"Small changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found. A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk's social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side."
"Most of the more than 1,000 users who took part in the experiment during the 2024 US presidential election did not notice that the tone of their feed had been changed. The campaign was marked by divisive viral posts on X, including a fake image of Kamala Harris cosying up to Jeffrey Epstein at a gala and an AI-generated image posted by Musk of Kamala Harris dressed as a communist dictator that had 84m views."
Small, barely perceptible shifts in the tone of posts shown to X users increased affective political polarization in one week to levels equivalent to roughly three years of change from 1978–2020. An experiment boosted posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity in feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters, producing substantial increases in unfavourable feelings toward the other side. More than 1,000 participants during the 2024 US presidential election mostly did not notice feed changes. Repeated exposure to such posts also raised sadness and anger. X’s "for you" algorithm amplifies engagement-optimised content, increasing exposure to divisive and misleading material.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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