Deep divides on social media, but algorithm tweaks may not help: Study on FB, Insta

There is significant ideological divide in the political information Facebook and Instagram users are exposed to, and they spend less time on these services when specially curated feeds are switched off, a set of new studies from what is the largest under-the-hood analysis of social media platforms has found, including clues that many problems that exist on these technologies may be hard to address by technical tweaks alone. They also challenge the now commonplace assertion that the ability to re-share content on social media drives polarisation,” said Nick Clegg, Meta’s president for global affairs, in advance comments shared by the company. The headline finding that Clegg referred to was when surveys of people — over 23,000 on Facebook and 21,000 on Instagram — found that removing the algorithmic feed “did not significantly alter levels of issue polarisation, affective polarisation, political knowledge, self-reported political, political behaviour or other key attitudes” during the study period. “These findings suggest social media algorithms may not be the root cause of phenomena such as increasing political polarisation, it raises the stakes for finding out what other online factors—such as the incentives created by the advertising model of social media — or offline factors — such as long-term demographic changes, partisan media, rising inequality, or geographic sorting — may be driving changes that affect democratic processes and outcomes,” said the study led by Guess. “Removing re-shares substantially decreased the amount of political news and content from untrustworthy sources people saw on their feeds, decreased overall clicks and reactions and reduced clicks on posts from partisan news sources,” said Guess.