Team debunks research showing Facebook's news-feed algorithm curbs election misinformation
Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a senate judiciary committee hearing on online child safety at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., January 31, 2024. Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta / The Associated Press
Phys.org
An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst have published work in the journal Science calling into question the conclusions of a widely reported study — published in Science in 2023 — finding the social platform's algorithms successfully filtered out untrustworthy news surrounding the 2020 election and were not major drivers of misinformation.
The UMass Amherst-led team's work shows that the research was conducted during a short period when Meta temporarily introduced a new, more rigorous news algorithm rather than its standard one, and that the previous researchers did not account for the algorithmic change. This helped to create the misperception, widely reported by the media, that Facebook and Instagram's news feeds are largely reliable sources of trustworthy news.
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