• fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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    1 year ago

    > The US 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study is a joint collaboration between a group of independent external academics from several institutions and Meta

    > Now we have the first results from this unusual collaboration, detailed in four separate papers—the first round of over a dozen studies stemming from the project.

    > “We also find that popular proposals to change social media algorithms did not sway political attitudes.”

    > “In other words, pages and groups contribute much more to segregation than users,”

    > Finally, the vast majority of political news that Meta’s third-party fact-checker program rated as false was viewed by conservatives, compared to liberals. That said, those false ratings amounted to a mere 0.2 percent, on average, of the full volume of content on Facebook. And political news in general accounts for just 3 percent of all posts shared on Facebook, so it’s not even remotely the most popular type of content.

    This last bit is key. This means (up to) 15% of popitical posts werr misinformation (some nonpolitical), mostly viewed by conservatives. They do not state which way this information leans.