digital influence.