Social Media Algorithms Can Alter Political Views Study Says

Researchers in the United States have developed a new tool that allows independent scientists to study how social media algorithms affect users—without needing permission from the platforms themselves. The findings suggest that platforms could reduce political polarisation by down-ranking hostile content in their algorithms. The tool, a browser extension powered by artificial intelligence (AI), scans posts on X, formerly Twitter, for any themes of anti-democratic and extremely negative partisan views, such as posts that could call for violence... It then re-orders posts on the X feed in a “matter of seconds,” the study showed, so the polarising content was nearer to the bottom of a user’s feed. The team of researchers from Stanford University, the University of Washington, and Northeastern University then tested the browser extension on the X feeds of over 1,200 participants who consented to having them modified for... New research shows the impact that social media algorithms can have on partisan political feelings, using a new tool that hijacks the way platforms rank content.

How much does someone’s social media algorithm really affect how they feel about a political party, whether it’s one they identify with or one they feel negatively about? Until now, the answer has escaped researchers because they’ve had to rely on the cooperation of social media platforms. New, intercollegiate research published Nov. 27 in Science, co-led by Northeastern University researcher Chenyan Jia, sidesteps this issue by installing an extension on consenting participants’ browsers that automatically reranks the posts those users see, in real time and still... Jia and her team discovered that after one week, users’ feelings toward the opposing party shifted by about two points — an effect normally seen over three years — revealing algorithms’ strong influence on... A web-based method was shown to mitigate political polarization on X by nudging antidemocratic and extremely negative partisan posts lower in a user’s feed.

The tool, which is independent of the platform, has the potential to give users more say over what they see on social media.iStock A new tool shows it is possible to turn down the partisan rancor in an X feed — without removing political posts and without the direct cooperation of the platform. The study, from researchers at the University of Washington, Stanford University and Northeastern University, also indicates that it may one day be possible to let users take control of their social media algorithms. The researchers created a seamless, web-based tool that reorders content to move posts lower in a user’s feed when they contain antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity, such as advocating for violence or jailing supporters... Researchers published their findings Nov. 27 in Science.

A new Stanford-led study is challenging the idea that political toxicity is simply an unavoidable element of online culture. Instead, the research suggests that the political toxicity many users encounter on social media is a design choice that can be reversed. Researchers have unveiled a browser-based tool that can cool the political temperature of an X feed by quietly downranking hostile or antidemocratic posts. Remarkably, this can occur without requiring any deletions, bans, or cooperation from X itself. The study offers the takeaway that algorithmic interventions can meaningfully reduce partisan animosity while still preserving political speech. It also advances a growing movement advocating user control over platform ranking systems and the algorithms that shape what they see, which were traditionally guarded as proprietary, opaque, and mainly optimized for engagement rather...

The research tool was built by a multidisciplinary team across Stanford, Northeastern University, and the University of Washington, composed of computer scientists, psychologists, communication scholars, and information scientists. Their goal in the experiment was to counter the engagement-driven amplification of divisive content that tends to reward outrage, conflict, and emotionally charged posts, without silencing political speech. Using a large language model, the tool analyzes posts in real time and identifies several categories of harmful political subject matter, including calls for political violence, attacks on democratic norms, and extreme hostility toward... When the system flags such content, it simply pushes those posts lower in the feed so they are less noticeable, like seating your argumentative uncle at the far end of the table during the... A study shows that the order in which platforms like X display content to their users affects their animosity towards other ideological groups A team of U.S.

researchers has shown that the order in which political messages are displayed on social media platforms does affect polarization — one of the most debated issues since the rise of social media and the... The phenomenon is equally strong regardless of the user’s political orientation, the academics note in an article published on Thursday in Science. Social media is an important source of political information. For hundreds of millions of people worldwide, it is even the main channel for political engagement: they receive political content, share it, and express their opinions through these platforms. Given the relevance of social media in this sphere, understanding how the algorithms that operate on these platforms work is crucial — but opacity is the norm in the industry. That makes it extremely difficult to estimate the extent to which the selection of highlighted content shapes users’ political views.

How did the researchers overcome algorithmic opacity to alter the order of posts that social media users see? Tiziano Piccardi from Stanford University and his colleagues developed a browser extension that intercepts and reorders the feed (the chronological timeline of posts) of certain social networks in real time. The tool uses a large language model (LLM) to assign a score to each piece of content, measuring the extent to which it contained “antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity” (AAPA). Once scored, the posts were reordered one way or another — without any collaboration from the platform or reliance on its algorithm. The experiment involved 1,256 participants, who had all been duly informed. The study focused on X, as it is the social network most used in the U.S.

for expressing political opinions, and it was conducted during the weeks leading up to the 2024 presidential election to ensure a high circulation of political messages. Artificial intelligence chatbots are very good at changing peoples’ political opinions, according to a study published Thursday, and are particularly persuasive when they use inaccurate information. The researchers used a crowd-sourcing website to find nearly 77,000 people to participate in the study and paid them to interact with various AI chatbots, including some using AI models from OpenAI, Meta and... The researchers asked for people’s views on a variety of political topics, such as taxes and immigration, and then, regardless of whether the participant was conservative or liberal, a chatbot tried to change their... The researchers found not only that the AI chatbots often succeeded, but also that some persuasion strategies worked better than others. “Our results demonstrate the remarkable persuasive power of conversational AI systems on political issues,” lead author Kobi Hackenburg, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, said in a statement about the study.

The study is part of a growing body of research into how AI could affect politics and democracy, and it comes as politicians, foreign governments and others are trying to figure out how they... Moody College researcher leads unprecedented study with Meta exploring the role of social media in elections In the aftermath of the 2016 election, politicians, the media and everyday people raised numerous concerns about the effects of social media on democracy and how platforms like Facebook and Instagram influence people’s political... What role do these powerful social networks and the algorithms that run them have in how people view candidates or feel about important issues? Over the past several years, a multi-university academic team has been working alongside Meta to answer these very important questions as part of an unprecedented research project co-led by Moody College Communication Studies professor... As part of the project, the team had access to data from Meta that has never before been made available to researchers and were given the ability to alter the Facebook and Instagram feeds...

In the summer of 2023, researchers released their first findings from the project in a sweep of papers published in both Nature and Science journals. And while they found that algorithms have a tremendous effect on what people see on their feeds, changing these algorithms to change what people see doesn’t necessarily affect people’s political attitudes. Also, when the researchers looked at platform-wide data from U.S. adults, they found that many political news URLs were seen, and engaged with, primarily by conservatives or liberals, but not both.

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