Tweaking Facebook feeds is no easy fix for polarization, studies find

Landmark research suggests that tweaking how people access news and other content on social-media platforms — to reduce the echo-chamber effect — doesn’t necessarily change their political opinions, knowledge or behaviour.

The findings are the work of dozens of scholars who were given unprecedented access to an extensive trove of user data from Facebook and Instagram; both platforms are part of Meta (formerly Facebook), based in Menlo Park, California. With the company’s cooperation, the researchers also conducted multiple experiments that altered how tens of thousands of people received and shared political news and other information. The first results were published today in four papers1–4 in Science and Nature.