In four new studies with collaboration from Meta, researchers find Facebook's algorithm is “influential” but doesn't necessarily change beliefs, and more
Ekeoma E. Uzogara Authors Info & Affiliations — pp. 386-387 Washington Post : Changing Facebook's algorithm won't fix polarization, new study finds Science : How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign? Nature : Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing Nick Robertson / The Hill : Facebook algorithms not driving political polarization: studies Theara Coleman / The Week : Turns out Facebook isn't as polarizing as previously thought Nikki Main / Gizmodo : Facebook's Influence on Political Views May Be Greatly Exaggerated, Researchers Find Nick Clegg / Meta : Groundbreaking Studies Could Help Answer the Thorniest Questions About Social Media and Democracy Kai Kupferschmidt / Science : Does social media polarize voters? Unprecedented experiments on Facebook users reveal surprises Vish Gain / Silicon Republic : Studies suggest Facebook feed may not change our political beliefs Antonio Pequeño IV / Forbes : Conservatives Bombarded With Facebook Misinformation Far More Than Liberals In 2020 Election, Study Suggests Charlesarthur / The Overspill : Start Up No.2049: AI's watermarking problem, how Tesla suppressed range complaints, global boiling is here, chatbots ahoy!, and more James Farrell / SiliconANGLE : Study: Facebook might not be as politically polarizing as we think The Guardian : Changing Meta's algorithms did not help US political polarization, study finds Ben Schreckinger / Politico : Score one for ‘the algorithm’ — With Mark Zuckerberg threatened with contempt of Congress charges … David Garcia / Nature : Influence of Facebook algorithms on political polarization tested H. Holden Thorp / Science : Face value — H. Holden Thorp hthorp@aaas.org Authors Info & Affiliations — No metrics to display. Taylor Hatmaker / TechCrunch : A new study found that Facebook's Pages and Groups shape its ideological echo chambers Jonathan Vanian / CNBC : New research on Facebook shows the algorithm isn't entirely to blame for political polarization Karissa Bell / Engadget : New research shows how Meta's algorithms shaped users' 2020 election feeds Nick Wingfield / The Information : Facebook's Sway Over Users' Political Beliefs Challenged by Studies Threads: Davey Alba / @daveya : Important follow-up: Researchers disagree with Meta's framing of the papers published in Nature and Science today ‼️... Mastodon: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life@mas.to : A lot of the “Facebook made my parents racist” or “Facebook made my family vote for Trump” noise of the past few years is from people who are reluctant to face the fact that maybe their family members are racist or Trump supporters. … Twitter: Jeff Horwitz / @jeffhorwitz : Here's the editor of Science. There are some results that should be favorably viewed by Meta. But the company's researcher partners, the work's rapporteur and Science all called Meta's claims about the takeaways overblown, illustrating the need for unmediated access to data. Dan Goldstein / @dggoldst : You will see a bunch of Meta / Facebook papers drop today and soon after Hats off to the academic researchers, but also to the internal Meta researchers The whole idea of doing collaborations with academics was theirs They invested years of tireless effort to get to today @mikeisaac : i also think they are not *fully* exculpatory of Meta if you read all the papers, but rather tell us how little we know about how social media affects people and that it will take years of study and to unwind it. Scientists fromt the study hope further research will be possible Brian Boland / @brianboland : @MikeIsaac @sheeraf Looking forward to reading these studies - proves why we need PATA. I worry that this only looked at political polarization and not racial, ethnic, religious etc. Probably can't pull out p99 hate filled feeds etc. It isn't about average impact. @hholdenthorp : Today, @ScienceMagazine is publishing three papers, a news story, a policy forum, and the editorial below on studies done by academic researchers on data from Facebook addressing the effect of the platform on political attitudes. 1/n https://www.science.org/... @sciencemagazine : A new special issue of Science investigates social media's impact on elections through a pioneering collaboration between independent academics and Meta researchers. Learn more: https://www.science.org/... #SocialMediaAndElections [image] Cristiano Lima / @viacristiano : Facebook and other social media companies will be citing these studies in every hearing and in response to every congressional letter anytime lawmakers claim platforms are driving political polarization https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @andreyfradkin : This is an unprecedented collaboration that shows the quality of social science that can be done if a platform fully cooperates. These papers will go straight to syllabi and will shape our conversation about the role of social media going forward. We need more work like this. Pablo Barberá / @p_barbera : Many of these had never been used in academic-industry social science collaborations before, and I hope they can become the standard. More details on all these steps are available in the papers. Pablo Barberá / @p_barbera : An important component of this project was all the steps we took to ensure its scientific integrity: pre-registration through OSF, IRB approval, code review of data pipelines and analysis code, the use of a “clean room” for data analysis, etc. Jeff Horwitz / @jeffhorwitz : It's worth noting that this was the one observational study. Regarding the experimental papers: internal Meta research has always struggled to show tie short-term tests with “offline” behavior. But few researchers I've spoken to considered those null findings dispositive. Tori Elliott / @telliotter : But notably, researchers also found that content that had been flagged by Meta's own fact checkers as misinformation tended to circulate almost exclusively in conservative corners of the company's platforms. [image] Katie Harbath / @katieharbath : 5. The left and right have very different online experiences - This makes it challenging for platforms when there is an external expectation of being “fair” across the parties regarding how much content is actioned against because how and what they consume is very different. Andy Guess / @andyguess : It's interesting to note the disconnect between the relatively powerful effects we document in terms of platform experiences and behavior, and the downstream outcomes focused on knowledge, attitudes, and off-platform behavior. 15/ Shirin Ghaffary / @shiringhaffary : a lot to dig into in this new set of research re: Facebook/Insta and 2020 elections. definitely challenges the common assumption that social media algorithms inherently drive polarization — but also room for much more research on this Andy Guess / @andyguess : Even with the existing algorithm, the baseline proportions are quite low: In the default feed, the average share of users' feeds in our sample containing posts from untrustworthy sources was 2.6% on FB; for uncivil posts, 3.2%; for slur words: .03%. And even less on IG. 11/ Katie Harbath / @katieharbath : 2. Results show the real trade-offs companies face - Making algorithmic changes to reduce certain types of content is not simple. They can reduce some good things and amplify bad ones and vice versa. So choices have to be made. Katie Harbath / @katieharbath : 7. There is work yet to be done - No company - especially Facebook - should take this research as an excuse not to do this work. I'm breathing a small sigh of relief, but the threats are still there; they are ever-changing, and social media still plays a role. Nick Clegg / @nickclegg : Today, academic journals Science and Nature have published four landmark research papers to better understand the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the US 2020 election cycle. https://about.fb.com/... Nick Clegg / @nickclegg : The papers are the first of what we expect to be 16 produced as the result of an unprecedented research project, in partnership with external researchers. They include studies of the effects of algorithmic ranking & virality, the prevalence & effects of like-minded information... Aisha Counts / @aishacounts : Meta worked with a group of 17 independent researchers to understand Facebook's impact on elections w/ @daveyalba https://www.bloomberg.com/... Andy Guess / @andyguess : TL;DR: We pre-registered, outside researchers had final say, and Meta committed not to block the publication of findings they didn't like (they kept their promise). Both Meta and the outside academic research team took user privacy very seriously. 5/ Aisha Counts / @aishacounts : Researchers found that conservatives engaged more with false news stories on Facebook than liberals during the US 2020 presidential election Andy Guess / @andyguess : What did we find? 1. ENGAGEMENT: The chrono feed decreased the time users spent on the platforms (by about 20% on FB and 11% on IG). Engagement on the platforms also went down. 8/ [image] Aisha Counts / @aishacounts : And that on the whole, audiences on Facebook are highly politically segregated. That political segregation was even more apparent in Facebook Pages and Groups Andy Guess / @andyguess : Today is publication day for the first 4 papers resulting from a unique collaboration between Meta researchers and outside academics to study the political effects of Facebook and Instagram in the 2020 U.S. election! 🧵 1/N Katie Harbath / @katieharbath : Here are my seven takeaways: 1. This research is unprecedented - it's important to remember how unique it is for a platform to open up to researchers in this way voluntarily. This took forever to release because both Meta and the researchers wanted to do this the right way. Davey Alba / @daveyalba : But none of the studies concluded that there are no negative impacts from social media on the political process. Also, no studies concluded that there are no viable solutions to help potential negative impacts from social media. Looking forward to the rest as they're published! Davey Alba / @daveyalba : Lots of outlets are carrying the news of these Facebook studies today. Here's my and @aishacounts' take. We focus on one study that we thought was most revealing: Facebook Misinformation in US Election Reached More Conservatives, Study Says https://www.bloomberg.com/... [image] Jennifer Pan / @jenjpan : Contrary to common belief, chronological feed did not significantly alter polarization, politics knowledge, or other survey-based outcomes, even though chronological feed led users to spend much less time on FB and Insta + changed what content they saw. [image] Jennifer Pan / @jenjpan : In the 2nd paper, we removed reshared content from Facebook feeds. This decreased political news participants saw in feeds, reduced their clicks on partisan news sources & reduced news knowledge but didn't affect polarization or other attitudes. https://www.science.org/... [image] Jennifer Pan / @jenjpan : Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing https://www.nature.com/... by @BrendanNyhan Jamie Settle @emilythorson @mwojcieszak Jennifer Pan / @jenjpan : Today, 2 papers I coauthored w/ @andyguess @namalhotra @p_barbera are out in Science. These papers, about the role of social media in American democracy, are based on pre-registered experiments with consenting participants conducted w/ @Meta #SocialMediaAndElections @blackamazon : LOL I feel nothing anymore. It's shoddy research, biased , full of questions that needed to be addressed before we got here And I'm not at all paid to fix this shit Matt Lindner / @mattlindner : Calling bullshit on this one. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... [image] @mikeisaac : @greglinden @sheeraf the limited nature of the tweaks is what we tried to convey in this piece. headlines could give meta an easy win but the findings are very nuanced Greg Linden / @greglinden : @MikeIsaac @sheeraf Yes, small changes to the ranking or features — such as removing the easy reshare button — have small effects that are difficult to detect in experiments. That conclusion is much more limited than saying that algorithms cannot impact people's views. @mikeisaac : (it is also important to note that news stories marked as untrustworthy by the FB 3rd party fact checkers were in the minority of the overall news stories that circulate on Facebook) These studies are huge and are the most direct access to facebook data yet. And more to come @mikeisaac : IMPORTANT: consumption of political news on FB and IG was * highly segregated* by ideology —97 percent of the people who read links to “untrustworthy” news stories on the apps during the 2020 election identified as conservative and engaged w/ mostly right-wing content @mikeisaac : the first four of 16 papers were published after a yearslong collaboration between outside academics and Meta, which gave the researchers access to data of more than 200 million anonymized US FB and IG users the findings are complicated & often contradictory to popular knowledge @mikeisaac : NEWS: Research from scientists who studied Facebook and Instagram accounts around the 2020 election found that changes to key features in the company's algorithms showed no “detectable changes to peoples polarization or beliefs” w/ @sheeraf https://www.nytimes.com/... LinkedIn: Yann LeCun : An informative Washington Post article about four papers published in Science and Nature on the effect of Facebook and Instagram on political opinion … Erica Finkle : Privacy was one key aspect of this research partnership between Meta and external academics to better understand the impact of Facebook and Instagram … Forums: Trashhalo To / Beehaw : Meta Just Proved People Hate Chronological Feeds See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The findings complicate a long-running debate over whether Facebook's feed mechanics themselves drive political division. They arrive after reporting that Meta had shelved internal research on polarizing effects, making independently conducted work with company collaboration consequential for how the evidence base is judged.
Earlier feed sampling found many users saw little news near the top of Facebook, while these election studies isolate how feed features alter exposure, engagement and knowledge. The distinction matters: changing what people encounter is not the same as changing their political attitudes.
First-order effects
- The studies give Meta evidence that its ranking and resharing systems influence content exposure and platform use, while not producing measurable changes in polarization or political beliefs in these experiments.
- A chronological-feed switch reduced Facebook and Instagram time and engagement; removing reshares reduced political-news exposure, partisan-source clicks and news knowledge without shifting polarization.
Second-order effects
- Calls to treat feed-ranking changes as a standalone remedy for polarization face a narrower empirical basis; debates can instead distinguish exposure, misinformation consumption and attitude change.
- Because the studies found untrustworthy-news engagement was concentrated among conservatives, interventions aimed at distribution or reshares may still change what political information circulates even if they do not quickly change beliefs.
Third-order effects
- The episode points toward platform governance evaluated through multiple outcomes—reach, engagement, information quality, knowledge and attitudes—rather than polarization alone.
- If this evidence is replicated across settings, platform accountability may shift from broad claims about algorithmic persuasion toward more targeted scrutiny of specific distribution mechanisms and measurable harms.
The trend: This is one data point in the move from treating social feeds as monolithic polarization engines to testing which design choices affect exposure, behavior and beliefs separately.