By The Wall Street Journal
Published on September 26, 2024
Meta Platforms claims that Facebook doesn’t polarize Americans came under new doubt as the journal Science raised questions about a prominent research paper the tech giant has cited to support its position.
In an editorial Thursday, Science said that Meta’s emergency efforts to calm its platforms in the wake of the 2020 election may have swayed the conclusions of the paper, which the journal published in July 2023.
The editorial, titled “Context matters in social media,” was prompted by a letter that Science also published presenting new criticism of the paper. Because the study of Facebook’s algorithms relied on data provided by Meta when it was undertaking extraordinary efforts to restrain incendiary political content, the letter’s authors argue that the paper may have overstated the case that social media algorithms didn’t contribute to political polarization.