{"id":7036,"date":"2023-07-28T15:36:38","date_gmt":"2023-07-28T15:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/startups\/metas-election-research-opens-more-questions-than-it-answers\/"},"modified":"2023-07-28T15:36:39","modified_gmt":"2023-07-28T15:36:39","slug":"metas-election-research-opens-more-questions-than-it-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=7036","title":{"rendered":"Meta\u2019s Election Research Opens More Questions Than It Answers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In the lead-up<\/span> to the 2020 presidential election, Meta set out to conduct a series of ambitious studies on the effects its platforms\u2014Facebook and Instagram\u2014have on the political beliefs of US-based users. Independent researchers from several universities were given unprecedented access to Meta\u2019s data, and the power to change the feeds of tens of thousands of people in order to observe their behavior.<\/p>\n

The researchers weren\u2019t paid by Meta, but the company seemed pleased with the results, which were released today in four papers in Nature<\/em> and Science<\/em>. Nick Clegg, Meta\u2019s president of global affairs, said in a statement that \u201cthe experimental findings add to a growing body of research showing there is little evidence that key features of Meta\u2019s platforms alone cause harmful \u2018affective\u2019 polarization\u201d or have \u201cmeaningful effects on\u201d political views and behavior.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sweeping conclusion. But the studies are actually much narrower. Even though researchers were given more insight into Meta\u2019s platforms than ever before\u2014for many years, Meta considered such data too sensitive to make public\u2014the studies released today leave open as many questions as they answer.<\/p>\n

The studies focused on a specific period in the three months leading up to the 2020 presidential election. And while Andrew Guess, assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton and one of the researchers whose findings appear in Science<\/em>, noted that this is longer than most researchers get, it\u2019s not long enough to be entirely representative of a user\u2019s experience on the platform.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know what would have happened had we been able to do these studies over a period of a year or two years,\u201d Guess said at a press briefing earlier this week. More importantly, he said, there is no accounting for the fact that many users have had Facebook and Instagram accounts for upwards of a decade now. \u201cThis finding cannot tell us what the world would have been like if we hadn\u2019t had social media around for the last 10 to 15 years or 15 or 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the issue of the specific time frame the researchers were able to study\u2014the run-up to an election in an atmosphere of intense political polarization.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there are unanswered questions about whether these effects would hold outside of the election environment, whether they would hold in an election where Donald Trump wasn\u2019t one of the candidates,\u201d says Michael Wagner, a professor of journalism and communication at University of Wisconsin-Madison, who helped oversee Meta\u2019s 2020 election project.<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s Clegg also said that the research challenges \u201cthe now commonplace assertion that the ability to reshare content on social media drives polarization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Researchers weren\u2019t quite so unequivocal. One of the studies published in Science<\/em> found that resharing elevates \u201ccontent from untrustworthy sources.\u201d The same study showed that most of the misinformation caught by the platform\u2019s third-party fact checkers is concentrated amongst and exclusively consumed by conservative users, which has no equivalent on the opposite side of the political aisle, according to an analysis of about 208 million users.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, Meta set out to conduct a series of ambitious studies on the effects its platforms\u2014Facebook and Instagram\u2014have on the political beliefs of US-based users. Independent researchers from several universities were given unprecedented access to Meta\u2019s data, and the power to change the feeds of tens of thousands […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-7036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-startups"},"yoast_head":"\nMeta\u2019s Election Research Opens More Questions Than It Answers | Brandiary<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, Meta set out to conduct a series of ambitious studies on the effects its platforms\u2014Facebook and\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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