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New research<\/a> published Thursday offers an unprecedented dive into political behavior across Facebook and Instagram \u2014 two major online hubs where people express and engage with their political beliefs. The studies, published by an interdisciplinary set of researchers working in tandem with internal groups at Meta, encompasses four papers published in Science and Nature examining behavior on both platforms around the time of the 2020 U.S. election.<\/p>\n The papers \u2014 only the first wave of many to be published in the coming months \u2014 grew out of what\u2019s known as the 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (FIES)<\/a>, an unusual collaboration between Meta and the scientific research community. On the academic side, the project was spearheaded by University of Texas Professor Talia Jomini Stroud of the school\u2019s Center for Media Engagement, and NYU\u2019s Professor Joshua A. Tucker, who serves as co-director of its Center for Social Media and Politics.<\/p>\n The findings are myriad and complex.<\/p>\n In one study on Facebook\u2019s ideological echo chambers<\/a>, researchers sought insight about the extent to which the platform\u2019s users were exposed only to content that they were politically aligned with. \u201cOur analyses highlight that Facebook, as a social and informational setting, is substantially segregated ideologically\u2014far more than previous research on internet news consumption based on browsing behavior has found,\u201d the researchers wrote.<\/p>\n At least two very interesting specific findings emerged out of the data. First, the researchers found that content posted in Facebook Groups and Pages displayed much more \u201cideological segregation\u201d compared to content posted by users\u2019 friends. \u201cPages and Groups contribute much more to segregation and audience polarization than users,\u201d the researchers wrote.<\/p>\n That might be intuitive, but both Groups and Pages have historically played a massive role in distributing misinformation and helping like-minded users rally around dangerous shared interests, including QAnon<\/a>, anti-government militias<\/a> (like the Proud Boys<\/a>, who relied on Facebook for recruitment) and potentially life-threatening health conspiracies. Misinformation and extremism experts have long raised concerns about the role of the two Facebook products in political polarization and sowing conspiracies.<\/p>\n \u201cOur results uncover the influence that two key affordances of Facebook\u2014Pages and Groups\u2014have in shaping the online information environment,\u201d the researchers wrote. \u201cPages and Groups benefit from the easy reuse of content from established producers of political news and provide a curation mechanism by which ideologically consistent content from a wide variety of sources can be redistributed.\u201d<\/p>\n That study also found a major asymmetry between liberal and conservative political content on Facebook. The researchers found that a \u201cfar larger\u201d share of conservative Facebook news content was determined to be false by Meta\u2019s third-party fact-checking system, a result that demonstrates how conservative Facebook users are exposed to far more online political misinformation compared to their left-leaning counterparts.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 Misinformation shared by Pages and Groups has audiences that are more homogeneous and completely concentrated on the right,\u201d the researchers wrote.<\/p>\n In a different experiment<\/a> conducted with Meta\u2019s cooperation, participants on Facebook and Instagram saw their algorithmic feeds replaced with a reverse chronological feed \u2014 often the rallying cry of those fed up with social media\u2019s endless scrolling and addictive designs. The experience didn\u2019t actually move the needle on the how the users felt about politics, how politically engaged they were offline or how much knowledge they wound up having about politics.<\/p>\n In that experiment, there was one major change for users who were given the reverse chronological feed. \u201cWe found that users in the Chronological Feed group spent dramatically less time on Facebook and Instagram,\u201d the authors wrote, a result that underlines how Meta juices engagement \u2014 and encourages addictive behavioral tendencies \u2014 by mixing content in an algorithmic jumble.<\/p>\n These findings are just a sample of the current results, and a fraction of what\u2019s to come in future papers. Meta has been spinning the results<\/a> across the new studies as a win \u2014 a view that flattens complex findings<\/a> into what is essentially a publicity stunt. Regardless of Meta\u2019s interpretation of the results and the admittedly odd arrangement between the researchers and the company, this data forms an essential foundation for future social media research.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n