Meta Just Proved People Hate Chronological Feeds

For three months in late 2020, nearly 7,200 US adults on Facebook and 8,800 on Instagram received a radically different experience than the services’ billions of other users. That result emerged from a multimillion-dollar, Meta-backed science project designed to study how Facebook and Instagram affected people’s political attitudes during the 2020 US presidential election campaign. Repellent Option The new data on Meta users’ chronophobia comes the same week that Instagram added a reverse chronological feed option to its new Twitter-clone, Threads. Mixed Results A previous study published in 2021 that evaluated Twitter’s feed-ranking algorithm found that it delivered fewer tweets with links to external websites than a chronological one, but that those shown were more likely to point to “junk news”—biased sources that could potentially harden users’ existing political views. Though the thousands of users served the reverse chronological feed from September to December in 2020 encountered more political and untrustworthy content on Facebook and Instagram than users with the standard feed, the change did not significantly affect those users’ political knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors such as likelihood of attending a protest or casting a ballot.