In 2305 we discuss the development of public opinion along with a topic called "agents of political socialization." These are the various influences on individuals that impact how they process political information. One of these is the media, and increasingly this means social media.
But saying that social media has an impact on its users and proving it are not the same. This article narrows the question down to the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what people see on their feed. Researchers are finding mixed results, suggesting we should temper what we think we know about social media's impact.
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The algorithms powering Facebook and Instagram, which drive what billions of people see on the social networks, have been in the cross hairs of lawmakers, activists and regulators for years. Many have called for the algorithms to be abolished to stem the spread of viral misinformation and to prevent the inflammation of political divisions.
But four new studies published on Thursday — including one that examined the data of 208 million Americans who used Facebook in the 2020 presidential election — complicate that narrative.
In the papers, researchers from the University of Texas, New York University, Princeton and other institutions found that removing some key functions of the social platforms’ algorithms had “no measurable effects” on people’s political beliefs. In one experiment on Facebook’s algorithm, people’s knowledge of political news declined when their ability to re-share posts was removed, the researchers said.
At the same time, the consumption of political news on Facebook and Instagram was highly segregated by ideology, according to another study. Ninety-seven percent of the people who read links to “untrustworthy” news stories on the apps during the 2020 election identified as conservative and largely engaged with right-wing content, the research found.
The studies, which were published in the journals Science and Nature, provide a contradictory and nuanced picture of how Americans have been using — and have been affected by — two of the world’s biggest social platforms. The conflicting results suggested that understanding social media’s role in shaping discourse may take years to unwind.
The papers also stood out for the large numbers of Facebook and Instagram users who were included and because the researchers obtained data and formulated and ran experiments with collaboration from Meta, which owns the apps. The studies are the first in a series of 16 peer-reviewed papers. Previous social media studies have relied mostly on publicly available information or were based on small numbers of users with information that was “scraped,” or downloaded, from the internet.
