So Maybe Facebook <em>Didn’t</em> Ruin Politics
“DEMOCRACY INTERCEPTED,” reads the headline of a new special package in the journal Science. “Did platform feeds sow the seeds of deep divisions during the 2020 US presidential election?” Big question. (Scary question!) The surprising answer, according to a group of studies out today in Science and Nature, two of the world’s most prestigious research journals, turns out to be something like: “Probably not, or not in any short-term way, but one can never really know for sure.”
There’s no question that the American political landscape is polarized, and that it has become much more so in the past few decades. It seems both logical and obvious that the internet has played some role in this—conspiracy theories and bad information spread far more easily today than they did before social media, and we’re not yet three years out from an insurrection that was partly planned using Facebook-created tools. The anecdotal evidence speaks volumes. But the best science that we have right now conveys a somewhat different message.
Three new papers in and one in are the first, led by Talia Stroud, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Joshua Tucker, a professor at NYU, teams of investigators were given substantial access to Facebook and Instagram user data, and allowed to perform experiments that required direct manipulation of the feeds of tens of thousands of consenting users. Meta did not compensate its academic partners, nor did it have final say over the studies’ methods, analysis, or conclusions. The company did, however, set certain boundaries on partners’ data access in order to maintain user privacy. It also paid for the research itself, and has given research funding to some of the academics (including lead authors) in the past. Meta employees are among the papers’ co-authors.
