"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 social divides it has amplified. The phenomenon is equally strong regardless of the user's political orientation, the academics note in an article published on Thursday in Science."
"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 order in which political messages appear on social media feeds alters users' polarization and animosity toward other ideological groups. The effect is equally strong across users with different political orientations. A browser extension intercepted and reordered chronological feeds in real time, using a large language model to score posts for antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (AAPA). Posts were reordered without collaboration from the platform or reliance on platform algorithms. The experiment involved 1,256 informed participants and focused on X, the U.S. network most used for political expression.
Read at english.elpais.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]