Social media use falls if algorithm-based feeds removed, study finds
2023/07/28
Removing algorithm-based feeds reduces the amount of time users spend on social media platforms but does not change people's political attitudes, a new study as found.
Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa
Social media platforms have long been criticized for using opaque algorithms that dictate what users see on their feeds.
But according to research published by the journal Science and backed by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, removing algorithm-based feeds only causes users to reduce the amount of time they spend on the platforms.
"The notion that such algorithms create political 'filter bubbles,' foster polarization, exacerbate existing social inequalities, and enable the spread of disinformation has become rooted in the public consciousness," according to the researchers, who were led by Andrew M. Guess of Princeton University.
Keeping user and algorithm apart, however, "did not change" peoples' political attitudes, knowledge and offline behaviours, they found, suggesting that when account holders encountered views at odds with their own, they were inclined to just stop scrolling and do something else.
The study sought to "examine the effect of algorithmic feed-ranking systems on individuals' political attitudes and behaviors as related to the U.S. presidential election in 2020."
The vote was widely described as reflecting an increasingly-polarized US, with supporters of incumbent Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden finding little common ground.
However, in a separate paper published by Science, a team of researchers led by the University of Pennsylvania's Sandra González-Bailón found that such "siloing" was in part driven by algorithm-driven Facebook feeds and the sharing of posts, with Trump supporters seen as more likely to be "ideologically segregated" than Biden backers.
"Our analyses highlight that Facebook ... is substantially segregated ideologically - far more than previous research on internet news consumption based on browsing behavior has found," the researchers said.
© Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
Social media platforms have long been criticized for using opaque algorithms that dictate what users see on their feeds.
But according to research published by the journal Science and backed by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, removing algorithm-based feeds only causes users to reduce the amount of time they spend on the platforms.
"The notion that such algorithms create political 'filter bubbles,' foster polarization, exacerbate existing social inequalities, and enable the spread of disinformation has become rooted in the public consciousness," according to the researchers, who were led by Andrew M. Guess of Princeton University.
Keeping user and algorithm apart, however, "did not change" peoples' political attitudes, knowledge and offline behaviours, they found, suggesting that when account holders encountered views at odds with their own, they were inclined to just stop scrolling and do something else.
The study sought to "examine the effect of algorithmic feed-ranking systems on individuals' political attitudes and behaviors as related to the U.S. presidential election in 2020."
The vote was widely described as reflecting an increasingly-polarized US, with supporters of incumbent Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden finding little common ground.
However, in a separate paper published by Science, a team of researchers led by the University of Pennsylvania's Sandra González-Bailón found that such "siloing" was in part driven by algorithm-driven Facebook feeds and the sharing of posts, with Trump supporters seen as more likely to be "ideologically segregated" than Biden backers.
"Our analyses highlight that Facebook ... is substantially segregated ideologically - far more than previous research on internet news consumption based on browsing behavior has found," the researchers said.
© Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
Agence France-Presse
July 27, 2023
Meta hit with record €1.2 billion fine for violating EU data rules
Do social media echo chambers deepen political polarization, or simply reflect existing social divisions?
A landmark research project that investigated Facebook around the 2020 US presidential election published its first results Thursday, finding that, contrary to assumption, the platform's often criticized content-ranking algorithm doesn't shape users' beliefs.
The work is the product of a collaboration between Meta -- the parent company of Facebook and Instagram -- and a group of academics from US universities who were given broad access to internal company data, and signed up tens of thousands of users for experiments.
The academic team wrote four papers examining the role of the social media giant in American democracy, which were published in the scientific journals Science and Nature.
Overall, the algorithm was found to be "extremely influential in people's on-platform experiences," said project leaders Talia Stroud of the University of Texas at Austin and Joshua Tucker, of New York University.
In other words, it heavily impacted what the users saw, and how much they used the platforms.
"But we also know that changing the algorithm for even a few months isn't likely to change people's political attitudes," they said, as measured by users' answers on surveys after they took part in three-month-long experiments that altered how they received content.
The authors acknowledged this conclusion might be because the changes weren't in place for long enough to make an impact, given that the United States has been growing more polarized for decades.
Nevertheless, "these findings challenge popular narratives blaming social media echo chambers for the problems of contemporary American democracy," wrote the authors of one of the papers, published in Nature.
- 'No silver bullet' -
Facebook's algorithm, which uses machine-learning to decide which posts rise to the top of users' feeds based on their interests, has been accused of giving rise to "filter bubbles" and enabling the spread of misinformation.
Researchers recruited around 40,000 volunteers via invitations placed on their Facebook and Instagram feeds, and designed an experiment where one group was exposed to the normal algorithm, while the other saw posts listed from newest to oldest.
Facebook originally used a reverse chronological system and some observers have suggested that switching back to it will reduce social media's harmful effects.
The team found that users in the chronological feed group spent around half the amount of time on Facebook and Instagram compared to the algorithm group.
On Facebook, those in the chronological group saw more content from moderate friends, as well as more sources with ideologically mixed audiences.
But the chronological feed also increased the amount of political and untrustworthy content seen by users.
Despite the differences, the changes did not cause detectable changes in measured political attitudes.
"The findings suggest that chronological feed is no silver bullet for issues such as political polarization," said coauthor Jennifer Pan of Stanford.
- Meta welcomes findings -
In a second paper in Science, the same team researched the impact of reshared content, which constitutes more than a quarter of content that Facebook users see.
Suppressing reshares has been suggested as a means to control harmful viral content.
The team ran a controlled experiment in which a group of Facebook users saw no changes to their feeds, while another group had reshared content removed.
Removing reshares reduced the proportion of political content seen, resulting in reduced political knowledge -- but again did not impact downstream political attitudes or behaviors.
A third paper, in Nature, probed the impact of content from "like-minded" users, pages, and groups in their feeds, which the researchers found constituted a majority of what the entire population of active adult Facebook users see in the US.
But in an experiment involving over 23,000 Facebook users, suppressing like-minded content once more had no impact on ideological extremity or belief in false claims.
A fourth paper, in Science, did however confirm extreme "ideological segregation" on Facebook, with politically conservative users more siloed in their news sources than liberals.
What's more, 97 percent of political news URLs on Facebook rated as false by Meta's third-party fact checking program -- which AFP is part of -- were seen by more conservatives than liberals.
Meta welcomed the overall findings.
They "add to a growing body of research showing there is little evidence that social media causes harmful... polarization or has any meaningful impact on key political attitudes, beliefs or behaviors," said Nick Clegg, the company's president of global affairs.
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