Filippo Menczer, Luddy Distinguish Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, has co-authored an eLetter in the prestigious journal Science questioning a study that reported Facebook and Instagram news feeds are reliable sources of trustworthy news.
The study results appeared in an earlier Science paper, “How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?”
Menczer was part of an interdisciplinary research team led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their eLetter said that the widely-reported study, funded by Meta, which owns and operates Facebook and other social media platforms, omitted important information when reporting Facebook and Instagram news-feed algorithms had successfully filtered out misinformation around the 2020 elections.
The UMass team said the original study researchers had analyzed a short period of time in which Meta had temporarily introduced a more rigorous news algorithm, and did not factor in this change when they reported the two major media platform algorithms were not major drivers of untrustworthy news, thus creating a widely-reported misperception.
The UMass team suggested Facebook can limit untrustworthy content, but social media platforms may not have the financial incentive to modify their algorithms in such a way. The implication – they put profit ahead of potential harm to the public and democracy.
Menczer said he discussed the issue with Przemek Grabowicz, then a research assistant professor at UMass Amherst and a long-time collaborator. Grabowicz had the data that led to the analysis and conclusions detailed in the Science eLetter.
eLetter co-authors stated that Meta introduced changes to Facebook’s news feed in November of 2020 to reduce the visibility of untrustworthy news after the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Those changes were successful, cutting user views of misinformation by at least 24 percent, but were not made permanent. Co-authors said Meta resumed using its standard algorithm starting in March of 2021.
Co-authors said the original study ran from Sept. 24 to Dec. 23 of 2020 and didn’t clarify it was conducted while Meta had a more stringent -- and temporary -- algorithm in place. The co-authors suggested the study created the incorrect impression that Facebook’s standard algorithm is good at stopping misinformation.
Other co-authors include UMass Amherst Ph.D. student Chhandak Bagchi and UMass Amherst professors Jennifer Lundquist, Monideepa Tarafdar and Anthony Paik.
Science is a peer-reviewed academic publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It’s considered one of the world’s leading academic journals.