The series of four papers, published in Science and Nature, found algorithms are “extremely influential” in terms of what people see on Facebook and Instagram and that there is there is a significant ideological split in political news exposure. Some of the experiments found that tweaking the algorithms changed what people saw and how much they engaged with the platforms, but these tweaks didn’t do much to change political attitudes over the three-month study period.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2023/07/28/the-impact-of-metas-algorithms-during-the-2020-us-election-expert-reaction/