Political Polarisation: Research shows how Facebook, Instagram ‘influenced’ US 2020 presidential elections – Times of India

Now, the first set of research papers has been published in Science and Nature. The four papers analysed algorithms used by Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 US elections and how they affected users’ political beliefs.
An insight into what conservatives and liberal users consume on social media

The study on Facebook’s ideological echo chambers shows that the platform is highly ideologically segregated, with groups and pages displaying more segregation than content posted by “like-minded” friends. There is a significant asymmetry between liberal and conservative political content, with conservative content more likely to contain false information.
Pages and groups are important in shaping the online information environment and contribute to political polarisation. However, not all of this content is explicitly political or news-related.
According to the research, during the 2020 election, over 97% of the links to news stories that were rated as false by fact checkers on various apps were clicked on by conservative readers rather than liberal readers. It was also discovered that sources preferred by conservative audiences were more prominent on Facebook’s news ecosystem compared to those favoured by liberals.
The study also found that reducing the amount of “like-minded” content decreased engagement but did not significantly alter users’ beliefs or attitudes.
Short-term changes may not alter users’ political views, says research
Another experiment replaced algorithmic feeds on Facebook and Instagram with a reverse chronological feed. However, it did not impact users’ political views or engagement offline. The only notable change was that users spent less time on the platforms. It highlights how Meta’s algorithm encourages addictive behaviour.
A similar study published in Science discovered that removing reshared content before the 2020 election significantly reduced the amount of political news, mainly from unreliable sources. However, it did not substantially impact political polarisation or individual political beliefs.
The research comes a day after Meta’s latest earnings quarter, during which the company said that Facebook exceeded 3 billion monthly active users for the first time.