Research, published in Science and Nature, part of the most comprehensive scholarly project to date examining role of social media in American democracy
Algorithm adjustments made by social media platforms alter the political news their users see and their engagement levels, but these changes do not notably affect their political attitudes, such as levels of political polarization, show a collection of studies appearing in the latest issues of the journals Science and Nature.
The findings are among the first published studies stemming from the most comprehensive to date examining the role of social media in American democracy.
These newly published studies from the project also show that social media algorithms used by Facebook and Instagram are extremely influential in shaping users’ on-platform experiences and that there is significant ideological segregation in political news exposure.
The multi-year project, led by academics from U.S. colleges and universities and working in collaboration with researchers at Meta, focuses primarily on how critical aspects of the algorithms that determine what people see in their feeds affect what people see and believe. In the coming year, additional papers from the project will be publicly released after completing the peer-review process. They are aimed at providing insight into the content circulating on Meta’s social media platforms, people’s behaviors, and the interaction between the two.
