New research shows social media algorithms don’t fuel political polarisation

Research published in the journals Science and Nature on Thursday deduced that social media platforms’ algorithms donot create political polarisation. The research came years after regulators and activists worried that social media companies’ algorithms were fuelling divide in the US politics through toxic posts and conspiracies.

The research, divided into four studies, was released under the unique partnership between university researchers and Meta’s own analysts to study how social media affects political polarisation.

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The partnership was the result of widespread concern from thinkers and regulators regarding the use of social media platforms to funnel political news in order to affect the upcoming presidential election of 2024.

Research doubts social media platformalgorithms fuel political polarisation

The initial results of the research show that a company’s social media platforms play a critical role in pivoting users to partisan information with which they are likely to agree more. But the results cast doubt on assumptions that the strategies Meta could use to discourage virality and engagement on its social networks would substantially affect people’s political beliefs.

“Algorithms are extremely influential in terms of what people see on the platform, and in terms of shaping their on-platform experience,” Joshua Tucker, co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University and one of the leaders of the research project, said in an interview.

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Tucker further said, “Despite the fact that we find this big impact in people’s on-platform experience, we find very little impact in changes to people’s attitudes about politics and even people’s self-reported participation around politics”.

All the studies of the research were peer-reviewed before publication, which is a standard procedure in science in which papers are sent out to other experts in the field who assess the work’s merit.

How the research was carried out?

Researchers, as part of the project, altered the feeds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users in the fall of 2020 to see if that could change political beliefs, knowledge or polarisation by exposing them to different information. The researchers generally concluded that such changes had little to no impact on users.

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The collaboration, which is expected to be released over a dozen studies, will also examine data collected after the 6 January 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Tucker said.

The ever-going debate

The findings are likely to bolster social media companies’ long-standing arguments that algorithms are not the cause of political polarisation and upheaval.

Meta has claimed in the past that political polarisation and support for civic institutions started declining long before the rise of social media.

But critics and researchers on the other hand, who had seen the research before its release, caution that the results do not give a free hand to tech companies to alter their algorithms indiscriminately.

(With inputs from agencies)

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