Interesting report here on a 'collaboration' between Meta and social scientists which seeks to support that company's contention that theirs and other social media platforms generate political and other polarisation:
But in a widely quoted corporate blog post, Nick Clegg, the former British politician who is Meta's global president and number-two executive, went much further. Clegg asserted that the four studies "add to a growing body of research showing there is little evidence that key features of Meta's platforms alone cause harmful 'affective' polarization or have meaningful effects on these outcomes." (Affective polarization describes partisan animosity that transcends disagreement on specific issues.)
Clegg's statement echoed congressional testimony by his boss, Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Then and now, this argument is misleading in at least three ways.
However:
But contrary to Clegg and Zuckerberg's contentions, a range of experts have concluded that widespread use of social media has exacerbated preexisting partisan animosity. In an October 2020 essay in Science, a group of 15 researchers, some of whom are co-authors of the more recent studies, wrote: "In recent years, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have played an influential role in political discourse, intensifying political sectarianism." Reinforcing the point, a separate quintet of researchers summed up their review of the evidence in an August 2021 article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "Although social media is unlikely to be the main driver of polarization," they concluded, "we posit that it is often a key facilitator." Nothing in the new studies contradicts these conclusions.
I think that point about facilitator is central to the impact of social media platforms. They exacerbate, accentuate, amplify, and most of all provide a context within which polarisation can occur. And as the piece notes - Meta itself has recognised their role in all this:
If all of this seems difficult to summarize, that's because it is. But Meta's claim of exoneration seems wrong no matter how it's considered. In fact, the company itself has implicitly acknowledged that it plays a role in stoking partisanship. In May 2020, the company posted an article on its corporate blog entitled, "Investments to Fight Polarization." Written by Guy Rosen, now chief information security officer and then vice president for integrity, the post pointed to "some of the initiatives we've made over the past three years to address factors that can contribute to polarization." The initiatives included hiring more moderators to remove incendiary content, combating hate speech more aggressively, and adjusting users' News Feeds to prioritize posts by friends and family over those of news publishers.
Why were such initiatives necessary? Not because the company was concerned about hypotheticals...
That companies like Meta continue to do this dance around the implications of their own activities says much.
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