"For years, regulators and activists have worried that social media companies’ algorithms were dividing America with politically toxic posts and conspiracies. The concern was so widespread that in 2020 Meta flung open troves of internal data for university academics to study how Facebook and Insta
Hilariously it wasn’t easy finding a source that wasn’t bias or factually off.
I would think that providing an echo chamber for an existing belief would make somebody less inclined to consider alternative view points. Further, I would suspect social media could sway people still undecided on issues. We’ve already seen reports on how Facebook deliberately manipulated the feeds for certain people to encourage either positive or negative emotional responses to a subject.
Couldn’t those impacts be seen as fueling division and polarization?
I would think that providing an echo chamber for an existing belief would make somebody less inclined to consider alternative view points. Further, I would suspect social media could sway people still undecided on issues. We’ve already seen reports on how Facebook deliberately manipulated the feeds for certain people to encourage either positive or negative emotional responses to a subject.
Couldn’t those impacts be seen as fueling division and polarization?
Sometimes things in life are counter intuitive