Social media platforms have given rise to online political debates by allowing people to connect with others, express themselves freely, and build and be part of borderless communities. . Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become arenas for democratic debate between citizens, candidates and voters, and campaigners and advocacy groups. Much of it is positive, even if it’s loud, messy, and often intense.
However, because these technologies are still young and emerged at a time of profound economic, political, and broader technological disruption, our understanding of social media’s role in society remains incomplete and incomplete. is. We face many important questions for which definitive answers based on clear empirical evidence have not yet been found. Will social media further polarize us as a society, or does it merely reflect the divisions that already exist? Does it help people know more or less about politics? How does it affect people’s attitudes toward government and democracy?
Today we have new evidence that helps answer some of these questions. Ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, there was an opportunity for researchers to build an evidence base to dig deeper into these and other questions, as well as a strong demand for research from academics. This was the impetus for an unprecedented research partnership between Meta and outside scholars to better understand the influence of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during election cycles. The result was a series of studies, the first of which he published today. More papers (16 in total) will be published in the future.
Papers published today include research on the effects of algorithmic rankings and virality, the prevalence and impact of like-minded information exposure on Facebook, and ideological segregation in news exposure. Although questions about social media’s influence on major political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors are not fully resolved, the results of this experiment suggest that only the primary features of meta platforms can lead to harmful “emotional” polarization. These results have significant implications, as they add to a growing body of research showing little evidence that they cause or have an effect. They also dispute the now commonplace claim that the ability to reshare content on social media promotes polarization.
For example, a summary of a paper in Nature says the findings “challenge ideas about the extent to which social media ‘echo chambers’ foster political polarization.” And the co-chairs of the study found that “Deleting reshared content on Facebook reduced news knowledge among study participants, but did not reduce political polarization or other individual-level political attitudes.” It didn’t have a big impact.”
The study also sheds new light on claims that the way content is published on social media, particularly Meta’s algorithms, is creating divisions among people. One of the papers shows that there is considerable ideological segregation in political news consumption, reflecting the complex interplay between algorithms and social factors. However, when participants in the experiment were exposed to less content from sources that reinforced their opinions, they were more likely to engage with like-minded content they saw in real life. And even then, there was no noticeable effect on polarization, political attitudes, or beliefs.
michael wagnerA professor at the University of Wisconsin, he has observed the research process in its entirety to document and publicly comment on it as an independent observer. And, as Dr. Wagner writes in the paper’s introduction, even if participants changed what they saw in their feeds or whether they encountered reshared content, “during the 2020 US election It did not reduce polarization or increase political knowledge.” In fact, removing reshared content reduces political knowledge. ”
We will continue to thoroughly review these papers, as well as those expected to be published in the coming months.
This is the first time that Meta and a technology company have partnered together to transparently investigate election influence. External researchers maintain complete professional and intellectual independence throughout. They are not paid by Meta and do not respond to us. We have the same agreements with them that we have with other independent researchers who use our data, and that data is publicly available. Social Science One website.
The US 2020 project is a partnership between meta-researchers and external academics, the latter led by professors. Talia Jomini StroudHe is the founder of and currently serves as a director. media engagement center Professor, University of Texas at Austin Joshua A. Tuckerco-director Social Media and Politics Center at New York University. Professor Stroud and Professor Tucker selected 15 additional researchers to collaborate on this effort based on their expertise. Meta’s in-house researchers designed the study in collaboration with these external partners. Importantly, neither Meta’s researchers nor the company as a whole has the power to limit the results of their research, regardless of whether the results are advantageous to the company.
as Four principal researchers explain on their blog When this project was announced, we wanted to overcome two major hurdles that had hindered previous research on this issue. First, “increasing public concerns and legal obligations regarding data privacy have led social media companies to restrict access to data previously used by outside researchers.” Second, it is difficult to conduct rigorous scientific studies on the effects of social media after the fact.
To overcome these issues, data were collected during the election period rather than after, and explicit informed consent was sought from those who chose to participate in the study analyzing individual-level data. . This means that research participants have consented both to the use of their data and to providing information about how and why their data is used. Additionally, as part of the study, researchers also analyzed aggregated user data on Facebook and Instagram to understand patterns. The study and consent language were also reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure compliance with high ethical standards.
The findings will be submitted to an academic journal in open access format and will be freely available to the public. Mehta and the researchers previously documented the research design and hypotheses. Pre-registration process And those initial commitments are released upon publication of the study. This means people can see that we do what we say we will and that we don’t hide any results. Additionally, we plan to provide anonymized data (i.e., data that cannot be reasonably linked to an individual) on the research we have conducted in order to perform our own analysis and further confirm our homework. is. This underlying data is archived Provided by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), part of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, allows other researchers to perform their own analyzes and check the validity of the results .
Last year, Meta’s transparency products were used by dozens of publications to advance academic research on elections, polarization, digital violence, misinformation, and other pressing social issues. We recently announced that researchers can now apply for access to the beta version of our new suite of research tools, the Meta Content Library and API. The library contains data from public posts, pages, groups, and events on Facebook. For Instagram, this includes public posts and data from creators and business accounts. Data from the library can be searched, explored, and filtered through a graphical user interface or programmatic API.
Although the research published in these papers will not resolve all debates about social media and democracy, we hope that they will advance society’s understanding of these issues. The findings are of great value to us and we hope that they will also help policy makers in developing internet rules of the road for the benefit of our democracy and society as a whole. .