What Can We Learn from the First Studies of Facebook’s and Instagram’s Roles in the US 2020 Election?

Recent studies are being over-interpreted by some as absolving social media of responsibility for incentivizing divisive content, write Ravi Iyer, managing director of the University of Southern California Marshall School’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making, and Juliana Schroeder, a professor in the Management of Organizations group at the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Meta headquarters, Menlo Park, California. Shutterstock After a great deal of commendable and careful work, four of the first studies concerning Facebook and Instagram’s role in the US 2020 election were released. These studies represent an unprecedented collaboration between academia and industry, with many things to be learned from each one. But contrary to how many, including Facebook itself, have characterized the findings, they do not squarely address what is perhaps the most robust criticism of social media’s effects on society – that optimizing for engagement incentivizes divisive content that, in the long-term, can enhance polarization. One of us (Iyer) worked on improving Facebook’s effects on society for over 4 years, including in places such as Myanmar and India. Iyer collaborated on dozens of internal studies examining the effects of reshares and other algorithmic features of newsfeed ranking, many of which are now public in the Facebook papers disclosed by whistleblower Frances Haugen. Both of us have conducted dozens of academic studies on values, political attitudes, and polarization.  As a result of the many studies conducted internally, Facebook eventually re-weighted the use of reactions, removed optimizations for comments and reshares for political content and reduced…What Can We Learn from the First Studies of Facebook’s and Instagram’s Roles in the US 2020 Election?