It’s a reminder of the excitement surrounding Facebook following Donald Trump’s election as US President in 2016. The social network’s algorithm allegedly “manipulated” millions of people, promoting political polarization and radicalization. And finally, everyone knows their own anecdote about the Boomer uncle, who, cell phone in hand, is getting bogged down in conspiracy theories. Incidentally, the whole debate brought forth a new job description – the media-effective technology critic who warns against the “radicalization machines” Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In this sometimes hysterical debate, researchers, with the blessing and help of the meta-corporation, began to evaluate how Facebook use affected people’s political thinking.
The results are now available, three studies in the journals Science and Nature. Casey Newton summarizes them in his newsletter Platformer and describes how differentiated the results are:
The claimed effect – Facebook radicalizes its users politically – could not be proven. Whether they were blocked from rebroadcasting hot-button political stories from their network or the timeline was sorted algorithmically (rather than chronologically), users didn’t think more radically about immigration, discrimination or Covid-19 theories. However, there is disagreement about the interpretation of the results. As expected, Meta uses the studies as absolution: Our systems are harmless! However, researchers involved disagree. They say the company is giving their results the wrong spin. Because the informative value is limited, among other things, by the fact that the investigation took place before the 2020 election. At that time, Facebook had installed various monitoring mechanisms precisely because of the 2016 outcry. The network was much more controlled than it was in 2016. One basic problem remains unsolved: as long as there are no far-reaching transparency obligations, researchers are dependent on the corporations. To a certain extent, they can control which data the scientists can work with at all.
Conclusion: We finally know more about how social media algorithms and feeds affect people. But this can only be the beginning when it comes to examining the influence of Facebook and other networks on the political sphere.