[Air-L] Studies on Meta and partisanship

[Marco T. Bastos]

"But [it] neither affected people's existing political attitudes or polarization."

Unless I'm missing something, in order for the study to have found the algorithms to be consequential the participants should have started attending protests or rallies, signing petitions, contributing money to candidates, or trying to convince people to vote. 

They expected these changes to take place within the 3-month period of the study, which also happened during an election cycle. Participants didn't start giving money to politicians nor started protesting and therefore the algorithm "doesn't affect people's existing political attitudes or polarization." 

That’s for H3. H1 is based on the “issue polarization scale” that measures attitudes towards immigration, healthcare, unemployment, COVID-19 restrictions et caterva. H2 sets similarly high bars for election knowledge. The study expected significant changes to opinion on immigration or election knowledge within this 3-month period when users were given a respite from the algorithms. 

Meanwhile they also found that the algorithms increased exposure to uncivil content and removed political content, particularly content from moderate friends and ideologically mixed audiences. And yes, the algorithm was found to dramatically increase time spent on FB and IG. It also seems that these conclusions are drawn from a convenience sample of just over 20K participants.

Lastly, removing the algorithms decreased exposure to both cross-cutting and like-minded sources, but the effect on the latter is twice as large as the effect on the former (i.e., the algorithms maximize exposure to like-minded content more so than cross-cutting). And yet, “it neither affected people's existing political attitudes or polarization." 

Surely I must’ve missed something.

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mtb

-----Original Message-----
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2023 16:39:01 -0400
From: Joly MacFie <joly at punkcast.com>
To: aoir list <air-l at aoir.org>
Subject: [Air-L] Studies on Meta and partisanship

> From POLITICO's Digital Future Daily
<https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily>

The article does not link to the studies. Maybe someone could provide?

<snip>

The studies released Thursday tried to tease out the influence of
particular factors, such as Facebook's algorithm for serving up content to
users. Two studies published in the journal Science that examined the
effects of Facebook?s algorithm and reshare feature during the fall of
2020 found that both features increased user engagement ? but neither
affected people's existing political attitudes or polarization.

A separate study published in the journal Nature found that reducing
users?
exposure to sources that echo their existing beliefs didn't affect their
political attitudes either.

Meta trumpeted the results in a memo circulated ahead of the studies?
release: ?Despite the common assertions that social media is ?destroying
democracy,?? the company wrote, ?the evidence in these and many other
studies shows something very different.?

Social media critics ? many of whom have spent years sounding the alarm
about the ways it has changed American politics ? suggested the studies
were too limited, and too close to Meta itself, to be persuasive,
including Frances Haugen, the former Facebook executive who leaked
internal company files in 2021, and Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of
Accountable Tech, an advocacy group focused on information controls for
social media.

A fourth study, also published in Science, found that a cluster of news
sources consumed by conservatives produced most of the misinformation
flagged by the platform?s third-party fact-checking system. (A study
co-author, Sandra Gonz?lez-Bail?n of the University of Pennsylvania,
declined to provide a list of those sources.)

The studies were the result of a collaboration between Meta and 17 outside
researchers from universities including Northeastern, Stanford and
Princeton.

An independent rapporteur tasked with evaluating the collaboration vouched
for the soundness of its results, but said its framework gave Meta
influence over the ways in which outside researchers evaluated its
platforms.

?Meta set the agenda in ways that affected the overall independence of the
researchers,? wrote Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison?s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

</snip>

Read more:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/27/meta-partisanship-00108553

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Joly MacFie  +12185659365
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