Does social media polarize voters? Unprecedented experiments on Facebook users reveal surprises

The bitter 2020 U.S. presidential election still reverberates in the courts and the media—and, in results out today, in scientific journals. Three papers in Science and one in Nature present some of the first conclusions of the 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (FIES), in which researchers joined with Meta, the company behind Instagram and Facebook, to study the effects of social media on the attitudes and behavior of tens of thousands of users during the election. “These are huge experiments,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a University of Bristol psychologist who was not part of the work. “And these results are quite interesting.” The study found U.S. conservatives were exposed to vastly more false news stories on Facebook than liberals. But surprisingly, removing all reshared content from individuals’ feeds for 3 months did not affect their political attitudes or make their views any less polarized. Neither did switching them from a curated feed to simply showing the most recent posts first. But the way the research was done, in partnership with Meta, is getting as much scrutiny as the results themselves. Meta collaborated with 17 outside scientists who were not paid by the company, were free to decide what analyses to run, and were given final say over the content of the research papers. But to protect the privacy of Facebook and Instagram users, the outside researchers were not allowed to handle the raw data. This is ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research