Did Facebook fuel political polarization during the 2020 election? It’s complicated.
Did Facebook fuel political polarization during the 2020 election? It’s complicated.
There's strong ideological segregation, but proposed interventions didn't change attitudes.
So this study kind of hints at it, but their (facebooks) algorithm worked exactly as intended. Showing users the stuff they want to see and that will keep them engaged. This has the unfortunate down stream consequence of radicalization of the consumer. I don’t recall the term exactly, but there’s a psychology term for groups that form and over time the members in the group tend to radicalize more and more. Us humans just did human things and we didn’t think about the group we’re trying to appeal to. You can see this on any left leaning political sub too. Rhetoric in both groups tends toward extreme especially with highly curated (eg. algorithms or upvotes) feeds. I don’t know how we can escape this other than cutting out constant political news out of our lives (which I have done and am much happier for).
Here’s a really good video that explains this concept really well. It puts it in terms of thought germs and how they spread virally in the form of memes.
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The only thing you can do, really, is to take ‘detox’ breaks and perform self-assessment every now n’ then. I’ve noticed my own leanings shift towards extremes and it’s very hard to pull yourself out of it.
It’s not that complicated The answer is, yes they did. They were aware that articles existed that contained false information, and they didn’t remove them. Leaving articles spreading lies, would have definitely led to more division in the 2020 election.
The medium is the message. The content is irrelevant. The scale, shape, symbolic meaning, targeted audience, access & interaction, duration of exposure, perceived authority (or subversive nature) of "shared" information, and saturation in culture and life made possible by the pipe that spews the content is likely far more responsible than the exact nature of the content users engaged with. Encoded alongside the content the characteristics of the platform are what shapes and controls human behavior, not just the content itself